The best thing that could happen to Linux as a desktop platform is if Microsoft (decently) ported IE to it.
You would of course never install IE on a box with confidential information on it (since it most likely would require to be run as suid root), but for John Average, who just wants to be able to navigate his favourite VBScript-driven Pr0n-Site, it would make Linux a much more acceptable Platform...
Didn't anyone think to requisition the SOURCE CODE to this defragmenter? That ought to put this whole issue to bed.
The german government tried this first, but of course Microsoft refused to pass them the source.
They then required that Microsoft itself checked the source code and gave them a guarantee that it doesn't include any backdoors, but again, they didn't want to do it.
So, in the end, providing instructions on how to uninstall Diskeeper was the only way to go...
It's an organisation which even uses illegal means to reach its well-defined goals.
Just like the U.S. government wouldn't use a disk defragger programmed by a Hamas member, the german government refuses to use Scientology software.
A potentially compromised disk defragmenter is quite a bit more dangerous than a simple movie (write me a trojan/virus/worm hidden in a movie file and I will be quite happy to change my mind)
Also, Windows 2000 was only banned from use on Government computers (private users and businesses are of course free to use it, but a lot of businesses decided on their own that they would not buy W2K).
And you simply cannot run a software written by people whose loyalty lie by an organization like Scientology on a sensitive computer.
You don't seriously believe that anyone (except perhaps a programmer which has been with Microsoft for 10 years and knows all the code changes since Windows 1.0 by heart) could change even one little line of the Windows code and the thing would still compile afterwards, do you?
Putting all your data specifically defeats the purpose of Laptops (namely that you can take it with you and work at home or in a plane or whereever)
Backing up your data from laptops is the best solution to making sure you dont lose any data in the event of theft, but if you want to make sure noone gets a competitive advantage by stealing your computers, theres nothing else than oldfashioned hardware-based 128bit-encryption.
Now just don't ask me where you could find a card which would exactly do that, because I really have no clue (and I'd admire any tips as to where to acquire such a card, I'd certainly be willing to pay a 100-200 bucks for an encrypting disk-controller (IDEA or AES or some comparable standard) )
I mean, the first thing I'd do if I were a Data-Thief ist to rip out the Harddisks and put them into another computer. I surely dont want any stupid Autostart programs to delete Data, require Passwords or stuff like that.
Even if the original owner is completely clueless about security, he might just use a program which periodically checks his e-mail in the background, and blam, you're busted.
The DeCSS source i have is 12K. Since we only need 100 different ASCII codes to write a C program, we use 2 decimals per byte, which makes the code 24'000 decimals long.
The chance of a specific sequence of n decimals appearing in a random string of numbers is 10^-n (since every decimal must be right, so only one out of 10*10*10*10*...*10 starting positions will fit)
For the DeCSS code, that's 10^-24000, so we can assume that the whole DeCSS code will be there somewhere within the first 10^24000 decimals (10'24001 if we want to be really sure). Of course, storing such a number would use as much place, as the DeCSS code would have needed anyway, but it's hidden now, and that's what we were after...
It's clear that probably none of us would ever trust a hardware encryption system endorsed (or even only tolerated) by the NSA/FBI/whatever other wannabe-freedom-protecting fascist organisation.
What I would use (if such a device would exist) was a hardware encryption card created (and used) by e.g. the Chinese government or another group which has no relationship to western intelligence agencies. (Since I don't have any counterrevolutionary material on my harddrive, but stuff like DeCSS and CPHack which could get me into trouble)
If the encrypting hardware is a Disk Controller on a PCI card, you could always attach a simple keypad or a smartcard reader to some connector (serial one probably, since USB would be somewhat of an overkill here) on the outside of the card...
On bootup, the BIOS then checks for an MBR but wont find one, since the controller merely returns (encrypted) gibberish.
You then insert the smartcard or tap in the secret number, the controller starts decrypting and the boot process can continue.
And with satellite dishes (which transmit directionally), this isn't even too hard to accomplish.
Unless someone is that stupid to point his antenna directly at some feds, they won't receive the signal, and everything is fine.
I guess something like that could even be used as some semisecure, because listening in ("wire"-tapping) is kinda impossible if you're not exactly between the sending and the receiving antenna.
You made a good job avoiding:
shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, tits and motherfucker (seems profoundly stupid to me to list both 'fuck' and 'motherfucker' in a list of banned words. After all, does that mean that I can say "fuckhead" on TV?).
Otherwise, your post might have been moderated doen...
When they wrote the firmware they just made sure that the phone could parse the messages which were sent by another copy of the same program (or a completely standard-compliant version from Ericson, Siemens or whatever).
But they never thought that they would have to handle 3v1l H@x0rs who send messages with fucked up length headers, escape characters or one of the usual other DoS attacks (I don't know anything about SMS, but all protocols kinda look like the other, so I think I can make that assumption)
If I were old enough to remember I coulda sing the "When will they ever learn?" song:p
Sorry, but i just fail to see how to lead a discussion over a medium where every once in a while, a post gets simply lost to the nirvana.
I used news for quite a few years, but the everpresent noncomplete threads pissed me off everytime where I saw some message quoted which I had never seen before.
Honestly, I'm not all too sad that Usenet died in favor of message boards and (to a lesser extent) mailing lists.
C'mon, it's sure nice to see more games coming out for Linux, but at this delay, it should be considered worse than nothing. Anyone who is into strategy games has already finished AC like 10 times, and unless you're a real Linux fanatic with lots of money to burn, no-one is gonna spend another 50$ for exactly the same game they already own.
And if AC for Linux sells a few thousand copies (perhaps even less) while the Windows version sold probably around a million, it won't give numbers you'd like to show to your investors when trying to bring them to produce a Linux port.
Just as I said, a one-year-late Linux port is probably worse than none at all...
Not because it addicts after a few glasses or because it kills a lot of people, but because of the social damages it causes. Especially alcohol-addicted parents are cause irreparable damage to their children, resulting in whole futures being lost and possible cost (if it's measurable at all) of trillions of $.
Actually, I think it's more likely that Mozilla dies from disinterest than Opera closes down in some way.
If Mozilla can't break the market share of Netscape 4.x (which is right now on about 20%), and doesn't succeed on portable devices (which is hard to do with its processor speed requirements), it's going to be hard to explain to the AOL business heads why to keep Netscape...
And the Mozilla code has reached a stage of complexity where it will take months for some arbitrary programmer to get worked into.
Slashdot Mirror
The best thing that could happen to Linux as a desktop platform is if Microsoft (decently) ported IE to it.
You would of course never install IE on a box with confidential information on it (since it most likely would require to be run as suid root), but for John Average, who just wants to be able to navigate his favourite VBScript-driven Pr0n-Site, it would make Linux a much more acceptable Platform...
--------------------------------------
The german government tried this first, but of course Microsoft refused to pass them the source.
They then required that Microsoft itself checked the source code and gave them a guarantee that it doesn't include any backdoors, but again, they didn't want to do it.
So, in the end, providing instructions on how to uninstall Diskeeper was the only way to go...
--------------------------------------
It's an organisation which even uses illegal means to reach its well-defined goals.
Just like the U.S. government wouldn't use a disk defragger programmed by a Hamas member, the german government refuses to use Scientology software.
--------------------------------------
A potentially compromised disk defragmenter is quite a bit more dangerous than a simple movie (write me a trojan/virus/worm hidden in a movie file and I will be quite happy to change my mind)
Also, Windows 2000 was only banned from use on Government computers (private users and businesses are of course free to use it, but a lot of businesses decided on their own that they would not buy W2K).
And you simply cannot run a software written by people whose loyalty lie by an organization like Scientology on a sensitive computer.
--------------------------------------
Please, for the love of God and all that is holy, use the metric system for such stuff...
--------------------------------------
You're one of the guys who try to grab the controller on the left- & right-most handles and use the analog stick, right?
--------------------------------------
Google spots for content, and doesnt simply grep the HTML-code like Altavista does.
YOu have to adjust your behaviour if you want to use Google...
--------------------------------------
You don't seriously believe that anyone (except perhaps a programmer which has been with Microsoft for 10 years and knows all the code changes since Windows 1.0 by heart) could change even one little line of the Windows code and the thing would still compile afterwards, do you?
--------------------------------------
Putting all your data specifically defeats the purpose of Laptops (namely that you can take it with you and work at home or in a plane or whereever)
Backing up your data from laptops is the best solution to making sure you dont lose any data in the event of theft, but if you want to make sure noone gets a competitive advantage by stealing your computers, theres nothing else than oldfashioned hardware-based 128bit-encryption.
Now just don't ask me where you could find a card which would exactly do that, because I really have no clue (and I'd admire any tips as to where to acquire such a card, I'd certainly be willing to pay a 100-200 bucks for an encrypting disk-controller (IDEA or AES or some comparable standard) )
--------------------------------------
I can't really believe that this would work.
I mean, the first thing I'd do if I were a Data-Thief ist to rip out the Harddisks and put them into another computer. I surely dont want any stupid Autostart programs to delete Data, require Passwords or stuff like that.
Even if the original owner is completely clueless about security, he might just use a program which periodically checks his e-mail in the background, and blam, you're busted.
--------------------------------------
> But it is not like that that that could not do anybody to others.
The original phrase:
Aber es ist nicht so, dass das niemand anderer tun könnte.
"so" is being translated to "like that"
"dass" became "that"
and "das" became "that" again
This gives the "like that that that" (or rather "like that, that, that")
Btw, The real translation is something like:
But it's not like noone else could do that.
The DeCSS source i have is 12K. Since we only need 100 different ASCII codes to write a C program, we use 2 decimals per byte, which makes the code 24'000 decimals long.
The chance of a specific sequence of n decimals appearing in a random string of numbers is 10^-n (since every decimal must be right, so only one out of 10*10*10*10*...*10 starting positions will fit)
For the DeCSS code, that's 10^-24000, so we can assume that the whole DeCSS code will be there somewhere within the first 10^24000 decimals (10'24001 if we want to be really sure). Of course, storing such a number would use as much place, as the DeCSS code would have needed anyway, but it's hidden now, and that's what we were after...
It's clear that probably none of us would ever trust a hardware encryption system endorsed (or even only tolerated) by the NSA/FBI/whatever other wannabe-freedom-protecting fascist organisation.
What I would use (if such a device would exist) was a hardware encryption card created (and used) by e.g. the Chinese government or another group which has no relationship to western intelligence agencies. (Since I don't have any counterrevolutionary material on my harddrive, but stuff like DeCSS and CPHack which could get me into trouble)
If the encrypting hardware is a Disk Controller on a PCI card, you could always attach a simple keypad or a smartcard reader to some connector (serial one probably, since USB would be somewhat of an overkill here) on the outside of the card...
On bootup, the BIOS then checks for an MBR but wont find one, since the controller merely returns (encrypted) gibberish.
You then insert the smartcard or tap in the secret number, the controller starts decrypting and the boot process can continue.
Don't let yourself get caught :)
And with satellite dishes (which transmit directionally), this isn't even too hard to accomplish.
Unless someone is that stupid to point his antenna directly at some feds, they won't receive the signal, and everything is fine.
I guess something like that could even be used as some semisecure, because listening in ("wire"-tapping) is kinda impossible if you're not exactly between the sending and the receiving antenna.
You all have to pay royalties to me now, because I was faster at getting to the patent office
You made a good job avoiding:
shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, tits and motherfucker (seems profoundly stupid to me to list both 'fuck' and 'motherfucker' in a list of banned words. After all, does that mean that I can say "fuckhead" on TV?).
Otherwise, your post might have been moderated doen...
/me says goodbye to his hard-earned Karma
...mechanisms
:p
When they wrote the firmware they just made sure that the phone could parse the messages which were sent by another copy of the same program (or a completely standard-compliant version from Ericson, Siemens or whatever).
But they never thought that they would have to handle 3v1l H@x0rs who send messages with fucked up length headers, escape characters or one of the usual other DoS attacks (I don't know anything about SMS, but all protocols kinda look like the other, so I think I can make that assumption)
If I were old enough to remember I coulda sing the "When will they ever learn?" song
there's still no need to make your spaceships out of Polyethylene (because that's how they looked like in Ep1)
Sorry, but i just fail to see how to lead a discussion over a medium where every once in a while, a post gets simply lost to the nirvana.
I used news for quite a few years, but the everpresent noncomplete threads pissed me off everytime where I saw some message quoted which I had never seen before.
Honestly, I'm not all too sad that Usenet died in favor of message boards and (to a lesser extent) mailing lists.
n/t = no text
C'mon, it's sure nice to see more games coming out for Linux, but at this delay, it should be considered worse than nothing.
Anyone who is into strategy games has already finished AC like 10 times, and unless you're a real Linux fanatic with lots of money to burn, no-one is gonna spend another 50$ for exactly the same game they already own.
And if AC for Linux sells a few thousand copies (perhaps even less) while the Windows version sold probably around a million, it won't give numbers you'd like to show to your investors when trying to bring them to produce a Linux port.
Just as I said, a one-year-late Linux port is probably worse than none at all...
-------------------------
Not because it addicts after a few glasses or because it kills a lot of people, but because of the social damages it causes.
Especially alcohol-addicted parents are cause irreparable damage to their children, resulting in whole futures being lost and possible cost (if it's measurable at all) of trillions of $.
Actually, I think it's more likely that Mozilla dies from disinterest than Opera closes down in some way.
If Mozilla can't break the market share of Netscape 4.x (which is right now on about 20%), and doesn't succeed on portable devices (which is hard to do with its processor speed requirements), it's going to be hard to explain to the AOL business heads why to keep Netscape...
And the Mozilla code has reached a stage of complexity where it will take months for some arbitrary programmer to get worked into.
http:// www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&what=web&enc =iso88591&text=yes