I have a 4 gig flash drive that I bought that's hidden by two dimes laying on top of it and about the thickness of the same two dimes. I keep it in my wallet. It's called a Sony Micro Vault Tiny, google it if you want to see a picture.
And it didn't cost much more than this drive...six month ago. So I'm really wondering what the 'innovation' is.
On the hilarious side, the drive came with a sheet of paper as instructions which is literally 3 feet by 3 feet square unfolded. I always thought 'instruction manual bigger than the product' was a joke.
I've sworn off all artificial heat and now operate entirely at 3 degree Kelvin. (Did you know that the sun's heat is nuclear? Yet they're allowed to claim it's 'natural'? Don't fall for it.)
I am currently suing the creator of the universe for the background radiation.
Hemp may, or may not, be useful to grow, and obviously some of the pro-hemp people are somewhat...overconfident about what it can do, but that doesn't change the fact it appears somewhat useful for a lot of things and it's fairly stupid to outlaw American farmers from growing it when it is actually legal to possess.
It's not going to solve our energy problems and is a horrible material to make clothing out of, though. Denim isn't going away anytime soon, nor is there any need for it to. But putting it in paper, or making paper entirely out of it, might be useful, as might places where insulation is currently made out of plastics, like the insides of coats.
Right, and then the manufacturer can claim it's patented and thus must work like how they described, despite the fact that, as has been pointed out, something like 50% of all patented processes do not actually function the way they should, as that is not a criteria for patenting something. This is why they stopped patenting such machines. But unless it's absurdly stupid, like a patent for turning lead to gold with a magical incantation, or something that is explicitly listed as a perpetual motion machine, it can be patented, no matter how non-working it is.
This, incidentally, includes 'zero point energy' machines, which are the new perpetual motion machines, but are allowed under patent rules without a working model because they aren't actually perpetual motion...they claim to extract energy from the vacuum difference between this universe's vacuum and true vacuum, which is maybe possible in theory, but quite obviously none of them actually can do that.(1) There is no theoretical process, even assuming the theories of vacuum energy are true, that can create a 'true vacuum' or even a 'lower vacuum', except the Casimir effect, and using that to create power is like trying to create power by letting two magnets come together and then pulling them apart.
1) It is worth mentioning that, if it was indeed possible to punch a hole to a stable region with a lower vacuum energy and send our 'vacuum' into it, (to create energy as it went by), this would actually be incredibly dangerous and could 'pop' the universe like a balloon to the lower vacuum state.
a) Like anyone would or could read the EM field given off by your muscles instead of the one in the keyboard. Keyboards, like all switches, make tiny sparks as the electrical circuit closes, and those are infinitely easier to see than the incredibly low voltage in the human body.
b) It's not fully enclosed, and thus worse than useless as it operates as an antenna...
c)..but that doesn't matter as your 'finger muscles' are almost entirely in your arms and operate your fingers by tendons. The ones that curl your fingers, at least.
Yes, this does indicate it may be possible to detect EM by a certain percentage (Roughly 2%, although with such an absurdly small sample who knows.) of the population, which is an interesting idea that needs more testing. This test might give ammo to this group's claims, if it didn't, at the same time, demonstrate that they only had 2% of those those people and 98% people who couldn't detect it.
Really, six tests isn't enough, and neither is only knowing the people who scored 100%. They really need about 100 tests, and see who scored more than 80% or so. Failing a single test doesn't mean much...everyone who can see doesn't have 20/20 vision either.
As has been pointed out, it is unlikely you are able to feel magnets. The human body has no demonstrable way of detecting those. OTOH, some birds which are assumed to be able to detect those have no demonstrable way either, so obviously we haven't figured out all the ways they can be detected in living things.
However, everyone here is missing the obvious way to detect huge magnetic fields...if you move ferrous material through them, for example, your blood and the water in your body(1), you generate electricity, and the human body has a number of ways to detect that. For example, it makes the hair all over your body repel itself from your body and rise (I'm talking body hair in a goosebumps-like manner, not comical electrocution-style hair on your head), and also, obviously, your entire body, brain, and senses are electrically run, so something in the nervous system that differs slightly is not implausible.
Although it is entirely possible you're just detecting vibrations or humming, instead.
For a double blind test, you have to use another friend who doesn't know which shirt is which when you ask for them. Or just you get them all in one big box and pick them yourself. This is because, even if your friend doesn't mean to, their reaction when handing you the shirts can give things away.
In fact, as their reaction to seeing the shirt could give things away, you should probably use someone who you are not likely to see often. Or someone who's forgetful.
But, anyway, a double blind test specifically requires no possible information passing, including subconsciously, from a person who knows which is which to the tester.
It's worth pointing out that electrical equipment produces constant humming. And a high-pitched whine that certain, I believe, transformers can make, that many people can't hear but some can. And there's the known issues with florescent lights, both from the unnoticeable flicker and the incorrect light spectrum they and other non-incandescent lights emit.
Any number of those can cause continual minor headaches and stress, which can cause tiredness and whatnot. Constant environmental stresses over long term, causing health problems, can get immediately better when those stressers are removed.
It going away when you hide the equipment behind a wall (Where they can't hear it.) and coming back when you fake it (Presumably with fake humming sounds.) only means it's not EM, which would pass through walls. It doesn't mean it's not caused by the equipment.
Mail cannot be refused and the USPS will not pick up unwanted junk.
What are you talking about? It's easy to refuse mail. Have you ever asked the post office to block mail to you before? Maybe you should try that before you sound off about it. You can block mail from any sender, although you can't block by class. It's called Form 1500, ask for it at the post office. You have to inform them that the mail has pornographic material you find offensive...but don't worry, the law specifically says that you have the sole discretion to decide it is so. (In other words, you can make up your own definitions of what the words mean.) The post office hates this law, because once you file a single one they are require by law to compare all incoming senders against the list, but it has held up in court to be able to block any mailing you want, regardless of how unpornographic it may seem to others.
For third class mail without your name on it, to return it, the best trick to tell the post office that someone doesn't reside at your house. Specifically, tell them that 'Current Resident' doesn't live there. I don't know anyone with that rather strange name, and they certainly don't live here! So write 'Does not reside' or 'Not at this address' and circle 'Current resident' and stick it back in the mailbox.(1) You may also want to draw a line through the scannable address because otherwise you risk it falling back into the automated system and coming back to you.
Even if they don't honor that, you still don't have to deal with that package, and you can just keep doing it over and over to get rid of junk mail. As the letter carrier is one of the people who is supposed to catch mail to 'invalid residents', eventually he will figure out that you're serious about this 'Does not reside' bit and stop delivering 'Current Resident' mail because he's just going to have to take it back.
You can actually 'Return to Sender' first class mail the same way, by writing 'Return to Sender' on it and sticking it back in the box, but only first class mail, so that's not that helpful.
1) Important note: Legally, mail addressed to 'Current resident' or 'Any resident' is addressed to anyone at your address, and if you assert they don't live there you are technically committing mail fraud unless they all agree they are not the named person. So get the permission of all residents at your property before you do that trick.
Yeah, that's actually how animated gifs work. They can draw just part of the image (Any rectangular part, that is), and they can also draw transparent pixels over existing images so only update part of it.
I don't think it would be very good by itself, but it might be a clever idea to generate CAPTCHA images that piece together the end image out of three or four frames. And perhaps starting off with a full image with easily OCRable text...that's only up there for a split second, then overwritten, designed to catch OCR software.
Don't use a hidden form field, some bots are smart enough to pass those straight through. (Often, they have to as part of the signup anyway.)
It's worth pointing out that this only works for widespread software that gets targeted automatically. Spammers software googles a certain filepath or whatever and get a list of all phpbbs out there, and it runs fully automatically. It won't help at all if you've been specifically targeted, the spammer will suck in the actual form and specify values for each field.
I thought so at first, I assumed that was some sort of 'sudo' system, but I hear that there are way to get around it.
Plus, more importantly, it doesn't actually work with broken apps. If an application needs write permissions to its own program directory to operate, and hence can't operate under a normal user account in Windows XP, it's not going to work in Vista either...it doesn't know how to trigger UAC. It could easily be rewritten to do so, but if it hasn't been fixed in the half a decade XP's been out, it's obviously not going to get fixed now.
UAC is, indeed, like the GUI 'sudo' system that Gnome and KDE have had forever, but, just like them, it needs applications to actually ask for elevated privs, as far as I know. There are certain things that are taken as 'implied' requests, but writing to bad places isn't one of them. If I'm wrong someone correct me.
The reason it's not 'as good' as the system on Linux isn't because it doesn't work, it does work and it's a good idea. It's not as good because, simply, a lot of windows applications are used to writing wherever they want, and UAC doesn't and can't fix that. (There are, however, some interesting things being done to make normal applications run on USB drives that could help here...basically you emulate the entire filesystem and let applications write whereever they want.)
Plus it has had fucking user accounts built in from the very start.
I have to run Windows for work. I tried, for six months, to run as a non-admin. I couldn't do it. Everything would just fail.
To run any admin stuff, I'd have to modify the shortcut, which isn't bad, but then, on every single launch, I'd have to tell it I wanted to run it as a different user (For some reason the fucking box defaults to running it as the 'Current User'), and then type the admin username, and then type the password. Instead of just typing the password.
And to run any of the admin tools, or control panel, I had to launch explorer that way, and then navigate around.
You want to see what I mean by that, right click on a shortcut and choose 'Run as' and count how much to takes to switch. Oh, and on top of that, I couldn't use 'Administrator' because I had scheduled tasks using that so didn't have a password on it...but you can't 'Run as' a user without a password for no logically conceivable reason. I had to make a new account and use that. (Looking back, it might have been easier to move all my cron jobs to another user and put a password on 'Administrator' so I could have skipped typing the user name, but this is just getting into the realm of utter stupidity at this point.)
And, of course, when I switched to that user...well, everything was 'su -' instead of 'su', if you grasp what I'm saying. My Documents directly was totally wrong, for some reason all my network drives weren't there anymore(?!), it was a mess. I eventually had to set up shortcuts on the admin's desktop to all the important places like my actual user's 'My Documents', and the network paths that were my mounted drives.
And I had to go and give myself write permissions on several program directories.
And absolutely nothing would prompt me and say 'You can't do that as this user. Would you like to switch to an admin user? Here they are, pick one, type the password.' like Linux GUIs were doing in 2000.
People want drugs, so have an incentive to do the deal secretly.
People do not want malware on their machine. Most of them don't know they have malware, but that's not the same thing as wanting it.
It's not the same thing at all. The analog to malware would be hundreds of very good pickpockets that steal a few dollars at a time wandering around a city:
50% of the victims not knowing they were robbed but know they have to go by an ATM every day or so and don't know where their money goes. (People not running antivirus, have to continually reinstall)
35% of the people carrying loud money monitoring devices that usually go off and allow the victim to snatch their money back, although sometimes it fails. (People running antivirus)
15% not carrying their fucking money taped to the back of their shirt like everyone else, although annoying that's the only way to pay for things at 60% of the stores, so they only get ripped off occassionally. (People not running Windows)
Anyway, it would be completely trivial for an organization with the FBI's resources and the ability to get warrants to stop all the felony computer misuse out there.
Or, if you're willing to upload at the end of your trip, at the start, once you get through customs, you can download either a disk image and mount it, or a VM image and run VMWare, or even an encrypted zip file and extract it. More time at the ends, but you don't need a high-speed net connection the whole trip.
Synchronize at the end of the trip, run Eraser over the image and files, if you used a disk image or zip file run CCleaner to erase MRU references pointing to nowhere, and you're good.
People, honestly. Don't take shit through customs you don't want them to see. We joke how incredibly stupid this is because they're looking for child porn and any one with any brains would transfer that encrypted off their computer before going through customs, and then we try to figure out how to get through customs with stuff.
Is everyone here mentally defective or something? Arguing in one breath how, if you had something you didn't want customs to see, you could just send it through the internet, and in the next breath trying to figure out how to get something hidden through customs instead of just sending it through the internet.
Instead, use a USB flashdrive. During the bootup scripts, if it's there, there's a prompt for the password, it's decrypted, and it's used as your user directory, or booted in VMWare if you want Windows.
Or, to make things a little less incriminating even with a deep inspection of your system, make it mount any USB drive during startup (Most distros probably have that happen already, actually.), and run a specifically named script on that drive if it exists, and put all the encryption stuff, even the program to do it, on the flash drive. Even extremely paranoid people just figure you're stupid and invented USB auto-run.
Flash drives are easy enough to conceal, or, instead, don't. Mail the damn thing to yourself.
You can either have all your private data on the drive, or you can use stenography to hide it somewhere else on the system.
Of course, in reality, you can just get VMWare and install Windows and truecrypt to protect it. They don't spend enough time to make you boot up every virtual machine you have laying around, and a 4 gig VMWare drive image isn't inherently suspicious in a filelist, especially as it actually is one and has an MBR and everything.
And the real solution is to not carry around files you don't want customs to get to through fucking customs. Um, duh. Has no one here heard of the internet?
The problem is that customs, in their infinite stupidity, has decided that they are in charge of anything and anyone entering the country, and can detain anyone and anything that enters the country through them however they see fit and do with it whatever they want. So let them, you dumbasses. Don't bring stuff you don't want customs into the country via a route that customs controls!
Carry through customs, in both directions, a nice, empty-of-personal-stuff computer. Once through, immediately connect to your online storage place, and download an encrypted disk image. Boot up and run that. (I'll mention truecrypt's whole-disk encryption again, which you can setup inside VMWare and not need 'decryption software'.) When you're headed back, copy it, or at least the changed files, encrypted, back to your online storage, and then overwrite the disk image.
The problem here, and this is an actual problem with PHP as opposed to the imaginary problems that haters have with it, is that there have been a lot of really stupid 'features' in PHP. Many of them making things less secure, like register globals, but, perhaps just as damaging, many of them making things 'more secure', like magic quotes and safe mode...but only if you were a complete idiot that didn't know how to code.
As a result, there's a lot of PHP code out there with really stupid security issues that no one's noticed because the language made them unexploitatable. The problem is that the idiotic little 'security hacks' caused all sorts of other problems and were pretty stupid. (Escaping all incoming data so you can use it in SQL queries is about the dumbest possible choice ever.)
At this point, everyone's realized how stupid those decisions are, but undoing those decisions all at once would break quite a lot of code, and it's taking time to depreciate them all out of the language. Meanwhile, it's made the 'platform' rather inconsistent, cause you don't know how it's been set up unless you test for it.
There are still a lot of very stupid features that haven't been deprecated out yet, either, like zlib.output_compression, but I'm assuming they're getting all the security stuff first.
Then how do you handle something like preg_replace, which takes, optionally, an array of regexps, and you want some to be case insensitive, some to be greedy, etc?
Slashes are not required. PHP regexps can be contained within any character. '~blah~' is a valid regexp. I regularly use something over than/, simply because / makes it hell to work with pathnames and URLs. With PHP, you can pick whatever character isn't in your regexp. How do Perl people handle that? Repeated escaping?
As for why it needs any container, it's because '~blah~i' is a legal regexp also. Yes, that *could* be another parameter, but then what do you do with functions that take arrays of regexps?
Slashdot Mirror
How does blocking blogs do the slightest thing to improve security? Productivity, maybe, but how would it improve security?
Comcast is a publicly traded company. Why have you not informed the stockholders of this security issue?
Seriously, too many executives forget they don't own the company, because too many owners forget they do.
I have a 4 gig flash drive that I bought that's hidden by two dimes laying on top of it and about the thickness of the same two dimes. I keep it in my wallet. It's called a Sony Micro Vault Tiny, google it if you want to see a picture.
And it didn't cost much more than this drive...six month ago. So I'm really wondering what the 'innovation' is.
On the hilarious side, the drive came with a sheet of paper as instructions which is literally 3 feet by 3 feet square unfolded. I always thought 'instruction manual bigger than the product' was a joke.
I've sworn off all artificial heat and now operate entirely at 3 degree Kelvin. (Did you know that the sun's heat is nuclear? Yet they're allowed to claim it's 'natural'? Don't fall for it.)
I am currently suing the creator of the universe for the background radiation.
I, personally, am allergic to standing in line more than 10 minutes.
It would be pretty easy to accommodate me with almost no cost to society. (Except people would have to wait a little longer.)
Hey, why'd you go throwing hemp in there?
Hemp may, or may not, be useful to grow, and obviously some of the pro-hemp people are somewhat...overconfident about what it can do, but that doesn't change the fact it appears somewhat useful for a lot of things and it's fairly stupid to outlaw American farmers from growing it when it is actually legal to possess.
It's not going to solve our energy problems and is a horrible material to make clothing out of, though. Denim isn't going away anytime soon, nor is there any need for it to. But putting it in paper, or making paper entirely out of it, might be useful, as might places where insulation is currently made out of plastics, like the insides of coats.
Right, and then the manufacturer can claim it's patented and thus must work like how they described, despite the fact that, as has been pointed out, something like 50% of all patented processes do not actually function the way they should, as that is not a criteria for patenting something. This is why they stopped patenting such machines. But unless it's absurdly stupid, like a patent for turning lead to gold with a magical incantation, or something that is explicitly listed as a perpetual motion machine, it can be patented, no matter how non-working it is.
This, incidentally, includes 'zero point energy' machines, which are the new perpetual motion machines, but are allowed under patent rules without a working model because they aren't actually perpetual motion...they claim to extract energy from the vacuum difference between this universe's vacuum and true vacuum, which is maybe possible in theory, but quite obviously none of them actually can do that.(1) There is no theoretical process, even assuming the theories of vacuum energy are true, that can create a 'true vacuum' or even a 'lower vacuum', except the Casimir effect, and using that to create power is like trying to create power by letting two magnets come together and then pulling them apart.
1) It is worth mentioning that, if it was indeed possible to punch a hole to a stable region with a lower vacuum energy and send our 'vacuum' into it, (to create energy as it went by), this would actually be incredibly dangerous and could 'pop' the universe like a balloon to the lower vacuum state.
Well, as people don't like fevers and no one wants them, I doubt there would be much outcry if someone actually came out and said that.
Now, sweatpants, OTOH...
I like the Faraday cage gloves.
a) Like anyone would or could read the EM field given off by your muscles instead of the one in the keyboard. Keyboards, like all switches, make tiny sparks as the electrical circuit closes, and those are infinitely easier to see than the incredibly low voltage in the human body.
b) It's not fully enclosed, and thus worse than useless as it operates as an antenna...
c) ..but that doesn't matter as your 'finger muscles' are almost entirely in your arms and operate your fingers by tendons. The ones that curl your fingers, at least.
Yes, this does indicate it may be possible to detect EM by a certain percentage (Roughly 2%, although with such an absurdly small sample who knows.) of the population, which is an interesting idea that needs more testing. This test might give ammo to this group's claims, if it didn't, at the same time, demonstrate that they only had 2% of those those people and 98% people who couldn't detect it.
Really, six tests isn't enough, and neither is only knowing the people who scored 100%. They really need about 100 tests, and see who scored more than 80% or so. Failing a single test doesn't mean much...everyone who can see doesn't have 20/20 vision either.
As has been pointed out, it is unlikely you are able to feel magnets. The human body has no demonstrable way of detecting those. OTOH, some birds which are assumed to be able to detect those have no demonstrable way either, so obviously we haven't figured out all the ways they can be detected in living things.
However, everyone here is missing the obvious way to detect huge magnetic fields...if you move ferrous material through them, for example, your blood and the water in your body(1), you generate electricity, and the human body has a number of ways to detect that. For example, it makes the hair all over your body repel itself from your body and rise (I'm talking body hair in a goosebumps-like manner, not comical electrocution-style hair on your head), and also, obviously, your entire body, brain, and senses are electrically run, so something in the nervous system that differs slightly is not implausible.
Although it is entirely possible you're just detecting vibrations or humming, instead.
1) Ever seen the frog levitation trick?
That's actually a single-blind test. Or somewhat.
For a double blind test, you have to use another friend who doesn't know which shirt is which when you ask for them. Or just you get them all in one big box and pick them yourself. This is because, even if your friend doesn't mean to, their reaction when handing you the shirts can give things away.
In fact, as their reaction to seeing the shirt could give things away, you should probably use someone who you are not likely to see often. Or someone who's forgetful.
But, anyway, a double blind test specifically requires no possible information passing, including subconsciously, from a person who knows which is which to the tester.
It's worth pointing out that electrical equipment produces constant humming. And a high-pitched whine that certain, I believe, transformers can make, that many people can't hear but some can. And there's the known issues with florescent lights, both from the unnoticeable flicker and the incorrect light spectrum they and other non-incandescent lights emit.
Any number of those can cause continual minor headaches and stress, which can cause tiredness and whatnot. Constant environmental stresses over long term, causing health problems, can get immediately better when those stressers are removed.
It going away when you hide the equipment behind a wall (Where they can't hear it.) and coming back when you fake it (Presumably with fake humming sounds.) only means it's not EM, which would pass through walls. It doesn't mean it's not caused by the equipment.
Turned into?
Mail cannot be refused and the USPS will not pick up unwanted junk.
What are you talking about? It's easy to refuse mail. Have you ever asked the post office to block mail to you before? Maybe you should try that before you sound off about it. You can block mail from any sender, although you can't block by class. It's called Form 1500, ask for it at the post office. You have to inform them that the mail has pornographic material you find offensive...but don't worry, the law specifically says that you have the sole discretion to decide it is so. (In other words, you can make up your own definitions of what the words mean.) The post office hates this law, because once you file a single one they are require by law to compare all incoming senders against the list, but it has held up in court to be able to block any mailing you want, regardless of how unpornographic it may seem to others.
For third class mail without your name on it, to return it, the best trick to tell the post office that someone doesn't reside at your house. Specifically, tell them that 'Current Resident' doesn't live there. I don't know anyone with that rather strange name, and they certainly don't live here! So write 'Does not reside' or 'Not at this address' and circle 'Current resident' and stick it back in the mailbox.(1) You may also want to draw a line through the scannable address because otherwise you risk it falling back into the automated system and coming back to you.
Even if they don't honor that, you still don't have to deal with that package, and you can just keep doing it over and over to get rid of junk mail. As the letter carrier is one of the people who is supposed to catch mail to 'invalid residents', eventually he will figure out that you're serious about this 'Does not reside' bit and stop delivering 'Current Resident' mail because he's just going to have to take it back.
You can actually 'Return to Sender' first class mail the same way, by writing 'Return to Sender' on it and sticking it back in the box, but only first class mail, so that's not that helpful.
1) Important note: Legally, mail addressed to 'Current resident' or 'Any resident' is addressed to anyone at your address, and if you assert they don't live there you are technically committing mail fraud unless they all agree they are not the named person. So get the permission of all residents at your property before you do that trick.
Yeah, that's actually how animated gifs work. They can draw just part of the image (Any rectangular part, that is), and they can also draw transparent pixels over existing images so only update part of it.
I don't think it would be very good by itself, but it might be a clever idea to generate CAPTCHA images that piece together the end image out of three or four frames. And perhaps starting off with a full image with easily OCRable text...that's only up there for a split second, then overwritten, designed to catch OCR software.
Don't use a hidden form field, some bots are smart enough to pass those straight through. (Often, they have to as part of the signup anyway.)
It's worth pointing out that this only works for widespread software that gets targeted automatically. Spammers software googles a certain filepath or whatever and get a list of all phpbbs out there, and it runs fully automatically. It won't help at all if you've been specifically targeted, the spammer will suck in the actual form and specify values for each field.
I thought so at first, I assumed that was some sort of 'sudo' system, but I hear that there are way to get around it.
Plus, more importantly, it doesn't actually work with broken apps. If an application needs write permissions to its own program directory to operate, and hence can't operate under a normal user account in Windows XP, it's not going to work in Vista either...it doesn't know how to trigger UAC. It could easily be rewritten to do so, but if it hasn't been fixed in the half a decade XP's been out, it's obviously not going to get fixed now.
UAC is, indeed, like the GUI 'sudo' system that Gnome and KDE have had forever, but, just like them, it needs applications to actually ask for elevated privs, as far as I know. There are certain things that are taken as 'implied' requests, but writing to bad places isn't one of them. If I'm wrong someone correct me.
The reason it's not 'as good' as the system on Linux isn't because it doesn't work, it does work and it's a good idea. It's not as good because, simply, a lot of windows applications are used to writing wherever they want, and UAC doesn't and can't fix that. (There are, however, some interesting things being done to make normal applications run on USB drives that could help here...basically you emulate the entire filesystem and let applications write whereever they want.)
Plus it has had fucking user accounts built in from the very start.
I have to run Windows for work. I tried, for six months, to run as a non-admin. I couldn't do it. Everything would just fail.
To run any admin stuff, I'd have to modify the shortcut, which isn't bad, but then, on every single launch, I'd have to tell it I wanted to run it as a different user (For some reason the fucking box defaults to running it as the 'Current User'), and then type the admin username, and then type the password. Instead of just typing the password.
And to run any of the admin tools, or control panel, I had to launch explorer that way, and then navigate around.
You want to see what I mean by that, right click on a shortcut and choose 'Run as' and count how much to takes to switch. Oh, and on top of that, I couldn't use 'Administrator' because I had scheduled tasks using that so didn't have a password on it...but you can't 'Run as' a user without a password for no logically conceivable reason. I had to make a new account and use that. (Looking back, it might have been easier to move all my cron jobs to another user and put a password on 'Administrator' so I could have skipped typing the user name, but this is just getting into the realm of utter stupidity at this point.)
And, of course, when I switched to that user...well, everything was 'su -' instead of 'su', if you grasp what I'm saying. My Documents directly was totally wrong, for some reason all my network drives weren't there anymore(?!), it was a mess. I eventually had to set up shortcuts on the admin's desktop to all the important places like my actual user's 'My Documents', and the network paths that were my mounted drives.
And I had to go and give myself write permissions on several program directories.
And absolutely nothing would prompt me and say 'You can't do that as this user. Would you like to switch to an admin user? Here they are, pick one, type the password.' like Linux GUIs were doing in 2000.
People want drugs, so have an incentive to do the deal secretly.
People do not want malware on their machine. Most of them don't know they have malware, but that's not the same thing as wanting it.
It's not the same thing at all. The analog to malware would be hundreds of very good pickpockets that steal a few dollars at a time wandering around a city:
50% of the victims not knowing they were robbed but know they have to go by an ATM every day or so and don't know where their money goes. (People not running antivirus, have to continually reinstall)
35% of the people carrying loud money monitoring devices that usually go off and allow the victim to snatch their money back, although sometimes it fails. (People running antivirus)
15% not carrying their fucking money taped to the back of their shirt like everyone else, although annoying that's the only way to pay for things at 60% of the stores, so they only get ripped off occassionally. (People not running Windows)
Anyway, it would be completely trivial for an organization with the FBI's resources and the ability to get warrants to stop all the felony computer misuse out there.
Or, if you're willing to upload at the end of your trip, at the start, once you get through customs, you can download either a disk image and mount it, or a VM image and run VMWare, or even an encrypted zip file and extract it. More time at the ends, but you don't need a high-speed net connection the whole trip.
Synchronize at the end of the trip, run Eraser over the image and files, if you used a disk image or zip file run CCleaner to erase MRU references pointing to nowhere, and you're good.
People, honestly. Don't take shit through customs you don't want them to see. We joke how incredibly stupid this is because they're looking for child porn and any one with any brains would transfer that encrypted off their computer before going through customs, and then we try to figure out how to get through customs with stuff.
Is everyone here mentally defective or something? Arguing in one breath how, if you had something you didn't want customs to see, you could just send it through the internet, and in the next breath trying to figure out how to get something hidden through customs instead of just sending it through the internet.
Um, that's a lot of work for fairly silly gain.
Instead, use a USB flashdrive. During the bootup scripts, if it's there, there's a prompt for the password, it's decrypted, and it's used as your user directory, or booted in VMWare if you want Windows.
Or, to make things a little less incriminating even with a deep inspection of your system, make it mount any USB drive during startup (Most distros probably have that happen already, actually.), and run a specifically named script on that drive if it exists, and put all the encryption stuff, even the program to do it, on the flash drive. Even extremely paranoid people just figure you're stupid and invented USB auto-run.
Flash drives are easy enough to conceal, or, instead, don't. Mail the damn thing to yourself.
You can either have all your private data on the drive, or you can use stenography to hide it somewhere else on the system.
Of course, in reality, you can just get VMWare and install Windows and truecrypt to protect it. They don't spend enough time to make you boot up every virtual machine you have laying around, and a 4 gig VMWare drive image isn't inherently suspicious in a filelist, especially as it actually is one and has an MBR and everything.
And the real solution is to not carry around files you don't want customs to get to through fucking customs. Um, duh. Has no one here heard of the internet?
The problem is that customs, in their infinite stupidity, has decided that they are in charge of anything and anyone entering the country, and can detain anyone and anything that enters the country through them however they see fit and do with it whatever they want. So let them, you dumbasses. Don't bring stuff you don't want customs into the country via a route that customs controls!
Carry through customs, in both directions, a nice, empty-of-personal-stuff computer. Once through, immediately connect to your online storage place, and download an encrypted disk image. Boot up and run that. (I'll mention truecrypt's whole-disk encryption again, which you can setup inside VMWare and not need 'decryption software'.) When you're headed back, copy it, or at least the changed files, encrypted, back to your online storage, and then overwrite the disk image.
The problem here, and this is an actual problem with PHP as opposed to the imaginary problems that haters have with it, is that there have been a lot of really stupid 'features' in PHP. Many of them making things less secure, like register globals, but, perhaps just as damaging, many of them making things 'more secure', like magic quotes and safe mode...but only if you were a complete idiot that didn't know how to code.
As a result, there's a lot of PHP code out there with really stupid security issues that no one's noticed because the language made them unexploitatable. The problem is that the idiotic little 'security hacks' caused all sorts of other problems and were pretty stupid. (Escaping all incoming data so you can use it in SQL queries is about the dumbest possible choice ever.)
At this point, everyone's realized how stupid those decisions are, but undoing those decisions all at once would break quite a lot of code, and it's taking time to depreciate them all out of the language. Meanwhile, it's made the 'platform' rather inconsistent, cause you don't know how it's been set up unless you test for it.
There are still a lot of very stupid features that haven't been deprecated out yet, either, like zlib.output_compression, but I'm assuming they're getting all the security stuff first.
Then how do you handle something like preg_replace, which takes, optionally, an array of regexps, and you want some to be case insensitive, some to be greedy, etc?
Slashes are not required. PHP regexps can be contained within any character. '~blah~' is a valid regexp. I regularly use something over than /, simply because / makes it hell to work with pathnames and URLs. With PHP, you can pick whatever character isn't in your regexp. How do Perl people handle that? Repeated escaping?
As for why it needs any container, it's because '~blah~i' is a legal regexp also. Yes, that *could* be another parameter, but then what do you do with functions that take arrays of regexps?