Slashback: Efficiency,Observation,WEP

Slashback brings you updates and additional notes on recent Slashdot stories. Tonight that means more on computers playing chess, on judges who don't like being monitored in the workplace (too bad!), and on the (less totally spectactular, still bad) cracking of 802-Errr, something.

Sargon Deep Fritz playing a person may be more cutting edge (and take a lot more processor power), but it seems like an awful lot of resources to spend on playing chess. Alex Bischoff writes: "From the February 1983 issue of "Your Computer", it's chess in 1 KB (for your brand-new ZX-81)."

But sir, even the judges are objecting! saulgood writes "the NY Times is carrying a further article here, about the revolt amongst some judges over their ability to look at Britney Spears and download Metalica mp3's at work... that's right - Power to the People Baby!!! No justice, No peace..."

Take that -- no, please, take that. Bob Lee writes:

"I authored the open source program Code Red Vigilante. This is an open effort to inform the public about the dangers of the Code Red worms and to specifically notify the owners of infected machines ... Vigilante is featured on Incidents.org, OnJava.com, TheServerSide.com, and it will be on the ScreenSavers on TechTV on next Monday.

Not to put too fine a point on it ... Jeffrey Fanelli of Sniffer Technologies writes: "Just to clarify on your story, that intern didn't crack 802.11x, but WEP in a 802.11b environment. 802.11x is a recently developed standard extension to Radius and 802.11 to allow for dynamic keys to be generated per user session. 802.11x uses the same WEP RC4 encryption, but makes it far more difficult to crack given the fact that all nodes associated with a particular Access Point will have a unique session based KEY (a key which, I might add, the user of the Mobile Unit in question cannot themselves identify).

Comments

code red vigilante

[perdida]

See the Kuro5hin.org story on this issue..here

Basically you are penetrating an already 0wned computer, but this still exposes you to liabilities. It's a precipitation of the libertarian or wild wild west version of the Internet. The thing to do is to get a respected authority, such as the FBI or the police, to notify the 0wned, hence saving yourself from accusations of propagating Code Red or being a cracker yourself.

Pr0n me baby one more time!

[Rudeboy777]

...revolt amongst some judges over their ability to look at Britney Spears and download Metalica mp3's at work.

I think we have a new champion for the dictionary definition of irony!

Clarification

[Sheldon_Brown]

At issue is whether it is legal and ethical for officials in Washington to check to see if any of the judiciary's 30,000 employees, among them nearly 900 active judges and hundreds of semiretired ones, use their computers for pornography, streaming video or music.

While this is certainly what the esteemed newspaper reporter has printed, we must ask ourselves: is it true? That is, is the monitoring program they have installed so brilliant, so incredibly artificially intelligent, that it can distinguish these three things: "pornography, video, and music" from everything else the judges might be looking at? Or is it (as I might believe to be the case) that the program is far less intelligent than the reporter claims, that the program simply monitors what web pages are viewed, and reports & tracks this at a central authority. Perhaps the judges don't wish any central authority to know that they are reading www.2600.com? Or perhaps that they are posting to weblogs as "Anonymous Coward", writing tracts such as "IANAL", which we all know means "I am not a lawyer (i'm a judge)" but which might be construed as pornography (I ANAL).

I think we must petition the reporter to check his facts at once.

Re:Clarification

[rgmoore]

I don't think that this is an issue of bad research as much as it is one of bad writing. It seems pretty clear from some of the other comments that the author does understand that it's necessary to monitor everything in order to see if the people in question are surfing for pr0n, etc. Take for instance the quote:

"My biggest concern is that signing off on these proposals opens the field to allow monitoring of every keystroke and basically makes an individual's computer an open book," Judge Kozinski said. "I don't think its appropriate for us to be forcing employees to give up rights wholesale without showing any need. If we did this with telephones, people would be outraged."

The problem is one of bad writing. The author doesn't make it explicit that they judges are worried that everything they do is being monitored.

One issue that's potentially pretty scary about this is that judges need confidentiality. The are sometime required to seal documents, rule on the admissability of trade secrets, and generally deal with things that are supposed to be given strictly limited circulation. Putting monitors on their computers so that people back in Washington can see what they're doing has the potential to undermine the confidentiality of their work, and the implications of that are very serious indeed.

Ignorance amongsy the Judiciary

[Jailbrekr]

The vote stems from a conflict that has been simmering since this spring. At issue is whether it is legal and ethical for officials in Washington to check to see if any of the judiciary's 30,000 employees, among them nearly 900 active judges and hundreds of semiretired ones, use their computers for pornography, streaming video or music.

So I guess the judges are forbidden to actually see the capabilities of the internet, but merely listen to half baked descriptions and accusations from the various special interest groups?

My Grandmother had a saying "Believe none of what you hear, half of what you read, and all of what you see". This filtering bullshit will SERIOUSLY impede the judges ability to make an INFORMED decision.