medievalist

Comment Threads

• john commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  There's quite a lot of evidence that increasing the severity of punishment does nothing to reduce the incidence of crime -- whereas increasing the probability of being caught is very effective, even if the punishment is relatively mild. I like to think of it as "human beings are probably at least as smart as pigeons, and we know how to train pigeons"....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  Charlie @ 177 This has been known for at least 50 years, but legislators & administrations still don't seem to get it, do they? Leaving aside Daily Heil campaigns, the problem is that this requires both more, & better-paid & better-educated police, rather than slamming down on the few who are caught. The fact that it might be cheaper in the long run (fewer people in expensive prisons) doesn't seem to enter in to the calculations. This "high first cost" fallacy has affected things like public transport & public building project facilites, as well .......
• anonemouse commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  No need to worry! The standard being lined up as the next USB, Thunderbolt, doesn't appear able to do "power only" - it doesn't have any dedicated power lines, for a start - so obviously your concern is unnecessary. /sarcasm, just in case....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  If we are talking about how guvmints censor, manipulate & distort information. .... And how they try to put the frighteners on to people who are "off-message" from their pov .... Then perhaps This strange piece should be informative. It describes how the guvmint & especially certain corrupt sections of the Brit Civil Service were frustrated by a brave "nutter" ( He was a railway enthusiast ) and the lengths to which those in power were prepared to go. Shades of Edward Snowden. [ Hint - ignore the first half of the linked article, & start at the paragraph just...
• yatima2975 commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  Late to the show as usual, but I recently came across this article describing how bog-standard MicroSD cards (not the fancy ones that phone home to the cloud) can be hacked as well. As it turns out, those cards have a controller on board to manage the bad blocks, that controller is a general-purpose CPU and that CPU has a backdoor for OEMs to flash the code it's running.Lots of gory details in the slides linked to at the end of the article, but the article itself already has plenty of meat on its bones, including some man-in-the-middle scenarios....