Because it makes a difference. Many of us first learned about computers in school or at a friend's house long before we could afford such a thing...

First used computer: Apple IIe, learning basic programming, logical thinking, math, and coordinates with Logo.

First owned computer: PackardBell 486-66 (whooo-hooo, turbo mode) with a monstrous 8 MB of memory and a 200MB harddrive, what would you ever do with so much space?

And what make you think the vendor added physical switch would do anything other than disable the camera LED and signal to the USB driver that the camera should be shown as "off"?

Its not just that... This has huge potential to also affect channels like ForgottenWeapons, BlokeOnTheRange, and Kickok45. Those all show demos of firearms almost daily, from new production to 100+ years old antiques, rarely-seen, and one-off developmental arms; along with discussions of the firearm containing massive amounts of historical, cultural, and production method documentation. A majority of the firearms ForgottenWeapons is able to showcase are from James D Julia Auctioneers and Rock Island Auction House, which are for subsequently up for public sale thru those 3rd parties.

The researchers don't seem to have a very active imagination...
  - Large numbers of people with spoofers, say rush hour traffic or a caravan moving in one direction across the city, to have high probability of all vehicles moving in the same direction to always have a green light.
  - The local bum^H^H^H grifter^H^H^H panhandl^H^H^H... errr... apparently disadvantaged contractor seeking private funding for self improvement, sitting on the side of the road causing large backups of people waiting at the light.

I've already seen the documentary on this. First the asteroid enters the solar system. Then the Bad Carrots arrive. And finally Lyekka eats Tokyo. Fortunately, we are a type 13 plant, so our suffering shouldn't last to much longer.

Actually, there was just a story about this on This American Life, this last weekend. A statistical study of the expected occurrence rate of the same name/birthdate across the entire US voter registration base.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thisamericanlife.o...

The details in short...
  - There are 3 million name/birthday matches across all states (roughly what DT/GOP claims are fraudulent votes)..
  - Removing bad data (i.e. no birthday so use a default day of Jan 1, etc.) reduces that to 750,000 matches.
  - Using a simple expected match based on statistical distribution (the 1 in 23), shows an expected 720,000 matches of different people in different states with the same name/birthdate.
  - Expanding the above to include common naming practices and oddities (i.e. Naming children "June" born in the summer, naming children "Carol" around the holidays, etc.) results in another 10,000 expected matches.
  - Going back to the "bad data" problem, the researchers then went back and reviewed the actual voting signature roles compared against the database reported voters who showed up... which removed another 20,000 matches nationally.

That leaves... 720,000+10,000 statistically expected name/date matches, plus 20,000 statistically found database errors, out of 750,000 "double voters".... i.e. ZERO actual double votes.

So apple is charting a new path with their headphones... but what happens when a user loses a headphone or the battery dies? Perhaps they should have talked with someone familiar with their development.

Seriously... that summary is crap and made head spin trying to make sense of it.

And which one of the estimated 200,000 attacking IPs would you target with this? How would the ISP responsible for that IP know that the one IP was part of the problem when being hit with a DDOS from 199,999 other IPs not under their control? The correct response to criminal activity is not to continue the criminal activity.

Due to the fact that many of the nets abuse handling channels are ineffective (roughly half take no observable action in my experience), perhaps a more effective long term solution would be for the major CDNs, Google, Facebook, etc., to get together and work on notifying end users more directly. In this case, the CDNs/etc. could implement a shared/dynamic blocking list for those 200k IPs such that no content would be delivered, only an error message indicating that their equipment is compromised. The end user would still be free to use the internet and transmit traffic, but their favorite sites would be useless until they clean their equipment/submit a removal request. This provides direct pressure on the end user creating the problem, and by extension their ISP thru support desk calls, to clean up the compromised systems.

Yeah... I had to flush our DNS servers last night. The problem was not that the host record was set to localhost, but that the SOA (Start of Authority) changed from Akimai to GoogleDomains. The old Akimai SOA had a multi-day expiration lifetime and the Akimai servers are still giving out a valid A record response of localhost with a 5min expiration. So until the SOA ages out of various name servers, it will remain unreachable for some.

ANI would be awful to use as a callerID because it marks signals the calling service line billing number. When you have a PRI/DS3/etc service trunk, the ANI for all calls out is that service trunk number, even though you may have thousands of legitimate TNs/callerIDs on the trunk.

I run more than a dozen PBXs hanging off a DS3 and multiple PRI trunks, thousands of incoming TN destinations, plus a fee hundred more valid outgoing TNs (think local business offices, outgoing calls with callerID of corporate main or 800 number). The ANI for all these outgoing call is the billing number of the trunk the call goes out.... It represents the responsible billing/legal party for escalation, not the actual endpoint calling. Further... ANI can be spoofed as well. It is much harder to (generally requires an SS7 trunk, which smaller companies dontt generally have access too), but can be spoofed the same.

The problem is not callerID perse, it is that the telcos refuse to filter/identify/track ongoing fraudulent uses of callerID on their network. The telco can easily pull their internal call records, lookup the ANI and routing codes associated with an incoming call, and track that call back thru their systems to the source. We have had repeated problems with dead-air callers to 800 voice numbers (apparently fax spammers) that come in burts from rotating sets of valid but fraudulent callerIDs. (Over days/weeks I have been able to capture the list and then predict the next incoming fraudulent callerID). I have sat on the phone with telco techs as they ran thru my call log of fraudulent callerIDs and confirmed the call path/ANI did not match that of what the presented callerID would have... But the telcos seem to have a policy that they will not investigate or stop the activity until sued in a specific case.

The charity/political exemption is not going away, that is a pipe dream... As for "existing relationships", you can already tell a caller to stop calling you and they must add you to their internal do-not-call list. What needs to be added to the "existing relationship" loophole is a specification that "existing relationship" only applies to existing services between you and the caller and specifically excludes the business or "partners" for calling in references to new services.

It is not a cooling off period and the 31-day wait is not for your benefit. It is a time frame so the hundreds of thousands of users of the do-no-call list can update their systems (which they are required to do at least once every 30 days). Sorry if you believe this stuff magically happens "in the cloud" instantly... but not everything is instant. It takes actual time and manpower to cross-reference databases, build filtering rules, and upload data sets to equipment. Quality calling centers are updating their do-not-call list every week, smaller call centers every few weeks. Can you guess how often the fraudulent callerID callers update their do-not-call list?

But none of this really applies... In my experience, the vast majority of do-not-call list violations are already illegal to begin with. When you get a "Card Holder Services" call, it is never CHS, it is one of dozens/hundreds of different groups using the name and making fraudulent/criminal calls. As is the same for the "You have won a free cruise", "You have qualified to reduce/refinance your student loans", etc...

... Which of the two cities are in Australia; Melbourne, Sydney, or Brisbane? (The forum post, by the way, makes no mention of "two in Australia"). Hurray for editors!

Wow.. I messed that up by picking the second worst and second best some how. worst case is 1 in 60.6 million miles (South Carolina), best case is 175.4 million miles (Massachusetts). These figures include fatalities of motorcyclist/bicylist/pedestrians as well as fatality injured drivers with blood alcohol content (BAC) >= 0.08.

It is quite disingenuous as it is comparing US high-end vehicle driver statistics with world-wide statistics including 3rd-world countries where driving can be borderline suicidal. As a quick comparison via Google. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports as of 2014 (last year stats are available, including all vehicle types), there were 32,675 vehicle crash-related fatalities. By state, that ranges between one fatality in 68 million miles driven (South Dakota) and 161 million miles driven (Vermont), with an average of one fatality in 92.5 million miles traveled nation wide. So even the worst-case US example is better than the claimed fatality rate.

In other words, exactly the right people? On the one hand you have "company executives and engineers" that are responsible for the loss of control over an industrial process; which has been clearly documented, who are currently the subject of state and federal investigation, and which is sure to lead to fines and punishment to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. On the other hand you have a bunch of self-righteous protesters, with no understanding of the real facts of what it takes to provide for millions of lives, who trespassed and possibly defaced/damaged private property. The local authorities have dealt with the local violations. The state/federal authorities are dealing with the state/federal violations. In other words, exactly what is suppose to be happening.

That is a bit of a revisionist history summary there... AOL was not an internet service provider or even "AOL" in 1983, it was platform attempting to sell a select set of products. And it did not call itself "the internet", for all intents and purposes "the internet" didn;t really exist before the very late 80's/early 90's outside of a very small community.

To quote Wikipedia:
AOL began in 1983, as a short-lived venture called Control Video Corporation (or CVC)... Its sole product was an online service called GameLine for the Atari 2600 video game console, after von Meister's idea of buying music on demand was rejected by Warner Bros... In May 1983... [CVC] was near bankruptcy.
On May 24, 1985, Quantum Computer Services... was founded by Jim Kimsey from the remnants of Control Video.... The service was unique from other online services as it used the computing power of the Commodore 64 and the Apple II rather than just a "dumb" terminal....From the beginning, AOL included online games in its mix of products; many classic and casual games were included in the original PlayNet software system. In the early years of AOL the company introduced many innovative online interactive titles and games ...in October 1989, Quantum changed the service's name to America Online.

So again.. AOL in the early years was never an ISP, it was a service (gaming, not network) provider. AOL wasn't even AOL until 1989. Yes it was then a vendor platform, but it did not call itself the internet or claim to link the world, only to sell a select set of games. I remember first learning about "Hyper Text Linking" in about 1991 on Mac computers... it was this new thing to link documents on your local network. Almost no one then really had an understanding of the internet. If you wanted to communicate with someone across the country or the other side of the world, you dialed into your BBS and downloaded Usenet/mail.

In September 1993, AOL added USENET access to its features....AOL quickly surpassed GEnie, and by the mid-1990s, it passed Prodigy and CompuServe. By 1993, AOL was able to provide public Internet access for its Windows client users.

So AOL started providing "the internet" in 1993. I did not even have an ISP or "the internet" until around 1995. The early 1990s were when BBSes started to disappear/transform into actual internet service providers. The internet, a global set of services as we know it, simply didn't exist before that time. Again, Facebook is claiming to provide "the internet" with its India initiative, when it is really providing "select Facebook".