Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Compromise, Bugs, Slag
Let me just slide your card a few dozen more times ... Any Web Loco writes "Following on from this piece on /., this story in the Sydney Morning Herald tells us that the company that got hacked (exposing up to 8 million credit card numbers) was Data Processors International. Not much to the story, but we now know who it was."
Another reason to be cautious about domains with "uk" in them. An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that Nominet has looked at opening .net.uk up or killing it off and then decided it can't decide. The chair of sub-committee responsible, Clive Feather, is currently standing for re-election to Nominets Policy Advisory Board. The sub-committee he chaired had suggested shutting down net.uk entirely, which the main board rejected. His position must surely be under scrutiny by the internet community."
Interesting bugs are in the teeth of the beholder. dvdweyer writes "I myself do remember having read the whole interview with Bill Gates in Focus, a German weekly news magazine (their online service now seems to be part of MSN *yuck*). There are however resources online which provide full sources, in English, most notably RISKS in issue 17.43 (not 17.42) with a follow-up in issue 17.44."
When fan-subs just aren't what you want. May Kasahara writes "Studio Ghibli fansite Nausicaa.net now has official release dates for Region 1 DVDs of Kiki's Delivery Service , Laputa: Castle in the Sky , and Spirited Away , as well as official preview artwork of the disks and packaging. As a side note, the site now has a page up for Miyazaki's upcoming Howl's Magic Castle . See you at the video store on April 15!"
Fonts make your terminal much more useful. Russ Nelson writes "The Bitstream Vera fonts are available for trial use. Bitstream is still tweaking them, so they're under the provisional "no redistribution" license. You can download them yourself, though, and in about a month, put them in your software distribution. Kudos to X co-creator Jim Gettys for finally getting X some professional-quality fonts."
Dear Mr. Ashcroft: I hope you find this slag useful. eecue writes "Due to the recent MIT study concerning data recovery from old hard drives, we decided that the only foolproof means of data removal was complete destruction."
with more on Bill Gates' comments on bugs in Microsoft's code
/. to rag on? - You're just sifting for dirt.
;)
Reading earlier someone (Presence2) stated:
This interview occured in 1995.. don't you folks read? This was before 98,win2k,ME,XP and even NT was still OS2 in disguise. I'm sure Gates et al said a whole mess of stuff (128k memory?) that looking back now is ridiculus. Why drag a 7 year old article out for
Dont you even read users posts? Its amazing what you would learn
The site www.dpicorp.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
while interesting, is;
8 years old.
a multiple dupe.
news for nerds, indeed.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I hope virus creators don't find out about this one...
Bill Gates' attitude back then might have had an effect on the development of future OSes. I mean, just because it was so old doesn't make it completely irrelevant.
Still, one would hope that he has had a few changes of heart since then.
The UK "internet community" cannot vote, assuming you mean UK internet users as the community. You can only vote in nominet elections if you are nominet member, which costs £1000+ per annum.
for destruction of magnetic data is to use thermite in situations where time is of the essence and less important than safety (eg, your base is being overrun), and acid in other cases. Both are quite effective, needless to say.
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
Now that's how I'd want to get rid of my hard drives.. Anyone have a furnace I can use to get rid of some crapped out drives that came from servers that have pissed me off?
Crash unexpectedly have you? Take that!
Turn them in to paperclips! Finally a way to come through with all those threats! HAH!
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
all 8 million credit cards were held by 6 families in an Alabama trailer park.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
...I hate paranoid companies. I have a pdp11 that used to control an experimental blast furnace at British Steel. Guess what the obvious thing to do with a disk rack full of company when the experiment was ended... :(
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Is supposed to be .gb.
If the people in Great britian complain we don't use metric, that I'm sure as hell going to complain that they don't conform to the Domain standard. Take that!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can't wait for Sun to finish on their Oak project for interactive Televisions!
Anyone out there hear of this new free OS called Lineux or something? I think it was written by some student in Estonia or something. Two guys down in San Jose are starting up some company based on this product called "RedHelmet" or something.... but I'm sure they'll go out of business in a year.
I tried to go to their website, but I can't get my Mosaic brower to display these new Jpeg pictures.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
10 Basic fonts are just what was holding me back from setting up a Linux desktop. Does anyone have time to set up a site where you give away true type fonts for free? That would be a great idea and I've never seen one.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
Seems to me that writing 0's to the drive is pretty sufficiant for most peoples needs. As it is its near impossible to impossible to retreive data from a disk that way. Turning one into slag after demag and what not is probalby pointless rite now. Of course, if you are thinking long term and have really sensative data that you are storing on a disk somewhere, then slaging is always an option. On the the writing of 0's to the disk. Best that I have come up with for windows is a bootable floppy/cdrom that had any type of program with the ability to write 0's block by block to the drive. This has worked 100% of the times that I have used it. Of course I havent done the extensive work of the MIT students but from the few programs that I've tried to use for recovery, I have come up blank which for what I keep on my drives is good enuf.
In an earlier incarnation I used to work for the government doing military research. We had to burn all disc containing classified material. The reason given, since substantiated by a guy at the swedish equiv of NSA, was that a SQUID (Super-conducting Quantum Interference Device) could manage at least 25 overwrites, possibly many more. Our security officer built a large bonfire every spring of used hard drives and ignited them with thermite. T'was a grand sight!
(Elegance is not an option)
was "after a few minutes we saw a toxic smoke" etc, etc. I don't know why but that made me laugh. For some reason I have visions of some geek smelling that shit and saying "that's not so ACK ACK ACK...thump".
So you can justify posting a 8-year old badly written and poorly translated article in an obscure German magazine merely because you think it's a novel way to "stick it to The Man"?
And here I thought that we'd never run out of material to generate amazingly insightful comments and unlimited nasal chuckles from the peanut gallery.
But I guess we've hit a new low.
For those of you without the tools necessary in the pictures above. A Road flare works wonders.
This from personal experience. I work for a rather large company. When we were upgrading from Windows 95 to 2000, many of the exec. at the company expressed concerns about the confidential data on their old machines. We Assured them that the data would be deleted.
We took the hard drives out to the parking lot broke open the drive, started up a road flare and proceeded to melt down the platters. We left the drive 'cool' down and took them back into our exec. and showed them to him. He was quite happy with the procedure. He asked that all exec.'s hard drive be treated the same. We decided at that point our supply of flares would not last so one tech mentioned that he had a blow torch at home. Next morning he returned with 10 nicly blown hard drives.
On another note, I've heard (someone please verify) that the military uses explosives to take care of old hard drives and storage media.
Ted
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
1) Advertise hard drive slagging service
2) Keep actual slagging procedure secret
3) ???
4) Profit!
Oh wait; I guess step 2 won't work now.
I used to just throw mine into the nearest active volcano, until I found out some volcano-diving kiddie named d4r74 was reading them anyway.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No need for dd; its easy enough to write a script that will write 1's to your drive forever, or until the stylus on your drive melts.
I think the underlying issue is that all too often no one takes these kinds of precautions, or no one thinks to take them with a drive that's "Dead". Had a client send me a "dead" drive (awful clicking screeching noise, you know, dead.) Slapped it into an oven for a minute to loosen up the lubricants inside, and was able to write about 60% of the data off it before it crapped out for good.
The way many people take security, I think it's all to the good to tell them to toss a drive in a fire for an hour or so, just to make sure that the data is really gone. Half these jokers think DELETE actually removes information from the drive.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Okay, it's 8 years old, so it's irrelevant, but still, the most revealing comment to me is:
And it makes perfect sense! New versions should not be about bug-fixes. Being told to "Upgrade" should never be a valid response to someone complaining about a bug. Gates isn't saying bugs are in their on purpose, he isn't saying their good. He isn't saying they're in there because that's what sells. He's saying bugs are bad, bugs should be gotten rid of in any given version, and that a new version isn't about bug fixes, it's about new features. Isn't that what a new version SHOULD be?
Some software companies are bad at that. Some companies <cough, Intuit, cough> *DO* insist that to fix a bug, you must upgrade. That is stupid.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
In some cases security has to take into account not only current threats, but future threats as well. Magnetic technology has been advancing quickly. A technology which can pack a terabytes in a square inch is also likely to be able to find and separate the remnants of multiple writes at today's gigabyte densities. If you have something you want to keep secret for the next decade or two, it's prudent to take extreme measures when you wnat to destroy it.
Very true. I have a friend who works for a large think tank up here in Massachusetts, and they had some critical data from a few years ago that they had to get off of a drive that had since been reformatted with a couple of different file systems and used for multiple different OSs in different workstations. (How the hell they ever figured out where the data was in the first place, I'll never know, but anyway
They took it to a commercial data recovery service and for about $500 they'll put it through one of those devices that reads weak quantum residues and get you back whatever data it was that you were looking for. Of course, the drive is in itty-bitty irradiated pieces, so you can never use it again, but it works
Okay, I didn't even realize the joke until I typed in the subject line. So, does anyone know what Vera looks like? The Bitstream fonts, I mean. Having high-quality good looking fonts is nice and all, but I'd like to know what they look like. Is there a sample picture of them anywhere? I haven't been able to find one.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Slag:
Is this one of those words, like fag and wank that means something horribly different depending on what side of the Atlantic you happen to be speaking?
I think we should be told.
No more ridiculus than looking back on Pearl Harbour or the Gettysburg Address. Humans learn from their mistakes, really clever ones learn from other peoples.
Does anyone know if the US version will have the red tint that was mentioned a while back here on Slashdot a few months ago? The linked site seems to say a new release on VHS over in Japan is correct, but what about the DVD? What about the US DVD?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
slag (WOMAN)
noun [C]
BRITISH TABOO
a woman whose appearance and behaviour, esp. sexual, are considered unacceptable
"Nausicaa" has not been release in Japan on Region 2 DVDs yet.
"Porco Rosso" has been released. The Japanese Region 2 DVD has the English Subtitles and English Soundtracks on it. If you want "Porco Rosso", and cannot wait for the US release, then you will be paying a lot more for the Japanese release.
Anime DVDs for the Japanese market cost a lot more than those sold in the US. To the point that it is a problem for the Japanese Anime distributors when the US Releases flow into Japan at a lower cost. "Porco Rosso" only came out recently, so it is likely that Studio Ghibli is waiting untill they have made enough out of their local market before allowing the US releases to appear. Also the US releases are for the movies that Disney licenced, and it is possible that Disney don't hold the licence for "Porco Rosso" at the moment.
Did anyone read the next article after the MS bug one? SMTP chicken and the social contract. It talks about how offended a guy was that someone had his own Domain with an MX record and was, get this, trolling while using the postmaster account! What an egregious crime against man!
Heh, just kinda reminds me of the day when the net was so innocent.
Rats, I don't think that my erased porn collection is worth $500...
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
It turns out you can do that if you have some securely deletable way to store just one key (e.g. 16 bytes for an AES key). See here for further description and a link to sample code.
Who else heard "netcraft survey says..." spoken in Richard Dawson's voice when they read that?
(Of course, I frequently hear Richard Dawson's voice in my head. Werner Klemperer, too...)
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
The Vera Sans Mono Roman is gorgeous. I'm making it my default terminal window font. Thank you, Jim and Jim!
It seems to me that since the article is a recycled translation from GERMAN (which probably means that Bill Gates migh have said that Linux is the next great thing and it would have been lost in the translation), this was just an IQ test that either the editors (for publishing it) or the readers (for failing to spot that forever) failed miserable. Smart money is on both - after all, how hard can it be to READ an article that is being submitted and see it's junk before you start ranting on and on? Have fun, Daniel
Why not just ask him? Couldn't slashdot officially do one of their interviews? It's not like he's unaware of slashdot. He's got a binary choice, he can accept or decline. The editors and mods pick the questions anyway, might as well try.
I'm not sure if anyone else noticed this, but.. good lord, Miyazaki is making Howl's Moving Castle into a movie?? That's *awesome*.
I don't really have a comment here. I'm just curious whether i'm the only person on Slashdot who's heard of Diana Wynne Jones. She was, like, one of my favorite authors all the way through junior and high school, but not a lot of people in america seem to have heard of her (she's apparently mostly known in Britain.. apparently Neil Gaiman is a big fan, or something). I randomly wound up running across and subsequently buying a bunch of her books in paperback last week, after not having really thought about them for years, and now i see that Studio Ghibi is making one of her books into a movie. That's kind of random.
Anyway, DWJ writes this very very well-realized sf/f that is pretty clearly aimed at a "younger audience". but doesn't seem any shallower now that i'm a bit older. Am I the only fan of hers around here? Just curious.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Well, one problem with that method is that the data can still be recovered. Read this paper for more information.
My inclination as a chemist would be to pry the cover off of the drive, remove the platters and then soak them in a tub of rust remover aka Naval Jelly. That should pretty much take care of any data and/or media capable of retaining data. Once done some baking soda will do a nice job of neutralizing the mess.
Since dictionary.com is so reassuring, I'd like to invite you to visit the UK, and refer to the first bloke you see as a slag within his hearing.
Bonus points if you pick significantly bigger and harder than you, or if you refer to his girlfriend as a slag too.
Steff
Writing one value over and over doesn't flip the field. This is a problem because the magic recovery methods look for the magnetic residue of field flips (and can guess how old they are due to some physical criteria that I can't recall). Writing ones lots and lots of times will make the 0's stick out harder "underneath". Unless you write it like more than a few hundred times.
Random bit patterns with equal mixes of 1's and 0's is ideal. I think the rule is 7 passes. You should always follow with a pass of 0 at the end, and then format it to make it look empty to a casual observer.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Why? You need help writing a letter?
"Silicon implants in women who had had cosmetic breast surgery were also known to have exploded during cremation."
Anyone out there want their info to go when they do? And what's more- does anybody want to think about where those smart Bio Chips are gonna go, if they aren't slagged? Do you really want that around forever? (On the other hand, it would make one heck of a 'memory album' for the great-grandkids...)
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.