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Astalavista baby

It must be human nature for some of us not to have question about the right choice here because if it isn't then I'm not human. I would like to think that those in charge of this place have been around long enough to know otherwise, but after my own experience with "authority" I have grounds to argue.

Now we are all looking at the face of the dragon. The only question is, "What to do next?".

We will continue to share our knowledge and skills with those around us for the better of the rest of us, and without question. There are some who would like to take advantage of the willing, and when the time comes for them to patent their life's ill-will we will be there to tell them "its allready being used, but thanks anyway - need a job?". Until then we are stuck in the middle of a battle that cannot be won in a court of law, but in a place where our domain originated: in our hearts.

The bottom line is about who wants to work for the good of our civilization, and who wants to work for "the man". In the simplest of terms: This is the rest of our lives, and what whe choose to do with is something we have to live with for the rest of humanity. Our only instict to survive should tell us about the future of the rest of the herd and not our own well being.

~/william

if I may humbly submit this just once, something I wrote as a "confused kid" long ago.

People, Believe It!

There are any number of freeware ftp clients. Go to a site like freewareweb and find several.

Personally, I use the ftp client built in to Far, which is shareware, but doesn't expire. (I guess the Win version of Midnight Commander has it too, if you use that on Linux.)

Want to write a PDF file? People in my office needed to, asked me to find something free online. After spending a couple of hours looking for something for windows, I ended up giving them a knoppix cd.

Or you could have used Ghostscript, i.e. the same app as in Knoppix.

And trust me, paying for software is far more abhorrent to these co-workers of mine than any piracy issues. In fact my boss always makes a joke every time someone comes in to get some software, "but you still have to pay the software company for the license to use the software". Heh.

Well, just go to Astalavista for all your serialz and crackz.

I hate Windows myself, but I stick with it for most of my work exactly because I can find just about any app I need, free (as in beer). There are many cool apps, it's the OS that sucks.

maybe they meant astalavista (good search engine)

Search "adobe premiere" and "after effects" on Kazaa. There's no cost.

Then go to this popup laden site and do a query for "adobe premiere serial".

Voila!

THIS IS EVEN BETTER THAN PENIS ENLARGEMENT!

Forget everything you know about /.! Slashdot is a mere shadow of itself.

A NEW SITE IS BORN - A NEW SITE THAT WILL RULE! Gentlemen, point your browsers to this address!

A new site for intelligent individuals! Spread the word!

THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!

Forget everything you know about /.! Slashdot is a mere shadow of itself.

A NEW SITE IS BORN - A NEW SITE THAT WILL RULE! Gentlemen, point your browsers to this address!

A new site for intelligent individuals! Spread the word!

THE TIME HAS COME! THE CLOCK IS TICKING!

Forget everything you know about /.! Slashdot is a mere shadow of itself.

A NEW SITE IS BORN - A NEW SITE THAT WILL RULE! Gentlemen, point your browsers to this address!

A new site for intelligent individuals! Spread the word!

What's the big deal?What's the big deal?What's the big deal?

The big deal is:

Forget everything you know about /.! Slashdot is a mere shadow of itself.

A NEW SITE IS BORN - A NEW SITE THAT WILL RULE! Gentlemen, point your browsers to this address!

A new site for intelligent individuals! Spread the word!

What's the big deal?

The big deal is: they make less noise.

Forget everything you know about /.! Slashdot is a mere shadow of itself.

A NEW SITE IS BORN - A NEW SITE THAT WILL RULE! Gentlemen, point your browsers to this address!

A new site for intelligent individuals! Spread the word!

Forget everything you know about /.! Slashdot is a mere shadow of itself.

A NEW SITE IS BORN - A NEW SITE THAT WILL RULE! Gentlemen, point your browsers to this address!

Finally a site for intelligent individuals! See you there! Spread the word!

Forget everything you know about /.! Slashdot is a mere shadow of itself.

A NEW SITE IS BORN - A NEW SITE THAT WILL RULE! Gentlemen, point your browsers to this address!

I'm the main programmer of Total Recorder, and I wanted to thank you for depriving me of potential income. I don't like to eat, or live under a roof, or drink clean water... I only live to code for you... for nothing... because information has no value... because im your fucking slave.

Have a nice day pirates,
sales@HighCriteria.com

There are tons of free fonts here.

That's because for that type of search you're supposed to use "astalavista." Really. Google's great, but the real hax0rZ know how to filter their own...

I think code.box.sk sucks, it contains links to some poorly written content and a bunch of popups. Here is the Java section. For a programming site that has been around for over 2 years that's the best they can do? I have a better Java tutorial library on my computer and I have never even programmed in Java! code.box.sk is off topic for this discussion.

http://code.box.sk

Actually the legality is the only problem here. Any technical measures used to enforce the EULA are just cracker fodder. They WILL be broken, and in short order. If you don't believe me, go look at the evidence.

DivX 5, as created by the DivXNetwork (DivX.com) isn't a hack, that is correct. DivX 3.11alpha (or DivX ;-) ) was a hack of the Microsoft MPEG-4 codec. See this site for more information on that issue. "DivX is a cutting-edge technology video codec made by Jerome Rota "Gej" in LOS ANGELES at 1999 using the standard ASF (MPEG4, Advanced Streaming Format) protocol originally made and copyrighted by Microsoft Corp. "

DivXNetworks seems to be taking a more commercial approach to the DivX codec than Project Mayo did. Does anyone have more insight on this?

When I was sysadmin (for a Windows network), I would just run l0pht. If A) the dictionary could hack it, or B) if they didn't have a number or special character, then I forced them to change their password on the next round. (Here is a detailed explanation of the Microsoft vulnerability.)If they didn't change it to something better, I'd give them a quick phone call and politely explain the security policty I was implementing. (Most people are very cooperative if you tell them politely and don't shave your security policy down their throat.)

There are other free programs out there (I forget the names) that generate nice reports based on l0pht findings. You can, for example, say that 80% of the users have passwords the same as their user names, 50% have passwords with one special character in it, etc.

Perhaps CxOs should visit sites like Astalavista.com. They'd then see how easy it is for a cracker to compromise your network!

The same thing happened to my girlfriend, and after a lot of investigating I found this proggy called GetDataBack which worked great! Of course you need to boot from another HD with windows installed, and it only works for FAT/NTFS partitions so if you're a l33t linux-only user or something, you're screwed :|
Of course if you don't want to fork out 69/129 dollars, depending if it's the FAT/NTFS version, there's a cool trick that i discovered in the free version, where every file you open is actually saved to the temp folder with a screwed up name. If you're pacient you can recover all your files one by one, renaming them manually... or you could also get a crack, but I didn't say this and I wasn't here ;)

Theres a nice software named dvdsubber It can playback DVDs with alternative subtitles from a file. Many subtitle files can be found at http://dvd.box.sk Or you can just import french dvd from france, most pc dvd roms can be made region code free with a alternative firmware. Most european dvds of us movies contain the english soundtrack too & subtitles. BTW: Princess Mononoke got a french track.

You don't know of enough tech sites to claim that "almost every tech site" banded together on something. No one does.

Trillian password files perhaps?

WinXP, anyone?

I used the internet in Beijing over the summer (over several dialup lines and an ISDN line), and had no problems viewing websites like CNN, Voodoo Extreme, AnandTech, or Astalavista, or telnetting to my university's server.

linux.box.sk

well, WinZip does have that nag screen. And some other software may even serve shareware that is disabled until registered. For those, I just go to hack.box.sk, find a registration key generator ("keygen"), and use it. The funny thing is I crack the shareware, then pay for it if I feel like it (my text editor, for example), and for others I don't. (WinZip being one of them) Alwawys the lesser the nag / disabilities, the better. Currently my BOUGHT office has trouble running (it thinks I pirated it and refuses to run!) so I use alternatives without nags. It would be sweet if MS Office was non-nag shareware. Actually, I wouldn't care. I'd just use alternative offices anyway.

However it makes often sense to save stuff locally, not only because for archival of interesting material (e.g. the Knuth and Minsky lectures and other very interesting videos from technetcast come to mind), but also it plays smooth once it is on the hard disk. Even if you have only a low bandwidth connection, you can enjoy higher quality versions this way.

An amazing program is Streambox VCR. Too bad it seems not available. However you can get old betas on the net.

This only for Win32 and there are some patches available to make it work with the latest Real servers. Obviously Real tried to get rid of programs like Streambox VCR, which are known as stream rippers.

There are other solutions:
In this Telepolis article (in German, but you will make sense of the given links, no doubt or use Babelfish) they discuss several approaches.

hey, that isn't the real astalavista site, this is!

As did I, many moons ago. I'd forgotten Altavista even existed.

At least Astalavista is still useful.

Oh, never mind. I thought the article was about Astalavista. Phew!

mobile.box.sk is as good a place as any to grab phone 'warez' and there are lots of fone sites but there are only so many ringtones you can take.

there's no h

http://astalavista.box.sk/

My counterargument: The first point is invalidated by the eventuality of distributed networks being more efficient with that volume of data anyway (think anonymous, dynamic akamai), and the second only requires that the "outlaws" be self-sufficient. e.g. If/when South Korea cracks down on the physical servers located @ astalavista.box.sk, it would resurface in a nebulous new form.

Myth #2: The Net Is Too Interconnected to Control:
TechReview's argument: Gnutella had to implement supernodes in order to fix its old bottleneck problem. What once was completely distributed now has a bit of hierarchy, and hence, is easier to attack with the help of the mega-ISPs.

My counterargument: There's a big difference between a massive central server being targetted, and hundreds of thousands of potential supernodes, which can also pop into and out of existance with the same ease as regular peers. Also, they mention that ISPs may move from simple port blocking to traffic analysis in order to defeat gnutella, and other 'rogue' packets, by sniffing their signature. That will work, but it also means that they'll NEXT have to blacklist ALL encrypted communication too--fat chance of that happening.

Myth #3: The Net Is Too Filled with Hackers to Control
TechReview's argument: You can restrict free communication most effectively at the hardware level. If consumers won't buy the crippled products, it becomes governments' job to mandate it, "just like [they] insist that cars have certain antipollution methods."

My counterargument: I think people will get off their asses and 'revolt' before their last bastion of freedom be co-opted by the system. Also, as long as ANY communication is still possible, you can hide whatever data you want to communicate within that channel... defeating the orwell network.

The most amazing 15 year old I've run across isn't even American. MacMillan India Ltd. is publishing a book he wrote as a 14 year old. From the jacket blurb: "...The author, Ankit Fadia, 16 years old is a tenth class student, studying in Delhi Public School R.K. Puram. Ankit Fadia, who at the tender age of 14 wrote this book, is the youngest author for Macmillan in their 110 years of history. He started his website, Hacking Truths for a small circle of friends to whom Ankit would send out periodic manuals, but very soon it evolved into a worldwide community of thousands of like mined people who subscribed to receive information that really mattered. The basic motive behind Hacking Truths is to spread the message of ethical hacking which would revolutionize the global security scene. He believes ethical hacking is like vaccination - you fight eveil for positive gains..." So go ahead, Slashdot Effect Ankit's website Hacking Truths...it's pretty cool.

And I'm beginning to be convinced that sites like this will be invaluable in the future. I am definately beginning to believe circumventing the law, or just quietly breaking it, are the ways to go.

One of the reasons I love IE so much is it's "security zones" feature. I default to browsing with everything disabled except non-encrypted form submissions, file and font downloads, and prompts for safe/signed ActiveX controls. No pop ups, no annoying Java-based auto-refreshes, no stupid cookies to a million and one sites. The "Restricted Sites" zone is basically "High" with cookies and a few other things set to "prompt", and "Trusted Sites" and "Local Intranet" are low and medium-low respectively.

If there's a site that requires Java or whatever to even view, I drop it in "Restricted Sites" temporarily. If it's a site I hit daily or hourly (like slashdot), it goes into "Trusted Sites" (because I know Rob Malda is basically Good).

Believe me, this is the only way to browse. Especially when one's showing off astalavista.box.sk to one's female superiors and a pr0n ad pops up after clicking on some 37337 exploit or crack.

Microsoft's FAQ on the subject is a little more vague, specifying only that "It is able to tolerate a certain degree of change in a hardware configuration so that users can change their hardware without having to reactivate the product. If the user completely overhauls the hardware, then activation may be required again, which would take place by telephone." What is a complete overhaul? I'm not sure...I've overhauled my engine before, but not my computer.

Volume licenses should be unaffected, OEM licenses may or may not be, retail definitely will be.

The EULA in Office (apparently) states that the primary user of Office on a desktop may install on a laptop computer for exclusive use. You would get an activation code for that laptop the same way. Windows (retail and OEM) and OEM licenses of Office only allow for a single installed copy.

Office may be reinstalled as many times as necessary on the same machine without a different activation code...but a reformat may require a new code. The FAQ only states that Windows can be installed as many times as necessary on the same machine, but does not say if a reformat (which is really the only way to install Windows properly) would require a new code...I'd guess it wouldn't, however.

All in all, this may actually be a good thing for small corporate customers (those not on the Volume Licensing programs, anyway). Remember those Slashdot stories about small governments and corps being confused on MS licenses? Well, now there's no excuse. If you've got a code for the HW, then you're legal. SPA Audits may become a thing of the past.

As for Windows warez and those that are admitted pirates, we'll just have to wait until some enterprising coder cracks it and links it to Astalavista and bypass it. Shouldn't be any more of an annoyance than other copy protection schemes have been, hopefully.

Any other questions?

You can find all sorts of ICQ hacking utilities here. As it says on the ICQ site, secret conversations should be held by other, more secure means.

I'm not really sure what the hell your point was...

But, the real point is that Napster is not just a database of song names, and the database is not the problem. The problem is that this little database contains the links to thousands of MP3's.

In case people haven't realized it, the courts are trying to essentially remove all links to questionable information (remmeber 2600 and DeCSS?). They can't stop the masses from trading/sharing in it because there's too many to police. But, if they can stop the large sites and companies from linking to it, then they have effectively removed it from 95% of the WWW users.

Expect search engines to come under fire next, with orders to remove links to pages offering MP3 or similar downloads. Then, they may even go to Usenet and remove the offending binaries groups from the major ISP's Usenet servers (this might be a stretch, as most Usenet users are pretty tech-savvy and would be able to point to a new server pretty easily).

At the end, we'll be left with what we had before. Only underground sources will be available for use. You're going to have to know to go to Astalavista to get your cracks, or IRC for your warez and MP3's. And, then the mom-and-pop users won't know where to find these things, and the RIAA and MPAA folks will be happy, because they know "us-types" aren't going to buy their crap anyways.

Just go to someplace like astalavista.box.sk a search for "vmware 2.0.3 linux" to find a crack for it. :-) oh, and forget vmware if you have less than a 450 Mhz processor and 128 meg of ram.

Or if you don't want to be an evil warez dood, just use something like vim/emacs for code editing. If you don't use raw code for sites anyway, well, linux ain't the OS for you. The JS debugging thing y ou can sort of mimic by turning on the javascript console in Netscape (javascript:console as a url in 4.x, maybe the same way in mozilla)

Games like the old spectrum classic 3D Ant Attack should be archived as examples of the evolution of computing entertainment.

3D Ant Attack was a 3D platform game released in 1983 for the Sinclair/Timex ZX Spectrum that could be argued to be the precursor to the Tomb Raiders of today.

Abandonware sites effectively archive such classic games in a similar way to the classic computer/consoles museums that exist legally.
Considering the ongoing trend for eye candy over gameplay we need the old games to be around as examples of good game design.

For example RARE, nee Ultimate Play The Game produced games for the old 8-bit computers that are still relevant today in terms of game design and sheer playability. Play UPG games like Cookie, Knightlore, Tranz-Am and JetPac and see how games should be designed. You can't even download the spectrum originals from Rare's site so without Abandonware their work could be lost.

P.S. For decent warez site vist new-warez and don't forget to visit astalavista if you need to get round pesky copy protection on old software (and a damn good site for security info too)

I often use the free (as in beer) search engine made by Copernic.

Basically they offer web searchs based on categories with each category using some of 80 different search engines to aggregate a result, with categories such as :
- programming
- tech news (searches sites such as slashdot and the register)
- games
- file search
- computer security (searches astalavista for ex)
- humour
- mp3
- e-mail addresses
- shopping
- news
- newgroups
- the Web(America),the Web(UK),the Web(Mongolian Goat Herders etc-well you get the picture)

Best of all it can filter out all the dead links before giving you its search results

It use engines such as Google,The Open Directory Project, Alta Vista, Hot Bot etc as new search engines come along they are available to use when you next update Copernic via the net.

They sell a commercial version but that differs only in the ability to cutomize more and do get rid of the annoying adverts whilst your surfing

If you want the commercial version just download the free one and get a license number from astalavista , register your software via the menu and lo and behold you have now got the Pro version.

"Would you pay $4.95 a month to use Napster? "
NO!
But i would get a serial from http://astalavista.box.sk

And if done via posting anonomously while browsing through an anon proxy server (http://astalavista.box.sk has a list) While not garunteeing absolute security it would probably keep the code distributed and allow comments to be posted.

The only problem i see is the informing of other developers where exactly to look on /.

oblisk

This is a really good idea, a bit like the unique transaction number system used in electronic banking - once the number is used, you can't use it anymore, nor can anyone else.

The problem I am seeing with it, however, is that it gives a whole new field of application to the credit card number generator programs that the usual cracking groups have been cranking out for the last year or so (like DisCard online, available from places like New Order). The algorithm by which AmEx would be generating their credit card numbers is going to be a company secret, of course, but so are the algorithms by which they are generated now. If anyone was able to provide a similar algorithm that generates disposable credit card numbers from someone's semi-public fixed account numbers or whatever static personal data AmEx would be using, it would probably lead to a new generation of credit card frauds ("What do you mean, you haven't used this number yet? So what about the transaction on XX-XX-XXXX?").

Heidi Moeller: [...] Is the MS-DOS prompt still in Millennium, or has it been deleted?

Alan Sohn: That's a good question. As you might or might not have heard,
Windows Millennium will not include the ability to be able to boot up to a MS-DOS prompt from the hard disk . We've included some of the real-mode functionality from within Windows Millennium, to allow for better stability and performance , and even eliminate a lot of the troubleshooting aspects . However, you still will be able to go out to a MS-DOS virtual machine, or a virtual MS-DOS prompt within Windows, just like you could in previous versions. Basically the limitation here will be the fact that you can't boot to a Start menu, and then choose command prompt as one of the options.

If you need to boot to a command prompt, you can still do so through the emergency startup disk. That will still be an option, to be able to create one within Control Panel Add/Remove Programs, or during setup. We'll also give you the option to create a startup disk at that time as well.

Posted by 11223:

On a related note, Pixel32 has promised a Linux port of their excellent (far better than PhotoPaint, IMHO) photo manipulation program. You can register until the end of July for $32, get the WinDOS version, and then get the BeOS and Linux versions for free later when they come out. (After that it's $50).

There was a recent post on regarding security courses. The poster was kind enough to reply back to the list with a list of responses to his question. I've included some of that list below.. my hands hurt from typing all day, so I don't feel like typing out the rest. Maybe I will tomorrow..

http://www.isc2.org/
http://www.brainbench.com/
http://www.robertgraham.com/
http://www.r00tabega.com/
http://www.sans.org/
http://www.csc.com/
http://www.ey.com
http://www.securityfocus.com/
http://astalavista.box.sk/
http://neworder.box.sk/
http://blacksun.box.sk/tutorials.html
http://www.prosofttraining.com/

Don Head
Linux Mentor