Since I have to spend a lot of time convincing my mom that I'm actually a lot safer than she thinks, I know that the US impression of Iraq is way off. The truth is life here is quite normal. The streets are crowded (way too crowded, traffic is a nightmare), shops are filled with new consumer goods. Restaurants are thriving. Schools are open. People go to work, school, hang out with friends.
Ok, folks, read it; and keep it in mind when you hear a political candidate, of either party, tell you that Iraqis aren't better off.
Moderate me off-topic or flamebait if you must, but if you're a computer professional or want to be one it seems to me that the ability to read a little bit of French or German comes with the territory,
Are you kidding me? The ability to speak German is becoming decreasingly relevant even in Germany, much less anywhere else. Might as well suggest one can't work in this industry without learning Latin while you're at it.
As for French, the French would prefer if we didn't learn their language; it interferes with their ongoing project to cut themselves off from the rest of the Internet.
IMHO, you're posting a story in English to an English-language website, you should be posting English links. Substitute any language you want in the previous sentence, as long as you substitute it three times.
Unlimited access (I.E., stay on as long as you care to) is not the same thing as unlimited bandwidth (I.E., use capacity that costs them 10 times as much to provide as they're charging you for the line.)
Information may want to be free, but fiber optic cable wants to be one million US dollars per mile.
One discussion that's been going on is the creation of a DNSRBL for sites that do this.
Perhaps, however, instead of reinventing the wheel, we could use existing solutions; send a virus-infected email to postmaster@ the offending domain, and/or abuse@ the offending domain.
If you get a bounceback that makes it clear no human will see the message, that meets the criteria for submission to RFC-ignorant
SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT SPENDING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS BECUASE IT IS A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THEIR INCOME YOU CLUELESS WHITE FLIGHT RICH SCUM!!!!
Then don't break the law. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. The vast majority of computer confiscations are followed by a conviction, and your same argument could be made against confiscating a firearm from an arrestee.
I guess these must be the prices that Haliburton etc. are charging. The war in Iraq looks like a damn efficient means to move money from the American taxer into the hands of friends of those in power in the USA. Go Bush!
$40 is what it costs for the Army to do it.
$3 is what Halliburton charges. Cost plus a percentage is what they were authorized to charge when they competitively bid to be the LOGCAP supplier.
Yes, I know it comes as a shock that they got the Iraq gig because of a competitive bid process, but that's what happens when you listen to the mainstream press and web sites.
Funny, normally when somebody is accused of something like this and their stuff gets confiscated, you folks are screaming bloody murder about the inequity of taking hard drives, and of the assault on a poor innocent person's dignity at being branded by the press as "guilty" when there has been no such determination by the courts.
But when it's folks with whom you have a political disagreement, all of a sudden you're thirsting for blood.
Operations like DSL Reports can't afford to move to a new provider every other week just because some spammer decides to make his operations there before the hosting provider gets a chance to do anything about it.
That's a strawman argument. This isn't a hosting provider getting a spammer hosted on them and then getting listed in SPEWS instantly. This is a hosting provider getting multiple warnings over a long period of time, and ignoring them.
If DSL Reports valued money over integrity, then they got what they deserved.
They've already got these things in airports and malls. You put in a quarter, and you each hold the handles, and boom, five seconds later the little LEDs show you if she loves you.
Oh, sorry.. there is research that has PROVEN the polygraph to have 50% accuracy rate.. ranking it right up there with the 'other' lie detector: A coin with the word 'truth' on one side and 'lie' on the other!
Source, please. I've seen nothing that claims worse than 61%, and usually much better than that.
Just imagine what a simple script could do on a Uix dervative when accidentatlly run aby a user. Now imagine what happens when that user is running as root. And that's just what many people are going to do...
This argument, and variations of it, get trotted out every time there's a new Windows virus that infects some significant percentage of the entire world inside of a day.
However, it always fails to consider the fact that each time, a Windows virus infects a significant percentage of the entire world. Linux virii may be few because of the number of users, but still, the ones that do exist don't infect anywhere near the percentage of Linux systems, even though it'd be easier if all things were equal, due to that number being small.
Why? Because 99% of Windows users run as "root", and 99% of Linux users don't. That's an OS issue, not a user issue. That's a problem in Microsoft's code, not a problem with education.
That is, in short, your problem, not ours, and no amount of small-user-base counter-examples is going to change that.
We can build a far better telescope on the moon. We can build fifty of them.
We can build long-baseline interferometric stuff that will make your head spin.
The moon is a big flat place to set stuff, without an atmosphere worth mentioning to screw up the images. We couldn't build a better place to stick a telescope.
How does them only taking the hard drives improve this situation?
You trust them? Well, that's your right. I don't.
How does them only taking the hard drives improve this situation?
How is the government more frightening if they take the whole PC? The data is the part that's important to you, right?
The chain of evidence is the part that's important to them. Whether you think their goal is to solve a crime and secure a conviction, or you think it is to scare people for no reason whatsoever just because they're mean, taking the whole PC is still the technically correct thing to do.
Well, I'm apparantly not that bright, so could you explain it to me?
You don't want field agents trying to figure out what hardware is important and what isn't, in the field. That distinction should be, and is, made by technicians in a lab.
Sometimes cases are booby-trapped to explode when opened.
It's less likely the hard drive will be damaged when transported if it's left in the case.
Time stamps on the system are more meaningful if you can show that the PC hardware wasn't set for the wrong date.
Of course, if the suspects were really guilty and were prepared for a raid, it would be risky to take the computer at all: how do you know that all your evidence isn't on a RAM drive (or on a "rubber hose" filesystem with cryptographic keys on a RAM drive) that has to be manually saved to disk before a shutdown?
Unfortunately, you don't. Does that mean the gathering of evidence should longer be done? Yes, it's possible to store data in such a way that field agents can't gather it. Is it what happens the majority of the time? Hell, no.
Especially when you're talking about a case of somebody stealing many megs of source code. The odds that they left all the code, and all the incriminating information such as log file entires, on a RAM disk is pretty damn slim.
But, yes, it's true; sometimes crimes don't get solved.
BTW, I asked the guy in charge of my local sheriff's department's computer forensics lab what he looks for when vetting a deputy for that duty. Technical knowledge is not only not on the list, but he considers it to be a detriment in some cases. Not to mention the fact that he'd have to pay us three times as much.
The comments are the amazing part to me. You'd think people savvy enough to have read this story would be bright enough to understand why they absolutely HAVE to take the computers, not sit there dicking around trying to pull hard drives out.
I think you've found the problem; they're still sending these off to Einstein to look over, and lately he hasn't been returning any as "not recommended for approval".
Unfortunately, Reflection's NFS might be stable, but their X server is crap.
I solved the whole problem by not trying to do UNIX under Windows anymore; I installed Linux and VMWare, now I do Windows under Linux, and it's all good.
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Since I have to spend a lot of time convincing my mom that I'm actually a lot safer than she thinks, I know that the US impression of Iraq is way off. The truth is life here is quite normal. The streets are crowded (way too crowded, traffic is a nightmare), shops are filled with new consumer goods. Restaurants are thriving. Schools are open. People go to work, school, hang out with friends.
Ok, folks, read it; and keep it in mind when you hear a political candidate, of either party, tell you that Iraqis aren't better off.
Moderate me off-topic or flamebait if you must, but if you're a computer professional or want to be one it seems to me that the ability to read a little bit of French or German comes with the territory,
Are you kidding me? The ability to speak German is becoming decreasingly relevant even in Germany, much less anywhere else. Might as well suggest one can't work in this industry without learning Latin while you're at it.
As for French, the French would prefer if we didn't learn their language; it interferes with their ongoing project to cut themselves off from the rest of the Internet.
IMHO, you're posting a story in English to an English-language website, you should be posting English links. Substitute any language you want in the previous sentence, as long as you substitute it three times.
Unlimited access (I.E., stay on as long as you care to) is not the same thing as unlimited bandwidth (I.E., use capacity that costs them 10 times as much to provide as they're charging you for the line.)
Information may want to be free, but fiber optic cable wants to be one million US dollars per mile.
One discussion that's been going on is the creation of a DNSRBL for sites that do this.
Perhaps, however, instead of reinventing the wheel, we could use existing solutions; send a virus-infected email to postmaster@ the offending domain, and/or abuse@ the offending domain.
If you get a bounceback that makes it clear no human will see the message, that meets the criteria for submission to RFC-ignorant
Is there a hyphen in "anal-retentive?"
SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT SPENDING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS BECUASE IT IS A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THEIR INCOME YOU CLUELESS WHITE FLIGHT RICH SCUM!!!!
Then don't break the law. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. The vast majority of computer confiscations are followed by a conviction, and your same argument could be made against confiscating a firearm from an arrestee.
I guess these must be the prices that Haliburton etc. are charging. The war in Iraq looks like a damn efficient means to move money from the American taxer into the hands of friends of those in power in the USA. Go Bush!
$40 is what it costs for the Army to do it.
$3 is what Halliburton charges. Cost plus a percentage is what they were authorized to charge when they competitively bid to be the LOGCAP supplier.
Yes, I know it comes as a shock that they got the Iraq gig because of a competitive bid process, but that's what happens when you listen to the mainstream press and web sites.
Funny, normally when somebody is accused of something like this and their stuff gets confiscated, you folks are screaming bloody murder about the inequity of taking hard drives, and of the assault on a poor innocent person's dignity at being branded by the press as "guilty" when there has been no such determination by the courts.
But when it's folks with whom you have a political disagreement, all of a sudden you're thirsting for blood.
Try developing RPG applications with nothing but a dumb terminal for a year.
A year? Damn, I didn't make it two months. Got out of the computer industry and into radio for over 4 years as a result.
Operations like DSL Reports can't afford to move to a new provider every other week just because some spammer decides to make his operations there before the hosting provider gets a chance to do anything about it.
That's a strawman argument. This isn't a hosting provider getting a spammer hosted on them and then getting listed in SPEWS instantly. This is a hosting provider getting multiple warnings over a long period of time, and ignoring them.
If DSL Reports valued money over integrity, then they got what they deserved.
Swim in sewage, you'll get a little shit on you. Find a hosting provider that isn't spammer-friendly, or expect people to complain about the smell.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-09-lie _x.htm
They've already got these things in airports and malls. You put in a quarter, and you each hold the handles, and boom, five seconds later the little LEDs show you if she loves you.
Oh, sorry.. there is research that has PROVEN the polygraph to have 50% accuracy rate.. ranking it right up there with the 'other' lie detector: A coin with the word 'truth' on one side and 'lie' on the other!
Source, please. I've seen nothing that claims worse than 61%, and usually much better than that.
Also, I stay away from those horseless carriages. Them things are dangerous, they'll never catch on.
Just imagine what a simple script could do on a Uix dervative when accidentatlly run aby a user. Now imagine what happens when that user is running as root. And that's just what many people are going to do...
This argument, and variations of it, get trotted out every time there's a new Windows virus that infects some significant percentage of the entire world inside of a day.
However, it always fails to consider the fact that each time, a Windows virus infects a significant percentage of the entire world. Linux virii may be few because of the number of users, but still, the ones that do exist don't infect anywhere near the percentage of Linux systems, even though it'd be easier if all things were equal, due to that number being small.
Why? Because 99% of Windows users run as "root", and 99% of Linux users don't. That's an OS issue, not a user issue. That's a problem in Microsoft's code, not a problem with education.
That is, in short, your problem, not ours, and no amount of small-user-base counter-examples is going to change that.
We can build a far better telescope on the moon. We can build fifty of them.
We can build long-baseline interferometric stuff that will make your head spin.
The moon is a big flat place to set stuff, without an atmosphere worth mentioning to screw up the images. We couldn't build a better place to stick a telescope.
Right. So they can use them for something else.
How does them only taking the hard drives improve this situation?
You trust them? Well, that's your right. I don't.
How does them only taking the hard drives improve this situation?
How is the government more frightening if they take the whole PC? The data is the part that's important to you, right?
The chain of evidence is the part that's important to them. Whether you think their goal is to solve a crime and secure a conviction, or you think it is to scare people for no reason whatsoever just because they're mean, taking the whole PC is still the technically correct thing to do.
Well, I'm apparantly not that bright, so could you explain it to me?
You don't want field agents trying to figure out what hardware is important and what isn't, in the field. That distinction should be, and is, made by technicians in a lab.
Sometimes cases are booby-trapped to explode when opened.
It's less likely the hard drive will be damaged when transported if it's left in the case.
Time stamps on the system are more meaningful if you can show that the PC hardware wasn't set for the wrong date.
Of course, if the suspects were really guilty and were prepared for a raid, it would be risky to take the computer at all: how do you know that all your evidence isn't on a RAM drive (or on a "rubber hose" filesystem with cryptographic keys on a RAM drive) that has to be manually saved to disk before a shutdown?
Unfortunately, you don't. Does that mean the gathering of evidence should longer be done? Yes, it's possible to store data in such a way that field agents can't gather it. Is it what happens the majority of the time? Hell, no.
Especially when you're talking about a case of somebody stealing many megs of source code. The odds that they left all the code, and all the incriminating information such as log file entires, on a RAM disk is pretty damn slim.
But, yes, it's true; sometimes crimes don't get solved.
BTW, I asked the guy in charge of my local sheriff's department's computer forensics lab what he looks for when vetting a deputy for that duty. Technical knowledge is not only not on the list, but he considers it to be a detriment in some cases. Not to mention the fact that he'd have to pay us three times as much.
The comments are the amazing part to me. You'd think people savvy enough to have read this story would be bright enough to understand why they absolutely HAVE to take the computers, not sit there dicking around trying to pull hard drives out.
I think you've found the problem; they're still sending these off to Einstein to look over, and lately he hasn't been returning any as "not recommended for approval".
The answer to this question is the same as the answer to every other fricking legal advice question posted on Slashdot: Talk to your lawyer.
If you can't afford a lawyer, either assign your copyright to the FSF, or relicense the damn thing BSD and stop bothering people.
Unfortunately, Reflection's NFS might be stable, but their X server is crap.
I solved the whole problem by not trying to do UNIX under Windows anymore; I installed Linux and VMWare, now I do Windows under Linux, and it's all good.
My experience of SFU was that it was much more reliable than Hummingbird's implementation of NFS client.
Almost anything is more reliable than Hummingbird's NFS.
Viewing the file in hex and yelling it out across the room to somebody else who types it back in is more reliable than Hummingbird's NFS.