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Slashback: Blaster, Sabers, Canada
Art of the Saber Jagaast writes "As a counterpoint to all the hype about the Star Wars kid, here's a Star Wars fan film that's actually very well done. Art of the Saber is 'a light saber fight sequence with the flavor of a Hong Kong martial arts action movie.' Well worth watching." Update by J : I've made torrents available.
Vote early, often, and reversably. An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to a previous story here on Slashdot on electronic voting, Excite has a story on the same subject with a bit more information including this amazing quote from Deborah Seiler, Diebold's West Coast sales representative: '"These activists don't understand what they're looking at," Seiler said.'"
GSM-crack paper online morcheeba writes "Copies of the GSM-crack paper described in last week's Slashdot article are now available online (PDF) thanks to John Young's Cryptome"
Mandrake ads...take 2 *no comment* writes "Apparently there has been some controversy over the ads in the upcoming Mandrake 9.2. I thought it was pretty cut & dried, but apparently Mandrake thought it was enough of a controversy to to release a written statement about it. I wonder how many flames were posted in the slashdot forum using the download version of Opera."
Blaster Worm still alive and well on MIT campus fwc writes "MIT still has 900 network drops disabled due to the Blaster worm infection. Of particular interest is that MIT network security requires users to reformat their hard drive and re-install their operating system before they get back on the network. Sounds like a good excuse to reinstall something other than a Microsoft operating system."
A big AWOOOGAH for Canadian file sharers.
Rumor writes in response to a recent story suggesting that Canadian users could swap files scot-free: "Listen, Canadians, don't go using your p2p apps and thinking you are immune from lawsuit, you are liable for copyright infringement if you share files on p2p apps.
To wit: a fellow law student and I have written an
analysis of s. 80 of the Copyright Act and we've
concluded that one can download music safely under the Private Copying provision, but no one can share or upload files without infringing on copyright.
In a nutshell, Private Copying allows anyone to make a
copy of a song purely for their own use. As you
probably know, when you share files and someone
downloads from you, what actually happens is that
their computer makes a request and your computer
actually sends the file to them. Thus, you're copying
for someone else's use and infringing. It doesn't
matter if you didn't realize that's what happens,
either... intent is not required for infringement.
The upside is that you can accept copies from other
people (ie. download) all you want. Although there
might be an issue of contributory infringement to
worry about... I won't go into analyzing that, since
so far the record companies are only suing uploaders.
The article can be found on greplaw.
I've recently confirmed this analysis with an IP law professor at my university, so I'm pretty damn sure of it. So, please, be aware of this danger. Downloading cool, uploading/sharing not. I
guess the situation still better than nothing."
Why not ask for your money back? zaaj writes "There are several articles out about a newly found/fixed(openssh.org) buffer management bug in OpenSSH and some derivatives. Cisco's Advisory only mentions DoS attacks against certain of their SSH-enabled devices, but ZDNet's article hints at rumors of long-existing root exploits. Regardless, RedHat's got their typical list of updated packages with the patch back-ported. A few other distro's have info in the vendor section of Cert's advisory CA-2003-24"
PS. Don't feed the trolls! Given the recent DCOM fiasco, it's fairly obvious where this thread goes...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
"MIT still has 900 network drops disabled due to the Blaster worm infection. Of particular interest is that MIT network security requires users to reformat their hard drive and re-install their operating system before they get back on the network. Sounds like a good excuse to reinstall something other than a Microsoft operating system."
Reformat? That's pretty dumb
B. Clear your computer of the Blaster worm
1.On the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, click Start, and then click Run. Type in services.msc and click on OK.
2. The Services window will appear. Enlarge it, if small, so you can see things. Click on the Name heading so the list is in alphabetical order. Look down the list for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) which Provides the endpoint mapper, etc. Do not choose Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator, which Manages things. Right click on Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and left click on Properties.
3. Click on the Recovery tab, and change first, second and subsequent failures to Restart the service, not Restart the computer. Click on Apply then OK. Close the Services window.
4. Hold down Ctrl and Alt keys and press the Delete key. The Windows Task Manager window will appear. Click on Processes. Click on Image Name to put the list into alphabetical order. Look down the list for msblast. There it is. Right click on it and click on End Process. Close all windows.
Total time to find this info: less than 30 seconds on Google cache... Interested in SoBigF? Check out my psychotic rants on it.
As for so called security team of whatever, I don't know why they would tell their users to format their machines... Seems a bit irresponsible, and makes me think their too lazy to read something like the DOC I just linked (Google cache link)... Hell they don't have to if you think about it... Print it out and throw it on every damn door. Come on if MIT can hang cars off bridges, place cars on roofs for pranks don't tell me they cant ctrl-p a damn doc...
MoFscker
The file's has a .mov extension, but neither file nor xine seems able to recognize it. Does anyone know what format it is, and how to play it?
MPlayer with the Quicktime support compiled in plays it fine. It's using the SVQ3 decoder module, if that helps.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
Its a quicktime file. So, you'll need either Quicktime, or a clone of Quicktime that runs on your system...
Art of the Saber is one of legions of "lightsaber effect" videos made by fans.
TFN Fanfilms has a huge library of Star Wars home movies. Many of them have excellent stories, and do much more than display the rotoscoping skills of the creators.
Duality is one of the most visually impressive, but because of conflicts between the two guys who made it it's not available on TFN anymore.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Reformat and reinstall is a pretty standard response to a root-level system compromise. It also serves as a rather effective deterrent to users who might want to delay installing patches in the future.
The command-line exploit for the hole was available several weeks before the Blaster worm came out. I demo'd it in the office by breaking into my Boss's workstation (Yes, while he was watching over my shoulder). Compile the exploit on a Linux box, run it against a remote NT host, up comes a nice command-shell with Administrator access.
While the Blaster worm itself is pretty easy to get rid of, the RPC/DCOM bug is a remotely-compromiseable hole that gives you Administrator privileges. As such, it's quite possible that vulnerable machines could have been backdoored by something other than the worm (or by some rare variant of the worm) in the process.
A Blaster-infected machine was wide open for long enough for the virus to catch it. At that point, you have no idea what malware could have be installed. You're pretty sure it's "just" the regular worm, and the standard removal instructions are all you need, but how sure is that? Network security want to be completely sure that their network doesn't become a home of a few thousand more DDOS drones.
In my judgement MIT security may be being a little paranoid, but if you work in network security, you're paranoid by definition anyway.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
The University of Minnesota has a similar policy for using it's network, except for the whole reformat thing. They were actually nice enough to provide each student with a CD that had all the necessary patches and removal tools on it. Your ethernet jack was disabled until you proved to them that you had been patched.
Seems like a much more reasonable way of dealing with it than MIT's policy.
The problem with law school is that while you learn the theory of law, you don't learn much about the practice of law. That comes only after law school.
All the potential copyright actions in the world aren't going to matter when you don't know who to name as a party defendant.
The DMCA has a subpoena provision which has been interpreted to require an ISP to provide the identity of the Kazaa user (say) in the USA.
No such similar provision exists under Canadian law and the DMCA has no applicability in Canada in a civil suit. The closest you could get to it is a Bill of Discovery for an intended action.
While you might get such a discovery right against the ISP, this area of the law is wholly unexplored in the context of file sharing in Canada.
Getting a Bill of Discovery granted for a novel action is also problematic.
And most of all - it would be extremely expensive. You can't just do all your Bills of Discovery in one motion either. To do them all at once would amount to a Class Proceeding, which in this context, would first require a certification motion and motions to strike before you ever got a single user name. And then it's appeals to the Divisional Court, Court of Appeal, motion for Leave to Appeal to the SCC and maybe even leave granted...
Four years later...your Kazaa user isn't even with the ISP anymore and Kazaa is yesterday's news. What now Mr. Bronfman?
Theory is fine - but $$$ and delay are the essence of the practice of litigation.
Robert Trifts
Barrister & Solicitor (Ontario)
.Robert
Of course, no patches have been installed, since they are available as downloads unless MIT is distributing service packs and patches to the students via CD.
0 610 and my reply
:-p
Actually, we are, but aside from that, we also tell them how to (temporarily) use the built in firewalling of winxp and win2k to prevent a compromise while installing the patches. Yes, there were cases of people getting recompromised before patching was finished. As a test, an unpatched laptop was placed on the network. Time to compromise: ~1 minute.
Besides, given the ease of fixing problems like these without reinstalling the OS, why bother forcing a drive wipe?
see also http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=78878&cid=699
Just wondering if they're forcing everyone with the SSH hole to reformat and reinstall? (Yes, not as serious since it isn't a worm, but still)
No, that's a vulnerability, not a compromise.
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Computer geek types who want to be clever need to understand one thing. Much of the law is based on intent and result. It doesn't matter if you print a file out, fax it, then send it via piegon droppings.
.. well .. he got into a lot of trouble for releasing PGP.
.. what did he/they do? Well, they _printed out_ the source code. Then they mailed it to the University of Oslo (Norway), where the entire source code was scanned in and checked for errors - then compiled and distributed.
Actually, I've got a funny little story about exactly that. The US have (had?) this funny law about exporting strong crypto.
Now, this law only covered the electronic implementation of the crypto systems. If you remember Phil Zimmerman of PGP fame
To make it _legal_
Legally.
If my memory served me right this was in the late 80s of the early 90s.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca