"This massive boondoggle needs to be shut down"
Yes it does.
I didn't know the liarman connection but as soon as they announced "Homeland".... well, I got that connection.
Another great post Hubris! That's insane that anyone would agree to do participate in that 
excellent post. Yeah, this is stupid, and useless besides.
I don't know anything about security, just using common sense.
great work. good god... how long do you think it will take for someone to get roughed up or killed in this "security experiment?" how totally F*#king stupid.
I hate these people
Remember when flying used to be glamorous and fun?
But Hub, we can't keep the "terrrist" doll inflated to the proportions of the Eiffel Tower, if we don't fearmonger our asses off.
I've been channelling Joe McCarthy, and it's really making things clearer for me...why, just last night he told me that his biggest regret was that he never got Roy Cohn to paint his body a bright, Kremlin, red, and then dance naked on the table in front of the House Un-american Activities Committee.
He's been a bit profane for my tender sensibilities, but he nailed it, when he said:
"Fuck all this "reality" shit. The idea is to mix the koolaid with the clear water, and a little paranoia-sugar, and the rubes will lap it up like it was their mother's milk."
We miss you, Joe! :o)
Flying. H. Spaghetti. Monster.
OFF TOPIC, BUT IMPORTANT---A pair of nasty intruders popped up on my PC tonight, namely the Backdoor HuPigeon trojan and the Delf ERE worm. My XoftSpy found and killed them both.
Well, that's what you should expect when you fill a security organization with a bunch of incompetent courthouse-loafing political hacks.
About 95% of the information security community has been laughing their asses off about DHS from Day 1. The other 5% took a year or two to wake up and smell the shit, but smell it they did.
For those of you who expressed surprise at the depths of stupidity this latest business managed to plumb - that's rhetorical, right?
If not ... well, I've been keeping notes. And I can hand you a ton of stuff as stupid that DHS has pulled, going back six years now. Although, I will have to admit, this latest piece of imbecility is a lot more dramatic than the norm for DHS.
Or at least, it will be, once the first innocent gets capped.
IBW:
Why I own a Mac: Reason #573.
OFF TOPIC, BUT IMPORTANT---A pair of nasty intruders popped up on my PC tonight, namely the Backdoor HuPigeon trojan and the Delf ERE worm. My XoftSpy found and killed them both.
I love the smell of private enterprise in the morning!
Why I own a Mac: Reason #573.
LOL.
But Mrs R., you should be aware that while
1) Macs are the lower profile target right now, and
2) Mac OS X ha a better security model than Windows is ever going to have,
you should not feel the least bit complacent.
Item 2 isn't likely to change at all soon. Item 1 is subject to change without notice.
I wonder if it has something to do with my briefly using IE instead of Firefox.
I have this problem on pch.com sometimes with my home PC. Sometimes, when I try to enter at pch.com using Firefox, the entry procedure starts going in circles, and I can only enter using IE. I notice that this happens in the wee hours; I don't think I've ever had that problem in the daylight hours.
First thing that occurred to me is that the Fatherland crowd is planning to send one of their tourist "recruits" all the way through security, let them board, then -- oops! -- blow up a plane in midair. Viola! Instant al qaeda attack, right in the midst of the presidential campain. And the beauty of it is that the only person/persons who would know the truth, other than bushco henchmen, would be splattered across the countryside. It would be over for us faster than you could say "President Ghouliani".
A few years ago, I would have considered such a scenario paranoid. Now it seems frighteningly plausible.
Xeno, the objection here is that your scenario requires competence.
The folks that run DHS need to find safe houses in order to live through Thanksgiving.
Never fear. The 3 major inspection services that comprise the DHS (USDA, INS, Customs) had individually lost every semblance of competence many many years before Lieberman's Folly was ever envisioned.
I knew we were in trouble the minute that asshole in the White House proclaimed the name of the agency - "Homeland Security."
Heimatsicherheit. It always sounds better in German.
It would have been better if he'd just done what George carlin suggested - have two agencies. The Department of What the Fuck Was That, and the Department of What the Fuck Do We Do Now.
Think of it from the perspective of the unfortunate tourist who gets pulled over and offerred the oppportunity to test the TSA. He refuses and the TSA has another name on thier watchlist. He says OK, and worries about gun happy airport security as he goes through the detector. Talk about a Faustian bargain...
You know terrorists read newspapers too... this idea has to be circulating throughout religious whackjob land, Christian and Moslem, right now.
Mrs Robinson: macs are no more secure then a windows box, only less targeted...
thats changeing, soem enterpriesign young men have been pushing unix worms into the mac world...bot nets are on the rise every where, your mac(or linux box whatever) may allerady be rooted (paypal's recent security audit found the biggist threat to its network was not the PC bot nets, but the gerowing *nix bot nets http://www.theregister.co.uk/200...nline_banking/)
also remember that there is no full disk encryption tools out there for macs(lepord may have some, but it anit there yet)
just because you run a mac dosn't mean you are imune to security issues, here is a white paper that can give you a good start towards securing your systemhttp://packetstormsecurity.nl/mac-osx/
050819-securing-mac-os-x-tiger.pdf
"This massive boondoggle needs to be shut down"
Yes it does.
Yes, indeedy. Who among us didn't know something strange was up when that word just jumped out there all of a sudden?
The 3 major inspection services that comprise the DHS (USDA, INS, Customs) had individually lost every semblance of competence many many years before Lieberman's Folly was ever envisioned.
This also is true. For instance, everything we've heard about "ICE" since the merger is consistent with what immigrant and visiting student friends had been telling me about the joint for years. It has always been a backwater of incompetence, obtuseness, and occasional sadism.
All that said, what in the world would you have to do to a random person to get them to co-operate with this harebrained nonsense? More to the point, what would you have to do to me? Merely asking would not be enough.
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