'hacking tools' we should also keep in mind are not like physical commodities. This is what FSF has been on about since the beginning. What halfway serious german hacker is going to absolutely *need* to download tools? Not many, how hard is it to write your basic brute force password cracker for instance? Not that difficult.
So with no (necessary) download records (p.s. if that seems unreasonable, wiping the history is usually within reach, lol), that means that to convict someone, the tools would have to be found on storage media that they own. Now lets say that I have a simple php script to brute force a password. One text file. Now imagine that it has permissions set so you must be root to read it. If I happen to have 'forgotten' the root password to the machine, in order to convict me, you would have to hack my root account... without (necessarily) having any evidence to warrant a warrant.
Basically, if a judge cannot be convinced that it is reasonable to suspect you as an teh_uber_hacker, you cannot be legally caught!
I wanted to be an IT guy well before I left school, but I took a year off between finishing school and starting university to just work and earn some money. In that year I worked as a trainee groundsman at a caravan park (tourist trailer park). I made marginally less than $16000 *AUD* for a year in that job cleaning toilets, mowing lawns, blowing leaves, etc.
I hated it, it was one of the best decisions I ever made to see it through to the end. I spent heaps of time with no one to talk to getting myself truly exhausted. It brought me closer to God to simply know what it was to do the jobs everyone hated for crappy money (even for a trainee) and finish each day feeling wasted.
I'm now doing CS at university, getting quite good grades and loving it to pieces. I appreciate so much more now the blessing of getting work in a field I enjoy and can honestly say I'm good at. I have a better attitude to life the universe and everything. Just my words in favour manual or trade work.
I feel it has become the unfortunate duty (speaking from experience) of many people in IT sales, to stop trying to explain to their customers what is and isn't worth them buying for their needs and just try to guess it for them in order to achieve maximum satisfaction. Then pressure them to buy it on the basis that you *probably* know better than they do. This sucks because honestly, how often do customers tell the sales guy the whole story?
cookie still needs to be stolen doesn't it?
on
Web 2.0 Under Siege
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· Score: 1
Am I missing something? Doesn't the attacker still need to be able to obtain the victim's cookie? Fair enough, this is not the most difficult task in the world, but if your cookie can be stolen and read by an attacker's site then the fact of AJAX being in the mix seems to be hardly relevant. If someone has your login cookie, why not just go the site with a forged cookie themselves? AJAX might help them to programatically use the cookie to authenticate themselves to the site and request data, but a program that just sends HTTP requests and takes cookies as input could probably achieve the same?
"The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries". I think this is getting at something deeper about humanity (particularly males). We were made to operate within boundaries. Bounderies create specific problems that require an exercise in creativity to solve. But truly boundary-free creativity is something that I'm not even necessarily convinced is within the scope of human potential.
When we come up with creative or deductive solutions to problems, I think we're just reflecting something of the true essence of creativity that is still a part of humanity. Created in the image of the truly creative God who came up with gravity, wrote love of music and rhythm into the human soul, dreamed up human sexuality, created combustion, coded the decryption algorithm that invisibly inverts the upside down picture of the world detected by our eyes.
That was truly creative. I think human capacity for creativity has always been something that operates within the confines of certain properties of the universe we could not ourselves have come up with comparable alternatives for. Interesting stuff.
Linux doesn't cost me a cent. But I'm a computer science student at a good university. Linux is for power-users and they love it because it stays out of their way and lets them set up their own ideal environment.
The real conclusion of these TCO tests is simple. Executives, share-holders - the kinds of people Microsoft and Novell are aiming for - they're all n00bs. n00bs who don't wanna be n00bs forever should learn to use Linux, it will work out cheaper and more effective for them.
n00bs who don't care how a computer works and just want to sip a drink and feel like they're saving money should buy Mac OSX or windows. Should jane doe suburban housewife by a V8 holden commodore with custom built hydrogen booster based on the fact that it's easier than her last car to pull apart and add more custom hydrogen boosters? Heavens no! In term's of cars, she's a n00b. She should by that cute little red car that looks like a bubble and matches her favourite lipstick. [/sweeping generalisations] [/sexism]
Put it this way, a couple of days ago a friend of mine in my college dorms asked me to help them install iTunes on their new laptop. Didn't sound so hard but they claimed to be running into cryptic error messages. I took a look (BTW, I don't consider this person unintelligent or unable to use a computer).
Upon running the iTunes installer an error message appeared that said in fairly clear and concise terms that the reason for failure was that they had a bad install of QuickTime present and they should delete the folder "C:/Program Files/Quicktime" before continuing. Then it exits to allow them to do so. For this college student, the words "delete C:/Program Files/Quicktime" either were not clear enough, or were simply ignored because the average user does not read error messages due to a presupposition that they are always cryptic.
Tech support is not going anywhere in my opinion. P.S. She gave me chocolates to say thanks, lol.
I'm a fan of the job that Autopackage has done. It's actually enabled me to convince some friends to try linux. The familiarity of downloading and double clicking a single installer file from the creator's website was enough to make them wonder why it had taken them so long to switch.
I'm about to start IT at university (combined with Teaching actually). But to make money, I've spent this year mowing lawns and cleaning toilets and such in a caravan park (a trailer park for the yanks I guess), a tourist type holiday place next to the beach. Hard work, no respect from customers. I had pretty good bosses though.
I'll agree, they took advantage of the fact that I was an IT guy. There were times when I felt seriously unappreciated and the whole "they wouldn't last long without me..." mentality crept in. Still, I feel it necessary after that to remind the IT guys that they have the best job! Someone already said, if you aren't doing an IT job because you can't imagine not doing it, you don't belong in the industry. You've got it great. There is a lot of frustration that comes with IT support work for one reason - STUPID PEOPLE. Plain and simple, but we were all them once. We didn't know HTML or how to find our desktop machine's IP or any of those things we now arrogantly consider general knowledge.
I've come to the conclusion that to be good at IT support, you have to enjoy the satisfaction that comes with working towards the best system possible and you have to have the personal quality of being very patient with people who don't have the same analytical mind as you (let's face it, if you can program, you have a very analytical and calculating way of thinking that most of the office n00bs don't share - that's why they hired you!).
then again, I've never been an IT professional for any extended period so I'm hoping someone corrects my misconceptions.
As a concept, DRM is necessary based on the assumption that, if left to their own devices, consumers will take valuable data (the kind which has taken work to create and thus is deemed to be worth monetary compensation for permission to possess) and redistribute it without such permission 'coz they can'.
I believe that this assumption is unfortunately reasonable. But that aside, I wonder what would happen if record companies and distributors like apple were to collectively give their customers the benefit of the doubt. If they were to remove DRM and simply make a polite request that anyone who wanted their own copy of the song please buy it instead of just copying someone else's.
Basic Idea: If people could be trusted to act in the interests of other parties instead of solely themselves, DRM would not be necessary. But that level of trust in the consumer is unreasonable. The consumer, in reality, can't be trusted to give fair pay to content creators when they don't have to. However, I believe that the reason for this is that the consumer doesn't trust the company. The consumer feels that if they don't go out of their way to avoid paying any money they can, they will inevitably be ripped off. Again, not a particularly unfair assumption in most cases. This is a case of circular distrust. Though I don't honestly believe it will ever happen, I believe what it would take to break this cycle is for either the consumers (who are much harder to organise) or the company to deliberately give the benefit of the doubt to the other party. They would more than likely lose a great deal of money over it, but if say, Apple and the RIAA were to jointly remove all DRM and simply ask their consumers to do what is fair (which for certain companies, without pointing fingers, may mean dropping their prices), they may find that when their customers realise that the company has enough respect for them to treat them how the company itself would like to be treated, they may just return the favour.
"People can enforce laws and morality - but only God can change the heart." - Jeremy Cole
Slashdot Mirror
'hacking tools' we should also keep in mind are not like physical commodities. This is what FSF has been on about since the beginning. What halfway serious german hacker is going to absolutely *need* to download tools? Not many, how hard is it to write your basic brute force password cracker for instance? Not that difficult.
So with no (necessary) download records (p.s. if that seems unreasonable, wiping the history is usually within reach, lol), that means that to convict someone, the tools would have to be found on storage media that they own. Now lets say that I have a simple php script to brute force a password. One text file. Now imagine that it has permissions set so you must be root to read it. If I happen to have 'forgotten' the root password to the machine, in order to convict me, you would have to hack my root account... without (necessarily) having any evidence to warrant a warrant.
Basically, if a judge cannot be convinced that it is reasonable to suspect you as an teh_uber_hacker, you cannot be legally caught!
I wanted to be an IT guy well before I left school, but I took a year off between finishing school and starting university to just work and earn some money. In that year I worked as a trainee groundsman at a caravan park (tourist trailer park). I made marginally less than $16000 *AUD* for a year in that job cleaning toilets, mowing lawns, blowing leaves, etc. I hated it, it was one of the best decisions I ever made to see it through to the end. I spent heaps of time with no one to talk to getting myself truly exhausted. It brought me closer to God to simply know what it was to do the jobs everyone hated for crappy money (even for a trainee) and finish each day feeling wasted. I'm now doing CS at university, getting quite good grades and loving it to pieces. I appreciate so much more now the blessing of getting work in a field I enjoy and can honestly say I'm good at. I have a better attitude to life the universe and everything. Just my words in favour manual or trade work.
I feel it has become the unfortunate duty (speaking from experience) of many people in IT sales, to stop trying to explain to their customers what is and isn't worth them buying for their needs and just try to guess it for them in order to achieve maximum satisfaction. Then pressure them to buy it on the basis that you *probably* know better than they do. This sucks because honestly, how often do customers tell the sales guy the whole story?
Am I missing something? Doesn't the attacker still need to be able to obtain the victim's cookie? Fair enough, this is not the most difficult task in the world, but if your cookie can be stolen and read by an attacker's site then the fact of AJAX being in the mix seems to be hardly relevant. If someone has your login cookie, why not just go the site with a forged cookie themselves? AJAX might help them to programatically use the cookie to authenticate themselves to the site and request data, but a program that just sends HTTP requests and takes cookies as input could probably achieve the same?
Where is my understanding flawed?
"The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries". I think this is getting at something deeper about humanity (particularly males). We were made to operate within boundaries. Bounderies create specific problems that require an exercise in creativity to solve. But truly boundary-free creativity is something that I'm not even necessarily convinced is within the scope of human potential.
When we come up with creative or deductive solutions to problems, I think we're just reflecting something of the true essence of creativity that is still a part of humanity. Created in the image of the truly creative God who came up with gravity, wrote love of music and rhythm into the human soul, dreamed up human sexuality, created combustion, coded the decryption algorithm that invisibly inverts the upside down picture of the world detected by our eyes.
That was truly creative. I think human capacity for creativity has always been something that operates within the confines of certain properties of the universe we could not ourselves have come up with comparable alternatives for. Interesting stuff.
Linux doesn't cost me a cent. But I'm a computer science student at a good university. Linux is for power-users and they love it because it stays out of their way and lets them set up their own ideal environment.
The real conclusion of these TCO tests is simple. Executives, share-holders - the kinds of people Microsoft and Novell are aiming for - they're all n00bs. n00bs who don't wanna be n00bs forever should learn to use Linux, it will work out cheaper and more effective for them.
n00bs who don't care how a computer works and just want to sip a drink and feel like they're saving money should buy Mac OSX or windows. Should jane doe suburban housewife by a V8 holden commodore with custom built hydrogen booster based on the fact that it's easier than her last car to pull apart and add more custom hydrogen boosters? Heavens no! In term's of cars, she's a n00b. She should by that cute little red car that looks like a bubble and matches her favourite lipstick. [/sweeping generalisations] [/sexism]
Put it this way, a couple of days ago a friend of mine in my college dorms asked me to help them install iTunes on their new laptop. Didn't sound so hard but they claimed to be running into cryptic error messages. I took a look (BTW, I don't consider this person unintelligent or unable to use a computer).
Upon running the iTunes installer an error message appeared that said in fairly clear and concise terms that the reason for failure was that they had a bad install of QuickTime present and they should delete the folder "C:/Program Files/Quicktime" before continuing. Then it exits to allow them to do so. For this college student, the words "delete C:/Program Files/Quicktime" either were not clear enough, or were simply ignored because the average user does not read error messages due to a presupposition that they are always cryptic.
Tech support is not going anywhere in my opinion. P.S. She gave me chocolates to say thanks, lol.
I'm a fan of the job that Autopackage has done. It's actually enabled me to convince some friends to try linux. The familiarity of downloading and double clicking a single installer file from the creator's website was enough to make them wonder why it had taken them so long to switch.
I'm about to start IT at university (combined with Teaching actually). But to make money, I've spent this year mowing lawns and cleaning toilets and such in a caravan park (a trailer park for the yanks I guess), a tourist type holiday place next to the beach. Hard work, no respect from customers. I had pretty good bosses though.
I'll agree, they took advantage of the fact that I was an IT guy. There were times when I felt seriously unappreciated and the whole "they wouldn't last long without me..." mentality crept in. Still, I feel it necessary after that to remind the IT guys that they have the best job! Someone already said, if you aren't doing an IT job because you can't imagine not doing it, you don't belong in the industry. You've got it great. There is a lot of frustration that comes with IT support work for one reason - STUPID PEOPLE. Plain and simple, but we were all them once. We didn't know HTML or how to find our desktop machine's IP or any of those things we now arrogantly consider general knowledge.
I've come to the conclusion that to be good at IT support, you have to enjoy the satisfaction that comes with working towards the best system possible and you have to have the personal quality of being very patient with people who don't have the same analytical mind as you (let's face it, if you can program, you have a very analytical and calculating way of thinking that most of the office n00bs don't share - that's why they hired you!).
then again, I've never been an IT professional for any extended period so I'm hoping someone corrects my misconceptions.
As a concept, DRM is necessary based on the assumption that, if left to their own devices, consumers will take valuable data (the kind which has taken work to create and thus is deemed to be worth monetary compensation for permission to possess) and redistribute it without such permission 'coz they can'.
I believe that this assumption is unfortunately reasonable. But that aside, I wonder what would happen if record companies and distributors like apple were to collectively give their customers the benefit of the doubt. If they were to remove DRM and simply make a polite request that anyone who wanted their own copy of the song please buy it instead of just copying someone else's.
Basic Idea: If people could be trusted to act in the interests of other parties instead of solely themselves, DRM would not be necessary. But that level of trust in the consumer is unreasonable. The consumer, in reality, can't be trusted to give fair pay to content creators when they don't have to. However, I believe that the reason for this is that the consumer doesn't trust the company. The consumer feels that if they don't go out of their way to avoid paying any money they can, they will inevitably be ripped off. Again, not a particularly unfair assumption in most cases. This is a case of circular distrust. Though I don't honestly believe it will ever happen, I believe what it would take to break this cycle is for either the consumers (who are much harder to organise) or the company to deliberately give the benefit of the doubt to the other party. They would more than likely lose a great deal of money over it, but if say, Apple and the RIAA were to jointly remove all DRM and simply ask their consumers to do what is fair (which for certain companies, without pointing fingers, may mean dropping their prices), they may find that when their customers realise that the company has enough respect for them to treat them how the company itself would like to be treated, they may just return the favour.
"People can enforce laws and morality - but only God can change the heart." - Jeremy Cole