And you can always provide signed Microsoft binaries. Straight off their website. Good as gold.
Or, hell, a fricking web page. Or text file.
Even extremely paranoid people like me wouldn't suspect the drive. We have autorun off, we show extensions, we have a virus scanner and, hell, we'll even run it manually on the drive, and we'll see it's a few perfectly innocent signed demos of MS software.
And even then we might not trust those binaries, and download them from MS's site.
But, regardless, we got infected the second we inserted the drive. With autorun off, a lot of us have gotten unparanoid about that, we assume we can look at the files and make sane choices.
There are USB drivers with buffer overflows. The device can identify itself in such a way that it gets its own code to execute, without any admin access on the local machine at all.
Basically, the device says 'I'm device number 4934:2949', and Windows goes, 'Okay, I've got a driver here, let me load it', and the driver says 'Okay, device, what's your status' and the device replies 'OK^^malicious code here', the driver happily sticks that in a four byte buffer, overwriting some code that gets executed later. With system privs.
No user interaction at all.
If one of these poorly coded drivers is for a storage device, it would be trivial to write a trojan you can slip onto any system in five seconds. If not, it would be more work, because you couldn't just say 'Run evil.exe off newly inserted device at system privs', but it's certainly doable.
Encrypted files on NTFS are encrypted using a 3DES key that's encrypted using the user password. (And the admin password.) When the user logs in, they can get access to their key, and access the files. Until then, they cannot. If their password is reset (Outside of 'legit' Windows methods, which will re-encrypt their in-memory decoded keys.), they cannot ever access the files.
The 'root fs' is never encrypted.
You know, this is exactly the kind of stuff that makes us Linux advocates look like idiots. Just because Windows is shitty in general doesn't mean every part of it is. Their encryption is amazingly well thought out.
And, of course, completely pointless when someone can plug in a USB frob that runs a system level program grabs the decrypted user keys out of memory.
Which is why NTFS encryption is so funny. It's an impenetrable vault door bolted to a wooden barn.
You keep missing the point. The problem isn't that I can't buy the movies...I can. I just mentioned where I lived to demonstrate there are entire sections of the population that NC-17 movies are not 'offered' to...when they 'go to get a movie', they only see R-rated ones, because that's all that is on the shelves.
Not because consumers specifically want things to be, there's really no consumers that would complain if, say, American Pie had included two minutes more female nudity and a penis and gotten an NC-17 rating.
The stuff is not being carried because corporations have caved into 'public' pressure (Read, a small minority of people who wouldn't buy the damn movies anyway.) and have chosen not to carry them, and thus they have to be toned down if they wish to be sold in most places.
The problem isn't that it's being 'blocked', it's that a few stores are so powerful and large that if they don't carry you, you're screwed economically, and thus businesses that produce the content quite logically say 'We can't make a NC-17 movie, because we can't sell it.', so the movie doesn't exist at all. You can't get it on Amazon if it's not made, or was instead made as a R-rated movie.
And it's been created, indirectly, by the government, by allowing large corporations to exist in the first place and to make 'moral' decisions on what they carry. (Frankly, how Walmart treats its workers is a lot more of a 'moral' issue than anything they have on their shelf.)
This is what is called a 'chilling effect'. People are toning down their speech because a small portion on the population likes to protest outside your door when you sell perfectly legal things. If corporations had backbones, we wouldn't be in this mess, but Walmart pisses so many people off already they can't afford to lose the 'family' support.
Or grabbing the old RPM and moving the.rpmsave back, or editing the config file that completely broke everything via booting with init=/bin/sh.
Windows upgrades are so opaque, and who the hell knows how to undo them. You just kinda hope and pray the uninstall knows what it is doing.
Some of us work for companies that aren't running fancy 'test' machines we can run every patch through. Yeah, we bitch, but companies are tightwads.
And thus every single upgrade and config change is done on a live machine, and consists of backing shit up, doing the upgrade, testing stuff as fast as possible to make sure it works, sometimes followed by frantic downgrades and config changes to put everything back as it was when something went wrong.
There's no way in hell I'd try that with a Windows box.
Get an old tape answering machine. Make a nice polite messages about how you've stepped out, but should be back in a hour, and would love to return their calls. Or they can just call back then. Set it in your utility closet. Every week, erase all messages without listening to it.
Seriously, don't worry about getting calls on lines you don't use. Instead, encourage calls to lines you don't use. Encourage them to leave messages. Give the number out. Keep it off the Do Not Call list.
Why? It's a frickin public service. When they're talking to you, they're not talking to other people.
One very bored spring break a few years back, when I was stuck in the dorm, I played deliberate phone tag with mortgauge spammers and wasted hours of their time. Boy were they pissed when they figured it out.
Or record a very very quiet message, and then sound an airhorn at them. Not quite as useful, time-wise, but lots of fun.
Seriously, people. Volunteer a hour of your time each week by wasting telemarketer's and spammer's time. Do some good in the world.
Than your local government is idiotic and hasn't gotten their act together. Either that or the cops just like slacking off.
In places that pay attention, that's exactly how it works. Every ticket a certain cop writes for three weeks might give out the same court date, specifically so that cop can just show up on that day.
And, yes, rescheduling and court delays and whatnot can break it. And 'real' trials, of course, have dates set by the prosecution and defense.
I'm just talking about the original traffic court date that the officer picks when they write the ticket, in sane juridictions, is delibrately picked so as to be the same day as their other cases. It can either be some sort of informal scheduling 'Mike, you've got next Tuesday morning for court, write your tickets for then.' or it can be an offical schedule on the wall. The cop might even decide to do it himself, although there you risk everyone picking the same time.
That first traffic court date is ten times more important than any other date, because a lot of people just show up hoping the cop doesn't, and plead guilty when he does, or at least after a few questions from the judges. Only a fraction of traffic cases ever take more than one day or are rescheduled.
While I may not be married to a traffic cop, they've told me that this is what they do here. And I've set in court and watched half a dozen cases come through with the same cop, because it was 'his day'.
If you're at a traffic light with no turn lanes facing each other, the person turning right is supposed to yield to the person turning left, although the bastards never do unless there's an explicit Yield sign.
And that's true even without a traffic light. If you're driving down the road and trying to turn right, and someone is waiting to turn left onto the same road, they are supposed to have the right-away. And it's because they have to turn across more traffic than you.
Although obviously that concept is a bit stupid, because they don't have the right-away if you are going straight, and can't magically predict what you are going to do.
Don't say you don't know how fast you were going, you can get in trouble for not paying attention. They've started pulling that crap in the UK, and actually writing tickets for drivers who say that, I'm sure they're start trying it in the US.
Just say you don't know how fast you were going when they measured your speed.
At this point, most of them will give up, but some of them will try to tell you where you were when they measured your speed.
Reply that you do not take notes on your speed at various locations while driving, as that would obviously be rather dangerous.
And you certainly wouldn't record it to the second or ten foot span of road, as they seems to be suggesting. That would be incredibly dangerous to attempt.
If you're feeling sarcastic, you can suggest that, next time, they should put a big electronic sign up and have it flash 'REMEMBER YOUR CURRENT SPEED' when they measure your speed, and you will be sure to make a note of it at that point.
Alternately, make up any lower speed you want. After all, they asked you 'how fast you were going', or 'how fast you were going back there', and you certainly were going 55 at some point 'back there'. It might have been after five seconds of hard braking when you saw their lights, but but it was still 'back there'.
Except that no one gives speeding tickets with arbitrary precision. It's to the nearest mph.
Although that logically opens a can of worms, because you could always knock one mph off the ticket, by arguing that, while he might have measured part of you going X mph, his measurement could have distrupted the system by imparting energy to it, by, for example, bouncing a laser off of it. Bring in documents about laser launched spacecrafts to show this is possible.
And while you admit that the officer's laser was incredibly underpowered compared to those, and could have only added, say,.0001 mph or so, point out that he only measured to the nearest mph, and you could have been measured at exactly 85 mph but only actually going 84.999 mph. Or if they round up, you might have been going 83.9995, and he bumped you to 84.0005, which was rounded up to 85.
In whatever system of rounding can, there exist values that can be changed by extremely small additions, and his laser could have done that. Please note laser measurements fire repeatedly to attempt to get a 'lock' on you, and then fire a measurement pulse. And he doesn't have to move your whole car, just your taillight casing or your license plate or whatever he bounced the pulse off of. (Note that makes it work from the front, also. He could have pushed something backwards and it bounced back.)
And while you cannot prove this is the case, it is his job to prove that the energy he imparted to you had no discernable influence on your speed. If he cannot, the largest amount he could have influenced your speed should be deducted from your ticket.
And before anyone points out that lasers can measure with much more accuracy, that's not the point. The point is, in court, there is no record of this accuracy.
I drove through an intersection once and an complete idiot tries to do a left turn in front of me. (From the other direction, if you see what I mean. Crossing in front of me.) I'd seen him stopped waiting to cut across, I never imagined he'd try to make it across there. Slammed right into him.
He claimed the light had been red when I entered the intersection (He was already sitting out there.), which would have made it my fault. It wasn't, because I was looking at the damn light instead of the road, because it had just turned yellow and I was in one of those 'Crap, should I slam on the brakes. Nope, too late. Whew, made it.' moments. (Followed shortly by a quarter-second of terror as I looked down, and then a few seconds I don't really remember, and then a few seconds trying to figure out what just happened, then realizing I was just in a car accident and I should stop the engine.) But that's what he claimed.
Luckily, the cop realized that, regardless of the color of the light, the other driver would have been pretty damn stupid to have pulled out in front of me anyway, and thus he only wrote that guy a ticket.
Which the guy wiggled out of, because I, being 19, was too stupid to collect any witnesses or anything, but at least it didn't go on my record.
Actually, looking back at it, I don't blame him, I was just pissed at the time he was asserting the light was red. I think he was watching the light, and saw it change, and went. Which was stupid, but we all drive stupidly.
Where was I? Oh yeah...the cop didn't write me a ticket, despite the fact it could have, in theory, been my fault for running a red light.
I know that was a misquote, but I've always wondered what to do if four cars reach a four-way stop at once.
If two cars opposite each other reach it, and aren't going the 'same' direction (because then they can go at once), I assume that cars going straight beat cars going left beat cars going right, because that's how it works at traffic lights. So it seems there's an issue, because neither is 'to the right', but there's not.
But what if four cars reach the intersection at once, and they all want to go straight? Or left?
I mean, the traffic light rules only apply to the person opposite you.
Should everyone try to yield to the right, and hope someone's making a right turn and thus doesn't have to yield to anyone? But, wait, if they're making a right turn, they should be yielding to people on the opposite side making a left turn...
Sure, in the real world, it's fairly unlikely. But still. The rules just completely fall apart.
Cops have scheduled court days. When they pull people over, they give them a ticket to appear on one of those days.
They don't just stand around all day because some idiot has scheduled a single case on that day. They have like a dozen cases scheduled. If the police force is small enough, they might have a significant fraction of the cases that day, or even all the cases might be theirs if the police force consists of ten people.
By not showing up, he's not just letting the innocent off. He's letting the guilty off also. He's basically wasting his entire last week of writing tickets.
Except that most people don't contest them so are found guilty anyway. But that's besides the point.
I'd be pretty upset if someone crashed into my car and their insurance refused to pay because they were found innocent because the damn cop didn't bother to show up.
There were almost no 'assets' associated with this. The characters are just the polygon characters they are everywhere, and I think you've gone to that house before, so the background exists.
However, in a sense, there were assets removed. Because having a sex game where people are fully clothed is idiotic. There obviously were supposed to be nude textures.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, hell, a fricking web page. Or text file.
Even extremely paranoid people like me wouldn't suspect the drive. We have autorun off, we show extensions, we have a virus scanner and, hell, we'll even run it manually on the drive, and we'll see it's a few perfectly innocent signed demos of MS software.
And even then we might not trust those binaries, and download them from MS's site.
But, regardless, we got infected the second we inserted the drive. With autorun off, a lot of us have gotten unparanoid about that, we assume we can look at the files and make sane choices.
Wasn't there a 'dos directory' virus once, where just looking at a directory listing (under certain DOS versions) would infect you?
But there appear to be indications that you can't really reprogram a normal USB device to do this.
However, yes, it's a godsend for spies. It's like TV shows have always depicted!
Basically, the device says 'I'm device number 4934:2949', and Windows goes, 'Okay, I've got a driver here, let me load it', and the driver says 'Okay, device, what's your status' and the device replies 'OK^^malicious code here', the driver happily sticks that in a four byte buffer, overwriting some code that gets executed later. With system privs.
No user interaction at all.
If one of these poorly coded drivers is for a storage device, it would be trivial to write a trojan you can slip onto any system in five seconds. If not, it would be more work, because you couldn't just say 'Run evil.exe off newly inserted device at system privs', but it's certainly doable.
The 'root fs' is never encrypted.
You know, this is exactly the kind of stuff that makes us Linux advocates look like idiots. Just because Windows is shitty in general doesn't mean every part of it is. Their encryption is amazingly well thought out.
And, of course, completely pointless when someone can plug in a USB frob that runs a system level program grabs the decrypted user keys out of memory.
Which is why NTFS encryption is so funny. It's an impenetrable vault door bolted to a wooden barn.
My opinion is that Thompson is a fucking nutjob.
I thought everyone knew the correct substitution is 'wang' for 'wand'.
Yeah, but it wastes more of their time if you have a nice, polite, long message, and then take one from them.
Not because consumers specifically want things to be, there's really no consumers that would complain if, say, American Pie had included two minutes more female nudity and a penis and gotten an NC-17 rating.
The stuff is not being carried because corporations have caved into 'public' pressure (Read, a small minority of people who wouldn't buy the damn movies anyway.) and have chosen not to carry them, and thus they have to be toned down if they wish to be sold in most places.
The problem isn't that it's being 'blocked', it's that a few stores are so powerful and large that if they don't carry you, you're screwed economically, and thus businesses that produce the content quite logically say 'We can't make a NC-17 movie, because we can't sell it.', so the movie doesn't exist at all. You can't get it on Amazon if it's not made, or was instead made as a R-rated movie.
And it's been created, indirectly, by the government, by allowing large corporations to exist in the first place and to make 'moral' decisions on what they carry. (Frankly, how Walmart treats its workers is a lot more of a 'moral' issue than anything they have on their shelf.)
This is what is called a 'chilling effect'. People are toning down their speech because a small portion on the population likes to protest outside your door when you sell perfectly legal things. If corporations had backbones, we wouldn't be in this mess, but Walmart pisses so many people off already they can't afford to lose the 'family' support.
I mean, every time. It's not some random thing.
Yet the drivers were, indeed, signed.
Good quality control there.
Windows upgrades are so opaque, and who the hell knows how to undo them. You just kinda hope and pray the uninstall knows what it is doing.
Some of us work for companies that aren't running fancy 'test' machines we can run every patch through. Yeah, we bitch, but companies are tightwads.
And thus every single upgrade and config change is done on a live machine, and consists of backing shit up, doing the upgrade, testing stuff as fast as possible to make sure it works, sometimes followed by frantic downgrades and config changes to put everything back as it was when something went wrong.
There's no way in hell I'd try that with a Windows box.
'Brittle' my ass.
Two words: Volume control.
Seriously, don't worry about getting calls on lines you don't use. Instead, encourage calls to lines you don't use. Encourage them to leave messages. Give the number out. Keep it off the Do Not Call list.
Why? It's a frickin public service. When they're talking to you, they're not talking to other people.
One very bored spring break a few years back, when I was stuck in the dorm, I played deliberate phone tag with mortgauge spammers and wasted hours of their time. Boy were they pissed when they figured it out.
Or record a very very quiet message, and then sound an airhorn at them. Not quite as useful, time-wise, but lots of fun.
Seriously, people. Volunteer a hour of your time each week by wasting telemarketer's and spammer's time. Do some good in the world.
Wells Forge-o.
Or included one where the driver wasn't actually doing anything wrong.
In places that pay attention, that's exactly how it works. Every ticket a certain cop writes for three weeks might give out the same court date, specifically so that cop can just show up on that day.
And, yes, rescheduling and court delays and whatnot can break it. And 'real' trials, of course, have dates set by the prosecution and defense.
I'm just talking about the original traffic court date that the officer picks when they write the ticket, in sane juridictions, is delibrately picked so as to be the same day as their other cases. It can either be some sort of informal scheduling 'Mike, you've got next Tuesday morning for court, write your tickets for then.' or it can be an offical schedule on the wall. The cop might even decide to do it himself, although there you risk everyone picking the same time.
That first traffic court date is ten times more important than any other date, because a lot of people just show up hoping the cop doesn't, and plead guilty when he does, or at least after a few questions from the judges. Only a fraction of traffic cases ever take more than one day or are rescheduled.
While I may not be married to a traffic cop, they've told me that this is what they do here. And I've set in court and watched half a dozen cases come through with the same cop, because it was 'his day'.
And that's true even without a traffic light. If you're driving down the road and trying to turn right, and someone is waiting to turn left onto the same road, they are supposed to have the right-away. And it's because they have to turn across more traffic than you.
Although obviously that concept is a bit stupid, because they don't have the right-away if you are going straight, and can't magically predict what you are going to do.
It looks like someone had a license plate on the wrong damn car.
Yes, of course you should get a ticket for that. In fact, I'm amazed they let him drive away.
I know what to do, I just don't know the legal thing to do. ;)
Just say you don't know how fast you were going when they measured your speed.
At this point, most of them will give up, but some of them will try to tell you where you were when they measured your speed.
Reply that you do not take notes on your speed at various locations while driving, as that would obviously be rather dangerous.
And you certainly wouldn't record it to the second or ten foot span of road, as they seems to be suggesting. That would be incredibly dangerous to attempt.
If you're feeling sarcastic, you can suggest that, next time, they should put a big electronic sign up and have it flash 'REMEMBER YOUR CURRENT SPEED' when they measure your speed, and you will be sure to make a note of it at that point.
Alternately, make up any lower speed you want. After all, they asked you 'how fast you were going', or 'how fast you were going back there', and you certainly were going 55 at some point 'back there'. It might have been after five seconds of hard braking when you saw their lights, but but it was still 'back there'.
Although that logically opens a can of worms, because you could always knock one mph off the ticket, by arguing that, while he might have measured part of you going X mph, his measurement could have distrupted the system by imparting energy to it, by, for example, bouncing a laser off of it. Bring in documents about laser launched spacecrafts to show this is possible.
And while you admit that the officer's laser was incredibly underpowered compared to those, and could have only added, say, .0001 mph or so, point out that he only measured to the nearest mph, and you could have been measured at exactly 85 mph but only actually going 84.999 mph. Or if they round up, you might have been going 83.9995, and he bumped you to 84.0005, which was rounded up to 85.
In whatever system of rounding can, there exist values that can be changed by extremely small additions, and his laser could have done that. Please note laser measurements fire repeatedly to attempt to get a 'lock' on you, and then fire a measurement pulse. And he doesn't have to move your whole car, just your taillight casing or your license plate or whatever he bounced the pulse off of. (Note that makes it work from the front, also. He could have pushed something backwards and it bounced back.)
And while you cannot prove this is the case, it is his job to prove that the energy he imparted to you had no discernable influence on your speed. If he cannot, the largest amount he could have influenced your speed should be deducted from your ticket.
And before anyone points out that lasers can measure with much more accuracy, that's not the point. The point is, in court, there is no record of this accuracy.
I drove through an intersection once and an complete idiot tries to do a left turn in front of me. (From the other direction, if you see what I mean. Crossing in front of me.) I'd seen him stopped waiting to cut across, I never imagined he'd try to make it across there. Slammed right into him.
He claimed the light had been red when I entered the intersection (He was already sitting out there.), which would have made it my fault. It wasn't, because I was looking at the damn light instead of the road, because it had just turned yellow and I was in one of those 'Crap, should I slam on the brakes. Nope, too late. Whew, made it.' moments. (Followed shortly by a quarter-second of terror as I looked down, and then a few seconds I don't really remember, and then a few seconds trying to figure out what just happened, then realizing I was just in a car accident and I should stop the engine.) But that's what he claimed.
Luckily, the cop realized that, regardless of the color of the light, the other driver would have been pretty damn stupid to have pulled out in front of me anyway, and thus he only wrote that guy a ticket.
Which the guy wiggled out of, because I, being 19, was too stupid to collect any witnesses or anything, but at least it didn't go on my record.
Actually, looking back at it, I don't blame him, I was just pissed at the time he was asserting the light was red. I think he was watching the light, and saw it change, and went. Which was stupid, but we all drive stupidly.
Where was I? Oh yeah...the cop didn't write me a ticket, despite the fact it could have, in theory, been my fault for running a red light.
If two cars opposite each other reach it, and aren't going the 'same' direction (because then they can go at once), I assume that cars going straight beat cars going left beat cars going right, because that's how it works at traffic lights. So it seems there's an issue, because neither is 'to the right', but there's not.
But what if four cars reach the intersection at once, and they all want to go straight? Or left?
I mean, the traffic light rules only apply to the person opposite you.
Should everyone try to yield to the right, and hope someone's making a right turn and thus doesn't have to yield to anyone? But, wait, if they're making a right turn, they should be yielding to people on the opposite side making a left turn...
Sure, in the real world, it's fairly unlikely. But still. The rules just completely fall apart.
Cops have scheduled court days. When they pull people over, they give them a ticket to appear on one of those days.
They don't just stand around all day because some idiot has scheduled a single case on that day. They have like a dozen cases scheduled. If the police force is small enough, they might have a significant fraction of the cases that day, or even all the cases might be theirs if the police force consists of ten people.
By not showing up, he's not just letting the innocent off. He's letting the guilty off also. He's basically wasting his entire last week of writing tickets.
Except that most people don't contest them so are found guilty anyway. But that's besides the point.
I'd be pretty upset if someone crashed into my car and their insurance refused to pay because they were found innocent because the damn cop didn't bother to show up.
People who get tickets almost always remember what what happening, or, at least, what they think was happening, when they got the ticket.
However, in a sense, there were assets removed. Because having a sex game where people are fully clothed is idiotic. There obviously were supposed to be nude textures.