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It does if people to change their behavior to prevent it.

In this case, there's evidence that behavior has changed, such as the Air Mauritiana flight hijacking in February. That hijacker was lucky the security forces got on board quickly.

Why did they do it? Think this through... imagine yourself on a hijacked plane. Prior to 9/11, what would you do? Common wisdom was that your best chance of survival was to sit quietly and cooperate, because most hostages were released unharmed. After two planes crashed into the WTC, that changed. It changed so quickly and so completely that passengers on a plane who were already in the air when it happened found out about it and adjusted their behavior to the new situation.

If you're on a hijacked plane, you now assume you're going to die when the plane is crashed into a target. So what's your best move? What gives you the best chance of survival? Doing exactly what the passengers on Flight 93 and on the Air Mauritiana flight did -- fight back, hard! In the case of Flight 93, it didn't save them, but it did save other lives. In the case of the Air Mauritiana flight, the passengers survived it as well.

Post-9/11, the only way hijackers have any chance on a passenger plane is if there are enough of them to physically overwhelm the passengers and flight crew, because nobody on board with half a brain is going to sit quietly and go along.

In deference to your limitations, I've spelled it out for you.

Sorry, that's stupidly wrong. Property rights are already protected in other parts of the constitution. If ``intellectual property'' were a natural right, it would already be covered, and the authorisation for copyrights would have been pointless.

Intellectual products are fundamentally different from physical products. We can both know the same thing, but we can't both eat the same hamburger. You can steal a hamburger, but you can't steal an idea (though we often speak of plagarism as ``stealing credit'').

We have a natural right to physical property, exactly because it is rivalrous in consumption. There is no such thing as ``intellectual property'', except as artifically defined in law, exactly because it is not rivalrous in consumption.

I agree that Bush is taking the country in the wrong direction, but vague slogans are not very convincing evidence. There are people who compare the European Union to the Third Reich using similar tactics, see for example this guy.

I prefer Ceephax.

ceephax acid krew

In the early days of the web, there was a webcam that was pointed at an LED sign. To which you could send your own messages, laugh while your coffee and TSP reports get cold, and marvel at the 'wonders of that modern Internet thingie'.

I also seem to remember some guy who claimed to have a speech synthesiser hooked up to an Amiga in his apartment, and you could talk to his cat.

Ah, here's some contemporary info about it, although the original talk to cat gateway is no longer running and even the Wayback Machine has nothing for the server.

Whether or not it actually spoke to his cat is probably debatable, but it certainly kept a log of messages sent.

Is Two Billion Years metric for 250 million American years?
I use sidereal time, you insensitive clod!!

There's a fun problem with tuning instruments: you can indeed tune them perfectly, provided you only ever stay in one key.

Simple intervals - 4th, 5th and octave are based on simple proportions of frequencies. Unfortunately, as you keep going up the simple proportions, you get out of line with where you started from.

Example: a simple circle of 5ths:

c - g - d - a - e - b - f# - c# - g# - d# - a# - f - c

This should take you exactly 7 octaves up, so with a frequency of exactly 2**7 that of the original C. But sadly, it doesn't. As you go further up, you get a bit out, and it's actually painfully out of tune.

Trouble is, a relatively common way to tune guitars without electronics is to do so by harmonics, counting beats. But this means that not only is your top E not 2 octaves above your bottom E, all your frets are subtley wrong and you'll have some problems around your G/B strings because it's not a simple 4th interval.

Violin players have it easy - they only have 4 strings at equal intervals, covering under 2 octaves, plus as they don't have any frets, really class violinists will unconsciously micro-adjust their notes mid stream.

What is much easier to do for fixed instruments like keyboards and fretted string instruments is tune one octave perfectly (say white notes starting at middle C), then tune each C on the instrument to N octaves up/down from the original C, then each D, and so on. Result, as long as you stay on the white keys (so C major/A minor/other white key modes), you're fine. But if you modulate to say G Major - a normal direction - you'll be in pain as your F# will be way out, so a simple dominant chord of D will be nasty.

This was well understood by about 1600, and came to a head with the rise of organ playing, and a number of compromises were worked out, where all the little differences are adjusted so that you can play in any key, and it'll be near enough OK. A side result of this is that different keys have different sounds as the adjustments fall differently.

As a demonstration of this variation of key colour, J S Bach wrote a set of preludes and fugues - 2 sets of 24, covering every major and every minor key, called the Well Tempered Klavier (or just the '48').

More than you need to know at A beginner's guide to temperament.

A product's value is whatever it was most recently traded for. A product's price is whatever the guy who's pushing it chooses it to be. That could be set based on a random number generator, it could be a number restrained by cash flow, maybe theories that one's product will lead to sales of another product from which they will profit (even if they're selling at a loss), or just a number set usingGiffen Good strategies.

However, no matter how you slice it, playing any market, including the market of life itself, is a zero sum game.

I also had an SDK-85, the Intel single board computer which showcased the 8085 chip. This was about like the Sym-1, but less neat-o hobby-oriented stuff in the rom. It actually had a proper area to which I could attach a breadboard, so projects on this looked a little less kludgy. Since I never really took a shine to the Intel chips, this collected more dust than the Sym.

Then, there were my portables: First an HP-41c, then a Sharp PC-1500 (also known as the TRS-80 PC2). The Sharp was a hand held, calculator sized (like a 10 inch long chunk of 2x4), basic programmable calculator. Its basic was almost entirely comaptible with the MS GWBasic which was shipping with PC-DOS at that time (1982 or so), so I could develope programs on it, then retype them on the PC. The little CMOS CPU on the Sharp ran at a slower clock speed than did the IBM PC's CPU, but the programs were still nearly as fast. I had the plotter/cassette interface, which let me print out circuit diagrams and so on in class, for tests. Since there weren't enough PCs in the classroom for everyone to use at once on tests, I got a big advantage out of this.

Of course, before I owned any of these, there was the Honeywell mainframe (lousy link, that'll give you an idea of how obscure Honeybucket computers were and are) I used at UAF.

Then, there were some that I worked on, but never owned:

The Otrona Attache. These were wonderful little CPM machines, with a Z80 CPU and a TI screen controller chip which I was never able to find a source for (Not sure about the TI part, but definitely sure about the hard-to-get part.). I never owned one, unfortunately, because none of the people who owned them would ever part with them, including the owner of the one with the chip I couldn't replace.

Then there were the various models of Altos and Vector Graphics machines. Both of these were multi-user, multi-CPU CPM machines.

Computers have created a society without attention spans or connection to the real world around them. Writing is a physical activity that should take time to produce quality results. Blogs are useless and a horrible waste of time. Please have your students write well not in excess.
Check out this article from one of Americas best essayist/poet/fiction write

Then I tried Bittorrent for the first time on this torrent and got the 500mb file damn fast and without needing a fileplanet account.

So it looks good to me so far, I hope it's used for more stuff like getting the big trailers and demos out and doesn't get bogged down with warez and stuff.

Also, farmer/poet/essayist Wendell Berry wrote a short, widely ridiculed essay years back entitled "Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer". It contains interesting criteria for accepting new technological innovations. Google reveals an online version of the essay here. Its short and worth reading. You should really buy the whole excellent book: What Are People For?

I aspire to create work of engineering quality - robust and reliable - and I am inevitably in the original sense an engineer (someone who applies ingenuity to problems); but I know that my work is not of comparable reliability to that of people who work in more established areas of engineering. I would like it to be and strive to make it so, but the reality is that if software became as disciplined and regimented as structural engineering is, I'd go looking for something a little bit closer to the edge, a little bit more raw.

Way back in the mists of time, i remember two occurances of pretty much the same thing. One was a sega mega drive in the same case as a desktop PC, literally it had a place where you could plug in a cart underneath the CD bay. Also the Amiga was released with the same thing, you had a Amiga 1200 mobo and a Intel mobo in the same case, both sitting on the same scsi chain using the same drives at the same time. It was kinda expensive at the time, but useful for the people who needed both. Screen switching was done via a built in kvm or something. Thinking about it now, i think it was a extension to the Siamese which used a serial leed between two seperate cases.

Most likely, it was named after this Exeter. Here's an account of how the Japanese sunk her in WWII.

Chris Mattern

The greatest question ever asked by clippy

(with apologies to kordy)

This chap managed to play back Baird's 1927 recordings (which is more than Baird ever did)

(Baird did some of his initial experiments in the Park in my hometown in England - there was a plaque on the building)

And nutcase Britons are still at it

Here's a gadget to convert modern TV to 30-line Baird

This chap managed to play back Baird's 1927 recordings (which is more than Baird ever did)

(Baird did some of his initial experiments in the Park in my hometown in England - there was a plaque on the building)

And nutcase Britons are still at it

Here's a gadget to convert modern TV to 30-line Baird

If IBM comes out with a computer with a roll-up display in or around 2025, I think they should call it the IBM AXE.

It occurs to me that when security tools such as nmap, or crack or airsnort or SATAN come from places OTHER than the government, they are seen as threats to Internet security. Some people in government even want to make them illegal.

But when the government itself comes out with software to expose security holes, it's called the "Gold Standard".

What gives?

Quibble:

You can't put data on vinyl.

Actually, you can -- well, ok, you can for sure put data on wax discs, and I should think vinyl would be/have been easier. The problem is getting the data off again.

Apparently, for that you need a computer.

Main argument:

Still, I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Cox has some good things to say about the MPAA's (lack of) distribution system, and their "my way or the highway" attitude when it comes to playing by their rules in the system they built.

Sometimes it's the angry outsiders who get most of the work done, or have you forgotten? If you're an American, I suggest you start with your own Founding Fathers. If not, I'm sure a little cursory research might turn up some more savoury examples for your delectation.

Incidentally, is Alan Cox more or less of an angry outsider than Leif Junker, (the late) Lucio Fulci, and Chas. Balun, all of whom had or have been talking about this stuff for years...?

Well, the Baird Standard System actually was used in Britain, and people watched it, too. Here's a page on early television history (begins with Nipkow in 1884[!]) by one of the foremost television scholars around.

There's much more interesting stuff on this page, including a history of Phonovision, Baird's attempt to record his television experiments;

and information on the earliest known recording of broadcast television, which dates from 1933, incidentally somewhat earlier than the Berlin Olympics broadcast in '36...

Granted, we now use an electronic system for television, but where would we have been without the analogue version?

Interrobang, graverobbing dead media since 1996

Well, the Baird Standard System actually was used in Britain, and people watched it, too. Here's a page on early television history (begins with Nipkow in 1884[!]) by one of the foremost television scholars around.

There's much more interesting stuff on this page, including a history of Phonovision, Baird's attempt to record his television experiments;

and information on the earliest known recording of broadcast television, which dates from 1933, incidentally somewhat earlier than the Berlin Olympics broadcast in '36...

Granted, we now use an electronic system for television, but where would we have been without the analogue version?

Interrobang, graverobbing dead media since 1996

Well, the Baird Standard System actually was used in Britain, and people watched it, too. Here's a page on early television history (begins with Nipkow in 1884[!]) by one of the foremost television scholars around.

There's much more interesting stuff on this page, including a history of Phonovision, Baird's attempt to record his television experiments;

and information on the earliest known recording of broadcast television, which dates from 1933, incidentally somewhat earlier than the Berlin Olympics broadcast in '36...

Granted, we now use an electronic system for television, but where would we have been without the analogue version?

Interrobang, graverobbing dead media since 1996

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:

• HOW TO BYPASS BIOS PASSWORDS by Elf Qrin
• How to Bypass BIOS Passwords by LabMice.net
• BIOS Password Recovery by Password Crackers, Inc.

A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.

Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:

• Security FAQ
• Proper Care and Feeding of Firewalls
• WAN-Hacking with AutoHack (plus slides)
• How To Build Your Own Network Intrusion Kit (readme)
• Programming Holes that will hose your System Security
• Crack FAQ
• CrackLib README
• Crack Humour

It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.

Other very common mistake is leaving a floppy drive set up as the first booting device, or not having password protected BIOS settings.

With e.g. Debian boot floppies or any other mini Linux and mini Unix distribution you can just insert a floppy, hit reset and wait a while until you got r00t and do whatever you want (like change the real root password in /etc/shadow on the main partition to whatever you want).

I'm talking about it, because it's much easier than trying to write a remote exploit, much easier than writing a local exploit and much easier than actually stealing the whole hardware. It's usually also much easier than social engineering.

It wouldn't be even hard to make a floppy which automatically do something to the system (like adding new users and adding them to every group, changing passwords, reading encrypted passwords for later cracking, leaving backdoors, etc.). When you have such a floppy, you only need few seconds to insert it, hit reset, come back after a minute when everything is done, take your floppy and hit reset again.

You can even prepare this floppy in a way, that when everything is done, your files from the floppy are deleted and "shutdown -r" is run. That way even when someone enters the room before you, he'll only find a normally working system with empty floppy in the drive. The chances are that no one will even go there to see what's wrong if the server was down for a minute and now it's OK, especially if it's a lunch brake or something.

Very dangerous and very easy if you can only go near a computer, and if it can boot the system from the floppy. And I've already seen servers without BIOS passwords and those set to boot in order of floppy,cd,hdd. It's very important and often forgotten issue, it's somewhere between physical and non-physical (logical?) security.

...but I do not think that perl is the "Write Once, Read Nowhere" langue you make it out to be ^_^

Just for a little fun, I thought I'd try out my rusting perl tricks and unroll your silly script.

$c = 'plfeY04jaJnYI';
$s = substr $c, 0, 2;
for $l (1..8) {
for ('a' x $l .. 'z' x $l){
if($c eq crypt($_, $s)) {
print "$_.$s\n";
exit;
}
}
}

If you want to see a really good password cracking program, check out Alec Muffett's great and famous Crack. It's really great, especially when you have good dictionaries. If you want to check if your password is easily cracked by Crack, you can use Alec Muffett's CrackLib. Check out my online Password-Guessability-O-Meter, I wrote it some time ago to demonstrate to one of my clients how does the CrackLib work. You just enter your desired password, and it tells you if (and why) it is easy to guess, using English, Polish, Czech, French and Latin dictionaries.

I use CrackLib for online registrations CGI scripts etc. so users can't have silly and easy to guess passwords. It can also be used with passwd program. Great library, and easy to use (there's Crypt::Cracklib Perl interface), but may be quite difficult to set up for the first time.

Not very difficile, Mister shiny@rfl.pl, but I shall compliment you for at least trying to obfuscate with the silly "q//" perl operateur ^_^

$q=q,p,.q,l,.q,f,.q,e,.q,Y,.q,0,.q,4,.q,j,.q,a,.q, J,.q,n,.q,Y,.q,I,;

The "if" statement is another ruse; suffixed "if" is in fact called before the condition of the "if" statement, and he uses this to initialise $q apparently after it's been first used. The above code is in fact equal to this:

$q = 'plfeY04jaJnYI';
$x = substr $q, 0, 2;

And it makes itself apparent that $q is the crypt hash (henceforth called $crypt) and $x is the salt ($salt).

for (++$_..$_<<3){...}

Now you are just being silly :-) $_ is not used yet and thus is 0, and ++0 is of course 1. 1<<3 is 8.

for($i = 1; $i <= 8; ++$i) {...}

Which not only looks simpler, but runs faster too ^_^

I just run this benchmark:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Benchmark;

sub s1{ for ($i = 1; $i <= 1_000_000; ++$i) { } }
sub s2{ for (1 .. 1_000_000) { } }

$t1 = timestr timeit 100, \
$t2 = timestr timeit 100, \

print "1. $t1\n2. $t2\n";

1. 103 wallclock secs (87.77 usr + 0.15 sys = 87.92 CPU) @ 1.14/s (n=100)
2. 60 wallclock secs (51.93 usr + 0.04 sys = 51.97 CPU) @ 1.92/s (n=100)

But in my code this loop has only eight iterations, where the 8th one takes two years, so the loop control overhead itself doesn't really matter here. The inner loop is more important but crack() function takes most of the time, anyway.

Older versions of Perl (I don't know which exactly) created a temporary array for the range operator in foreach loop, so the code like:

for (1 .. 1_000_000_000) { ... }

The "and die" bit just is taking advantage of the short-circuit boolean operateur système. The "die" only is executing when $crypt (the origin hash) and the encrypted form of the current guess are equal, in which case the key has been found and we quit ^_^ I changed it to a nicer looking "print" statement for further clairitie.

I think you're very good, really. Most of people have no idea how to analyze such obfuscated code. Actually I'm quite disappointed that decrypting my code was so easy for you... :)

I'll tell you why and how I wrote this program. I was inspired by this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
@a=(Lbzjoftt,Inqbujfodf,
Hvcsjt); $b="Lbssz Wbmm"
;$b =~ y/b-z/a-z/ ; $c =
" Tif ". @a ." hsfbu wj"
."suvft pg b qsphsbnnfs"
. ":\n";$c =~y/b-y/a-z/;
print"\n\n$c ";for($i=0;
$i<@a; $i++) { $a[$i] =~
y/b-y/a-z/;if($a[$i]eq$a
[-1]){print"and $a[$i]."
;}else{ print"$a[$i], ";
}}print"\n\t\t--$b\n\n";

So I wrote the first working version and started to make it as small as possible. Originally it didn't have to be obfuscated, just small. This is the smallest version I've written so far:

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,0,
2;for(1..8){for('a'x$_..'z'x$_){
die"$_.$s\n"if crypt($_,$s)eq$c}}

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,
0,2;for(1..8){$c eq crypt$_,$s
and die"$_.$s"for'a'x$_..'z'x$_}

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,0,2;$k=
'a';$k++while$c ne crypt$k,$s;die"$k.$s";

Hopefully that wasn't too difficile to follow, my english is not perfect.

Just remember, Mr. shiny@rfl.pl, no langue is completely impenetrable (except perhaps Intercal, but that's a small bit pathological :-)

This Unlambda program "calculates and prints the Fibonacci numbers (as lines of asterisks)":

```s``s``sii`ki
`k.*``s``s`ks
``s`k`s`ks``s``s`ks``s`k`s`kr``s`k`sikk
`k``s`ksk

I wanted to show a Hello world example of Brainf***, but I got this error:

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

You like Perl, so if you know Inline::C and Inline::CPR (if you don't, read Pathologically Polluting Perl by Brian Ingerson) you may enjoy understanding this code:

#!/usr/bin/cpr
int main(void) {
CPR_eval("use Inline (C => q{
char* greet() {
return \"Hello world\";
}
})");
printf("%s, I'm running under Perl version %s\n",
CPR_eval("&greet"),
CPR_eval("use Config; $Config{version}"));
return 0;
}

Are you up to date with Perl 6 development? It's going to be great and extremely powerful language. Read Larry Wall's Apocalypses and Damian Conway's Exegeses if you're interested:

• Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good (April 2, 2001)
• Apocalypse 2: Fundamental data types, variables and the context and scoping of the language (May 3, 2001)
• Exegesis 2 (May 15, 2001)
• Apocalypse 3: Operators (October 2, 2001)
• Exegesis 3 (October 3, 2001)
• Apocalypse 4: Syntax (January 18, 2002)

...but I do not think that perl is the "Write Once, Read Nowhere" langue you make it out to be ^_^

Just for a little fun, I thought I'd try out my rusting perl tricks and unroll your silly script.

$c = 'plfeY04jaJnYI';
$s = substr $c, 0, 2;
for $l (1..8) {
for ('a' x $l .. 'z' x $l){
if($c eq crypt($_, $s)) {
print "$_.$s\n";
exit;
}
}
}

If you want to see a really good password cracking program, check out Alec Muffett's great and famous Crack. It's really great, especially when you have good dictionaries. If you want to check if your password is easily cracked by Crack, you can use Alec Muffett's CrackLib. Check out my online Password-Guessability-O-Meter, I wrote it some time ago to demonstrate to one of my clients how does the CrackLib work. You just enter your desired password, and it tells you if (and why) it is easy to guess, using English, Polish, Czech, French and Latin dictionaries.

I use CrackLib for online registrations CGI scripts etc. so users can't have silly and easy to guess passwords. It can also be used with passwd program. Great library, and easy to use (there's Crypt::Cracklib Perl interface), but may be quite difficult to set up for the first time.

Not very difficile, Mister shiny@rfl.pl, but I shall compliment you for at least trying to obfuscate with the silly "q//" perl operateur ^_^

$q=q,p,.q,l,.q,f,.q,e,.q,Y,.q,0,.q,4,.q,j,.q,a,.q, J,.q,n,.q,Y,.q,I,;

The "if" statement is another ruse; suffixed "if" is in fact called before the condition of the "if" statement, and he uses this to initialise $q apparently after it's been first used. The above code is in fact equal to this:

$q = 'plfeY04jaJnYI';
$x = substr $q, 0, 2;

And it makes itself apparent that $q is the crypt hash (henceforth called $crypt) and $x is the salt ($salt).

for (++$_..$_<<3){...}

Now you are just being silly :-) $_ is not used yet and thus is 0, and ++0 is of course 1. 1<<3 is 8.

for($i = 1; $i <= 8; ++$i) {...}

Which not only looks simpler, but runs faster too ^_^

I just run this benchmark:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Benchmark;

sub s1{ for ($i = 1; $i <= 1_000_000; ++$i) { } }
sub s2{ for (1 .. 1_000_000) { } }

$t1 = timestr timeit 100, \
$t2 = timestr timeit 100, \

print "1. $t1\n2. $t2\n";

1. 103 wallclock secs (87.77 usr + 0.15 sys = 87.92 CPU) @ 1.14/s (n=100)
2. 60 wallclock secs (51.93 usr + 0.04 sys = 51.97 CPU) @ 1.92/s (n=100)

But in my code this loop has only eight iterations, where the 8th one takes two years, so the loop control overhead itself doesn't really matter here. The inner loop is more important but crack() function takes most of the time, anyway.

Older versions of Perl (I don't know which exactly) created a temporary array for the range operator in foreach loop, so the code like:

for (1 .. 1_000_000_000) { ... }

The "and die" bit just is taking advantage of the short-circuit boolean operateur système. The "die" only is executing when $crypt (the origin hash) and the encrypted form of the current guess are equal, in which case the key has been found and we quit ^_^ I changed it to a nicer looking "print" statement for further clairitie.

I think you're very good, really. Most of people have no idea how to analyze such obfuscated code. Actually I'm quite disappointed that decrypting my code was so easy for you... :)

I'll tell you why and how I wrote this program. I was inspired by this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
@a=(Lbzjoftt,Inqbujfodf,
Hvcsjt); $b="Lbssz Wbmm"
;$b =~ y/b-z/a-z/ ; $c =
" Tif ". @a ." hsfbu wj"
."suvft pg b qsphsbnnfs"
. ":\n";$c =~y/b-y/a-z/;
print"\n\n$c ";for($i=0;
$i<@a; $i++) { $a[$i] =~
y/b-y/a-z/;if($a[$i]eq$a
[-1]){print"and $a[$i]."
;}else{ print"$a[$i], ";
}}print"\n\t\t--$b\n\n";

So I wrote the first working version and started to make it as small as possible. Originally it didn't have to be obfuscated, just small. This is the smallest version I've written so far:

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,0,
2;for(1..8){for('a'x$_..'z'x$_){
die"$_.$s\n"if crypt($_,$s)eq$c}}

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,
0,2;for(1..8){$c eq crypt$_,$s
and die"$_.$s"for'a'x$_..'z'x$_}

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,0,2;$k=
'a';$k++while$c ne crypt$k,$s;die"$k.$s";

Hopefully that wasn't too difficile to follow, my english is not perfect.

Just remember, Mr. shiny@rfl.pl, no langue is completely impenetrable (except perhaps Intercal, but that's a small bit pathological :-)

This Unlambda program "calculates and prints the Fibonacci numbers (as lines of asterisks)":

```s``s``sii`ki
`k.*``s``s`ks
``s`k`s`ks``s``s`ks``s`k`s`kr``s`k`sikk
`k``s`ksk

I wanted to show a Hello world example of Brainf***, but I got this error:

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

You like Perl, so if you know Inline::C and Inline::CPR (if you don't, read Pathologically Polluting Perl by Brian Ingerson) you may enjoy understanding this code:

#!/usr/bin/cpr
int main(void) {
CPR_eval("use Inline (C => q{
char* greet() {
return \"Hello world\";
}
})");
printf("%s, I'm running under Perl version %s\n",
CPR_eval("&greet"),
CPR_eval("use Config; $Config{version}"));
return 0;
}

Are you up to date with Perl 6 development? It's going to be great and extremely powerful language. Read Larry Wall's Apocalypses and Damian Conway's Exegeses if you're interested:

• Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good (April 2, 2001)
• Apocalypse 2: Fundamental data types, variables and the context and scoping of the language (May 3, 2001)
• Exegesis 2 (May 15, 2001)
• Apocalypse 3: Operators (October 2, 2001)
• Exegesis 3 (October 3, 2001)
• Apocalypse 4: Syntax (January 18, 2002)

...but I do not think that perl is the "Write Once, Read Nowhere" langue you make it out to be ^_^

Just for a little fun, I thought I'd try out my rusting perl tricks and unroll your silly script.

$c = 'plfeY04jaJnYI';
$s = substr $c, 0, 2;
for $l (1..8) {
for ('a' x $l .. 'z' x $l){
if($c eq crypt($_, $s)) {
print "$_.$s\n";
exit;
}
}
}

If you want to see a really good password cracking program, check out Alec Muffett's great and famous Crack. It's really great, especially when you have good dictionaries. If you want to check if your password is easily cracked by Crack, you can use Alec Muffett's CrackLib. Check out my online Password-Guessability-O-Meter, I wrote it some time ago to demonstrate to one of my clients how does the CrackLib work. You just enter your desired password, and it tells you if (and why) it is easy to guess, using English, Polish, Czech, French and Latin dictionaries.

I use CrackLib for online registrations CGI scripts etc. so users can't have silly and easy to guess passwords. It can also be used with passwd program. Great library, and easy to use (there's Crypt::Cracklib Perl interface), but may be quite difficult to set up for the first time.

Not very difficile, Mister shiny@rfl.pl, but I shall compliment you for at least trying to obfuscate with the silly "q//" perl operateur ^_^

$q=q,p,.q,l,.q,f,.q,e,.q,Y,.q,0,.q,4,.q,j,.q,a,.q, J,.q,n,.q,Y,.q,I,;

The "if" statement is another ruse; suffixed "if" is in fact called before the condition of the "if" statement, and he uses this to initialise $q apparently after it's been first used. The above code is in fact equal to this:

$q = 'plfeY04jaJnYI';
$x = substr $q, 0, 2;

And it makes itself apparent that $q is the crypt hash (henceforth called $crypt) and $x is the salt ($salt).

for (++$_..$_<<3){...}

Now you are just being silly :-) $_ is not used yet and thus is 0, and ++0 is of course 1. 1<<3 is 8.

for($i = 1; $i <= 8; ++$i) {...}

Which not only looks simpler, but runs faster too ^_^

I just run this benchmark:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Benchmark;

sub s1{ for ($i = 1; $i <= 1_000_000; ++$i) { } }
sub s2{ for (1 .. 1_000_000) { } }

$t1 = timestr timeit 100, \
$t2 = timestr timeit 100, \

print "1. $t1\n2. $t2\n";

1. 103 wallclock secs (87.77 usr + 0.15 sys = 87.92 CPU) @ 1.14/s (n=100)
2. 60 wallclock secs (51.93 usr + 0.04 sys = 51.97 CPU) @ 1.92/s (n=100)

But in my code this loop has only eight iterations, where the 8th one takes two years, so the loop control overhead itself doesn't really matter here. The inner loop is more important but crack() function takes most of the time, anyway.

Older versions of Perl (I don't know which exactly) created a temporary array for the range operator in foreach loop, so the code like:

for (1 .. 1_000_000_000) { ... }

The "and die" bit just is taking advantage of the short-circuit boolean operateur système. The "die" only is executing when $crypt (the origin hash) and the encrypted form of the current guess are equal, in which case the key has been found and we quit ^_^ I changed it to a nicer looking "print" statement for further clairitie.

I think you're very good, really. Most of people have no idea how to analyze such obfuscated code. Actually I'm quite disappointed that decrypting my code was so easy for you... :)

I'll tell you why and how I wrote this program. I was inspired by this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
@a=(Lbzjoftt,Inqbujfodf,
Hvcsjt); $b="Lbssz Wbmm"
;$b =~ y/b-z/a-z/ ; $c =
" Tif ". @a ." hsfbu wj"
."suvft pg b qsphsbnnfs"
. ":\n";$c =~y/b-y/a-z/;
print"\n\n$c ";for($i=0;
$i<@a; $i++) { $a[$i] =~
y/b-y/a-z/;if($a[$i]eq$a
[-1]){print"and $a[$i]."
;}else{ print"$a[$i], ";
}}print"\n\t\t--$b\n\n";

So I wrote the first working version and started to make it as small as possible. Originally it didn't have to be obfuscated, just small. This is the smallest version I've written so far:

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,0,
2;for(1..8){for('a'x$_..'z'x$_){
die"$_.$s\n"if crypt($_,$s)eq$c}}

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,
0,2;for(1..8){$c eq crypt$_,$s
and die"$_.$s"for'a'x$_..'z'x$_}

$c='plfeY04jaJnYI';$s=substr$c,0,2;$k=
'a';$k++while$c ne crypt$k,$s;die"$k.$s";

Hopefully that wasn't too difficile to follow, my english is not perfect.

Just remember, Mr. shiny@rfl.pl, no langue is completely impenetrable (except perhaps Intercal, but that's a small bit pathological :-)

This Unlambda program "calculates and prints the Fibonacci numbers (as lines of asterisks)":

```s``s``sii`ki
`k.*``s``s`ks
``s`k`s`ks``s``s`ks``s`k`s`kr``s`k`sikk
`k``s`ksk

I wanted to show a Hello world example of Brainf***, but I got this error:

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

You like Perl, so if you know Inline::C and Inline::CPR (if you don't, read Pathologically Polluting Perl by Brian Ingerson) you may enjoy understanding this code:

#!/usr/bin/cpr
int main(void) {
CPR_eval("use Inline (C => q{
char* greet() {
return \"Hello world\";
}
})");
printf("%s, I'm running under Perl version %s\n",
CPR_eval("&greet"),
CPR_eval("use Config; $Config{version}"));
return 0;
}

Are you up to date with Perl 6 development? It's going to be great and extremely powerful language. Read Larry Wall's Apocalypses and Damian Conway's Exegeses if you're interested:

• Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good (April 2, 2001)
• Apocalypse 2: Fundamental data types, variables and the context and scoping of the language (May 3, 2001)
• Exegesis 2 (May 15, 2001)
• Apocalypse 3: Operators (October 2, 2001)
• Exegesis 3 (October 3, 2001)
• Apocalypse 4: Syntax (January 18, 2002)

.

That's a lot truer than you may think.

could happen

I dug into airliner black boxes last year after the Concorde disaster and I found some interesting stuff:

• called FDR - flight data recorders
• they're not black - orange or red.. easier to find in the debris.
• withstand an impact of 270 kts (3,400 G decceleration) - from the videos, those airliners were doing 350-400+ knots easy (but Im only an armchair pilot - what do I know)
• withstand 1,100 deg. C fire for up to 60 min. Much analysis was done on the structural failure of the WTC - 1,500+ deg. fires caused that steel to buckle. Does not bode well for the FDRs.

  That, and now they lay under tons of rubble. Or, they could have been vapourized. Then again, I don't think I really want to know about the last terrified moments of those poor souls (unless the terrorists were discussing bin Laden's address and phone number before they died)

  Here's a bit about these amazing little boxes: Whups... some of these appear to be stale - but you could probably still google them.

  • Black boxes: Key to investigations - BBC (good history)
  • Honeywell//Allied Signal Aerospace CVR, FDR - manufacturers of black boxes.
  • Black Boxes, Flight Data Recorders and Cockpit Voice Recorders - Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
  • Penny + Giles Aerospace - Data recorders makers of fine black boxes (good history and technical info).
  • Smiths Industries Flight Data/Cockpit Voice Recorders A report on black box tech. to the International Symposium on Transportation Recorders from a company that makes them for the US armed forces (cool.)
  • not just for planes: crashing race cars

land of the brave & the free

There was this game a long time ago by Bethesda called Daggerfall, that had a very large universe that had no real goals what-so-ever. The world was incredibly large (we're talking about wandering outdoors for hours between towns, and none was randomly generated!) The NPCs and town members were all created in such a detailed manner (with agendas and what not) and it still had the best "real-world" type experience I have ever seen. It was online, without being online.

I still remember being branded a criminal, riding on my horse to a town which ports it's fort gates up at night. I remember getting off my horse, looking around, scaling the wall... listening for guards, sneaking up behind them, knocking them out, and then climbing down into the town from the fort walls, and breaking into a house to find a bed to sleep at night. Now that was incredible.

It's a shame the 3D engine sucked... but they are making a new one with a new engine, that is going to be incredible. Daggerfall took over three years to make, and this one seems to be taking longer! I can't wait!

If overclocking was that simple, then there wouldn't be websites dedicated to it.

While I'm not saying that overclocking is trivial, don't use websites as a measure of a task's complexity! Many simple tasks have elaborate instructions on the web...

60 seconds on Google turned up these few...
How to use an extension cord safely
How to comb and wash your hair (many of these)
How to sort, store, and use Lego

You should call this Nano-trousers. In the English-speaking world, pants are what you Americans call underpants.

Also pants is used as a term of abuse indicating lameness, as in 'those trolls are really pants'.
Maybe it's a British thing - I think it came from some Childrens' TV show using 'pants' as a substitute for a word that you can't use onTV

Anyway nanopants sound totally pants to me.

After posting this, I found a working link.

"As in the 1978 confrontation with MOVE, the city claimed MOVE members inside the house
fired first - but when city workers combed the debris the next day, they found no trace of the
automatic weapons the police had accused MOVE of firing to initiate the battle. "

Clue for you... :)

Scumbag

Cracklib can be found on the Author's home page at http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~crypto/

But this guy does not work for the BBC. He works for an independent contractor called "World of Wonder" who presumably do documentaries to order.

The only thing I've ever seen by World of Wonder was the excellent Adam and Joe Show (although it got a bit samey in the third and final series).