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Terror Plot, NASA, DHS Patch Alert
from the those-are-three-separate-things-by-the-way dept.
It was a tough decision to part with my laptop, PDA and mobile but I decided to take my chances. It only really then dawned on me the extent to which I depend on these items when I was waiting for hours to clear security ... While I could have found a public pay phone, all my phone numbers are stored in my mobile & PDA and I actually remember very few of them. I could speak to people, after somehow getting their numbers, but they could not call me back. All the usual channels that are normally available to me to get information about a delay were unavailable to me - no web access or even SMS messages to friends with access. You just have to stand in a queue like a sheep.
[...]
As has been reported, items allowed were limited to wallets/travel documents and baby/health-specific products. However, many of us brought books and papers with us also. Interestingly, Duty Free shops were open airside - although I didn't see if any electronics shops were. The focus this morning was really on what can be brought from landside to airside and they didn't seem to have thought about what you buy airside so much (although I would speculate that electronic items bought airside do not pose such a threat in that terrorists would use pre-modified devices to detonate explosives). The search at security was a remove shoes, belts etc. job - rather like being in the US :)
"First, congratulations to the Security Services for foiling this plot," writes reader ettlz, before raising a few relevant questions:
Did they need to detain someone for 90 days without trial to prevent this disaster? Would ID cards have helped?
And how long before I can travel with my notebook onto an aeroplane again, as we all know a cargo hold is no place for a lithium ion battery?
Null537 asks
Is anyone else more angry about the hassle this causes, than anything else? Terrorists spread terror, so they've hit their mark. By being foiled the plot does an amazing amount of damage on its own, spreading FUD.
I don't feel any safer by having my liquids/toenail clippers/pocket vibe/ipod/laptop taken away from me, when there are plenty of other ways to kill/be killed that airlines have no control over. I am more angry at terrorists for making American privacy close(er) to extinction than anything else. With a "war" on "terror" there are going to be casualties, my water consumption/music listening/laptop using/game playing/phone usage habits shouldn't be at the top of the list.
Why does the scapegoat have to be the common citizen?
Reader v1 left one of hundreds of comments on the missing original recordings of the first moon walk, which NASA would like to recover and safely archive before their inevitable deterioration past the point of rescue.
It would not surprise me if these tapes have been in some very rich person's "personal museum" for the last several years, the result of a quiet and large payoff to someone that had access to the archives. Things like this don't just "disappear," they "grow legs."
Ninwa questions the significance of the claim made in the linked article that "The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.":
Is the article honestly trying to suggest that NASA couldn't reverse engineer a format and design a player for it if the original player was lost? I personally find that a little hard to believe. It just sounds like a convenience excuse to create a "give-up searching" date. In my opinion these tapes are very important to our country's history. It's almost shameful to me to think they could have lost them so easily.
According to reader Detritus, "The format isn't a big mystery, it's IRIG 106 if anyone cares" -- but that's not the problem, he says:
The problem is that as part of the continuing budget crunch at NASA, made worse by the need to scrounge money from the existing budget for new tasks like a Shuttle replacement and going to Mars, many activities and facilities are being cut or eliminated. The lab that can handle these old tapes, the Data Evaluation Lab at Goddard, has lost its funding. That means that it will be closed at the end of this fiscal year. The equipment goes into storage or is surplused. The people have to find other jobs or be laid off or retire.
Building a recorder from scratch would be insanely expensive. These recorders cost anywhere from $50-100K when they were new and being manufactured in quantity.
It's easy to say that "they" should keep and maintain the hardware, catalog and store the tapes in climate controlled warehouses, and do all the other things needed to preserve the data for future generations. That doesn't pay the bills. Just storing a tape can cost a dollar or more a year. That doesn't sound too bad until you realize that a single spacecraft can easily generate tens of thousands of tapes. Another problem is that at $100-200 for a new reel of tape, there has always been a large incentive to recycle and reuse tapes for current missions.
Reader Aufero has no trouble believing that if NASA did have to reverse engineer the format, it would run into more than a bit of bureaucratic barbed wire:
If NASA did it, it would require five years, fifteen administrators, and fifty million dollars. The quarterly funding reviews alone (much less the reviews of the reviews) would take up more time than the project, and the funding would be proxmired halfway through to pay for a bridge to an island owned by a friend of some congressman. If they ever find the tapes they should hand them over to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which would probably have them transferred to more durable media in six months at a cost of $30,000.
The problem of preservation sure isn't one confined to NASA, though: reader drDugan writes with an insightful comment on long-term storage of historically important but voluminous data:
I was recently at a meeting in Bethesda at the NIH and heard Don Lindberg, the director of the national library of medicine talk about long term information storage.
After going through all the normal stuff about media degrading and backups, etc -- he made a really interesting point: The only way to really ensure REALLY LONG storage - like tens of thousands of years is to keep having people accessing information. The point he made is that all the storage technology will continue to evolve, and it's only the information we stop accessing that will fall into danger of getting lost.
I thought it was a good point.
Why on earth do we not have access to the original data from the Moon landings? If we did, lots of people would have a copy around. Silly secretive state.
On the announcement that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had issued a strongly worded recommendation that Windows users update their computers with the latest security patches from Microsoft, tholomyes writes that the suggestion is a good one:
This update is as important as it gets. There are vulnerabilities in every major MS program which allow remote code execution, which means that as soon as the exploit is discovered, it can take advantage of holes all over your system.
Affected programs and services:
- MS Server Services (TCP 139 and 445)
- DNS servers
- Internet Explorer
- Outlook Express
- Microsoft Management Console
- HTML Help
- Visual Basic
- Microsoft Office
- Windows kernel
I'm not too surprised that they're trying to push awareness of this patch. It was the lack of patching several weeks beforehand that allowed Code Red to do as much damage as it did.
Many comments suggested that the Department of Homeland Security's motives for issuing its urgent suggestion to patch systems were less than admirable, if not not downright conspiratorial; in response to by ExE122's suggestion that "monitoring 10 million computers to find out what porn sites people like to visit isn't [a government priority]," Shaper_pmp offered a level-headed reason not to discount such suspicions:
How about monitoring 10 million phone calls?
And with a handy backdoor installed monitoring computers would be even easier to automate.
I'm not saying they have, merely that your pooh-poohing of the whole idea is a bit baseless when they've already been caught doing essentially the same thing in a different medium.
[...] The only way this makes sense to me is if you're saying conspiracy theories shouldn't attract tinfoil hat accusations any more... because everyone knows they're watching you, lying to you and breaking the law all the damn time?
Reader twofidyKidd outlines the tension that makes it hard to decide between tempting conspiracies and comforting trust:
The real problem is that our cynicism makes viewing realistic possibilities hard to imagine, and our tools [of] logical deduction sort of seem to fail. Occam's razor can't be used in a situation like this because time has proved over and again that the interests of people at the government level aren't always in the interest of people at the constituency level. This is one of those times that we (the Slashdot conflux) would like to imagine that someone (like Lawrence Lessig or Brad Templeton) has finally said something to an official that he finally understood and as a result has taken this action, but since we often have a hard time getting our own management to listen to the good ideas we put forth, we're hesitant to believe such a thing has happened. In fact, given the recent history of our government, we're much more inclined to consider a sinister purpose. The DHS press release has many of the "hidden agenda" trappings, like specifically indicating which patch to apply, as well as the call of immediacy. ...
Just to put things in perspective; right now, Britons are unloading all liquids and gels into trash cans prior to boarding U.S.-bound planes, while we're wondering if the U.S. government is acting in our best interest by adamantly suggesting we patch our Windows computers.
Many thanks to the readers (especially those quoted above) whose comments went into each of these conversations.
They're onto me! (Score:3, Informative)
What a story ... (Score:5, Funny)
NASA was involved in a terror plot but the Department of Homeland security patched it up to look like Al Qaeda did it.
Among the banned items: gameboys (Score:5, Funny)
Remember, if Koopa can kidnap the princess with impunity, the terrorists have already won!
Just wait until terrists start swallowing bombs (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, you gotta figure that in a position like that, a potential bomber would have to be really sure that the flight would leave on time.
Re:Just wait until terrists start swallowing bombs (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, Chicago-O'Hare International has just been awarded the title of "Safest Airport in the World."
Re:Just wait until terrists start swallowing bombs (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just a regular guy, and I thought of it, so if it's viable, some bad dude has thought of it too. The best protection from this sort of attack is to not make someone hate you enough to want to attack you. We can cry "ooh they hate our freedoms", but their problems are more tangible than that. meh. flame on.
Re:Just wait until terrists start swallowing bombs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just wait until terrists start swallowing bombs (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously though, it's impossible to negotiate with someone who's opening position is a deal breaker, as in:
Western Civilization: "What can we do to make you stop hating us and trying to blow up our planes?"
Islamic Horde: "All you of you must die"
Western Civilization: "yeah, that doesn't work for us. How about... we send your goverment tons of money?"
Islamic Horde: "Um, we'll take the money, sure, but then, all of you must die."
Western Civilization: "Let's try this another way. What if we just leave all of you alone?"
Islamic Horde: "Well, to the extent it enables us to kill all of you, that works for us, but again, our basic position, and this is a deal-breaker, is that you must all die."
etc.etc.
The solution is not to look inward and say "what can we do to make them stop hating us?" It's to ask instead, "what can we do to make them understand that trying to kill us doesn't work as a strategy."
Audacity and Ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but your not at the top of the list. Your a casualty of the other side's attempt to make you a real casualty.
What would you have the government do? The media has already handcuffed them with the help of paticular interest groups from doing what is truly effective, profiling. So whats left? Simple, inconvienence EVERYONE. After all its "only fair". Hence my mother gets harrased trying to board flights with her dog. One day some of ya'll are going to grow up and realize that "the man" isn't out to get you. He is out to get the bad guy and the real problem is that the most effective ways are denied to him because of political correctness.
The truth is that there is a group of people out there who only want to kill. You are no more an individual target of their aspirations as you are no more the direct target of restrictions of what you are allowed to take on a plane with you. These people don't care. The fact that they are willing to die to kill others means that we going to suffer some extraordinary restrictions just to make sure they don't get the chance. You want to blame someone, blame them. I know, its far easier to blame our government and Bush (in fact its popular among some segments) but the truth is that they didn't create this enemy. Its been around a long time. Time and technology have given them a means to hit people other than in their home areas.
This will continue until this group is either rendered harmless or their attempts so futile they go back to doing what they did before.
honestly, what would you expect of your government with regards to this situation? There is no reasonable defense that will work against an unreasonable enemy. The sooner that is acknowleged the sooner many will realize just what a major problem it truly is.
Re:Audacity and Ignorance. (Score:5, Interesting)
and perhaps one day you'll bother to open a history book.
"I know, its far easier to blame our government and Bush (in fact its popular among some segments) but the truth is that they didn't create this enemy."
Bush failed attempt to deal with this issue has done nothing but create more terrorists.
"The media has already handcuffed them with the help of paticular interest groups from doing what is truly effective, profiling. So whats left?"
The media holds the government accountable. The only thing accountability can handcuff is illegal actions.
"This will continue until this group is either rendered harmless or their attempts so futile they go back to doing what they did before."
See, some people know this, that is why there created a war on somthing that can never be conquered.
"The truth is that there is a group of people out there who only want to kill."
you abviously do not understand what is happening. What there are is people who will kill to fullfill a goal. There where somepeople whon would kill to get amaerica out of the mid east. Now there are a whole bunch more people who want to kill Americans to revenge dead civillians.
"honestly, what would you expect of your government with regards to this situation? "
1) Go after the specific enemy, i.e. alquade
2) not use this issue as an excuse to push there agende to go into other countries and establish military bases.
3) not lie to the people
4) increase talks and communication with people in the mid-east
5) continue good relations with our allies
6) give the military real adjectives within there training
7) increase law enforcement while respecting civil liberties
8) government oversight on military contracts a'la Trumen committee
9) educate and finance law enforcement. This is how you catch terrorist.
10) obey the law.
Yes, the government is only out to get the 'bad guys'. unfortuantly everyone is now a bad guy to some degree.
Of course, when you deviate from a recorded pattern you are suspect. When all your patterns are recorded, any deviation will make you a suspect. Look at the history of any large body of people who where monitored.
I don't mind a law that says someoen can tap my wire, but needs to prove to a court of law they have cause. even if they present it to a court 7 days after the action.
But, if the court rules against thenm I want to be notified, and I want the request removed from all records.
As for this recent incident, you are aware that there was a nearly identical plot in 1995 that was stopped? So clearly they do not need these new regulation to stop them.
Re:Audacity and Ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Audacity and Ignorance. (Score:4, Interesting)
Profiling would require terrorists to try to beat the profile.
Now, beating the profile wouldn't be as easy as it sounds; you just can't take a twenty-something Durka male and make him look like an eighty-something Dystopian female. Elaborate disguises would stand out on their own, regardless of the profiling policies. They would be a risky and failure-prone solution to profiling.
You'd pretty much have to start recruiting outside your most sympathetic demographic, to find people that didn't fit the profile. And that itself would be very risky and failure-prone. After all, not fitting the profile, your prospective new recruits are more likely to turn you in than join your cell.
Either way, or even if you came up with another solution than the two I've thought of, it's still a new technology as far as you're concerned. You still have to test it, experiment with it, try repeatedly until you get it right.
Suddenly your current tactics, refined through many years of R&D, no longer work. Many more years of R&D are now necessary. You have to start all over again, with an all-new learning curve. Your mistakes are going to increase in number overnight, and formerly "quiet" operations will now be "noisy" operations. Your whole jihad becomes more noticeable, and easier for security forces to engage.
As you improve your new tactics, profiling will lose some of its effectiveness, of course. But as long as jihad is appealing in some circumstances more than others, profiling will always be a threat to your operations.
Meanwhile, as its effectiveness is reduced, profiling will be replaced as the top weapon by other weapons, better-tuned to the new tactics you've been trying to perfect since profiling ruined your old ones. And since you needed some time to practice these new tactics, you've been giving off clues as to how your tactics were evolving. Vigilant security forces will be able to shut down your new tactics even faster than your old ones. So now you have to adapt and change tactics again.
Pretty soon, you're spending so much time trying out new tactics that you don't have any time to put together a successful and devastating major attack. Plus, with all the fuckups that attend any experimental new technology, your entire organization is falling apart. More test runs are getting busted sooner by security forces, fewer recruits are able to complete a training course without getting caught or killed, etc.
If nothing else, profiling would be an excellent first step in keeping jihadis on the hop, rather than giving them a free ride to mass murder.
Re:Audacity and Ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Audacity and Ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
In 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown up over the Atlantic by:
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Bill O'Reilly
c. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir
d. Indian Sikh extremists, in retaliation for the Indian Army's attack on the Golden Temple shrine in Amritsar
In 1986, who attempted to smuggle three pounds of explosives onto an El Al jetliner bound from London to Tel Aviv?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Michael Smerconish
c. Bob Mould
d. A pregnant Irishwoman named Anne Murphy
In 1962, in the first-ever successful sabotage of a commercial jet, a Continental Airlines 707 was blown up with dynamite over Missouri by:
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Ann Coulter
c. Henry Rollins
d. Thomas Doty, a 34-year-old American passenger, as part of an insurance scam
In 1994, who nearly succeeding in skyjacking a DC-10 and crashing it into the Federal Express Corp. headquarters?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Michelle Malkin
c. Charlie Rose
d. Auburn Calloway, [wikipedia.org] an off-duty FedEx employee and resident of Memphis, Tenn.
In 1974, who stormed a Delta Air Lines DC-9 at Baltimore-Washington Airport, intending to crash it into the White House, and shot both pilots?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Joe Scarborough
c. Spalding Gray
d. Samuel Byck, [wikipedia.org] an unemployed tire salesman from Philadelphia
The answer, in all cases, is D.
Our lives have been changed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does the scapegoat have to be the
When the terrorists first attacked, we were told to keep living our lives and not let the attacks change our lives. The attacks didn't - our Government has.
As far as I'm concerned, the terrorists have occomplished one of their goals: we are all living in fear. The terrorists just threaten us and we end up having to have more of our civil liberties taken away.
Congratualations, Bin Laden! You are a fucking genius! You've won. The US is now a cowering giant.
Watch out world, the trouble with cowering giants, they can turn into the worst bullies! I heard a woman on talk radio this morning who thinks that terrorists should be put into old military bases - in effect, she was suggesting we creat concentration camps for Muslims.
There's another Holocost coming! But this time its:
Multi state
Against the Muslims
and no one will stop it!
This isn't rocket science. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here, the cure is the same as the malady it is supposed to be curing. Yeah, yeah, I know, sometimes you have to do things you don't like, but that's really not the issue. The issue is not whether X, Y or Z is necessary, the issue is whether X, Y or Z is substantially different from what they are remedies for.
If you wage a war to prevent a war, you still have a war. The war you attempted to prevent may now not take place, but since it has been substituted for something that is essentially identical, that isn't much of an achievement.
The biggest problem is when you don't, in fact, prevent whatever it is - or even causes it when it would probably never have occured on its own. Then everyone gets to suffer twice, quite needlessly. See World Wars I and II for details.
The current instability in Russia, and quite possibly the two Chechen wars as well, are likely a byproduct of Western countries depriving Gorbechev of the aid he needed to stabilize things after Glastnost. Ronald Reagan and George Bush I denied that aid on political grounds. True, we'll never know what would have happened if a concerted effort had been made at that time to bring Russia to a healthier economic condition. Things might have ended up worse. However, by waging a political war to prevent that "might be", conditions deteriorated to the point where actual wars were fought and actual people died.
If we look at the current instabilities, it is in populations that have been neglected, where poverty is high, life expectency is low, purpose and meaning are seldom to be found. It would seem obvious to me that smashing property and killing wildly is not going to improve things in such a climate, but this has been the typical response. As responses go, it is flat-out guaranteed to be counter-productive.
There's an interesting article in The Guardian [guardian.co.uk] (sorry, Teh Grauniad) newspaper where an anti-terror expert claims that 95% of terrorists are acting on secular or political grievances. (Notice the word "grievance". It's important.) The implication of the Palestinian situation, the Russian situation and the Middle East situation is obvious - if we created a tolerable society where we can, and avoided creating an intolerable one otherwise, 95% of the problem would go away on its own, leaving a paltry 5% for the super-paranoid police and intelligence organizations to fret over.
(I'm not sure I would trust them with much more than 1/20th of their current workload, anyway.)
Boon to travelers! (Score:5, Funny)
Au Contraire! When you step off a plane at your destination, be sure to pick up your free-refill selection of lighters, pens, pencils, toothpaste, keychains, etc. Every airport will now have giant barrels of them.
Re:Boon to travelers! (Score:5, Funny)
Heh - TSA employees are now going to be greeting us with the whitest of smiles, fresh and minty. Complete with slick-gelled hair and large keychains full of LED-fobs.
Number of /. Pictures (Score:3)
Where are the Republicans now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time there's an environmental regulation (clean air, clean water) or some social program which impacts business, there's an instant outcry from the right side of the aisle that there needs to be an economic impact study to determine if these new regulations are really financially viable. So, where is the cry now? We're looking at billions upon billions of lost productivity, likely slowing of the economy, more people losing jobs and healthcare (and other) benefits beacuse of the increased "downtime" due to these draconian flight regulations.
There were what, 10 aircraft in all, tops? I want to see the cost of the aircraft and the insurance value of the couple thousand people balanced against the lost productivity. Yes, call me cynical.
Oh, and I'd just like to point out that they caught these folks without the ban in place, and only catching the extra one or two planes that might slip by just makes my economic argument that much more salient.
Re:Where are the Republicans now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Airlines and hotels will change (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to ensure someone has no risk of being killed doing something is to kill them beforehand.
I would rather your perception on risk in no way affects how the rest of us conduct our travel.
Re:Airlines and hotels will change (Score:5, Insightful)
Put me on the airline that doesn't screw with this. I'm more worried about getting killed on the drive to the airport.
Sorry for the rant. Your sig. is really funny.
Re:Airlines and hotels will change (Score:5, Insightful)
That is massive. How many bags do you think are handled a day by these airlines? How many passengers per year?
Re:LOL YOU BITCH LIBERALS (Score:5, Insightful)
Several terrorist plots were foiled under Clinton's watch (such as the attempted bombing of the Holland Tunnel) but of course he didn't dislocate his shoulder trying to pat himself on the back or hold any press conferences or anything as this administration no doubt would.
Yes, cheer as our country is scared into totalitarianism. That's just great. You're the type of idiot that would have followed the sheep into fascism in Nazi Germany after the staged bombing of the Reichstag. Grow a brain.