I can't comment on the hardware part, but what you say is certainly doable.
If you go the CMS route, Drupal is a very powerful, flexible and extensible CMS. It also has a couple of add ons that facilitate this. For example, there is the kiosk module, and the kiosk theme module (I am the author of the latter). These are in use at some museums already (e.g. Science Museum of Minnesota and Arts Institute of Chicago).
Using a CMS will allow you do do many things, such as interactive quizzes, polls and surveys, display news and events,...etc. Much more than just DVDs can do.
So, I upgraded my own laptop from Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on Saturday. The GUI upgrade refused to run. So I did it from the command line using the do-release-upgrade command, and it was successful.
The second problem was power management. The laptop got so hot, up to 63C (normally it is between 42C to 49C). Guidance Power Manager did not detect when the AC was plugged, although at the ACPI level (/proc/acpi) showed that events were detected. The solution was simple: edit/boot/grub/menu.lst and add:
acpi_os="Linux"
At the end of the line that has "ro quiet splash" in it.
Now the laptop works fine, and I am typing this from it. KDE4 on 9.10 is far better than KDE4 on 9.04 which was too broken.
Then, I proceeded with another laptop, also Toshiba, but older CPU. This one refused to boot after the upgrade.
This is reported on launchpad, but none of the solutions mentioned there worked for me.
Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del did indeed work though...
I used boot options like noresume, acpi=off, single, to no avail.
Was able to change the grub command line to "... rw init=/bin/bash", and get a prompt. I connected the ethernet cable, got an IP address, and ran "aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade" and made sure there are no pending updates. Still no go.
I regenerated the initrd image using update-initramfs -k all -c, and ran update-grub as well. No go still...
Running dpkg-reconfigure -a did not help either (and complains about upstart socket not being there).
I booted from an old Kubuntu disk and connected a USB drive and made a backup of the home directory. Then booted from a fresh Kubuntu 9.10 i386 desktop CD, but the fonts were all borked: too big to be useful, and most popup dialogs (e.g. when you press on the K start button) are unreadable, so can't even proceed with a full clean install.
Not sure what to do for that second laptop. I am hesitant of doing 2 more now that I am stuck on that one.
Yes, I would consider the 5K if it is simple to connect and operate. 10K? Maybe not so much. That would be after the kids are done with university and I have spare time and money.
Or perhaps the public library should get one, or the local Hacker Space, and share it among many people.
Three decades ago, when I was at high school, and even in early university years, I was fascinated with biology and specially botany. I acquired a good conventional optical microscope and got custom fixtures made for SLR cameras to take pictures. I managed to scan some of those I could find on my page on photomicroscopy. I was endlessly fascinated by seeing the patterns on pollen grains and chloroplasts inside plant cells.
I always hit the limit on what optical microscopes can see, even with an oil immersion lens. The depth of focus was always very shallow and I had to prepare stuff before seeing much. I kept reading on electronic microscopes, both scanning and tunneling, and only dreaming of ever operating one.
Perhaps in my lifetime it can be more affordable as an item for the hobbyist.
For those who are into web site performance, like me, the standard tool for everyone was Yslow, which is a Firefox extension that measured front end (browser) page loading speed, assigned a score to your site/page and then gave a set of recommendations on improving the user experience.
Now Google has the similar Page speed Firefox extension.
However, when I tried it, with 5+ windows and 100+ tabs open, Firefox kept eating away memory, and then the laptop swapped and swapped and I had to kill Firefox, and go in its configuration files by hand and disable Page Speed. I have Yslow on the same configuration with no ill effects.
You are someone whom I respect, and as an Egyptian, I am disappointed by the misinformation in your post.
Here is an article I wrote about the issue of Egypt's response to the swine flu by killing pigs. First, it is far more than Egypt or Muslims: it is Swine Flu, social networks and media spreading misinformation, there is the Israeli health minister's comment, there is Twitter and social networks, and there is xkcd too ("I ate pork, am I going to get the flu")!
There is a real problem in Egypt, which is persecuting its Coptic Christians by slaughtering their pigs. A minority in Egypt are Christian, the word "Copt" refers to their Egyptian ethnicity.
The problem is misinformation. When bird flu hit Egypt a few years ago, about 26 people died, and chicken and ducks were destroyed for everyone.The current government just did the same for pigs, which happens to be kept mostly by Christian Coptic families. Not exclusively though. Some Muslim families raise pigs too. And just so you know, most Copts will not eat pork in Egypt because of the unhealthy way they are raised. The common knowledge is that it is non-Egyptians who consume the most pork (e.g. Greeks, Italians, Armenians,...etc.) While in Europe with a Coptic friend, I was surprised when he ordered pork for breakfast. He explained that he does not eat it in Egypt because of the unhealthy way it is raised, but OK with eating it in Europe due to more sanitary conditions. You will know why when you read about the Garbage village of Muqattam.
Even the Coptic Church has chimed in supporting the cull of pigs in Egypt this time, saying that eating pork is neither forbidden nor recommended by church law, and if public health calls for killing them, then it supports it! Of course, pigs are not a vector, and that is misinformation.
Some of the Copts farm pork, which the majority of Egyptian Islamic citizens (and their powerful clerics) feel are unclean.
Just like Judaism, Islam has some dietary restrictions, which include pork. You can agree or disagree with that
And which "powerful clerics"? Can you name a few? Are they in the government? Do they make government policy? You are probably confusing Iran with Egypt, no?
Fact is, the government in Egypt is far from being religious (of any brand) neither are they ethical nor moral!
The Copts feed the pigs by recycling garbage, compounding their unclean nature in the eyes of Islamics.
Who are the "Islamics"? Use the proper terms please: Muslims.
So, the Egyptians are slaughtering the pigs in the fear that they are influenza vectors.
Exactly. This is not about prosecution, this is about misguided fear. The government are wrongly extending the bird flu measures to the swine flu.
We don't actually know that the pig is a vector for the virus at all. Thus, the Egyptian slaughters are unwarranted. We do know that human-to-human contact is a problem this time.
Agreed, and that is what I wrote in my post above.
The pigs are where influenza genes are often mixed, because they are susceptible to avian, human, and swine viruses. There probably was one pig-to-human transmission at the beginning of this epidemic, but there isn't evidence of continuing transmission after that.
Agreed again.
The Copts are persecuted like most religious minorities in religious states.
The Copts are no more persecuted than the Muslims. The current issues in Egypt are due to a government who is despotic and resisting an change or attempt to cha
At work... ordered a Dell Precision Mobile Workstation with Red Hat Linux preinstalled.... find some partly working solutions.... installing Ubuntu which worked out of the box.
Your case has highlighted two things that have bugged me for a while:
1. Red Hat has exited the desktop market a long time ago. Instead, their test bed community run distro (Fedora) is the desktop version. Red Hat Linux is mainly a server operating system.
2. I see dealers who consider only Red Hat and SuSE as viable commercially supported distros. The argument is that they have hardware support from the hardware vendors (HP, Dell, IBM,...etc.)
When I mention that Ubuntu is really a mature desktop operating system, the argument is : the hardware vendors don't support it.
In your case, it was exactly the opposite of what the perception is: Red Hat and Dell did not provide a working solution, while Ubuntu did (indirectly).
I hail originally from Egypt. English is taught in public schools, but not to a high degree. Most university graduates have some working knowledge of it to get by. French is also taught for a much lesser number of years, but does not have an impact. Both English and French are taught more extensively in private schools.
In some disciplines, English *IS* the language of instruction and study (e.g. Medicine, Pharmacy,...etc).
For computers, English is used as the natural language. All major computer languages are based on English (remember COBOL? Was very popular for decades).
Even when some company (Sakhr?) came up with Raed in the 80s, which was a computer that booted in Arabic, and had a BASIC like interpreted language in Arabic. The name Raed means "pioneer" as well as "astronaut". The company, Sakhr was based in Kuwait, and was promoting this as a platform for native Arabic speakers.
It did not fly. Most people who were doing computing already knew English, and those who did not know English nor computers did not see this as a viable option.
So, English continues to be the language of computing in Egypt and other places in the center and east of the Arab region. The western region (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) is influenced by French, and hence different.
Many years ago, I have had the "pleasure" of working briefly on an application that was developed in Morocco in C (for credit card handling), and all the comments were in French. So, it was "ouvres la fichier", instead of "open the file". Moreover, variable and function names were French too. Making it incomprehensible to non-French speakers. Was very confusing.
English is not my first language, but it is the lingua franca of computing in most countries I worked in, on three continents.
So, it was odd to see this, but when you realize it is because of the influence of a different cultural hub, it does not become so odd.
The Quebecers understand the Parisians perfectly well, while the Parisians don't understand the Quebecers. The biggest reason for this is that the Parisians they never hear enough Quebec French often enough to learn it, while the Quebecers see plenty of movies in European French. (A similar situation happens for Brazilian and European Portuguese; the Portuguese understand Brazilian perfectly because they watch Brazilian soap operas, while Portuguese soaps are dubbed for the Brazilian market.)
This is a very interesting observation, since I saw it in other contexts.
Before satellite TV was common (1990s), Egypt used to be the exporter of popular culture to other Arabic speaking countries, such as the Levant, Gulf, Libya, Sudan and elsewhere.
This resulted in me, an Egyptian, being understood perfectly when I first traveled outside Egypt, while me having major difficulty with the dialects of Saudis, Lebanese, and others.
This "culture exporter" also leads to some degree of frustration ("Why doesn't every one speak our language/dialect") and arrogance ("We are superior because of it").
The cultural hub (Paris, Cairo), becomes the center for the culture based on the language/dialect (Parisian-French, Egyptian-city-Arabic). Other places look up to the hub as the center of the world (immigrants from former colonies, migrants from villages, artists from other countries,...etc.)
In the case of Paris, I believe a big part of the rudeness is due to this being an exclusively a cultural exporter, and never having imported culture in the form of language. To them, they are the center of the world because they don't know any better. They have not been exposed to anything rather than the indigenous culture. The same was true for Cairo in the pre-satellite TV era as well.
Paris was one of the best and worst places I've ever visited. Worst because of the rudeness of the natives, whether they are a customs official, subway inspector, Algerian taxi driver, or a Moroccan couscous restaurant waiter. It is so pervasive, that the hotel reception and the folk I was visiting on business stuck out by their politeness.
I don't use Windows, so I will not be directly affected.
But it may have an impact on the internet itself. Think about wasted bandwidth, web sites putting measures against it, domain registrars requiring more Draconian measures for registring domains (imagine having to send paperwork, while you don't have to now),...etc.
The author(s) of the worm would register just 500 (or so) of the 50,000 domains. That is 1% as you said.
The worm then generates the 50,000 random names, and tries to contact a sample of 500 of these.
It has to just succeed in contacting one of them, and downloading a payload.
There is also the peer to peer protocol, which is not fully understood (the SRI researches say that studying it is an "ongoing concern"), but will allow nodes to act as client and/or servers and exchange payloads without the internet rendevouz points, which are the above domains.
So, they just have to initially have some domains, and distribute a payload through it. After that the payload can dictate another distribution method.
Ideally, yes, all of them cooperating would help a lot.
But note that the TLDs belong to different entities/countries with varying levels of competence/funding. Some are very small islands that have a cool TLD, run by small outfits.
Getting them all to agree to act and coordinate it all would not be realistic.
Let us hope I am wrong. I don't use Windows, but I think this worm will have an impact on the internet itself.
Yes, it should have been done quietly. Perhaps it is a PR thing "our.ca domains are not vulnerable"? Who knows.
As I >pointed out in another comment, the author(s) scan all the info about Conficker and then modify it to protect itself against the defenses. They did that by releasing the C variant to select domains out of a random number of 50,000 total, after the initial 250 got outed in B.
I bet that there will be a D variant shortly before April 1st, and it will have more defenses and convolutions.
I saw the article today on CBC (Canada's equivalent of the BBC).
This effort may help, but given that the worm has so many other TLDs to choose from, it may not help much. Making the 110 TLDs only 109 (or even 75 if other TLD authorities do the same) will not help that much.
Moreover, there is another mechanism which is not very clear, whereby the infected nodes will contact each other via a See Peer to Peer protocl. So, once the botnet gets going, the need for the domain name (so called "Internet Rendevouz points") may diminish.
Also, the article contains some inaccuracies:
"... expected to launch its attack once the system date on an infected machine is on or after April 1, 2009".
Actually, the worm author(s) are aware that the user may change the clock of the PC to avoid the worm from triggering. So they query several well known sites and check the date/time on the HTTP headers to make this defense point moot. See Internet Date Checking
"... will try to generate and connect to 50,000 web URLs a day..."
I recently got delayed in an airport, and sat next to a Canadian doctor.
The discussion led to what I work with and hence Open Source. He said that doctors in Canada use open source software. So I looked it up and found OSCAR which is indeed open source.
No proprietary lock-in for formats, no vendor lock in, and minimal costs.
You make very good points and I agree with all what you have mentioned, except for the part that said al-Qaeda's funding was : "through legal dealings with the US of other Bin Laden family parts."
The Bin Laden business empire is well respected in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. They are not the same as Osama. In fact they are against him, if nothing else for the ill repute that befell on it because of his family name.
Remember that Bin Laden had three phases: one before 1990, one during the 90s, and one after Sept 11. The first phase is when he was a good guy in the Muslim world and in the West because he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. No one saw him as a bad guy then. In 1990, he had a spat with the King of Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait. The end result was that he preached against the king, who dropped his citizenship. He left to Sudan, where he was joined by the ideologue Ayman El Zawahri who changed him from a reformer/resistance to someone who targets the West. This is when the East Africa and Cole bombings happened. Then officially, the two groups merged (Zawahri's and Bin Laden's). September 11 happened shortly after that, and Bin Laden became the most wanted and in hiding.
Here is a piece of relevant information: Back in the mid 1990s, before all that, I was sitting on a flight next to a pharmacist who worked for one of the Bin Laden family businesses (medical supplies or something). We had a lengthy conversation. He told me, among other things, that Bin Laden's immediate family (wife and kids) were living in Medina, and their relatives were supporting them financially, but in a very strange method to prevent any cash from reaching Osama. The school bills were paid by cheques to the school. Food and groceries were obtained by them by going to a store, and then the relatives paying the store directly for what they consumed. The whole idea was to prevent any cash from reaching Osama. And that was way before Sept 11 was even an idea in his mind. At that time he was an enemy of the Saudi state and ruling family, not an enemy nor a threat of the West.
So, I don't believe any claims that his family, or anyone in Saudi Arabia would fund Al Qaeda directly and incur the wrath of royal family. Anything that claims that, let alone claim the Bush family had dealing with Osama (as much as I am against W) is flat wrong. Dealings with the greater Bin Laden family and business empire? Sure? Any of that reaching Osama? No way!
Your point about the economies behind warfare are ignored is a good one.
But...
In fact, none of their cities had a wall at all.
This is inaccurate.
Narmer's palette, from around 3000 BC, shows a siege of a walled city (lower obverse side). For all we know, Narmer unified Egypt's north and south, so this reflects the realities of the cities within Egypt during his time.
As well, Memphis an ancient capital, was named Inbu-Hedj, meaning "White Walls". That was before Pepi's pyramid was built and the name changed to Men Nefer (beautiful) after Pepi's pyramid.
So at least some cities were fortified.
Romans, if you look at them, were actually a remarkably peaceful civilization. With some few exceptions, like the last war against Carthage, Rome almost never started a war of aggression. They just defended what was theirs and honoured their alliances to the letter. But when attacked, they hit back _hard_. Among other things because they hadn't ruined their economy and manpower with pointless wars before that. The vast majority of their conquests were actually done in counter-attacks.
Rome was a mercantile expansionist empire. The armies served the trade interests, and put down any threat to its economic dominance of the Mediterranean. The expansion just kept continuing on and on after Carthage was vanquished as an economic threat and a military one. North Africa was taken, Egypt was invaded, without being a threat at all. They wanted to secure a wheat source for the populace of Rome. After that it was Syria and Palestine, Asia Minor, and vast stretches of Europe as well. Then the long wars with the Persians over Coel-Syria. Then the failed expedition to Arabia Felix over Arabia Deserta. And on and on...
From one city state in the peninsula, to an empire in the entire Mediterranean basin, half of Europe and as far as the British Isles.
To say they just "defended what is theirs" is revisionist at best.
But anyway, while everyone drools about the Roman legions, few people give thought to the economy that could afford them in the first place. There were advances in engineering, administration, construction, etc. There was stuff like the aqueducts that allowed Rome to have that monstruous manpower to throw at an enemy. Most of that stuff was civillian tech. Nobody built an aqueduct as an offensive thing.
The roads were made for trade and army mobility. So they served a dual purpose. Just like the internet started as a military project and see what it offers today.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't comment on the hardware part, but what you say is certainly doable.
If you go the CMS route, Drupal is a very powerful, flexible and extensible CMS. It also has a couple of add ons that facilitate this. For example, there is the kiosk module, and the kiosk theme module (I am the author of the latter). These are in use at some museums already (e.g. Science Museum of Minnesota and Arts Institute of Chicago).
Using a CMS will allow you do do many things, such as interactive quizzes, polls and surveys, display news and events, ...etc. Much more than just DVDs can do.
So, I upgraded my own laptop from Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on Saturday. The GUI upgrade refused to run. So I did it from the command line using the do-release-upgrade command, and it was successful.
The Intel Wifi Link 5100 did not work but I was able to compile it from source and get it going, like I did on 9.04.
The second problem was power management. The laptop got so hot, up to 63C (normally it is between 42C to 49C). Guidance Power Manager did not detect when the AC was plugged, although at the ACPI level (/proc/acpi) showed that events were detected. The solution was simple: edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add:
At the end of the line that has "ro quiet splash" in it.
Now the laptop works fine, and I am typing this from it. KDE4 on 9.10 is far better than KDE4 on 9.04 which was too broken.
Then, I proceeded with another laptop, also Toshiba, but older CPU. This one refused to boot after the upgrade.
It would show:
Then nothing. No prompt, no GUI, ... stuck there.
This is reported on launchpad, but none of the solutions mentioned there worked for me.
Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del did indeed work though ...
I used boot options like noresume, acpi=off, single, to no avail.
Was able to change the grub command line to " ... rw init=/bin/bash", and get a prompt. I connected the ethernet cable, got an IP address, and ran "aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade" and made sure there are no pending updates. Still no go.
I regenerated the initrd image using update-initramfs -k all -c, and ran update-grub as well. No go still ...
Running dpkg-reconfigure -a did not help either (and complains about upstart socket not being there).
I booted from an old Kubuntu disk and connected a USB drive and made a backup of the home directory. Then booted from a fresh Kubuntu 9.10 i386 desktop CD, but the fonts were all borked: too big to be useful, and most popup dialogs (e.g. when you press on the K start button) are unreadable, so can't even proceed with a full clean install.
Not sure what to do for that second laptop. I am hesitant of doing 2 more now that I am stuck on that one.
Yes, I would consider the 5K if it is simple to connect and operate. 10K? Maybe not so much. That would be after the kids are done with university and I have spare time and money.
Or perhaps the public library should get one, or the local Hacker Space, and share it among many people.
Three decades ago, when I was at high school, and even in early university years, I was fascinated with biology and specially botany. I acquired a good conventional optical microscope and got custom fixtures made for SLR cameras to take pictures. I managed to scan some of those I could find on my page on photomicroscopy. I was endlessly fascinated by seeing the patterns on pollen grains and chloroplasts inside plant cells.
I always hit the limit on what optical microscopes can see, even with an oil immersion lens. The depth of focus was always very shallow and I had to prepare stuff before seeing much. I kept reading on electronic microscopes, both scanning and tunneling, and only dreaming of ever operating one.
Perhaps in my lifetime it can be more affordable as an item for the hobbyist.
From a technology point of view, the site was open source when it first launched in February or March 2009. It used Drupal on Linux.
Now, it is using ASP.NET, presumably on Windows.
Not saying this made it less accessible. Far from it. But that there was also a switch from open source to proprietary as well.
Most times it is: Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.
False positive from a DLL? That is nothing ...
How about TrendMicro giving a false positive on a valid PHP plain text file that is part of Drupal!
For those who are into web site performance, like me, the standard tool for everyone was Yslow, which is a Firefox extension that measured front end (browser) page loading speed, assigned a score to your site/page and then gave a set of recommendations on improving the user experience.
Now Google has the similar Page speed Firefox extension.
However, when I tried it, with 5+ windows and 100+ tabs open, Firefox kept eating away memory, and then the laptop swapped and swapped and I had to kill Firefox, and go in its configuration files by hand and disable Page Speed. I have Yslow on the same configuration with no ill effects.
Bruce
You are someone whom I respect, and as an Egyptian, I am disappointed by the misinformation in your post.
Here is an article I wrote about the issue of Egypt's response to the swine flu by killing pigs. First, it is far more than Egypt or Muslims: it is Swine Flu, social networks and media spreading misinformation, there is the Israeli health minister's comment, there is Twitter and social networks, and there is xkcd too ("I ate pork, am I going to get the flu")!
The problem is misinformation. When bird flu hit Egypt a few years ago, about 26 people died, and chicken and ducks were destroyed for everyone.The current government just did the same for pigs, which happens to be kept mostly by Christian Coptic families. Not exclusively though. Some Muslim families raise pigs too. And just so you know, most Copts will not eat pork in Egypt because of the unhealthy way they are raised. The common knowledge is that it is non-Egyptians who consume the most pork (e.g. Greeks, Italians, Armenians, ...etc.) While in Europe with a Coptic friend, I was surprised when he ordered pork for breakfast. He explained that he does not eat it in Egypt because of the unhealthy way it is raised, but OK with eating it in Europe due to more sanitary conditions. You will know why when you read about the Garbage village of Muqattam.
Even the Coptic Church has chimed in supporting the cull of pigs in Egypt this time, saying that eating pork is neither forbidden nor recommended by church law, and if public health calls for killing them, then it supports it! Of course, pigs are not a vector, and that is misinformation.
Just like Judaism, Islam has some dietary restrictions, which include pork. You can agree or disagree with that
And which "powerful clerics"? Can you name a few? Are they in the government? Do they make government policy? You are probably confusing Iran with Egypt, no?
Fact is, the government in Egypt is far from being religious (of any brand) neither are they ethical nor moral!
Who are the "Islamics"? Use the proper terms please: Muslims.
Exactly. This is not about prosecution, this is about misguided fear. The government are wrongly extending the bird flu measures to the swine flu.
Agreed, and that is what I wrote in my post above.
Agreed again.
The Copts are no more persecuted than the Muslims. The current issues in Egypt are due to a government who is despotic and resisting an change or attempt to cha
Your case has highlighted two things that have bugged me for a while:
1. Red Hat has exited the desktop market a long time ago. Instead, their test bed community run distro (Fedora) is the desktop version. Red Hat Linux is mainly a server operating system.
2. I see dealers who consider only Red Hat and SuSE as viable commercially supported distros. The argument is that they have hardware support from the hardware vendors (HP, Dell, IBM, ...etc.)
When I mention that Ubuntu is really a mature desktop operating system, the argument is : the hardware vendors don't support it.
In your case, it was exactly the opposite of what the perception is: Red Hat and Dell did not provide a working solution, while Ubuntu did (indirectly).
Ha!
Looks like the userpoints system that I wrote for Drupal. Also has a plethora of contributed modules that integrates with lots of stuff.
Can be used as a site currency, reputation system, motivation for participation and much more.
I hail originally from Egypt. English is taught in public schools, but not to a high degree. Most university graduates have some working knowledge of it to get by. French is also taught for a much lesser number of years, but does not have an impact. Both English and French are taught more extensively in private schools.
In some disciplines, English *IS* the language of instruction and study (e.g. Medicine, Pharmacy, ...etc).
For computers, English is used as the natural language. All major computer languages are based on English (remember COBOL? Was very popular for decades).
Even when some company (Sakhr?) came up with Raed in the 80s, which was a computer that booted in Arabic, and had a BASIC like interpreted language in Arabic. The name Raed means "pioneer" as well as "astronaut". The company, Sakhr was based in Kuwait, and was promoting this as a platform for native Arabic speakers.
It did not fly. Most people who were doing computing already knew English, and those who did not know English nor computers did not see this as a viable option.
So, English continues to be the language of computing in Egypt and other places in the center and east of the Arab region. The western region (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) is influenced by French, and hence different.
Many years ago, I have had the "pleasure" of working briefly on an application that was developed in Morocco in C (for credit card handling), and all the comments were in French. So, it was "ouvres la fichier", instead of "open the file". Moreover, variable and function names were French too. Making it incomprehensible to non-French speakers. Was very confusing.
English is not my first language, but it is the lingua franca of computing in most countries I worked in, on three continents.
So, it was odd to see this, but when you realize it is because of the influence of a different cultural hub, it does not become so odd.
This is a very interesting observation, since I saw it in other contexts.
Before satellite TV was common (1990s), Egypt used to be the exporter of popular culture to other Arabic speaking countries, such as the Levant, Gulf, Libya, Sudan and elsewhere.
This resulted in me, an Egyptian, being understood perfectly when I first traveled outside Egypt, while me having major difficulty with the dialects of Saudis, Lebanese, and others.
This "culture exporter" also leads to some degree of frustration ("Why doesn't every one speak our language/dialect") and arrogance ("We are superior because of it").
The cultural hub (Paris, Cairo), becomes the center for the culture based on the language/dialect (Parisian-French, Egyptian-city-Arabic). Other places look up to the hub as the center of the world (immigrants from former colonies, migrants from villages, artists from other countries, ...etc.)
In the case of Paris, I believe a big part of the rudeness is due to this being an exclusively a cultural exporter, and never having imported culture in the form of language. To them, they are the center of the world because they don't know any better. They have not been exposed to anything rather than the indigenous culture. The same was true for Cairo in the pre-satellite TV era as well.
Paris was one of the best and worst places I've ever visited. Worst because of the rudeness of the natives, whether they are a customs official, subway inspector, Algerian taxi driver, or a Moroccan couscous restaurant waiter. It is so pervasive, that the hotel reception and the folk I was visiting on business stuck out by their politeness.
Read about the entire experience in my Paris travel notes
No.
I don't use Windows, so I will not be directly affected.
But it may have an impact on the internet itself. Think about wasted bandwidth, web sites putting measures against it, domain registrars requiring more Draconian measures for registring domains (imagine having to send paperwork, while you don't have to now), ...etc.
Here is my educated guess:
It is based on probability.
The author(s) of the worm would register just 500 (or so) of the 50,000 domains. That is 1% as you said.
The worm then generates the 50,000 random names, and tries to contact a sample of 500 of these.
It has to just succeed in contacting one of them, and downloading a payload.
There is also the peer to peer protocol, which is not fully understood (the SRI researches say that studying it is an "ongoing concern"), but will allow nodes to act as client and/or servers and exchange payloads without the internet rendevouz points, which are the above domains.
So, they just have to initially have some domains, and distribute a payload through it. After that the payload can dictate another distribution method.
Ideally, yes, all of them cooperating would help a lot.
But note that the TLDs belong to different entities/countries with varying levels of competence/funding. Some are very small islands that have a cool TLD, run by small outfits.
Getting them all to agree to act and coordinate it all would not be realistic.
Let us hope I am wrong. I don't use Windows, but I think this worm will have an impact on the internet itself.
Yes, it should have been done quietly. Perhaps it is a PR thing "our .ca domains are not vulnerable"? Who knows.
As I >pointed out in another comment, the author(s) scan all the info about Conficker and then modify it to protect itself against the defenses. They did that by releasing the C variant to select domains out of a random number of 50,000 total, after the initial 250 got outed in B.
I bet that there will be a D variant shortly before April 1st, and it will have more defenses and convolutions.
Interesting to watch this unravel nonetheless.
I saw the article today on CBC (Canada's equivalent of the BBC).
This effort may help, but given that the worm has so many other TLDs to choose from, it may not help much. Making the 110 TLDs only 109 (or even 75 if other TLD authorities do the same) will not help that much.
Moreover, there is another mechanism which is not very clear, whereby the infected nodes will contact each other via a See Peer to Peer protocl. So, once the botnet gets going, the need for the domain name (so called "Internet Rendevouz points") may diminish.
Also, the article contains some inaccuracies:
Actually, the worm author(s) are aware that the user may change the clock of the PC to avoid the worm from triggering. So they query several well known sites and check the date/time on the HTTP headers to make this defense point moot. See Internet Date Checking
It will query only 500 out of 50,000 generated domain names. See the domain generation algorithm.
I bet there will be a revision D shortly before April 1st, and the author(s) will address many of the potential defenses in revision C.
I recently got delayed in an airport, and sat next to a Canadian doctor.
The discussion led to what I work with and hence Open Source. He said that doctors in Canada use open source software. So I looked it up and found OSCAR which is indeed open source.
No proprietary lock-in for formats, no vendor lock in, and minimal costs.
You make very good points and I agree with all what you have mentioned, except for the part that said al-Qaeda's funding was : "through legal dealings with the US of other Bin Laden family parts."
The Bin Laden business empire is well respected in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. They are not the same as Osama. In fact they are against him, if nothing else for the ill repute that befell on it because of his family name.
Remember that Bin Laden had three phases: one before 1990, one during the 90s, and one after Sept 11. The first phase is when he was a good guy in the Muslim world and in the West because he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. No one saw him as a bad guy then. In 1990, he had a spat with the King of Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait. The end result was that he preached against the king, who dropped his citizenship. He left to Sudan, where he was joined by the ideologue Ayman El Zawahri who changed him from a reformer/resistance to someone who targets the West. This is when the East Africa and Cole bombings happened. Then officially, the two groups merged (Zawahri's and Bin Laden's). September 11 happened shortly after that, and Bin Laden became the most wanted and in hiding.
Here is a piece of relevant information: Back in the mid 1990s, before all that, I was sitting on a flight next to a pharmacist who worked for one of the Bin Laden family businesses (medical supplies or something). We had a lengthy conversation. He told me, among other things, that Bin Laden's immediate family (wife and kids) were living in Medina, and their relatives were supporting them financially, but in a very strange method to prevent any cash from reaching Osama. The school bills were paid by cheques to the school. Food and groceries were obtained by them by going to a store, and then the relatives paying the store directly for what they consumed. The whole idea was to prevent any cash from reaching Osama. And that was way before Sept 11 was even an idea in his mind. At that time he was an enemy of the Saudi state and ruling family, not an enemy nor a threat of the West.
So, I don't believe any claims that his family, or anyone in Saudi Arabia would fund Al Qaeda directly and incur the wrath of royal family. Anything that claims that, let alone claim the Bush family had dealing with Osama (as much as I am against W) is flat wrong. Dealings with the greater Bin Laden family and business empire? Sure? Any of that reaching Osama? No way!
Your point about the economies behind warfare are ignored is a good one.
But ...
This is inaccurate.
Narmer's palette, from around 3000 BC, shows a siege of a walled city (lower obverse side). For all we know, Narmer unified Egypt's north and south, so this reflects the realities of the cities within Egypt during his time.
As well, Memphis an ancient capital, was named Inbu-Hedj, meaning "White Walls". That was before Pepi's pyramid was built and the name changed to Men Nefer (beautiful) after Pepi's pyramid.
So at least some cities were fortified.
Rome was a mercantile expansionist empire. The armies served the trade interests, and put down any threat to its economic dominance of the Mediterranean. The expansion just kept continuing on and on after Carthage was vanquished as an economic threat and a military one. North Africa was taken, Egypt was invaded, without being a threat at all. They wanted to secure a wheat source for the populace of Rome. After that it was Syria and Palestine, Asia Minor, and vast stretches of Europe as well. Then the long wars with the Persians over Coel-Syria. Then the failed expedition to Arabia Felix over Arabia Deserta. And on and on ...
From one city state in the peninsula, to an empire in the entire Mediterranean basin, half of Europe and as far as the British Isles.
To say they just "defended what is theirs" is revisionist at best.
The roads were made for trade and army mobility. So they served a dual purpose. Just like the internet started as a military project and see what it offers today.
So, valid point.
It is Evan Leibovitch, not Eric!
Fix the typo in the summary.
Hi
Thanks for all this info.
I have a question. Got a new as yet unused Barracuda 7200.11 750GB ST3750330AS, date code 09103, P/N 98X156-303, firmware SD15.
Will this experience the issues mentioned in this thread (stutter, bricking)?
If so, would a firmware upgrade fix it?
If so, which firmware level?
Thanks.