Define 'obscene' - you don't max out your line when downloading/uploading/seeding your Linux ISOs? The latest versions of uTorrent 'automagically' manage your connection settings, but not very well. I tried 'auto' and was uploading at 200k...
Perhaps they just target people who visit isohunt.com etc...orthose dunb enough to not use 'encryption' option
OK, I'll bite. As a Brit, I'm tempted to respond with an equally facile quip about the crumbling public infrastructure in the USA. Collapsing bridges spring to mind. Mind you, I choose to live in France, where the trains are excellent, so...
Returning on topic, I'm not sure that the 'caveat emptor' analogy can be stretched so far. To what extent can we expect people to be tech-savvy enough to know that their device is 'insecure' by default, especially when the marketing hype is to make things 'easy to use'. It reminds me of the old windows 'ships insecure by default' debate. We all know who won that one.
So, is it 'people act as if they want to be bugged', or, 'people have a legal right to privacy, and existing vendors are not taking reasonable steps to ensure that such rights are protected'?
Monopolies breed arrogance. I quit IBM in the 80's because all my bosses seemed to be concerned about was politics.
The customer was always wrong - just a source of revenue. But when you're making 75% net margin, (yup - NET), on some hardware, hell, why not get lazy and arrogant?
I joined a software house, and, years later, was in the sad position of telling some of my former colleagues why they were unemployable.
Urm, maybe we don't have the same bibles at home, but I had a pretty heavy dose of christianity, (yup, small c), whilst a kid, and I don't remember that the main message was about avoiding materialistic pleasures. I think it was - and is - about love, honesty, mutual respect and understanding...
"Just say no', well, "just does not work". I've got 4 teenage kids, and they seem to be doing OK.
Maybe that's because my wife and I talk with them about what you can and should do to have a full and happy life, rather than what you should not do. I think that the time when people were frightened into compliance with threats of 'eternal damnation' has passed, thank God, (yeah, he gets a big G). Sure, masturbating over a bunch of porn, (a very man thing), could be viewed as 'wrong', but I'd rather explain to my kids how much better making love with a real person - who loves you - is.
Did not Jesus enjoy having his feet washed? That's pretty material and pleasurable, I think. Do I feel guilty, when, having earned an honest buck by working hard, I'm eating an indulgent meal with my family and friends in a good restaurent? Hell no!
Yeah, as you say. Let's not talk about that, huh? Notice how nobody replied to your post, or modded you, and were just happy to flame the shit out of me, and get modded 'interesting'...
As you'll see from my other posts, I was there in the shit, so I know what being 'sent off to die' means. Like many others before me, I found out that it was pretty much a waste of time, money, youth and life. But I least I came back alive.
The real concern is, while we are witnessing a massive erosion of our civil liberties, (all around the world - I'm an Englishman living in France - in many places in Europe now that can detain you for WEEKS without any valid reason, access to an attorney etc.), we are NOT seeing any real benefit in counter-terrorism. WTF? Less liberty, but more secure, perhaps I can accept. More liberty, less secure, hey, your choice bub, go and live in Afghanistan.
But less liberty and less secure, and high taxes...you gotta be shitting me
Do you mean 'wrong' as in 'immoral', or 'wrong' as in 'does not work'?
Personally, I think it's both.
Like many people here, (I imagine), I change hardware frequently, and am also cursed with being my neighbours', friends', childrens' software and hardware support. So I get this 'activation' bs regularly. Have you ever tried fixing a system that was delivered with a 'recovery' CD, that tries to access some (corrupt) partition etc...of course, no 'original' installation CDs
How long before you cut your losses and install from one of your 'corp.' CDs, or - if it's not in the family - download some streamlined thing from isohunt? Believe me, its 10x quicker than going the ms way. Shit, it's not even as if they or I did not BUY the software in the first place... Anybody want a load of VALID ms serials - you can have 'em...
The real problem is that 'activation' punishes the honest user, whilst doing little or nothing to stop the pirates.../end rant.
I'll reply to your post, but also address the other comments, if I may.
1. To the people who posted along the lines of 'gutless, coward etc.', well kids, I fought for my country and have the pieces missing from me to prove it. I did not lose them due to smoking or to auto accidents.
2. As for odds of dying, well, I'm pretty good at stats, thanks. However, please note that I choose to drink, smoke, drive and fly - both private and commercial. I'm aware of the odds, and am no more afraid of them than I would be of a terrorist threat, or a lightening strike.
But let's make one thing clear, there's a BIG different between me accepting certain risks, and having them imposed on me.
That's what my original post was about - re-read it, please. Let's make sure the people who are elected and/or paid for by us are doing the best job possible to minimise such risks. Sure, the current executive has gone much too far, but their biggest failure has been , IMHO, to compromise our liberties and international image without any tangible results!
Do I shut down & clean, thereby protecting my clients, data, shareholders and above-all my ass?
Or do I play amateur cop / responsable citizen (depends on your point of view), and try and sniff and smoke the bastards out?
Tough call.
Having said that, some of my clients are massive multinationals, (like Vodafone), and they seem more preoccupied with cutting costs than taking this kind of threat seriously. Whilst a local entity - to take your example, Greece - could not necessarily justify investing in a proper defensive & forensic team, such a team would be trivial in terms of cost on a global level. It would probably be efficient too, since such attacks are - for the moment - relatively rare.
1. The biographies of many 'great' scientists, (selfish, obsessed and frankly quite often mad), 2. How hard it is to get funding for 'real' science these days,
Then I suppose a little hyperboyle is inevitable, indeed perhaps necessary
From that last article, "Could al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash-not wire transfers-wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored, Atta's team might still never have been caught.
But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended-just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried."
I'm very concerned about my civil liberties, but I'm even more concerned that the the next time I take the 'plane, the bus, the subway - or I'm just sitting at my desk, or on holiday with my family - I might get wiped out by some terrorist.
Where you have a point is that intelligent, positive options to resolve the inhuman mess in the Middle East probably did not include invading Iraq.
1. In my experience, flash memory can sometimes fail totally. This may be due to it being often removable, and accessed in rather non-robust ways, (USB ports, card readers). Hence (presumably) gets nuked by static etc. My attempts at recovering such 'dead' flash devices have not been great, so far. When it's dead, it's dead...even re-format does not work sometimes. Presumably, internal flash 'disk drive replacements' would be rather more robust.
2. When flash drives first came out, 'classical' data-recovery tools seem to have difficulty recovering from acidental deletes and formats etc., since they seemed (I'm not an expert) to be looking for HDD-like behaviour. I remember reading an interesting paper long ago about the consequences of 'random walk' data storage for recovery... Since then, things have improved, and a lot of tools claim to be/are able to recover data from flash. Of course, I never need these, since I have good backups, ahem.
BTW, I was recently at a client site (for once without my PC and DVDs, CDs, flash drives etc. stuffed with tools) when the sales manager wiped his hard disk. Their in-house IT support was - as usual - no help. I download one of my fav. simple tools, http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html ran it from a USB, copied the undeleted files to a USB HDD and bingo! Another happy customer.
Check it out - if the PC boots (into windoz) it does the job...
Your own employees! You're right of course, that the networks should be separate. However, a real danger of connecting your process control sytems to the 'office' intra/internet is that you:
1. Immediately introduce an extra dimesion of complexity in support and debug. A NIC goes nuts in accounts? Someone connects some unauthorised hardware? Someone decides to repatch in the cable cabinet? Bang goes your process, (sometimes literally 'bang')
2. Open the door to the exec. who - in trying to show-off the 'transparent factory' process reporting and control, manages to open the dump valve on a large tank full of dangerous chemicals. "Look, this dial is moving...that's in reeeal time, folks"! Urh, what's that siren? True story. Fortunately the containment wall did its job for once. The tech was sacked, since he 'should have better-protected access to that function', (which is true, tho' as always, the Exec had demanded 'full access'...)
The integrated electronics do it for you, otherwise the flash drive would 'fail' sequentially, in order of cell use, and you'd steadily see your reported usable capacity dropping. Does not happen. In my experience, flash drives just keep on working - even in intensive use - but then just somtimes fail suddenly and totally, with no warning.
No need to defrag the drive - indeed, would me harmful (uses scarce 'write' cycles). Is a waste of time, since flash memory is written to in a 'random walk' pattern to spread the damage evenly. That's one the main reason it's so hard to 'undelete' stuff from flash mem.
There are many instances of car keys being duplicated by thieves in league with garages, valet parkings and so forth. The important thing here is that the person you *think* was guarding your key *could not* have stolen your car. In fact, you have no way of knowing how yuo car was stolen.
In an interesting varient, thieves also hire cars, dup the keys, then just drive 'em away after rental return...
So yes, it's important that they can crack the crypto, so can duplicate...
Slashdot Mirror
Dupe?
4 98825
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=290119&cid=20
But for once, an INTERESTING one. Keep up the good work, Frosty
Define 'obscene' - you don't max out your line when downloading/uploading/seeding your Linux ISOs?
The latest versions of uTorrent 'automagically' manage your connection settings, but not very well. I tried 'auto' and was uploading at 200k...
Perhaps they just target people who visit isohunt.com etc...orthose dunb enough to not use 'encryption' option
Amen to that - the number of times I've stuffed a working system by trying to 'improve' or 'upgrade' it - hardware and software.
These days, if it works, I leave it alone...
OK, I'll bite. As a Brit, I'm tempted to respond with an equally facile quip about the crumbling public infrastructure in the USA. Collapsing bridges spring to mind. Mind you, I choose to live in France, where the trains are excellent, so...
Returning on topic, I'm not sure that the 'caveat emptor' analogy can be stretched so far. To what extent can we expect people to be tech-savvy enough to know that their device is 'insecure' by default, especially when the marketing hype is to make things 'easy to use'. It reminds me of the old windows 'ships insecure by default' debate. We all know who won that one.
So, is it 'people act as if they want to be bugged', or, 'people have a legal right to privacy, and existing vendors are not taking reasonable steps to ensure that such rights are protected'?
Monopolies breed arrogance. I quit IBM in the 80's because all my bosses seemed to be concerned about was politics.
The customer was always wrong - just a source of revenue. But when you're making 75% net margin, (yup - NET), on some hardware, hell, why not get lazy and arrogant?
I joined a software house, and, years later, was in the sad position of telling some of my former colleagues why they were unemployable.
Gonna happen to Ms.
Urm, maybe we don't have the same bibles at home, but I had a pretty heavy dose of christianity, (yup, small c), whilst a kid, and I don't remember that the main message was about avoiding materialistic pleasures. I think it was - and is - about love, honesty, mutual respect and understanding...
"Just say no', well, "just does not work". I've got 4 teenage kids, and they seem to be doing OK.
Maybe that's because my wife and I talk with them about what you can and should do to have a full and happy life, rather than what you should not do. I think that the time when people were frightened into compliance with threats of 'eternal damnation' has passed, thank God, (yeah, he gets a big G). Sure, masturbating over a bunch of porn, (a very man thing), could be viewed as 'wrong', but I'd rather explain to my kids how much better making love with a real person - who loves you - is.
Did not Jesus enjoy having his feet washed? That's pretty material and pleasurable, I think. Do I feel guilty, when, having earned an honest buck by working hard, I'm eating an indulgent meal with my family and friends in a good restaurent? Hell no!
Yeah, as you say. Let's not talk about that, huh? Notice how nobody replied to your post, or modded you, and were just happy to flame the shit out of me, and get modded 'interesting'...
As you'll see from my other posts, I was there in the shit, so I know what being 'sent off to die' means.
Like many others before me, I found out that it was pretty much a waste of time, money, youth and life. But I least I came back alive.
The real concern is, while we are witnessing a massive erosion of our civil liberties, (all around the world - I'm an Englishman living in France - in many places in Europe now that can detain you for WEEKS without any valid reason, access to an attorney etc.), we are NOT seeing any real benefit in counter-terrorism. WTF? Less liberty, but more secure, perhaps I can accept. More liberty, less secure, hey, your choice bub, go and live in Afghanistan.
But less liberty and less secure, and high taxes...you gotta be shitting me
Do you mean 'wrong' as in 'immoral', or 'wrong' as in 'does not work'?
/end rant.
Personally, I think it's both.
Like many people here, (I imagine), I change hardware frequently, and am also cursed with being my neighbours', friends', childrens' software and hardware support. So I get this 'activation' bs regularly. Have you ever tried fixing a system that was delivered with a 'recovery' CD, that tries to access some (corrupt) partition etc...of course, no 'original' installation CDs
How long before you cut your losses and install from one of your 'corp.' CDs, or - if it's not in the family - download some streamlined thing from isohunt? Believe me, its 10x quicker than going the ms way. Shit, it's not even as if they or I did not BUY the software in the first place... Anybody want a load of VALID ms serials - you can have 'em...
The real problem is that 'activation' punishes the honest user, whilst doing little or nothing to stop the pirates...
I've killed for my country, and been wounded.
I was scared shitless in combat. So I guess you're right.
How about you? Ever been to war, brave man?
I'll reply to your post, but also address the other comments, if I may.
1. To the people who posted along the lines of 'gutless, coward etc.', well kids, I fought for my country and have the pieces missing from me to prove it. I did not lose them due to smoking or to auto accidents.
2. As for odds of dying, well, I'm pretty good at stats, thanks. However, please note that I choose to drink, smoke, drive and fly - both private and commercial. I'm aware of the odds, and am no more afraid of them than I would be of a terrorist threat, or a lightening strike.
But let's make one thing clear, there's a BIG different between me accepting certain risks, and having them imposed on me.
That's what my original post was about - re-read it, please. Let's make sure the people who are elected and/or paid for by us are doing the best job possible to minimise such risks. Sure, the current executive has gone much too far, but their biggest failure has been , IMHO, to compromise our liberties and international image without any tangible results!
Oh, the horns of dilemma
Do I shut down & clean, thereby protecting my clients, data, shareholders and above-all my ass?
Or do I play amateur cop / responsable citizen (depends on your point of view), and try and sniff and smoke the bastards out?
Tough call.
Having said that, some of my clients are massive multinationals, (like Vodafone), and they seem more preoccupied with cutting costs than taking this kind of threat seriously. Whilst a local entity - to take your example, Greece - could not necessarily justify investing in a proper defensive & forensic team, such a team would be trivial in terms of cost on a global level. It would probably be efficient too, since such attacks are - for the moment - relatively rare.
This just in, "Sony and Dell in sweet new deal that promises explosive new laptop experience!"
With you 100% - but then again, if you look at;
1. The biographies of many 'great' scientists, (selfish, obsessed and frankly quite often mad),
2. How hard it is to get funding for 'real' science these days,
Then I suppose a little hyperboyle is inevitable, indeed perhaps necessary
As you say, not exactly. Depends on your definition of 'domestic spying', I suppose:
. htm
a sualties.htm
3 835,00.html
Deaths from WTC: 2,726 See http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm51SPa6
US deaths in Iraq, to date: 3,774 See http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_c
Could better 'domestic spying' have prevented the WTC atrocities, well, maybe.
See http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,33
From that last article,
"Could al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash-not wire transfers-wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored, Atta's team might still never have been caught.
But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended-just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried."
I'm very concerned about my civil liberties, but I'm even more concerned that the the next time I take the 'plane, the bus, the subway - or I'm just sitting at my desk, or on holiday with my family - I might get wiped out by some terrorist.
Where you have a point is that intelligent, positive options to resolve the inhuman mess in the Middle East probably did not include invading Iraq.
Yeah, just another day in /; dupemand.
Still, as a fellow fan of Crowe and Sting, glad you got a 5
Good reply from AC, just to add to that.
1. In my experience, flash memory can sometimes fail totally. This may be due to it being often removable, and accessed in rather non-robust ways, (USB ports, card readers). Hence (presumably) gets nuked by static etc. My attempts at recovering such 'dead' flash devices have not been great, so far. When it's dead, it's dead...even re-format does not work sometimes.
Presumably, internal flash 'disk drive replacements' would be rather more robust.
2. When flash drives first came out, 'classical' data-recovery tools seem to have difficulty recovering from acidental deletes and formats etc., since they seemed (I'm not an expert) to be looking for HDD-like behaviour. I remember reading an interesting paper long ago about the consequences of 'random walk' data storage for recovery... Since then, things have improved, and a lot of tools claim to be/are able to recover data from flash. Of course, I never need these, since I have good backups, ahem.
BTW, I was recently at a client site (for once without my PC and DVDs, CDs, flash drives etc. stuffed with tools) when the sales manager wiped his hard disk. Their in-house IT support was - as usual - no help. I download one of my fav. simple tools,
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html
ran it from a USB, copied the undeleted files to a USB HDD and bingo! Another happy customer.
Check it out - if the PC boots (into windoz) it does the job...
Thanks - did not help my karma, though!
Still, got loads to burn, so 'troll' this as well, you sad fucks!
Your own employees! You're right of course, that the networks should be separate. However, a real danger of connecting your process control sytems to the 'office' intra/internet is that you:
1. Immediately introduce an extra dimesion of complexity in support and debug. A NIC goes nuts in accounts? Someone connects some unauthorised hardware? Someone decides to repatch in the cable cabinet? Bang goes your process, (sometimes literally 'bang')
2. Open the door to the exec. who - in trying to show-off the 'transparent factory' process reporting and control, manages to open the dump valve on a large tank full of dangerous chemicals. "Look, this dial is moving...that's in reeeal time, folks"! Urh, what's that siren? True story. Fortunately the containment wall did its job for once. The tech was sacked, since he 'should have better-protected access to that function', (which is true, tho' as always, the Exec had demanded 'full access'...)
So yeah, lock it off TIGHT
The integrated electronics do it for you, otherwise the flash drive would 'fail' sequentially, in order of cell use, and you'd steadily see your reported usable capacity dropping. Does not happen. In my experience, flash drives just keep on working - even in intensive use - but then just somtimes fail suddenly and totally, with no warning.
You SURE it's a million? Arf
Just for starters...
No need to defrag the drive - indeed, would me harmful (uses scarce 'write' cycles). Is a waste of time, since flash memory is written to in a 'random walk' pattern to spread the damage evenly. That's one the main reason it's so hard to 'undelete' stuff from flash mem.
More careful OS management of swapping & caching.
etc.
Not trolling, but how the *$à&!! does re-stating both the summary, and the damn obvious, get modded 'interesting'?
Solid state drives have no moving parts? No shit, Sherlock!
Urm, yes, that was my point...this news is important for just that reason...
No need for hardware stores, not far away from where I live there's a guy who duplicate ANY metal key for you, real cheap, while you wait.
He might struggle with encryption, tho'
Look for a job where they got lots of oltp!
There are many instances of car keys being duplicated by thieves in league with garages, valet parkings and so forth.
The important thing here is that the person you *think* was guarding your key *could not* have stolen your car.
In fact, you have no way of knowing how yuo car was stolen.
In an interesting varient, thieves also hire cars, dup the keys, then just drive 'em away after rental return...
So yes, it's important that they can crack the crypto, so can duplicate...