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'an experiment... Can you make a Unix systems administrator into a fictional character who people will find compelling?'

BOFH? Pitr?

-(())

While both in the same vein humor-wise, only the best of UF is as good at the worst of BOFH. To compare it to a broader range of humor in the same medium, Garfield and Cathy are more entertaining than UF, even if all three are not funny. I get a bigger chuckle reading Mark Trail, Judge Parker, and Prince Valiant, and they aren't even supposed to be amusing.

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transient electromagnetic field in your drive actuator

I can't seem to remember that one. Was that the Dynamic Transient Magnetic Re-allocation Policy of my hard disk or the transient hysterisis loops in the head media? If it's the Re-allocation Policy of my hard disk, then I'm fscked, cuz I didn't do those backup things that everybody said I should do (but my AOL should back up important things, right? It said that it would make sure that I had an excellent browsing experiance!). If it's the transient hysterisis loops in the head media, then I already tried the reasonant magentic distortion rectifier. But I didn't really have one after you told me to use the 'highly-acidic battery charge' on the supply cabinet while they were plugging in the new networking room, so I just used the hammer and screwdriver, like last time. But now my hard drive is sort of bent and part of the metal box broke, and now that floppy circly thing is hanging out. And the AOL tech support people keep hitting the 'mute' button on their microphones for long periods of time after I call them and tell them what I did. It's almost as if they're laughing at me. But AOL wouldn't do that, right? Right?

transient electromagnetic field in your drive actuator

I can't seem to remember that one. Was that the Dynamic Transient Magnetic Re-allocation Policy of my hard disk or the transient hysterisis loops in the head media? If it's the Re-allocation Policy of my hard disk, then I'm fscked, cuz I didn't do those backup things that everybody said I should do (but my AOL should back up important things, right? It said that it would make sure that I had an excellent browsing experiance!). If it's the transient hysterisis loops in the head media, then I already tried the reasonant magentic distortion rectifier. But I didn't really have one after you told me to use the 'highly-acidic battery charge' on the supply cabinet while they were plugging in the new networking room, so I just used the hammer and screwdriver, like last time. But now my hard drive is sort of bent and part of the metal box broke, and now that floppy circly thing is hanging out. And the AOL tech support people keep hitting the 'mute' button on their microphones for long periods of time after I call them and tell them what I did. It's almost as if they're laughing at me. But AOL wouldn't do that, right? Right?

Link first sighted in NTK

Lets have a .falco as well.

Then when .coms like boo implode, we just move their registrations over to the .falco TLD.

Whats a Falco ?/a>

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Read This... It is some funny shit. I submitted it as a story way back and it was declined. I guess it wasn't breaking news but I figured that funny sarcastic material about how Microsoft handles 'interoperability'-type issues would go over well here... :)

This guy is well known for, er, um, well Demon are my ISP too, so let's just say he's well known in UK internet circles ;)

\a

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Worse than all the above is that if ISPs or their employees ever reveal that they were forced by the Government to tap your communications, they're liable to prosecution.

Not long ago, our beloved Home Secretary Jack Straw (who's responsible for this piece of crap) was up in arms about the fact that our Secret Services kept a file on him when he was younger, because he was a dangerous, subversive Leftie.

Under the new bill, a future Jack Straw figure will not be able to call for an investigation into a previous government's unnecessary surveilance of him, because no-one will ever be allowed to admit that it ever happened.

Can you say "potential abuse of powers"?

Futhermore, this bill is being fast-tracked, which means it was first put forward in February, and unless we can stop it, will be law by October.

To quote a mail by Danny O'Brien over at NTK, "The government insists that the Bill must be completed as speedily as possible, so that it may come into force before the enactment of the European Convention on Human Rights. To which they assure us it complies."

Anyone over in the US got a spare room I can move into?

Right, Windows 2000 escapes^H^H^H^H^H^H^His released tomorrow, the kernels are close to completion. Hmmm... imminent death of the internet?

So let's suppose that our nightmares come true and Slashdot becomes a mouthpiece for VA and posts unashamedly biased reports. The cost of entry to this little marketplace is so amazingly low that a competing site (let's call it Crashpoint) would appear within days, if not hours, and we would all skip over there to get our daily fix of nerdnews. We Slashdot readers aren't stupid and it's not as if anybody would have to rebuild something like cnn.com from scratch.

The result would be that Slash loses its ad revenue and VA loses a very valuable jewel in its crown. So if the Slashdot/VA guys have any sort of clue, they'll continue to be independent.

As an aside, it wouldn't hurt for Slashdot to have a prominent 'Part of the VA Network' banner or something so that all know where we stand.

As another aside, I think it would make sense if there were more competition to Slashdot, just to keep the guys on their toes. If only ntk were updated daily. I wouldn't point my browser anywhere else.

Crashpoint.com is available at all good domain name resellers, by the way.

Bandless wireless? I can type that fast sometimes :-)

I've installed and am testing GPRS for a project. I even got to choose some of the cell sites to upgrade, so naturally the best one just happens to serve my house :-) and the other my office, and since there is no billing on my circuit I can keep a 14kbps channel open from home to work all the time. It just supplements my other wireless project, and an ISDN circuit.

We're still using WAP over GPRS, because the business model means that every little bit of use is going to be charged for. All WDP packets are routed into a local WAP gateway machine, and only WAP traffic is allowed to pass from internet to handsets. There is also a pure data pipe application for companies, which BT/cellnet are already testing in the City.

I'm also trying to implement free (as in open source) versions of WAP/WDP, so that I can plug a linux box into my nokia and have a permanent IP connection. That would be useful for having email delivered instead of dialing up with fetchmail, xntpd could get stable, the works. I'm also hammering on the suits to make a very low cost or flat rate permanent GPRS so many people in remote locations can have a semblance of a permanent net presence. Then they could charge for the bursty traffic that a user would need occasionally. But suits have no vision, even if the figures are good and solid.

If you are looking to make a lot of money, get into the billing application business. BT, Boygues, and all the other GSM operators are trying to figure out how to charge for every packet crossing the ether, with extremely expensive packages for bandwidth hogs.

This cellnet offer will first be in the City, all the pico cell sites are in place and wired. But expect the suits to dither around for quite a while trying to figure out how to make the maximum $$$ (should be pound signs) out of early adopters. They are also going to use this offer as a big stick to extract many favors from OfTel before allowing the public to have it. BT is trying hard to make everyone hate them.

the AC

There was once a porn site named linuxchick.com.
It had no obvious Linux content, unless one counts the word "Linux" in its title banners. Seems like some pornmonger decided to repackage their content and tie it to a trendy buzzword.

It was mentioned in NtK sometime last year.

Ungoed-Thomas has had a few mentions in NTK, too. Try a search on his (or her) name.

I suppose if Taco and Hemos had posted this under a humour heading we would understand we should all laugh at it. But they are just re-posting drivel in the hopes of getting their failing andover stock to go up in price :-)

The article is by one of the most ridiculed "journalists" in Britian, which puts him out in front of a large pile of pathetic scandal-mongers. JU-T has been pointed out to the /. community several times before as a creator of the worst lies about computing we have seen. His job is to create shocking headlines to try and sell a few more papers in an overcrowded market. His dishonoured name makes a regular appearance on www.ntk.net, I would suggest you go on over there and do a search on double-plus-ungoed.

Some of the "stories" which only he has uncovered lately include one whereby his "highly placed source at the FBI" confirms that drug lords all over the world are hiring thousands of programmers to write software drugs, and then they can download them to cyber-junkies and make trillions of $$$ untraceably over the evil internet. Another story regurgatated the claim by a far right wing US research group that 70% of all material on the internet was hard-core pr0n.

The reason you don't see any other newspaper cover these stories or run more truthful versions is that these articles are completely works of fiction, and even the other scandalsheets in Britian won't stoop low enough to answer the Times garbage.

This story first broke last summer, when some kids tried to extort money from VISA. They were stupid, they even made the phone call from their home phone. Scotland Yard closed that case out without blinking. Now the Times pulls it up along with a few hints of other cases, but offers no facts or details, to prove to their readership the internet is a big evil thing which needs strong government regulation.

I can see there are a few other /.ers laying this one open as well. Its amusing how most /.ers are blaming VISA security, when the real story is in tearing apart this piece of "journalism" as the fiction it is.

the AC

... is the author. Jon Ungoed-Thomas has managed to embarrass himself several times in the past, once by e-mailing Earth First! pretending to be an anti-corporation activist called "Jo", trying to provoke them into letting him in on something illegal. He sent the e-mail from the address jonathan.ungoed-thomas@sunday-times.co.uk!

More details at NTK - search for "Ungoed".
Gerv

Nick

Also interesting that none of the mainstream media have picked up this enormous scoop ...

OTOH !!! there are attributed quotes in there -- so if theyr'e wrong, they'll get the arse sued off 'em. And then it really will be the end for the editor, can't remember his name now ...

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I think the next thing we need a word for, after "benchcrafting", is "hacksationalism" (or maybe "cracksationalism" before people flame me) to cover all these media stories trying to spread panic about cracks amounting to nothing.

I can't be bothered to look it up now, but I'm almost convinced that The Times has featured a number of stories like this before, all of which indeed did lead to end of civilisation as we knew it (or maybe not...)

Displaying lack of technical knowledge

An example of shoddy reporting...

...and an analysis of the 'expert opinion' on which it was based

Trundling out the same ol' tired junk

This doesn't mean there isn't at least some truth to the reports of attack, but, it does suggest you should take what they say with more than a pinch of salt; in fact, I'd recommend sprinkling on a heavy layer of skepticism and critical thought.

Displaying lack of technical knowledge

An example of shoddy reporting...

...and an analysis of the 'expert opinion' on which it was based

Trundling out the same ol' tired junk

This doesn't mean there isn't at least some truth to the reports of attack, but, it does suggest you should take what they say with more than a pinch of salt; in fact, I'd recommend sprinkling on a heavy layer of skepticism and critical thought.

I saw this link on NTK) last April or May, so when I was in SF last June for JavaOne, I dropped in on Cliff Stoll in Berkeley to pick up a few bottles for my very own. He has a shack behind his house filled with Klein bottles and a bunch of old calculating machines, which he's rebuilding. He regaled me and my buddy for about an hour with stories about the intricacies of glass sculpture and a few other random topics. He was also planning to make knitted Klein bottles with a recently-acquired knitting machine. I was also privileged to receive an old sock sewn into a projective plane! Quite the guy!

Have a look at The Bastard Operator from Hell too...

The Bastard Operator From Hell is a hell of a lot funnier than User friendly and Dilbert put together.

To quote from the Bastard Operator From Hell:
THE PHONE RINGS AGAIN!
"The screen on my PC is really dim" The woman at the other end says "Should I wind the brightness knob up?"
"NO!" I scream "Don't touch that knob! Have you any idea of the radiation that comes out of that thing when the knob gets wound up?!!!!"
"Well I..." she says, all uncertain
"TAKE MY ADVICE!" I say "There's only ONE way to fix a dim display, and that's by power surging the drivers"
The words "power surging" and "drivers" have got her. People hear words like that and go into Dummy Mode and do ANYTHING you say. I could tell her to run naked across campus with a powercord rammed up her backside and she'd probably do it... Hmmm...
"Have you got a spare power cord?"
"No.."
"Oh well, never mind, we'll have to do the power surge idea... "

Emphasis mine :-)
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Just found this link. Sweet.

In case you don't know why this is funny, it refers to an unintentionally amusing personal homepage recently doing the rounds of the mailing lists. (I believe NtK mentioned it too.)

Anyway, the main reason of this post was to drop this link: NTK's grey day..., which I think will strike a chord with many of us...

Read the description in NTK of how the crypto on a DVD is organised: the whole disk is encrypted with a single random key, then the key is itself encrypted several times, once for each DVD manufacturer. Your DVD player will have only one of these manufacturer master keys built in, so the corresponding encrypted key needs to be on the disk for you to read it.

The nasty bit is this: the idea was that if a given key is leaked, they simply stop using it on newly pressed disks. Bang: the key in *your* brand of DVD player was leaked, so now neither you nor anyone else with a player from that manufacturer can play new disks. This threat has never been carried out.

Fortunately, they screwed up the crypto: master keys can be brute forced in a few days. Basically DVD locking is dead; they'd have to come up with a forward-and-backward incompatible "DVD Plus" format to rescue things now.

However, this is so far the industry's best effort at a universal copy-resistant format; as the tide turns our way, it might hopefully be their last.
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Oh man, get out of here! Flamebait, alright, but redundant?! TWICE?

I wasn't making those things up you know.

Queen hires spin doctor


Sunday Times Internet 'Journalism'

I think both these points are very relevant to the story.

--AC

-- AC

A while ago, NtK mentioned the existence of a site named linuxchick.com. This turned out to be a fairly generic porn site, seemingly putting the word "Linux" in its title to get more hits. They didn't even have any penguin graphics.

grep Need To Know, 1st October 1999 for quantum.

They have got Adi Shamir's TWINKLE _concept_ confused with a finished product. NTK took the piss out of this on Friday.

This is a classic demonstration of how poor The Times has become. The paper as a whole and especially it's computer suppliment has been very factually challenged ever since Rupert Murdoch took over. He has attempted to make up for crappy quality with price cuts (20p for the paper some days [30cents]) and has so far failed.

The Times is the worse broadsheet paper in the UK and the sooner American's realise this (no-flamage intended), the sooner we won't have joke stories like this on /.

Hah! Didn't take very long for Need to Know to comment: http://www.ntk.net/

slashdot -did- run the story... as soon as zdnet did.

The story was mentioned on NTK on the 24th. I know that CmdrTaco reads NTK, probably Roblimo does too. Then the ZDNet story ran on the 27th. The Slashdot article was published on the 28th, and Roblimo said that loads of people had been submitting it. I think that was the reason why it was featured - lots of people suggesting it - rather than any idea of 'keeping up with the zdnets'.

Let me just repeat that - Slashdot keeping up with ZDNet? Surely it hasn't sunk that low!

slashdot -did- run the story... as soon as zdnet did.

The story was mentioned on NTK on the 24th. I know that CmdrTaco reads NTK, probably Roblimo does too. Then the ZDNet story ran on the 27th. The Slashdot article was published on the 28th, and Roblimo said that loads of people had been submitting it. I think that was the reason why it was featured - lots of people suggesting it - rather than any idea of 'keeping up with the zdnets'.

Let me just repeat that - Slashdot keeping up with ZDNet? Surely it hasn't sunk that low!

Which is why the perfect repsonse to a request for a key is to claim that you used a one-time-pad :
"Yes officer, I'd be happy to hand over the key, but all you're likely to find is a list of risqué jokes..."

-- AC

I've heard a lot of people dismissing this story as pure fabrication and, whilst I do suspect that Ungoed-Thomas doesn't have a clue about what he's writing about (do a search for "Ungoed" on NTK for my reasons for thinking this), I'm inclined to suspect that there may be some truth behind the story.

Back in '95 I wrote a couple of articles on on information warfare, battlefield technology, etc. for an international military magazine. In April '96, I was contacted and asked if I could supply an EMP device which could "wipe out all computers within a 100m radius in a built-up area", for a certain amount of money (in excess of $15k).

Obviously, I refused the "commission", and thought no more of it, but several weeks later, the Sunday Times led with this story.

Needless to say, I've kept an open mind about these things since, especially as, since then, I've been asked to do all manner of illegal things, from hacking into the mail servers of competitors, takeover-targets and companies planning IPOs, to monkeywrenching - i.e. causing crashes, glitches and other problems in a company's systems and networks to make them look bad).

The methods of blackmail are very simple as most of the systems run over standard high bandwidth lines. It's a simple enough problem to get into these systems by going through the exchange points rather than walking through the front door of a bank (just like breaking into most company networks is actually much easier to break the PABX system and then jump across into the data stream that contains the network link rather than trying to attack the firewall directly).

That's true enough, and it's also true that companies' phone systems are often a lot less secure that their data networks, but that sort of hacking is quite low-level and requires a level of knowledge which, luckily, isn't as easy to acquire as normal hacking scripts are.

You'd be surprised as just how lax most banks are with thier internal security.

I don't have any experience with banks, but I've been involved in testing the security at other financial institutions, and I've been completely astonished at things like an insurance company with a wide open RAS dialup into their internal network. Senior executives can and do crap themselves when they realise just how vulnerable they are and, perhaps more importantly, that they are legally responsible for the security of their company's information systems and networks and the data (financial and personal) held on them.

Another interesting whole to watch out for in the future will be the increasing use of direct fibre channel connections. Some of the setups that I've seen put the mainframe connection in one site and the drives and backdrives in two separate sites. The drives are hooked up using fibre channel as though they were local hard drives to the machine. If you know what you're doing, getting inside one of these links can be quite easy.

I work with FCAL technology (Sun A5*00 arrays, mostly) and so on and I've heard of these type of set-ups as well. I think that the security of SANs and NAS devices will become an issue over the next couple of years.

Despite repeated demonstrations of how easy some of these systems are to break, the banks just don't seem to be interested in trying to make it more secure. They don't want to spend the extra money because it eats into the profit margin. Security through obscurity seems to be their favourite mantra.

Agreed. There's a huge amount of complacency in the UK regarding computer security. In August, a bunch of guys at DNSCon "outed" a couple of websites which were vulnerable to hackers, including the Scottish Government's site. Unfortunately, although they claimed to have tightened security, the new measures obviously weren't quite secure enough, as they were hacked not long afterwards.

There's a growing feeling in the UK that companies are failing to place enough emphasis on information security, and that a lot of so-called information security consultancies are incompetent. Many of them are formed by IT auditors, who might know how to count computers, but know fuck-all when it comes to effective information security risk management. Even the British Standards Institute's BS7799 standard for information security management is widely acknowledged to be a joke. The majority of systems which are certified as conforming to BS7799 are still vulnerable to attack.

The recent revision of the UK's Data Protection Act has taken a step towards making the directors of companies directly responsible for ensuring that the private information which is held on their companies' information systems, is adequately protected.

However, I feel that it won't be until the shareholders realise that their companies' profits are in danger, because of management incompetence, that we'll see real moves towards implementing effective information security practices.

The Dodger

As I suspected when I saw the reference to the Sunday Times, the original article that was cited in USA today was authored by Jon Ungoes-Thomas. Readers of ntk.net will be familiar with Ungoed-Thomas as a journalist who is long on unsubstantiated sensation, and very short on fact checking, and who is building a career out of predicting the collapse of civilization as a result of the Internet.

I'd take this particular article with a few large and tasty grains of salt.

As I suspected when I saw the reference to the Sunday Times, the original article that was cited in USA today was authored by Jon Ungoes-Thomas. Readers of ntk.net will be familiar with Ungoed-Thomas as a journalist who is long on unsubstantiated sensation, and very short on fact checking, and who is building a career out of predicting the collapse of civilization as a result of the Internet. I'd take this particular article with a few large and tasty grains of salt.

HTML(ish) version at
http://www.ntk.net/ecbill/.

d.

I'm standing by our original story
[NTK 1999-06-11] that BT will begin rolling out ADSL for 50UKP from September. There have been rumblings that BT are considering backing out of this plan following Oftel's unexpectedly militant "free the local loop" stance, but I reckon that's just sour grapes.

They may be BT, but they know which way the wind's blowing. If you act like a monopoly a moment longer than you *have* a monopoly, you're in trouble.

More info we've gleaned: it starts third week in September, roll-out begins in Westminster, finishes in Northern Ireland by Sept. 2000. They haven't got enough engineers, and I bet they've underestimated the demand.

cheers,

Tim

P.S. At present ADSL is avaliable in a couple of areas as a BT trial. According to NTK, BT will be start rolling out across the country in September, and it will have a monthly cost of £30 (around $48)/month.

::Anyone else have demon issues??

You mean apart from still paying 10 quid a month for a service most other UK ISPs charge a fiver for, or give away for free?

A static IP address plus fax-to-email and batch FTP is not worth an extra five quid a month (although it is Most Handy, I admit).

Demon need to cut their price to a fiver a month or risk going down the pan.

I'm only sticking with them because I've been with them so long that my email address and web site are now so extensively cross-linked by other web sites and search engines that it would take me two years to get all my traffic back.

According to a "friend in the know" at Telehouse, Scottish Telecom have invested far too much in Demon to let the company sink. Frankly I see little evidence of this- every week I expect Demon's Falco obituary in NTK. Cliff Stanford knew when to quit- nowt to do with Demon needing a telecoms partner; all to do with increased competition.

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These days I get most of my web reading from links on weblogs of one kind or another - I'd personally count Slashdot as a weblog. I read Ars Technica, Scripting News, Robot Wisdom and Tomalak's Realm, and I'm on Haddock which has several great links every day.

NTK is often listed as a weblog, innaccurately - it's a weekly mag. But it's completely brilliant. Subscribe.

Also, h2g2.com (The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, online) has, amongst its many fab features, the ability for users to create their own weblogs on their homepages, with forums hanging off each entry. Worth a look, and I'm not just saying that 'cos I work there.

anyway, i echo the sentiment: thanks for all the great work (and candid opinions), and great going in the future!

I assumed at the time that this was their April Fools joke. But did they really know ahead of time, or was it just life imitating fiction?

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