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DVD Porn Viruses Ravage US Soldiers' Computers
stevegee58 writes "Tom Ricks' Inbox in the Sunday Washington Post reported that bootleg DVDs purchased in Iraqi markets ('souks') are frequently infected with viruses. Iraqi soldiers were affected as well; electronic interaction between Iraqi and US soldiers frequently resulted in a corresponding exchange of viruses from these infected DVDs."
This sounds like a fairly big national security issue to me...
Now, I do realize that these computers operate on separate networks, but traveling disks that are frequently infected presents an issue. Or, put another way, a tempting target for foreign intelligence.
And before you jump to the 'impossible' conclusion, consider this: What are those Iraqi officers trading with our soldiers by thumb drive? Is it ALL unsec material? NONE of it is of ANY operational importance? Really? Really, really?
That strains disbelief...
And consider this: If the portable drives were intentionally infected by a custom virus designed by, oh say, a super power, would the sec networks have a chance to detect it?
My network would not. I'm certain of that. And I'm also fairly certain that I have far less BillyWare than they do in their deployment.
I was overseas and bought a lot of bootlegs as well. But I was all digital....
I've never had a bootleg DAT tape infect a DAT player.
I've never had a virus filled CD infect a CD player.
I've never had a Virus filled DVD infect my DVD player.
The answer here is use a hardware player and not a computer. An incredibly simple and cheap solution.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You know, I'm fairly certain (at least I hope so) that you're either joking or just being a troll (in which case, I'm falling directly into your trap), but as (maybe one of the few) people on this site that were also previously in the military, I'm just about as offended as humanly possible at your comment above.
Not everyone that goes into the military is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, and quite a few of us are above average in terms of intelligence. I spent 6 years in the Navy, and I (nor anyone I knew) didn't shoot, rape OR pillage anyone.
On a site like this one, where people from the outside would presume everyone is a pasty and pimply 34 year old living in their parent's basement, I really would expect (just a little) a little more tolerance and less assumption from the people involved.
After having been there a few times, I'll just point out that it is 100% illegal to have any kind of pr0n in country. No DVDs, no Playboys, no nothin, so don't mail it (I realize you made the above statement in jest, but someone reading it may think it's a good idea).
That being said, I've seen more pr0n on classified servers than I've seen in the rest of my previous life. We had to remove about 3 or 4 TB off of one server so the map server could run properly. That and it was slowing down Call of Duty. Mind you, it wasn't all of it, just a couple of TB.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If that's the case, they've (The armed forces) brought this on themselves. Porn isn't illegal, the soldiers are adults and they're away from their significant others (if they have one). Denying it to them in that situation is just asking for them to go underground for it.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Please do everyone a favor and learn the difference between the military, an instrument of national power, and the GOVERNMENT that wields it. If you want to meet a person who abhors war, talk to a soldier. If you want to judge someone for wanting to "kill people after the Cold War finished" I suggest you look at the people who decide when and where to send the military. I'll give you a hint, they don't wear uniforms.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
You know, I don't know if you're joking or not, but I see no reason why this SHOULDN'T be the case. In the past, the government has provided soldiers with cigarettes, alcohol, and other "creature comforts" for morale purposes.
I'm not suggesting they be given anything illegal or particularly depraved (by "conventional" standards, whatever that means), but how hard is it to provide a collection of confirmed virus-free pics and video?
The only problems I see are that a) soldiers who prefer the company of their own gender would be worried about being tracked despite "don't ask, don't tell," and b) the difference (generally speaking, of course) between how men and women get their ya-yas may cause female soldiers to feel that the porn objectifies women and sets up inequality between soldiers.
Still, it seems worth exploring (and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the government HAS investigated the possibilities). Fact is, the soldiers are going to seek it out. If it's not clean, it puts the network at risk.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Try this, RIAA ...
"Go ahead - make my day."
The RIAA/MPAA are your classic bully, targeting the weak and vunerable: single mothers, children, grandmothers, homeless people - even dead people. I imagine that taking on any armed force (including pirates, arr!), is on their list right after "hell freezes over".
One word ... autorun.
um the ASVAB isn't all that hard. I got a 98 on it in 1996. I took it just to keep my options open at the time.
Any one of the geeks here could pass it with one hand tied under the desk.
As for military service, It would do most of the slashdot community some good. 8 weeks of basic training would do wonders for them. while i never joined that was due to medical not intelligence. I would have to insist on joining.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"If you want to meet a person who abhors war, talk to a soldier..."
I wonder why they join up, then?
Seriously, the ones who love war and want to keep it going aren't the grunts, but they aren't the politicians either. Given the choice, the politicians would rather be screwing the taxpayer to fund a lavish lifestyle.
The ones who love war are the heads of the military, who would have no function if there were no war, and the heads of the arms businesses. And yes, they do (or did) wear uniforms. Why should you think that an organisation that prides itself on killing wouldn't attract large numbers of amoral bullies?
Actually, no, you would not.
You would merely have to know enough history to know that the modus operandi described in my post has been characteristic for invading armies since the invention of armies.
Then you would have to notice that I actually implied that American soldiers were kind of wusses for not raping and pillaging, since all they really do is jack off to porn.
The rest of your post I would rather not comment on in great detail; let it suffice to say that the rest of the world has a bit different view of your army. And of your country.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Well, first of all, you only get to abhor the war as much when you've actually participated in one. Or four.
Furthermore, some people join up in order to finance their education, hoping to hell there would never be a war they would have to fight in.
Then again, as a Croatian citizen, I know fairly well what kind of people also joins the military and fights in wars.
You get all kinds, and thus all generalizations are false.
Ignore this signature. By order.
If you want to meet a person who abhors war, talk to a soldier. If you want to judge someone for wanting to "kill people after the Cold War finished" I suggest you look at the people who decide when and where to send the military. I'll give you a hint, they don't wear uniforms.
That is so naive, on so many fronts.
The people who want war are those who profit from it, either directly in dollars, or indirectly from the political power that comes from agitation of the dumb voting public, or more simply, from leading the war machine. And yes, many of those people wore uniforms at one time, or have deep and long-standing links with the military so that they might as well be wearing uniforms.
What you say does have some truth when taken literally, but you can't shrug off the responsibility for your government's warmongering that easily. Soldiers are the facilitators of the problem, and unless your upper ranks perform a direct veto on government excesses, then you cannot avoid the taint that comes from your actions. The excesses would not happen if you did not perform them.
It's so easy to pass the buck, but that doesn't make it right. Nor is it correct to pass the buck, because much of the push for military action comes from the military leaders, always happy to support action that will inflate their budgets and raise their profile.
While your grunts-eye view isn't a lie, it's highly myopic, and very very naive.
Huh? For almost three quarters of our countries existance, we didn't have a standing army in peace time. It was only out of fear we kept one around after WW2, and I'd venture a guess that if we didn't have a standarding army the past 60 years or so, we wouldn't BE in Iraq or Afganistan right now, and a good number of other countries may not hate us as much.
As for the literacy rate, it stands to reason you need basic reading skills to be a solider and so they either won't let you in or make you learn to read. Might as well say Hooters employs more women waitresses than any other chain...
But, it comes with some very serious strings attached. I abhor the idea that killing is a solution to any problem. A soldier (or airman, seaman, marine) is given a gun. A gun is a machine designed to kill. The idea is kill your killer before he kills you. This is a morally dubious proposition and incompatible with the Christian theology I grew up with.
This is a boring sig
If you want to talk to a person who abhors war, you want to talk to a person who refuses to have anything to do with the military. A person who turns down ROTC scholarships and pays their own way through college. A person who refuses to work a high paying job with a military contractor just because it would imply working for a business that produces weapons and support for the military. THOSE are the anti-war people to talk to, not a soldier.
Supporting their presence overseas is not supporting our soldiers. You want to do something to support the troops? Lean on your "elected" representatives to bring them home from fighting an illegal war.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Am I not allowed to abhor natural disasters as I have not been in any?
If they are stupid enough to enlist just to finance, well they do not deserve my "tolerance".
I lived through a war.
However, I lived in the capital, which was only a target of several air raids.
Some of my friends survived regular bombings day after day, night after night; some of them had their parents and other relatives killed; some were re-settled or lived in camps.
Do you think my feelings about the war are as deep and as strong as theirs?
I'm pretty anti-war and anti-military myself, for various reasons, but I will never ever try to imagine I can feel as deeply about it as they do.
As for financing your education... people do what they can. Or what they have to. I refuse to judge their choices as long as they act humane.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Sorry, you are wrong. Re-read the Bible and spend time thinking about it.
There are guns designed to punch paper. There are guns designed for hunting - killing animals.
And then you get into the Christian policeman thing. Is it immoral for a Christian to be a policeman? Should he kill to stop a murder? Yes - It would be immoral for him NOT to.
A soldier is much like a policeman. His purpose is to fight to end a war. (Not all soldiers fight with weapons - some are medics, etc. But all fight to bring an end to the war.)
BTW, many people's confusion about Christian theology on this point comes from a poor translation of the 10 commandments. It's NOT, "Thou shalt not kill." It IS, "Thou Shalt Not Murder." (If you disagree, read ahead in the book - commands expressing society's duties to execute muderers.)
A lost cause, I suppose, but it seems to me that the root cause of this is a series of insanely bad decisions made by the industry as a whole and by Microsoft in particular, in blurring the line between data and programs in viewable media.
.jpg or a DVD as passively viewed content.
There is no good reason why an email program should willy-nilly try to execute any attachment it sees, and no good reason why a computer should execute stuff on a DVD.
99.99% of the time, the end-user thinks of a
An unholy alliance between technical sweetness (oooh, generality), possibilities for commercial exploitation (this DVD could display ads with a "buy" button on them), and DRM, has created a terrible situation.
The mischief comes in when there are so many parties that have an interest in creating media that are not what they appear to be to the end-user.
When the end-user thinks he's just watching something, the system should enforce the will of the user... not the will of the media provider. If the media does what the vendor wants and not what the user wants, that's a bad capability in itself--but it also is a gaping whole for malware which can subvert that capability to purposes neither user nor vendor want.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There may well be other factors needed to cause war. But soldiers are a pre-requisite. "Soldiers will be 'created' if none exist..." Ignoring the movies, how? Conscription? Unwilling conscripts make lousy soldiers, which is why it's so out of favour with most "advanced" militaries these days. Anyway, there does seem to be a ready supply of volunteer "professional soldiers" willing to fight these wars, despite what the OP said.
Exactly.
Just the same way a person becomes a doctor because he or she loves blood and cutting people open.
On the other hand, you become a nurses if you like sticking needles into people, dirty bedpans, and watching people suffer.
You don't want to think why a person becomes a mortician.... trust me.
I suggest you re-read your history books :) Oh, wait, our history books are rife with inconsistencies and lies. Like our overall goal in Vietnam was honorable, we just bungled it up. That previous sentence? Load of horseshit. History is written and molded by the victors, and very rarely is it seen through anything other than tainted glasses.
Vietnam was directly instigated. Many of our military endeavors over the past 70 years or so were directly instigated by us. Things that have happened that 'threatened' us since then have been blowback. People don't hate us because we're free, people hate us because we kill their elected / populist leaders and install puppet dictatorships and then go to war with the puppet dictatorships when the puppet dictator gets tired of our hand up his ass.
A well-trained force? Sure.
2. It should be noted that you most likely live in an allied state (either a NATO country or one in the western hemisphere) OR an enemy/former-enemy state like the old soviet bloc. If you live under the latter, well, I understand why you'd say such a thing. However, if you live in the former, please consider this: The US has, for 50 years, guaranteed your safety. It may not seem like much to you. But please, consider it: We've made a treaty that says that if you're attacked by nuclear weapons that we would consider that an attack upon our own soil and retaliate as necessary.Best in the world? I wouldn't really know, and I don't really care.
Since the USA is not the only country in the NATO with nuclear weaponry, do keep in mind that each of the other countries in the NATO has said absoutely the same thing.
Frankly, if my country is attacked with nuclear weaponry, I don't give jack shit how you will retaliate; I'll have been incinerated and/or irradiated to the degree of absolute apathy by that point.
Furthermore, during the Cold War, it seems to me that you benefited way more from that treaty; the USSR was more likely to nuke you than us. With several European nations armed with nuclear weaponry, they were much less likely to try anything.
I don't believe in altruism in high politics; if it hadn't benefitted you and you primarily, you wouldn't have signed the treaty. Case in point: Tokyo Treaty.
BTW, your either-or logic is severely flawed: I was born in Yugoslavia, which has since fallen apart in a nasty little bunch of nasty little wars. We were neither in the Allied nor in the Soviet block, and Croatia is only now about to enter NATO. Probably.
In other words, we, the American People, would deliberately involve ourselves in full nuclear exchange just to protect you and your countrymen.Yugoslavia was Non-Aligned, which I still consider the best position in the dick-measuring contest you had with the Russians.
Oh, puh-lease.
It's so sad to encounter people who so fervently believe their own propaganda.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Due respect to those who lay their lives down to service in the military, but it's not the military alone who guarantees us the right to free speech - it's also anyone in organizations such as the ACLU or People For the American Way who protect us from people like you who use false patriotism and fear as a shield to shout down free speech.
<snip>
My point is simple: we stood beside you. You can throw stones at the people of this country. But we stood beside you. You can deride our military. But we pledged our military to protect YOU if you needed it.
... because you saw interest in it.
To be more accurate, your government saw interest in pledging some of your military - therefore, someone else's lives - in case some other NATO member was attacked.
No-one ever thought about protecting me. And since my country wasn't in the NATO, we had no protection whatsoever. I remember the war, and the weapons embargo while we were being attacked.
You didn't do jack shit.
So please, please don't try to give me that self-righteous self-sacrificing crap. I grew up in a society ruled by war profiteers, listening to such propaganda. Please don't insult me by trying to feed me the same crap I'd gagged on when I was ten.
We're a flawed people. But you show me one that isn't.Of course, I can't do that.
But I can show you a number of peoples who do not invade other peoples in order to force upon them their preferred version of freedom in a holy war.
Some flaws are more irritating than others. So please do not flame me.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Geez, talk about overly sensitive US centric knee jerk reactions.
If anyone objecting to it actually read the comment (and not embellish it with your own sensitivities) it was referring about war in general historical terms (ie the "Previously..." bit). And in that sense it was far more accurate than it was inaccurate.
The only reference to Iraq and/or the current American military was in the contrasting "Nowadays..." bit that related to the story.
Out of all western democracies, only the US seems to have this fawning glorification of all things military where any criticism of its actions gets the standard "you wouldn't have the freedom to say that without them" reaction or branded as unpatriotic.
Dulce bellum inexpertis.
I joined up because of a desire to give something back to my country, Starship Troopers-style. I know war sucks. I've deployed to Iraq twice. I think it's the most terrible thing I'll every experience in my life. And I'm signing up to go again.
I did not join to finance my education; scholarships would have covered that.
I am a citizen (politicians are scumbags who would kill me to win an election) AND a solder (I will do everything in my power to get the job done). That is a lot to wrap your mind around if you haven't been in the same situation. And I won't get on some moral high horse about it, because before I joined and before I went off to war, I didn't know what it was like, really. There just isn't a way to prepare for it. It changes you. But on the other hand, I'm going to have to take exception to this:
"Am I not allowed to abhor natural disasters as I have not been in any?"
There is 'abhor' and then there is hiding under your couch on July 4th, keeping your bags packed, staying armed, staying isolated, jumping at every slammed door...
It is one thing to hate something on the principle that it is something that deserves to be hated, and quite another thing to hate something because it has power over you.
So anyways... I see your point- and it is worth reflection- but there is another side to the story. I just thought I'd give you a soldier's perspective.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I had written a long reply. But you'll just wave your arms and yell "propaganda" because, well, it's easier to label it all "propaganda" than it is to actually discuss something reasonably.
I think a cultural barrier is going to prevent us from ever really seeing eye-to-eye.
But here's my issue with you:
You fault the American people for the mistakes our Government has made. Most notably, in your last post, about Iraq.
But, when it comes to extending the "nuclear umbrella" over NATO states, when it comes to intervening in and winning "The Great Patriotic War," for these things, it's "high politics" and a selfish act.
Well, you can't have it both ways. If our country, if our people, deserve your scorn for Iraq then that means that you believe that the American people are responsible due to who we chose to elect into power.
Well, the American People could've elected in isolationist in 1940, 44, 48, 52, etc.
We could've sat idly by while Nazi's consume the people and resources of Europe for their own gain.
No matter what you want to believe Hitler, even if he'd been successful in Europe, posed no direct threat to our homeland. We weren't required to fight him to defend ourselves.
The American People chose to.
Regualar folks, middle class, middle age, middle income voters, in the voting booth, pulling the lever for a man who would continue to send our young boys to Europe to fight YOUR menace.
Regular men and women, who knew what that vote meant. Who remembered WWI, where we also fought on your behalf, who knew the sacrifice of another European war.
You say there is no act of altruism.
Well, you're wrong about that.
The only other option is that the power the American people hold is fictitious, that they were manipulated by our gov't.
Well, like I said: you can't have it both ways. If you do feel that way, then how could you hold it against us for invading Iraq?