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Grab it quick and pass it around.

Come on, everybody sing along!

"3.54562x10^5 copies of cssdvd.zip on the net, 3.54562x10^5 copies of cssdvd!
You take one down, pass it around, 3.54563x10^5 copies of cssdvd.zip on the net, 3.54563x10^5 copies...."

Done and done. DVD CSS code in .ZIP format:

www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Po rt/3224

Grab it quick, pass it around.

Grab it here, rolled in .ZIP format for easy use.

www.geocities/SiliconValley/Port/3 224

Grab it quick and pass it around.

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVal ley/Port/3224

Get it quick and pass it around.

The xBox is a bit permutation algorithm for use in crypto's, created by me in ~February 99.

http://www.geocities.com/P entagon/Barracks/3030/xBox.doc

MS - go and steal someone elses stuff!

SCOOP 1 2 3 4 5
Unofficial P.J. Online
Dave Dobbyn as Dobbo, the bard Hobbit and his merry band?
LOTR movie site by an apparent stalker (oh, excellent)
Official LOTR



==
remove pointy nose to email me
Little Stalker Boy (of websites and girls)

SCOOP 1 2 3 4 5
Unofficial P.J. Online
Dave Dobbyn as Dobbo, the bard Hobbit and his merry band?
LOTR movie site by an apparent stalker (oh, excellent)
Official LOTR



==
remove pointy nose to email me
Little Stalker Boy (of websites and girls)

In my opinion "The Matrix" was conceived as a trilogy from the beginning, and that means, that the authors created a longer story - and we have seen only the first part of it. Whatever rumors there might be about Wachowski brother thinking about this or that[4], methinks the story is already there, and what we saw in the first part will fit in the second

By the way: I am not a fanatic Matrix advocate - in my opinion, the basic message, the idea and so on have been already described hundreds of times, and in a much deeper way - stories by P.K.D. or Stanislaw Lem[5], for example. However, Matrix was a very good movie - the first one to touch this subject with so much expression, so much esthetics, and so deeply. IMO, of course.

Regards,

January

[1]The Matrix - screenplay

[2]The MATRIX FAQ

[3]Oracle Turing Machine

[4]Matrix 2 rumors

[5]A very good site on Lem

Overall it works, but there are a couple of problems to beware of:

passwd / group file automagic rollover http://www.g eocities.com/ResearchTriangle/3328/conversion-tool s.tar.gz
I didn't end up using the script since I only had two users to worry about. I did look it over, but I don't know enough perl to make it sing. The /etc/{passwd,group}files in the tarball were very useful though. Heed this note from the mini-howto's author: Trouble! convert passwd and group first, before ever installing anything debian related using dpkg. Otherwise the ownerships will be almost irrecoverably incorrect.

dselect|apt-get don't work completely
-probably because my partition setup is unexpected, they always crash at the install phase ('unable to remount /usr' or something).
That's okay, use apt-get or dselect to download the packages, then cd to /var/cache/apt/archives/
and use 'dpkg --install *.deb'. Keep an eye on the console for the 20-30 packages you will have to reinstall because of broken dependencies (here's where it is useful to do this over a telnet session so you can log all the screen output).

Here are my notes left over from doing my RH6.0 to Deb2.1 conversion:

-----[snip]------
>If you would, could you let me know how the conversion goes?

Well, I think I'm done, but I'm not sure if I broke anything or not. I imagine there will be few toys on the floor to trip over. :)
(btw, I completely ignored version numbers for everything)

I did not take any safety precautions. The computer I'm playing with has no important information on it. I use solely for experimenting with and learning Linux. I fully expect it to blow it up non-recoverably at some point.


Step (1)
- no problem except for the passwd/group thing (not having a debian version available); I just skipped that and came back to it later

(2) libstdc++ was already installed

(4) took me awhile, but I eventually found a nondebbin version of dpkg at
ftp://ftp. [mirror] .debian.org/debian/project/dpkg/

(8) This is the order that worked for me, but I had to try it a bunch of times so it shouldn' be considered definitive:

$ dpkg --force-depends --install libldso*
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libncurses*
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libstdc++
$ dpkg --force-depends --install ldso

$ dpkg --force-depends --install libc6
; core dumped after a segmentation fault at this point almost any command will segfault, even ls and rm. Don't worry All-Is-Not-Lost! (but I sure thought I was!!!)

$ ldconfig
; *wait* for ldconfig to exit, it really is busy doing something

$ dpkg --force-depends --install libc6
$ dpkg --force-depends --install dpkg
$ dpkg --configure dpkg

* these files are new (not mentioned in the HowTo). The best way to make sure you get what you need is to go to
http://debian.org/distrib/packages
and search for the package you are looking for. It will also give the dependencies, download them too.

(10) Skip this step for an http/ftp install

(11.2) ---==---
$ dselect
- choost Apt for access method, see bottom description panel for firewall/proxy setup

:: Proxy Setup (skip if you don't have one) ::
- if you have to setup proxies, *exit* not suspend dselect otherwise your changes will have no effect.

First try:

$ http_proxy="http://your.firewall.here:port/"

This is important for us MS weenies: don't use the command:

$ set http_proxy=bklah blah blah

because it's not the same as the previous one. I don't want to talk about how long it took me to figure this out.

- rerun dselect and try and Update, if the main menu returns too quickly your proxy is probably not working. Exit again and try this:

$ gunzip /usr/doc/apt/examples/apt.conf.gz
$ cp /usr/doc/apt/examples/apt.conf /etc/apt/apt.conf

and edit apt.conf for your particular firewall setup. Hopefully you know a bit about how proxies work. I only had to change one line:

Proxy "http://firewall.gov.yk.ca:80/";

and comment out the following one (the 2 '//'):

// Proxy::http.us.debian.org "DIRECT";

- run deselect again and [U]pdate. This is where it started working for me.

(11.3)
- dselect > Update downloaded about 40mb and then I ran into my next problem:

"mount: can't find /usr in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"

I presume because the script is expecting /usr to be it's own partition, which it isn't on my machine. Anyhow, at this point dselect is effectively dead in the water.

Look for /var/cache/apt/archives, it should have all of your downloaded .deb packages. Then run:

$ cd /var/cache/apt/archives
$ dpkg --install *

and go get a coffee. But keep an eye on the machine because you'll have to answer a few prompts.

On my box, 5 .deb's didn't install because of failed dependencies and 8 packages unpacked but didn't finish installing. From here it was a fairly simple matter of running

$ dpkg --install some.pack.age.0.10.deb

and figuring out from the error messages what it needs to be installed first (for the 5). And then running

$ dpkg --configure

for the 8 incomplete installs.

that's all folks. ;-)
=========================

do you know where the dselect/dpkg logs are kept?
A few messages scrolled by of things to do and programs to run at a later date, but I don't remember them all...

Oh yeah, there's one more juicy tidbit: I never once layed a finger on my computer. I did all of this from remote using telnet/ssh and VNC.

thanks for your help Brock,

-matt
-----[snip]------

I took a look at this last week with intent to turn a "partly RHAT 5.0, 5.1, and other stuff" box into a Debian system.

Unfortunately, the process is fairly dependent on some particular packages (notably libg++ ) and it looks like it is a distinctly nontrivial process to make this work in practice.

The second problem that you'll hit is that you'll wind up with a whole lot of "cruft," library-like stuff hiding here and there larding up your filesystem.

My inclination would be, instead, to:

• Do a backup of /etc
• Make sure that /home and /usr/local are on suitable partitions such that they will survive the transition unscathed.
• Nuke out /usr , /var , and / by doing an installation from scratch of Debian. Do not format or automagically mount /home or /usr/local ; that can wait 'til after the system is semi-working.
• I took a look at the portions of networking config that I wanted to keep working from old OS to new OS; I set up cfengine rules that I tested on the old RHAT install before installing fresh to manage this.

At this point, the box happens to be running RHAT 6.1; there is a good likelihood that I'll set up some even "smarter" cfengine rules than I have now and run the box through a few distributions just for the sake of regaining familiarity before letting it settle down with Debian.

http://www.geocit ies.com/ResearchTriangle/3328/rh5todeb-howto.txt

Google is good! "convert debian redhat", "I'm feeling lucky", Bam.

I do agree that the website should acknowledge Andrew Veliath, Lucien Murray-Pitts & Andrew de Quincey. However, I think Creative Labs is taking steps in the right direction and they could be taught to be more community friendly. They have given on their Creative Open Source page an email address for feedback, so use it! If you feel this strongly about it then also please contact Jon Taylor, the Creative Labs CVS maintainer for dxr2. It may also help the dxr2 project greatly if we organize a write-in campain requesting the source code to the dxr2 windows driver or the dxr2 specs.

See the "Plausible Deniability: Denied!" project here. The goal is to /. Intuit, and count the requests.

The version of the drivers on creative's web page aren't the most recent. The most recent version can be found here:

http://www.geocities.com/dxr2linux

Al so take a look at the developers message on the livid mailing list:

http ://livid.on.openprojects.net/pipermail/livid-dev/1 999-November/000770.html

If you're interested, here's the first part of the readme:

Readme for DXR2 driver v0.9b

This is still a DEVELOPMENT driver, because parts of it are still not properly tested, and a few parts are missing (see "Todo"). The player program could do with some more user friendliness :)

The driver is being actively developed by adq@tardis.ed.ac.uk, and lucien@martincurrie.com

************************************************** **************************
Also, VGA overlay is not yet supported.... output is to a TV connected to the video output of the card.
************************************************** **************************

The current IOCTL interface is TEMPORARY and WILL change... probably to be compatable with the prototype DVD interface on linuxtv.org's web pages.

The current major device number (120) is TEMPORARY, and only for development purposes. It WILL change when the driver is finished.

It has been tested with kernels 2.2.5, 2.2.9, 2.2.12

Howdy!

Rock/Opera fans in or around the Boston area can check out the first production ever of the Pretty Things lesser-know but highly esteemed rock opera, SF SORROW. The music will be live and loud and the show features some great talent.

Please check it out!

-kent

I honestly don't know what flaws you are refering to, unless you are one of them wussy VB programmers that regards real OO as a flaw because it's "too hard"

OO is harder than procedural, but it is also nearly useless in many domains. It is complicating software, languages, and training in exchange for minimal benefits. Perhaps in large RAM-centric scientific or modeling applications it shines, but I have found OO to add nothing but complexity, headaches, and mind-numbing buzzwords to regular business apps.

It seems like OO is all geared up to solve "problems" that are not really problems. For example, the apps I work on expand at least as much in the operational dimension as they do in the sub-type dimension. OO tends to assume the type-wise orientation is better than operational-wise orientation, which I find to be bogus. (Some OOers try to remedy this OO weakness by adding "pattern" classes. These are often nothing more than bulky, silly middlemen classes that add nothing useful to software except satisfaction for anal-retentive OOP class protection purists.)

Inheritance is another look-good-on-paper-just-like-socialism OO concept that makes bigger messes than it solves. The real world does not expand or change in a hierarchical fashion. Businesses love to recombine features into unpredictable new arrangements that do not follow any clean hierarchy. OO books like to use animal species and shapes for inheritance examples, because most business examples would prove too inter-relational in growth and change patterns.

Finally, there is not one shred of scientific evidence outside of pro-OO organizations that proves that OO is superior for most applications. Even the hyper-promoted reuse of OO is being withdrawn as a benefit. Any remaining benefits are vaguely stated in a Zen-like tone or are perhaps personal preferences. (Software engineering is about modeling developers' minds and habits more than about modeling the real world, which OO does not do well either. Thus, OO may simply be a subjective personal preference.)

Much of the criticism that OO fans toss at procedural concepts are based on a bad specific language (like C), or a bad procedural experience that they were too uninformed about to solve. For example, I sometimes bump into OOers who claim that procedural/relational programming cannot factor as well as OOP. However, with a few language constructs included, it can indeed factor as well as OO. (My results are often ugly from a type-safety standpoint, but they factor.)

However, that amount of abstraction is often not a goal of most programming projects anyhow. It is widely accepted that building generic routines takes roughly 3 times longer than building per-application routines. Very few business will budget for this.

Part of the reason is that they know a new language or paradigm fad will pop up and eat away at their source base within a few years. I can't wait for this day. OO has been mucking up software and progress with useless mind-candy and abstraction toys for too long. It is time to leave the dOOrk ages behind.

now, let me get something straight first. until today, I did not believe in ghosts. frankly, the idea that a public library would be encouraging some kind of ridiculous ghost hunt in the late 20th century appalled me. but no more! I'm a believer! rationalism is for the weak!
I don't want to go around ruining the contest for everyone, so I didn't submit it to the contest. I'm sure everyone will have a lot more fun if they still have a chance to win. however, my evidence is obvious and incontrovertible.
I've taken the liberty of adding a few arrows pointing toward the mysterious and beautiful apparation... she's sitting in a chair at the back of the room, reminding us all that there is life after death, that we are more than just another species of animal, that if we all close our eyes and wish hard enough, we'll become more than sex-crazed beasts hiding behind the silly mask of irrational spiritualism, possibly copulating and passing on our genes before dying and being recycled into nutrients for other forms of life! the answer is right before your very eyes!
Behold!

1. Keep expansion in mind - there's no use naming your four machines after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse if you're going to have a fifth machine come along some day. Something nice and open ended is a good bet - trees, asteroids, countries, as opposed to musketeers, David Bowie albums or deadly sins.
2. Keep 'em brief - it may be extremely cool to call your machines bananadaiquiri or slowcomfortablescrew, but after a while you're going to get really bored of typing those names over and over again. About 6-8 characters is a good maximum.
3. Don't give machines role names - "www", "mail" and "news" are what CNAMEs are for. Give the machines the dignity of a proper name.
4. Alphabeticals only - for the sake of simplicity (and speed of typing) it's best to stick to a-z only. Keep those underscores right out (they're not allowed, IIRC, folks - check your RFCs) - mr_gumby is just as legible when it's mrgumby.
5. Be interesting! - try to think of something offbeat that will keep people thinking until they work out where it's from or, even better, give in and have to ask. One of my prouder achievements is naming a lab of 20 machines after priests from the TV series "Father Ted". If you want to name your machines after planets, that's fine, but just remember that, if I recall correctly, "venus" was the most popular hostname on the Internet until everything suddenly became "www".

I saw it for a little bit and got the source of it and threw it on a Geocities page. So here is what is basically looks like:

The New Altavista

I for one would like to see as much amiga stuff ported to linux as possible. The amiga was a wonderful computer - not "just good enough" like a PC is. There's a wealth of GPL'd and open source software on the aminet. There's still stuff thats slicker in the AmigaOS than anywhere else. BTW, there's now an MUI clone on linux here The AmigaOS provided a sound learning environment for today's linux programmers: particularly in Europe, mnany of today's best open source coders are ex-Amigans. The AmigaOS had much more in common with UNIX than MS-DOS/Windows.

I thought I was pissed when I realized that Amazon was trying to patent an idea that probably occured to anyone who bought anything on the web more than once (Why do I need to go through all this crap again? Don't they already have my account info?). It got worse when I realized they were patenting cookies (that's it? No fancy shmancy algorithm, no magnificent feat of scripting genius, no originality) that I got really livid and sent them a letter advising them of my decision to boycott their company and start a chain letter which I shall forward to all my friends asking them to boycott Amazon. This is what I received in reply...makes me wanna puke.. Not especially the use of the words innovative and unique.

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

As you know, Amazon.com has filed suit against barnesandnoble.com, saying it has illegally copied Amazon.com's patented 1-Click technology.

The 1-Click feature securely stores billing and shipping information so that returning customers need only click their mouse once to buy a selected item. In recognition of the innovative and unique nature of the 1-Click technology, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent No. 5,960,411 to Amazon.com on September 28, 1999.

Amazon.com spent thousands of hours to develop the 1-Click process. As our founder, Jeff Bezos, has said, "The reason we have a patent system in this country is to encourage people to take these kinds of risks and make these kinds of investments for customers."

I hope you'll understand that we are unable to discuss this case any further as we are currently in litigation. Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us.

Best regards,
Titus G.
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/
Earth's Biggest Selection
=========================


Bad Command or File Name Go In The Corner Till U Learn Some Manners Carnage

Bad Command Or File Name

Yay Andrej! is an Andrej Bauer fanclub.

So is this one, simply entitled "Andrej Bauer Fan Club.

All of the evidence seems to fit together and support non-hoaxness of Forum2000. Or but at least, somebody bothered to set up a LOT of extra crap to make it look real. Definiately more believable than FuckU/FuckMe.

Is Andrej Bauer a mad genius? A nonperson? A pseudonym? Come on, Slashdotters, let's get to the bottom of this one!

Using Dennis Chao's work as a base I implemented an interface for the Linux Back Orifice client in Doom! Now you too can Play Doom while you Blow up Windows Machines!
http://www.geocities.com/doomhack/
Joe.

Joe.

Clearly, since it has become a story item on /., that the kid has whined to enough people about the situation. A measure of a man is how he gets things done, not how he whines about it.

I too had similar problems when I was a kid, I learned way around the system. I lied about my age, whatever it took to get where I needed to be.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
"If" - Rudyard Kipling

Andrew

17 is the age of consent.

Ooooohhhh, now have her sing and play like Virgin Steele and I'll really be in love.

Anyway, here's your age of consent chart -- keep it with you where ever you go!

Ok, so no money exchanges hands there, it might be harder to argue in a court. But my web page now (nevermind my profile, I need to update it) is on a web server at a public university. I pay tuition and am the primary administrator of this machine -- I like to think of it as mine even though it really isn't. If I put that Nader site here, with all kinds of fun stuff like petitions and links and essays and endorsements and yadda yadda yadda, is someone supposed to pay then?

This is stupid. I can almost follow the FEC's logic: expensive equipment is being used. If you were to publish in a newspaper or run a radio or television broadcast ad, you would have to pay the publisher of that media for the space. In this case, you've already paid for it (via tuition & fees) but from a certain point of view it's the same thing.

But that's an insane point of view. Would it be better to pay by the percentage of clock cycles or disc space that goes to serving out the political page? Arguably, but it's a weak argument at best.

God I hope this doesn't stand up in court...

Is it just me, or does the YAMS logo look like Mr. Hanky and a couple of his buddies? RP

Actually, I tend to just fire up SidPlay and listen to some of the classics of computer music. The mind-clearing qualities of Delta's in-game theme, Wizball's bonus level theme, or even demo music like Mixer's SurSumTheme are not to be underestimated. The 12000+ songs (many with sub-tunes) at your fingertips are sort of nice as well. B-)

My current playlist

Only 170 hours 10 minutes 23 seconds to go...

I've used MI/X and Exceed, but I actually prefer X-Win32 from StarNet. I've found it to be very reliable. When running in a single window mode, I also enjoy the full screen mode. It doesn't have that pesky windoze title bar at the top. I've also heard that there may be a crack available at: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Campus/1088/ , but I wouldn't know anything about that. ;)

Talking about Colossus - a computer that blew the socks off ENIAC and (in a recent benchtest) was shown to be faster than a Pentium II for code-cracking - would devastate US pride. A British computer from the 1940's, superior to a modern American high-tech system? That's one hell of an ego-basher.

Do you have a link for this? I've heard about Colossus being faster than a PII, but have never seen anything concrete.

One data point I do have is comparing Turing's earlier Bombe with a P100. The link mentions a P100 doing in 8 minutes what a Bombe did in 900 minutes (15 hours).

If we assume that Colossus was twice as fast as a PII, and the generic PII is four times as fast as a P100, then Turing's Colussus was about 800 times faster than his Bombe. Damn, that really blows Moore's law away.

George

What's evil about these projects, of course, is that they don't let people just talk to one another. It would be neat to be able to have access to the literuture of other countries, but that pales in comparison to having access to the people in other countries. If you just learn Esperanto you can really converse with people without needing technology or anything. It just works.

Here is a "mini-HOWTO" on how to convert RedHat 5 to Debian 2 without a reboot!

Maybe not the easiest way and a little old but very cool. Could still be helpful.

Sounds like a feature of Jesux...

If you think that site is too "shallow" then try this one: Creation "Science" Debunked. It is one of my personal favorites.

The first thing consideres gene therapy, cloning and such. Although I personally believe that human cloning - say, human cloning from somatic cells, as opposed to cloning the embryo - will remain fiction for a long time, not due to ethical or technical reasons, but because it's not useful - I also think that the further evolution of medicine and biology will go in the direction depicted by Mr. Sterling in "Holy Fire". In a few years the human genome will be sequenced - either by the Humane Genome Project or Craigg Venter from The Institute for Genomic Research, and this will provide the basis for an extensive research on the functioning of a human cell. Sooner or later the gene therapy becomes something widespread, and I'm not even talking about super-human beings or creating superintelligent kids, but just mending all the small defects a person inherited from his parents. You would be amazed if you knew how many of such little defects you have :) I wonder what do
you think, realistically, about future of medicine - will it be something like what was described in "Holy Fire"?

Another thing I wanted to ask Mr. Sterling (my esprit d'escalier be damned) is, what does he think about the Internet as an experimental field for memetics. A meme is a term coined by Richard Dawkins (the samed who first used the expression "selfish gene") back in the 80s, and it described what is also know as a "virus of the mind" - a small portion of information, which spreads from one human to another, replicating and evolving, using the human brain as a host, but not providing any advantage to the person who spreads it (rather a disadvatage). The first time I started getting the "Good Times" message to my mailbox, I told myself - well, here you have a perfect virus of the mind, spreading and evolving, and relatively easy to trace. Right now there are plenty of ideas on the Internet, which spread like a virus, and it could be possible to design some memetical experiments.

What do you think about memetics? Do you think it is worth using it to examine the cultural evolution?

Regards,

January

The so-called Nemesis theory is about 14 years old - a large planet with extremely long period deflects comets from the Oort cloud and is responsible for mass extinctions like the dinosaurs which appear to be happening periodically.

The new thing here is that someone has actually calculated a probable orbit.

I was thinking the same thing... so I just pulled out my hand dandy DVD...

Applicable blade runner quotes

I personally like wxWindows, which works for Unix, Win, and Mac (although the mac port seems to be a bit behind).

There's a list of many cross-platform toolkits here.

The comment he made about the anti abortion site that told people the location of doctors willing to practise abortion is way off.

Just take that comment for what it was, for what the entire article was, a cheap attempt at emotionalism to sway public opinion. Hackers are like anti-abortionists who kill doctors... Hackers are evil because they smoked and it hurt me... Hackers are evil because... blah blah blah...

Do you think it's a coincidence that he made the comparison of hackers to two groups of people that the media have demonized (terrorists and smokers). I think, perhaps, it was an article written for another website (which shall remain nameless, because I don't want any lawyers to be sent after me, but if you know about Defcon, then you know who I'm referring to), because the readers of /. seem to have rejected it out of hand.

The theme of the conference, however illusive, was this: There are wizards in our midst -- some masters; some journeymen; some merely would-be apprentices. Many of these wizards, through their knowledge, can endanger or damage the rest of us. But there is no common ethical code among them; each makes up his own, or simply has none. It is unclear that any one of them is well-intentioned or even fully cognizant of the consequences of his actions.

Okay, I forgot the obvious comparison to wizards. Masters of arcane and dark arts. Makes deals with demons. Heck, I'm surprised that he was so gentle on this point. He could have just as easily said: All computer hackers worship Satan. Anyone who worships Satan will go to Hell. You don't want your children to go to hell, do you? (See also the political ad in the Gnomes episode of South Park).

But, worse that the attempt to slant public opinion, is the call for the end of individuality. We need a common ethic. One World, One Nation, One People (One Orgasm - the i-brator). Unfortunately, it's the quest for personal freedom which leads to people joining this sort of sub culture. Do what you want for no reason other than because you can, because in the physical world, some guy with a club and a gun, wearing a uniform, can walk up to you on the street, beat the crap out of you, and then lock you up in a prison, just as soon as look at you.

Some break in merely for the challenge; some target people or organizations they don't like; others trash systems at random just to prove they can. The public, which doesn't really understand how computer security works, mostly sticks its head in the sand and ignores the issue unless an intruder does serious damage.

Heh, corporate america sticks it's head in the sand instead of dealing with computer security... True. But, lets face it, they also stick their head in the sand for everything else (the machine's about to crash.... -Oh, is that a bad thing? the software that you have a month to turn out won't work and will destroy your credibility.... - Yes, we know. Mine is better.... - It doesn't matter)

Other than that, I thought the rest of the article was pretty pedestrain... Actually, the title was kind of witty (would have been wittier if it were: "Phear and L0phting in Las Vegas" or maybe "Ph3ar and (ip)Flooding in Las Vegas")

Y2K is a one time cost, too

Apples and Oranges.

I'd love to see us go metric, but I think we're about 200 years too late to make a conversion without destroying the economy.

So what you are saying is that all the other countries in the world (I think there are one or two minor exceptions) managed it but we can't?
The UK and Canada switched in the 60's and 70's...when we were supposed to...hardly 200 years ago. The treaty of the metre was only signed in 1875. Again...not 200 years ago. It wasn't even standardized to SI until 1960! I sugest you read this for a history of metric.

Scroll down the email responses to the site, and you'll see Robin's correspondence with the hoax guy. It's nice to know that slashdot puts in more time to investigate and verify stories than other sites who fell for it *coughzdnetcoughcough*.

That aside, I find this whole thing to be a big embarassment to Christians like myself. C'mon... Christians have much more important concerns than nitpicking the words "kill" and "daemon" out of a Linux distro.

I've put up a temporary mirror and list of mirrors. I'll remove it in a few days so enjoy it while it lasts. I also zipped up the entire contents so you can download it for later reading. From what I've read its really good. The url is:

http://www.geocities.com/tekhi r/Progstone/index.html

First of all you need a target program, something that you'd like to reverse. Initially I'd suggest writing a smallish C/C++ program yourself, compiling it, then reversing that - I say this because it'll be small, and you should know how it works.

Once you have a program to reverse - Around 20-40k would be a good size for a start, then you'll need a dissasembler there are several around, mostly commercial ones, and some free ones.

Heres the few that I've heard of / used:-

• IDA This is a great dissasembler, with different back-ends that can dissasemble different things. (For example .class files). Its a commercial one, but you can get a demo. Find this at www.datarescue.com.
  
• WinDasm this is also a good one, I can't remember where I saw it.
  
• Dis is the best free dissasembler I found, with source code at: http://www.geocities.com/~sangcho/disa sm.html - The beauty of this is that it builds under Linux, so you can decompile a Windows Program from your windows partition, and study it under Linux.
  

Anyway by now you should be able to decompile most executables, and study the assembly language.
Much of this is going to be strange to you, so try to seperate out the different parts of the assembly - such as the startup code, the function calling, and the error handling.

After a bit of study you'll soon realise what a lot of the common code is doing.

Heres a small example of the sort of thing the DIS.exe will produce:

:00402001 E8AA220000 call 004042B0
:00402006 83F801 cmp eax, 00000001
:00402009 7434 je 0040203F
:0040200B 6A00 push 00000000
:0040200D 68A0034100 push 004103A0
(StringData)"Startup Message"
:00402012 6878034100 push 00410378
(StringData)"Program Starting In Interactive Mode"
:00402017 6A00 push 00000000
:00402019 C705F839410000000000 mov dword[004139F8], 00000000
:00402023 FF1560644100 call dword[00416460]
;;call USER32.MessageBoxA
:00402029 EB0A jmp 00402035

From this you can see the names of the win32 function calls that the program is making - this will help you "copy" the program back into C.

This is what I've done - with a good read of the assembly language you can see which Win32 API calls the program is making, and that should give you a good head starting into reimplimenting the code... *grin*

Of course if you are just interested in cracking, (Removing protection from programs, etc), then the same things apply - you just search through your listing till you find "Incorrect Serial", etc, and change the conditional jumps appropriately - But thats' bad so I'm not going to encourage you.

Once you have your program, you can then try to translate it into C .. could be tricky .. or modify it in place. For that you'll need a good hex editor, and some understanding of assembly language. (A quick tip, you can see the instructions, and op codes in the dissasembly so to replace JNZ, with JMP you could search the dissembly for a JMP and find the opcode to use. ;)

Another to decompiling via static analysis is to study the program inside a debugger. Without a double NuMega's Soft Ice is the best debugger - but its also very, very terse, and quite hard to learn.

To give you some idea of the power of soft ice, when it is loaded you can set a breakpoint on a function such as "MessageBoxA", (Called from AfxMessageBox, et al), with




bpx MessageBoxA



Then when any running program calls this function Soft-Ice will pop up, allowing you to study / modify the running process.

Anyway thats enought encouragement for now. Just have patience and it will all come to you.


Steve

I think I'll recommend that as a cost-cutting measure at the next company meeting. ``Say boss, I think that outsourcing our company's web page is not cost-effective. Look at all those places where you can get a web page for free!''

Here comes that promotion!