Well, being given an Aston Martin for a company car is rather tempting, don't you think?
In any case, haven't the Intelligence and Security Services been outsourcing a lot of stuff recently? All those IT services companies seem to be doing rather well...;-)
No, 'strue! Guinness contains lots of iron, which led to doctors prescribing it to pregnant women a few decades ago.
I pity all you foreigners, though, as you can only get a real pint of Guinness in Dublin (or in the Coach and Horses pub in Covent Garden, London, which imports it's Guinness from Dublin). And yes, it is better than the other stuff that's brewed in over fifty cities across the world...
So if you think you can assume a position in the army, don't forget that you are taking a choice in my view immoral, because nothing can transform a war in a good cause
So, you're saying that killing people is immoral, thus war is immoral, and because armies wage war, joining the army is immoral.
Now, tell me this - were NATO's actions in driving the Serbs out of Kosovo immoral? Were the Allies right when they defeated the Nazis in WWII? Should we simply disband our armed forces and live together on this world as one big happy family, embracing peace, bortherhood and friendship?
Wake up and smell the roses, pal. The world isn't a nice place. There are nasty people out there, and to defend against them, the members of the armed forces have to be ready to do unpleasant things, while the rest of us sleep peacefully in our condos and semis.
Did you know that modern bullets are designed, not to kill the target, but to maim him, so that the opponent is forced to allocate resources to evacuating and treating the casualty?
Contrary to what many people think, soldiers, on the whole, don't look forward to going to war. Who wants to put themselves in a situation where other people are likely to be trying to kill them? Yet, the members of our armed forces are prepared to risk death to protect the rest of us, while people like you witter on about how they're immoral.
A soldier's job is not to die for his country. His job is to make the other poor bastard die for his.
I rather doubt that the military of any oponet we might have would make any of their important computers available online, which seems to be an assumption in the Wired article.
So, are you assuming that a computer must be connected to the Internet for it be "hackable"?
If IBM were serious about Linux on the S/390, I wouldn't be surprised if they made a machine or two available to bona fide Linux hackers who wanted to work on the OS.
If IBM keep this up, they'll be able to offer their customers the same operating environment on any IBM hardware, from PCs to mainframes. This is a smart move on IBM's part, because they are breathing new life into old hardware - customers who might have been considering binning their old IBM mainframes in favour of HP or Sun will now reconsider. They're also going to be giving Internet companies a reason to look at IBM hardware which, after all, has a reputation for being extremely reliable and has a good track record in the financial sector.
I wonder if they're considering the possibility that they might end up dropping AIX eventually, in favour of Linux.
The big question, of course, is whether other hardware vendors like HP, Sun, etc. will follow suit. If they do, we could end up seeing hardware companies competing, using Linux as the playing field.
This development, on top of the recent success of the iMac, G3 and G4, would seem to indicate that MacOS usage is beginning to rise, quite significantly. I'm wondering whether Apple haven't managed to catch the Internet wave and ride it to a serious resurgence of Apple on the desktop.
We've all been talking about M$ vs. Linux, SGI and BeOS, but maybe we should be looking at Apple as well.
I wonder what would happen if they ported MacOS to IA-64, or produced a MacOS emulator for Linux.
This is such old news! Patricia Hewitt got ambushed at the 'Scrambling for Safety 3.5' event back in September by Nicholas Bohm of the Law Society. She'd just announced that the Govt. was dropping mandatory key escrow from the Bill, and was expecting a round of applause or something, when Bohm hit her with this. Absolutely hilarious, it was. Almost as good as that woman from the Post Office who nearly had a kitten when that bloke asked why she was talking about privacy when their website had been wide open to hackers... Fucking hilarious!:-)
The British Empire once stretched across the globe and it wasn't until Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese that the sun finally set on it. The UK used to be the most powerful nation in the world, but it is no longer, and that realisation was a hard one to swallow. It's only recently that the Brits have begun to lose their superiority complex, characterised, for example, by their reluctance to fully participate in the European Union.
However, they did eventually come to realise that Britain was no longer a global superpower, and the UK is now doing quite well for itself, that-you-very-much. They no longer rely on brute force to achieve what they want. Practically everyone knows the SAS' motto: Who Dares Wins. That typifies the British attitude which resulted in them standing firm against tyrannic regimes such as Nazi Germany and Iraq. Less well know is the Special Boat Squadron, an elite force which draws it's members from the Royal Marines (think of it as the UK equivalent of the SEALs). The SBS motto is: Not by Strength, By Guile. The UK continues to exert immense geopolitical influence by dint of it's diplomatic and intelligence assets, which it utilises in a subtle manner. Lacking the brute strength to effectively bully or intimidate other nations into doing what it wants, the UK uses less obvious, more sneaky methods to achieve it's aims.
So what has this got to do with the NSA? I hear you cry. Well, I think that the United States of America is going to have to face the same reality as the UK had to - that it no longer has the capability to ake problems disappear by simply throwing resources at them. Just as the Web levelled the playing field in terms of business, allowing companies like Amazon to appear overnight, the sociological, technological and economic developments which have occured since the end of the Cold War are levelling the playing field in a much wider range of areas, from economic to military/intelligence.
The NSA doesn't need to get stronger. It needs to get smarter. It needs to understand better how to pursue it's aims, within the big picture of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. If it tries to cling on to it's position, using the old methods, it will get swept away. Only by adapting to the New World Order (for want of a better phrase), can it survive and continue to fulfil it's mission.
Let's face it guys - even though you all bitch about the NSA, Echelon, the CIA, etc., you all know that they do a lot to protect your way of life. There are entire nations for whom 'Death to America!' is a perfectly legitimate political declaration. Fair enough, there are situations where the intelligence community has overstepped it's mark, but do you really think they give a flying f**k about a bunch of Linux-loving, long-haired nerds?
..it would be interesting to see if their boxes could be adapted to keep the same fast memory subsystem but accept MIPS, Cray, Intel or Alpha processor node cards...
Agreed. SGI's strength has always been their technology innvoation. I was seriously hoping that SGI would take the lead in developing a new physical architecture for PCs. The current PC design is years out of date and it requires updating. I think that a modular approach could be the key - not that different from how Sun's enterprise servers are built, for example.
I don't think SGI is capable of being a box-shifter. It ought to be concentrating on what it does best - pushing the barrier with innovative, cutting-edge technology and selling it to other companies to use in their boxes.
Unfortunately, it'll be competing directly with Intel, more and more.
I have thought about it. You, on the other hand, obviously haven't. No wonder you're posting as an AC - I'd be ashamed to reveal my identity if I was as clueless as you.
There is no "campaign". I'm merely pointing out that Red Hat would be vulnerable to bad PR, and the worst PR it could suffer from would be the news that the Linux community were shunning it.
In other words, you implying that I've got a "campaign" is like saying that I'm waging a war against China merely because I state that it's theoretically possible to launch a cyber-attack on them.
This is the age of spin. If you think that all Red Hat are worried about is how many boxes they shift, then you really don't have a clue. Bad PR can kill companies stone dead. In the volatile climate in which companies like Red Hat operate, characterised by low equity liquidity and an ignorant market (in terms of shareholders - i.e. the day traders), a well-coordinated anti-Red Hat campaign would have the Board reaching for the rubber underwear.
The Linux and Internet sectors has always been characterised by the fact that it bucked the standard commercial model. Have you seen how much money some of these companies are losing? Yet they're amongst the biggest companies in the world, measured by equity value. Don't you remember how eBay's stock price dropped when it was hacked earlier this year? Has it ever occured to you that MagicFX had a motive other than getting his name in the papers?
Finally, and most crucially, I have been responsible for making decisions or recommendations which led to the purchase of Red Hat products. What's more, I will make those sort of decisions again in the future. Behind this handle sits the CTO of an Internet startup. I am exactly the sort of customer Red Hat would be worried about losing.
I think you've managed to reach the stage where you can't be any more wrong. Well done!
Anyone who's heard RMS speak on the subject of free software will be well aware that the "free" bit doesn't just refer to the fact that you don't have to pay for it - it also refers to the fact that the user is free to do as he likes with the software. Because the source is available, he can modify it, something which can't be done with close, proprietary software.
The GPL also ensures that anyone who benefits from free software also has a responsibility to ensure that others can benefit from any improvements they make to it. It's a two-way street - if I use a piece of GPL'd software, and add extra functionality, I can't exploit it commercially (i.e. sell it to people) unless I make it available under the terms of the GPL.
Now, having said that, there is, of course, a danger that, if a piece of software was written and GPL'd by a company (or, indeed, an individual), they may decide to revoke it's free status and create a prorietary version. That is their right. There is nothing wrong in doing that, in and of itself. Obviously, there are some situations where companies have allowed something to be used for free until it becomes a de facto standard, and then started charging for it. But, with GPL'd software, things are different.
There is a danger that a company such as Red Hat could acquire the copyright to some open source software and revoke the GPL, in an attempt to profit from a commercial version, thus forking the software. However, some companies already have both free and commercial versions of their software, and it doesn't cause many problems. Plus, the potential for backlash against Red Hat should make them careful of doing this sort of thing.
In a sense, by going public, Red Hat has put itself in a position where it needs to be more careful about pissing us off than before. If the Linux community boycotted Red Hat, their stock price would take a serious nosedive.
However, I am concerned that Red Hat employs (and, therefore, controls) too many of the key open source programmers. I don't think there's any ulterior or sinister motive in it, but I would much prefer if, instead of employing these coders, they allowed them to go work for, say, the FSF, and sponsored their salaries.
That way, Red Hat would still be giving something back to the open source/free software movement, but it wouldn't actually be controlling it directly.
According to my "sources" (what a wonderful word - it could mean that I know someone in the plant, or that I met this guy in some bar...), security at the "EMF" (European Manufacturing Facility) is quite tight (e.g. metal detectors, etc.).
They do more than just assembly of boxes - they do a bit of research there as well - e.g. Linux clustering. Although, from what I've heard, the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're doing, not to mention their inability to organise a piss-up in a brewery, means that they're not getting anywhere very fast.
Also consider London. Check out Sohonet's members page for some websites. Sohonet, by the way, is an ATM network which allows digital media companies to swap huge files without having to resort to putting them onto a DLT and couriering them to their destination. I understand that most (if not all) of the effects for Lost in Space were done by British companies, and Sohonet was used a lot when they they were collaborating...
Well, everyone seemed to like my analysis of the Bill Gate's interview, so...;-)
By posting a photo of my younger sister (who was a minor at the time), along with her full name and address, he successfully started a mass campaign of harassment against her and my family. [...] Ken sold for a reported $125,000 to Kroll.
Can anyone confirm these statements?
AntiOnline was asked by the FBI to help investigate a group called "HFG" which broke into the New York Times' Website. AntiOnline does some digging, and turns over its findings. Shortly there after, Brian Martin, founder of Attrition.org, and someone that no one at AntiOnline had ever had any contact with before, was raided by the FBI.
So, let me get this straight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation requested help from Vranesivich. Okay, fair enough. Now, what I'd like to know is what these "findings" were. Did they include anything relating to Brian Martin? In other words, was Brian Martin raided by the FBI because of information supplied by AntiOnline?
I don't expect any answers to these questions, because if Vranesevich was at all interested in justifying himself, he would have actually answered the questions the Slashdot readers put to him. Instead, he's ignored them.
Hackers have their own lingua franca and they have coined various terms to describe that which they despise. A "lamer" is someone who's clueless and doesn't understand what hacking is about and isn't interested in learning. Often, a lamer is interested in hacking because he perceives it as being "cool". A "script kiddie" is someone who doesn't have the intelligence, skills, creativity or perseverance to be a hacker, and instead relies on using scripts and programs developed by others to break into sites. A "media whore" is someone who is primarily interested in getting coverage in the media, whether it's by getting mentioned in the press for a webpage defacement, or getting intervied. Finally, a "narq" is someone who informs on others to law enforcement agencies - i.e. an informer or grass.
I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out why Vranesevich is so despised.
Finally, his motives. I think it's clear that, in the beginning, Vranesevich's motives for launching the AntiOnline site were to do with a desire to gain acceptance in the hacker community. Later, I think that a desire to get coverage in the press may have influenced his decision to manufacture stories (see The Synthesis for more information) and possibly arrange/pay for sites to be hacked, so he could break the stories. Later still, his rejection by the hacker community, who perceived him for what he is, probably influenced his decision to switch sides, although it's possible that financial matters may also have played a part in that decision. Finally, the gradual realisation by the mainstream media that he is not, in fact, a security expert, but is, rather, a charlatan, probably forced him to look around for some other source of revenue.
I'm just wondering whether the reasons behind Vranesevich's continuing antagonism of the hacking community are related at all to his apparent pride at being the target of so many hacking attempts. He says that AntiOnline "probably have one of the most targeted networks on the internet today, and we take full advantage of that. Do you think that we let the type of data that we're able to collect and log just go to waste?"
Now, perhaps he thinks that information about attacks is valuable. Perhaps he's creating some form of database of information, or gathering statistics about the most common attacks. Security is a big deal at the moment - a lot of people are getting interested in it and are investing it in, in various ways. This sort of information would be of interest to certain companies, organisations, etc., but there are much better ways of gathering it, than effectively paying someone to become the most despised person in hacking circles.
If he's found someone who's stupid enough to pay for this sprt of info, then fair dues. Everyone's got to live, and seeing as how he's a complete failure (failed college, failed hacker, failed journalist, failed information security "expert"...), it kind of makes sense that he's managed to make a living out of the fact that practically everyone despises him. You could say that he's a professional loser, in fact.
The message that I'd like to get across to people is that Vranesevich isn't worth wasting time on. People like him are only significant as long as people care about them. As long as you're pissed off at what he does, he'll continue to be important.
So just ignore him. Stop visiting and attacking his site. Stop discussing him on Slashdot. Ignore him, and he'll become insignificant.
Unless he really pisses someone off, and turns up dead in a gutter one day. Which, from what I've heard, isn't exactly unlikely.:-)
For the record, I've never had any dealings with Vranesevich, except for one email a long time ago, pointing out the inaccuracy of some misleading information on his site, which he never replied to.
But I've read his articles and his comments and I've spoken to people who've had dealings with him, whether by interacting directly with him, or by owning him and reading his mail, and I'm not particularly impressed by him or well-disposed towards him.
What's your point here? The Mozilla project is hosted in America, so it cannot include strong encryption, so the "
crazy Ozzies" put the crypto back into Mozilla using SSLeay. I could be wrong, but I believe their plan is to produce a new version of Cryptozilla each time a new version of Mozilla is released, which, as far as I'm concerned, is just as good as if Mozilla itself included strong crypto.
GPG, to quote the web page you pointed to, is "mainly useful for offline communication (email) and data storage".
The relevance of your comments is not immediately obvious to me, I'm afraid.
I think that one of the key advantages of the Mozilla project was that it allowed in the development of a version of Netscape with full encryption, instead of the crap 40-bits the US Government restricts exports to.
Can coders whose contributions have been included in the Linux kernel now use the Royal Crest on their websites, with the legend "By Appointment to Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, Developers of Open Source Operating Systems"?
Seriously, though, how much of a concern is security - e.g. the fear that hacktivists might use the site to spread propeganda - and do you receive help from UNIRAS and the CESG?
Anyone who's read Iain (M) Banks' latest novel The Business (it's excellent, by the way, and I am planning to write a review of it, as well as IMB's sci-fi novels) will be able to draw definite parallels between Nauru, as a country which has a seat at the UN, and requires external help to support itself, and a certain country in the novel, the name of which I won't mention, as it's a spoiler.
By the way, hasn't it occured to anyone that the websites, systems and networks which these offshore banks use, are probably completely owned by various intelligence agencies' hackers?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not actually American, but thanks anyway! :-) Dodger - Irish thru & thru.