spec_laconic

My best friend in HS happened to be a genius on paper. Got straight A's freshman and sophomore year, ended up doing less well junior and senior year, and, when he got to college, failed out. He now parks cars in a garage. I don't really care for IQ levels, I think they're mostly meaningless.

I thought chrome was open source: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code

It's weird to think that Google would tell you not to RE an open-source project, I must be missing something

I can't speak to frats or Harvard, but I can speak of personal experience of MIT. When I began taking courses at MIT, I worked my proverbial ass off in a very difficult class in CS (course 6 by their parlance) and got an A. After the semester was over, I found out that students generally work together on labs, which was a major portion of the class, and would have significantly lightened my load. (Talking about spending entire weekends with hands-on-keyboard, very unreasonable amount of work for one person, even an overachieving one such as myself)

This is a _cultural_ difference of MIT; people tend to work with one another, or they tend to fail. They learn it freshman year, and it's ingrained in their psyche from then on.

Interestingly, the line between cooperative work and cheating is difficult to discern and mostly set up by the professor. When the professor does not say one way or another if the work is collaborative, students will generally consider it collaborative.

As for the "[n]ever build cool things" troll, I'll let you google the number of neat inventions by famous MIT / Harvard alums; I won't waste my time.

I completely agree.

As I get older, I find the abstractions to be much more interesting; how does one express a lambda in assembly? Functional programming in general? The simplicity of Python and the beauty of Lisp / Scheme / f# keep me going as a programmer.

I wonder, as assembly languages become more complex and malformed with the introduction of ARM and all of the headaches of custom architectures, if there won't be more people moving to the higher level, just for sanity's sake.

Perl module for such: http://search.cpan.org/~asavige/Acme-EyeDrops-1.60/lib/Acme/...

That .lnk vulnerability is now in metasploit; I don't think we can safely say that Gauss is from the same org from this one piece of evidence.

Really? That sounds like it'd be very inefficient when performing context-switching heavy tasks. Does OSX just take the cache penalty or does it somehow compensate with carefully written syscalls?

Yeah, you can just take a quick pic using the camera; the light flashes for barely a second and you won't notice. Metasploit has a stager for exactly this purpose: http://www.metasploit.com/modules/payload/osx/x86/isight/rev...

TL; DR - No proof / source code / details on the backdoor - Outlandish claims of this being a "stuxnet" weapon

Show me some source, a schematic, or a technique that you're using, and then I might believe you, otherwise this is just FUD. They didn't even name the bloody chip.

I'm going to go ahead and play devil's advocate; I think concern over this is really overblown. There are two things about this case that I don't really get:

1. If you're blasting your data over an unencrypted wifi connection, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? This seems to be equivalent to someone screaming the contents of their email, and then getting angry at you for eavesdropping. Also, who the hell transfers that kind of data over anything but SSL?

2. What was Google trying to get out of these packets, besides wifi-GPS data? This seems like more of a simple overstep of collection than anything else. Do we seriously think that this data was collected maliciously? They already have the majority of people's data, what more would they be trying to get? After all of my DNS lookups, my GPS coordinates, my email, and my social connections, what more is there?