I think we have to have at least a little sympathy for the goverment's point of view. From what I've read they have no idea what is in the gig or so of data they can't dycrypt. Being the pariniod kind of people they are; they probably think that he has a couple million credit card or Swiss bank account numbers. Or maybe something really bad like a mpeg of a senator gettin' busy with an aide.
I've never seen reported what method Kevin used to encrypt his data. Let's speculate that he used 1024 bit RSA. The goverment may have decoded the stuff and therefor they know he has the plans to the B1 encrypted on his laptop. But to reveal the fact that they know what he has on his laptop would also reveal that they can break 1024 bit RSA. Not good. So they play dumb instead while still denying access to the data.
How is he supposed to decrypt this information anyways. With an abacus? pen and paper? After all he's restricted from practically all computer use.
Assuming he has nothing more then 100,000 credit reports they still would be in very hot water if Kevin was to somehow commit a crime with the data. How the heck he would do that without access to anything more technological than a light switch I have no idea. He seems to be a master of the wetware attack so I guess it's possible.
Fixing Binaries is definatley harder than text files. It helps if you have the right tool of course. And the advantage of text is that lots of tools are available and they are often self documenting. Though anyone who has ever messed with sendmail can tell you that text can be just as hairy as binary.
Of course it gets back to what I originally said. The registry was a good idea with a typically poor microsoft implementation. For example wouldn't life have been great if they had treated the registry files like dhcp.leases/dhcp.leases~ are treated.
The registry could have been great as it's actually a fairly good way of keeping track of things. The problems are two fold: 1st not everything uses the registry (eg older software or sloppy coding); 2nd recovery of previous states needs to be easy and bulletproof. Of course MS implemented the registry so it's hardly surprising that the registry is neither.
The argument "If your not doing anything wrong why should you care if people are / watching you / testing your urine / reading your mail / tapping your calls / analyzing your visa bill / testing your blood / tracking your movements / going though your garbage" really ticks me off. The point is that in Canada (and the US I think) we have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. This presumtion is not the care everywhere; some places you have to prove you are innocent when accused of a crime. Personally I like our method better. The presumtion of innocence should mean that unless a crime has been committed and the authorities have some reason to suspect me specificly they should leave me alone. They shouldn't be watching me just in case I commit a crime in the future.
Anyone who doesn't get the willies when they read a story like this needs to read Orwell's 1984 again. Mind you we seem to be dodging the bullet of Big Brother; but, we have replaced him with a bunch of little brothers instead.
Someone else meantioned that he works as a security guard and that he felt people were over reacting because the guards that watch these cameras get bored and miss a lot. Somehow this isn't reassuring. The fact we often hear about people who are video taped in dressing and hotel rooms points out how often abuses happen. And these abuses are very hard to track because often people don't even know if they are being watched. It would be different if the cameras were an active device that emitted a visible beam of light or something; but often we can not even see the cameras never mind know whether someone is looking at the monitor (or tape) they feed into.
The Reason everyone with a brain was down on DIVX was that it was controlled by a central source. And that source could disable your player/media anytime it wanted. Or if the company went out of business (which it has) then your investment in upgraded DIVX disks when out the window. Basicly at this point anyone who bought a DIVX player paid too much for an inferior DVD player. The fact that DVD encryption could be broken like it was is one of the reasons it is a good format.
One advantage that private schools have is the ability to remove persistant troublemakers from their systems. Up here in Canada (I imagine it is similiar in the states) it is practically impossible to remove someone from their choosen school for any long term duration. Heck we spent weeks to get a convicted rapist (14 yrs) removed from the school he shared with his victim.
Consider, for instance, disk file compression. No other OS that I'm aware of bundles that capability, but clearly it is a benefit to consumers that Microsoft did it. Granted, it sucked to be Stacker when they started bundling it -- but it was good for the market
Maybe not the best example considering MS stole compression from STAC. One of the few times MS actually got stung in a settlement.
One thing to note is that the Sherman Act could care less about money and wealth. The act is concerned with CONTROL (who controls things). It is quite possible that Bill & Co. will be richer after whatever remedies are applied; however they will (hopefully) have less control. And as shares get sold and resold the concentration of control is further diluted.
For example one of the big fights in the Standard Oil break up was who got control of the Standard Oil brand name. They eventually gave each regional oil company control in their region but outside their region they had to use a different name. Therefor into the world entered EXXON, Cheveron, etc. Now some of these companies no longer use the Standard Oil Brand name at all, even in their home region.
So remember when looking at remedies anti-trust legislation is about control not money.
Yah but MS already _has_ a competing product which wasn't broken by this patch. And the patch is a Y2K compliant requirement. Companies are going to be forced to apply it sometime in the next six weeks.
Bah. I guess you have never been in a situation where your next meal depends on the royalties from a novel... or a song I think the point your missing is that although the creator should have the ability to make money off of their labour; (thereby encouraging creative production; the whole point of copyright) the creators great grand kids collecting a royalty check doesn't promote anything. Society is therefor better served by those creative works entering the public domain. This is especially true for more obscure works which are not available to the general public at all because the copyright holders are unavailable/unknown to give permission to publish.
GRASS actually seems pretty strange compared to ARCVIEW.
GRASS isn't really competing against ARC/View it's market is the same as ARC/INFOs. Having used ESRI products I can say it would be nice to have another option. ESRIs bug fixes are slower than MS and often the bugs are real show stoppers. (Metric units anyone?:( )
I'm presently looking into using GRASS for a project and if it has the functionality I require it should save me 10's of thousands of dollars in licenceing fees. (Both ESRI and OS -Soloris or TRU64- because ARC/INFO will not run on linux.)
If you are a systems admin,and worth a damn, you should have plenty of free time on your hands. If you type it more than once, automate it.
I'd bet you have never worked for a PHB (assuming you have worked at all). Often one isn't given the resources to do a task once let alone spend time to automate it. And how the heck do you automate something like reinstating passwords. As the article pointed out the wetware attack is commonly the easiest one and admins spend a lot of time dealing with it.
When people have free access to firearms, they use them.
Just ask your self the last time you heard of a school shooting in Canada.
I'm not sure what your getting at here. Guns are widely available here in Canada. Gun availablility in the USA may be higher (I don't know, I haven't spent enough time there to judge) but there isn't any lack in Canada.
I don't think anything used in this spree was illegal in Canada and not in the USA. (I.E. Everthing was illegal.) Assuming the handgun was a 9mm as reported and not fully automatic, even it would have been legal in Canada after about two weeks of paper work. However it would have been illegal for anyone under eighteen to possess it and doublely illegal to take it onto school property.
My wife and I lay in bed last night trying to think of something in our popular culture that isn't linked to violence, sex, lying, war, oppression, or the like. We figured out that Sesame Street fits the bill but beyond that, well, not much.
Why the objection to links to sex in american popular culture? European society seems to have a much healthier additude. This difference would seem to me to be more significant than any differences in gun control laws.
Untrained teachers can be a problem. But at least having the systems available will allow motivated students to gain or improve their skills. We used to blow instructors away with what we could do.
I don't think I was ever in a computer class where the instructor knew more than I did about the subject until I hit college.
Education is 80% about what you (the student) put into it.
They are throwing fits over burners. A lot of countries (like up here in the great white north) have source taxes on blank media. The revenue goes to media groups.
And it's really ticking me off. I go through dozens of CD-Rs a month to distribute digital data to clients. Why Sony et. al. have to take a cut of that is beyond me.
Hey don't do that, I don't want my province/.'d Heading to the woods is something I've considered a time or two. Especially as Y2K gets closer. Heck with new sat tech you can still get decent bandwidth in the middle of nowhere; if you can afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we have to have at least a little sympathy for the goverment's point of view. From what I've read they have no idea what is in the gig or so of data they can't dycrypt. Being the pariniod kind of people they are; they probably think that he has a couple million credit card or Swiss bank account numbers. Or maybe something really bad like a mpeg of a senator gettin' busy with an aide.
I've never seen reported what method Kevin used to encrypt his data. Let's speculate that he used 1024 bit RSA. The goverment may have decoded the stuff and therefor they know he has the plans to the B1 encrypted on his laptop. But to reveal the fact that they know what he has on his laptop would also reveal that they can break 1024 bit RSA. Not good. So they play dumb instead while still denying access to the data.
How is he supposed to decrypt this information anyways. With an abacus? pen and paper? After all he's restricted from practically all computer use.
Assuming he has nothing more then 100,000 credit reports they still would be in very hot water if Kevin was to somehow commit a crime with the data. How the heck he would do that without access to anything more technological than a light switch I have no idea. He seems to be a master of the wetware attack so I guess it's possible.
Hmm, The opt out page is /.'ed to hell and back. Wonder why that is. Maybe people actually do care about this.
Fixing Binaries is definatley harder than text files. It helps if you have the right tool of course. And the advantage of text is that lots of tools are available and they are often self documenting. Though anyone who has ever messed with sendmail can tell you that text can be just as hairy as binary.
Of course it gets back to what I originally said. The registry was a good idea with a typically poor microsoft implementation. For example wouldn't life have been great if they had treated the registry files like dhcp.leases/dhcp.leases~ are treated.
The registry could have been great as it's actually a fairly good way of keeping track of things. The problems are two fold: 1st not everything uses the registry (eg older software or sloppy coding); 2nd recovery of previous states needs to be easy and bulletproof. Of course MS implemented the registry so it's hardly surprising that the registry is neither.
She didn't embarrass an entire Continent. Up here in Canada we were amused. I'd imagine Mexicians felt the same.
Anyone who doesn't get the willies when they read a story like this needs to read Orwell's 1984 again. Mind you we seem to be dodging the bullet of Big Brother; but, we have replaced him with a bunch of little brothers instead.
Someone else meantioned that he works as a security guard and that he felt people were over reacting because the guards that watch these cameras get bored and miss a lot. Somehow this isn't reassuring. The fact we often hear about people who are video taped in dressing and hotel rooms points out how often abuses happen. And these abuses are very hard to track because often people don't even know if they are being watched. It would be different if the cameras were an active device that emitted a visible beam of light or something; but often we can not even see the cameras never mind know whether someone is looking at the monitor (or tape) they feed into.
The Reason everyone with a brain was down on DIVX was that it was controlled by a central source. And that source could disable your player/media anytime it wanted. Or if the company went out of business (which it has) then your investment in upgraded DIVX disks when out the window. Basicly at this point anyone who bought a DIVX player paid too much for an inferior DVD player. The fact that DVD encryption could be broken like it was is one of the reasons it is a good format.
One advantage that private schools have is the ability to remove persistant troublemakers from their systems. Up here in Canada (I imagine it is similiar in the states) it is practically impossible to remove someone from their choosen school for any long term duration. Heck we spent weeks to get a convicted rapist (14 yrs) removed from the school he shared with his victim.
Maybe not the best example considering MS stole compression from STAC. One of the few times MS actually got stung in a settlement.
For example one of the big fights in the Standard Oil break up was who got control of the Standard Oil brand name. They eventually gave each regional oil company control in their region but outside their region they had to use a different name. Therefor into the world entered EXXON, Cheveron, etc. Now some of these companies no longer use the Standard Oil Brand name at all, even in their home region.
So remember when looking at remedies anti-trust legislation is about control not money.
Yah but MS already _has_ a competing product which wasn't broken by this patch. And the patch is a Y2K compliant requirement. Companies are going to be forced to apply it sometime in the next six weeks.
Bah. I guess you have never been in a situation where your next meal depends on the royalties from a novel... or a song I think the point your missing is that although the creator should have the ability to make money off of their labour; (thereby encouraging creative production; the whole point of copyright) the creators great grand kids collecting a royalty check doesn't promote anything. Society is therefor better served by those creative works entering the public domain. This is especially true for more obscure works which are not available to the general public at all because the copyright holders are unavailable/unknown to give permission to publish.
GRASS isn't really competing against ARC/View it's market is the same as ARC/INFOs. Having used ESRI products I can say it would be nice to have another option. ESRIs bug fixes are slower than MS and often the bugs are real show stoppers. (Metric units anyone? :( )
I'm presently looking into using GRASS for a project and if it has the functionality I require it should save me 10's of thousands of dollars in licenceing fees. (Both ESRI and OS -Soloris or TRU64- because ARC/INFO will not run on linux.)
I'd bet you have never worked for a PHB (assuming you have worked at all). Often one isn't given the resources to do a task once let alone spend time to automate it. And how the heck do you automate something like reinstating passwords. As the article pointed out the wetware attack is commonly the easiest one and admins spend a lot of time dealing with it.
Just ask your self the last time you heard of a school shooting in Canada.
I'm not sure what your getting at here. Guns are widely available here in Canada. Gun availablility in the USA may be higher (I don't know, I haven't spent enough time there to judge) but there isn't any lack in Canada.
I don't think anything used in this spree was illegal in Canada and not in the USA. (I.E. Everthing was illegal.) Assuming the handgun was a 9mm as reported and not fully automatic, even it would have been legal in Canada after about two weeks of paper work. However it would have been illegal for anyone under eighteen to possess it and doublely illegal to take it onto school property.
Why the objection to links to sex in american popular culture? European society seems to have a much healthier additude. This difference would seem to me to be more significant than any differences in gun control laws.
Untrained teachers can be a problem. But at least having the systems available will allow motivated students to gain or improve their skills. We used to blow instructors away with what we could do.
I don't think I was ever in a computer class where the instructor knew more than I did about the subject until I hit college.
Education is 80% about what you (the student) put into it.
They are throwing fits over burners. A lot of countries (like up here in the great white north) have source taxes on blank media. The revenue goes to media groups.
And it's really ticking me off. I go through dozens of CD-Rs a month to distribute digital data to clients. Why Sony et. al. have to take a cut of that is beyond me.
Hey don't do that, I don't want my province /.'d
Heading to the woods is something I've considered
a time or two. Especially as Y2K gets closer. Heck
with new sat tech you can still get decent bandwidth
in the middle of nowhere; if you can afford it.