Links

“Defense Wins”

Nicolas Weaver explains how a “defense wins” policy in a combined offense and defense environment doesn’t sound not very convincing (case in point: the NSA reorganization).

Instead, NSA seems intent on ensuring that they will never be trusted again. The objective reality is this: from the perception of those outside the government, merging the IAD and SIGINT missions is tantamount to eliminating IAD entirely. Trust is a matter of perception as much as reality.  “Defense wins?” Whatever the actual truth, for now, the rest of the world says “HA!”

Oh, The Losses … All Those Losses

It seems pirates have found the ultimate weapon to kill the music industry: copying music to /dev/null … all the time! ?

Money Quote:

Last week, Sunde told TorrentFreak that he’d already made 120 million copies and “cost” the music industry $150 million in losses, at least by the music industry’s preferred accounting practices counting the dollar value of any copied song as lost revenue.

 

Ramen Code

The plaintiffs in Toyota’s Unintended Acceleration lawsuit had someone with knowledge in building embedded software had a look at Toyota’s source code:

possible bit flips, task deaths that would disable the failsafes, memory corruption, single-point failures, inadequate protections against stack overflow and buffer overflow, single-fault containment regions, thousands of global variables. The list of deficiencies in process and product was lengthy.