Are Body Scanners Safe?

I think the answer is we just don't know.

I've read an article from a DNA researcher that might have put me over the top.  Between my own scan cancer and both my mom and dad, I think it's time to bypass the scanners.

http://myhelicaltryst.blogspot.com/2010/11/tsa-x-ray-backscatter-body-scanner.html

I really don't want to make the TSA people angry, they're just doing their job and I'm sure they don't want to work next to those evil machines any more than I want to get inside.

I'll just have to be extra-charming. ( how hard can THAT be? )


Update - 11/2/2011

Well, I've been through the pat-downs a few times, now (2-3) and the airport security folks are pretty understanding, I haven't even had to play the cancer card.   They've been great actually, but the physical patdown easily takes over a minute, and it has taken a few minutes to wait for a guard.

Oh, here's another paper that tells why we're using the scanners in spite of the rule that X-rays can only be used for a medical need.

For crying out loud - (this is for me too)  Do some observation and get in the line using the magnetometers!

Perry

Red Hat releases KVM hypervisor 3.0

El Reg reports that Red Hat has released version 3.0 of its enterprise virtualization server, RHEV.

It appears that the biggest change is that you can now manage it from Linux and don't need Windows.  Wait. What?  I guess it had something to do with the QEMU technology that it got when it bought Qumranet in sept 2008 (huh?). Oh well - read the article yourself.

Code has been ported from .NET to Java, database has been ported to Postgres,  you can still use Active directory to manage user logins, plus their own LDAP/Kerberos.

More scalable - up to 128 physical cores and 2TB main memory, guests can have 64 virtual cores and 2TB virtual memory.

Cost?

"Companies decide to standardize their Linuxes on RHEL, then they virtualize their workloads using either the integrated KVM or RHEV. Then, they look at the cost of vSphere from VMware and decide to try a few Windows workloads on RHEV. Thadani says that prior to VMware's vSphere 5.0 launch and its memory tax, RHEV cost about one-seventh as much per host to virtualize x64 machines with the same number of VMs. But in the wake of the virtual memory tax, even after VMware's rejiggering, RHEV now costs one-fifteenth to one-twentieth of vSphere 5.0 to virtualize a big, fat server."

This is pretty cool, and there are definitely places in labs where this technology should be tested.

[p]

You have a Duoply for Broadband ( or worse ), now a leaked document shows the AT&T is gunning for the same thing for wireless

How do you think *THAT* will work out?

From DSL Reports:

The leaked document shows that AT&T is eliminating the T-Mobile presence in the markets where they overlap, which is basically all of them, and doesn't need the extra spectrum - it already has more than anyone else and less customers, and we can see from the iPhone fanbots how they like that.

It also shows that they will largely use it to eliminate Sprint, leaving the market to 2 providers.  Don't like either one of them?  Maybe Radio Shack will still be around to buy a walkie talkie?

The leaked AT&T document shows shows that instead of the promised $8 billion increase in network investment after the deal, it will be a $10 billion *decrease*, based on the lack of the expected $18B that T-Mobile will be doing.

Is the market big enough for 4 carriers?  I think so. 

Will the FCC roll over and let the consumers lose?  With an election so close?  I think it comes down to how much influence the geeks have - do you think we can pull this off?

P

Is running open source E-Commerce a good idea?

According to El Reg, 5 million web pages have been taken over in an attack against open source store manager tool named osCommerce.

There's a pretty good movie of a drive-by exploit in action, taken by a security researcher named Wayne Hwong from Armorize.com running an infected page from gamefocus.uk web store.  It bounces from UK to EU to RU where it gets the updates.exe file that runs on your PC.  Unfortunately it doesn't go into detail how to protect yourself.

The overall problem is the popularity of the ecommerce tool.  If it's popular and widespread tool, then once an exploit is created, google can be used to find all the stores that use it, the badguy can load his malware on all the sites.  It starts out one at a time, but this one was automated, so sites were taken over quickly, then all the machines that accessed the web sites.

This is the reason I run Noscript.

Perry