That's fine --- but once , say I put up that proxy,
How many people would know how to look for it and use it? Also: countries like China seems to like blocking connections to open proxys, so even those people in China who knew how to find and use my proxy would soon lose access.
You don't defend the statue of liberty from 'terrorist attack' by covering it with 10 million pounds of styrofoam. It defeats the whole purpose... Just like making a website designed to help citizens abroad vote unavailable to most citizens abroad defeats the whole purpose of having the site there far more effectively than any theoretical attack would.
It seems to be Bush administration standard practice to do the terrorists' job for them.
That's nice, but how many tourists and other people overseas going to know how to do that? There's always a solution for the technologically advanced, but not that many people technologically advanced (pretty much by definition).
Now that you mention it: This is stupid. If I was going to hack the site, I wouldn't use a public Proxy, I'd buy a fleet of US-based Zombie boxes (at $0.15 each) and do my hacking from one of them.
Put the entire website on a CD ROM (or DVD, if it's that big) with cachefs, and create symbolic links for
any parts that need constant updates (like any databases).
Site updates can be done by cycling the webserver and swapping out the CD.
At that point, you'd pretty much need to attain root access to deface the box. If you remove everything that's not necessary to serving
the site, you remove most of the capability for rooting the box.
After all, isn't the military the largest portion of the voting public abroad? And don't they overwhelmingly vote Republican?
DO you really think that the military would block their own networks?? Given their excuse (fear of hackers), do yuo think that they'd admit that their own network was compromised by hackers (even if it was)??
Or for that matter, why does the CIA, can't they hire hackers?
Because the CIA reads Al Jazeera.
When you're serious about security, knowing what your enemy thinks is important. -- more important, even than hiding their version of 'the truth' from your friends.
No, no - shipping is free for the esteemed My Bin Laden (long time customer and all). However, we will require that he take personal delivery.
That's not too far from my more serious fear: If this thing is left on the ocean bottom in 12 feet of water, somebody with nefarious purposes may try and recover it.
Now, I'm pretty sure that no 'friends of bin-ladin' woul probably be allowed anywhere near that thing right now, but some right-wing militia members might decide to, uhm, 'go fishin'....
Mighty fine fishin in Georgia, I hear... Yup'n...
If this low-budget recovery failed, worst case is that we might find out (the hard way) whether the military was hiding the truth about the bomb's "Radiation trigger" (apparently a small nuke inside the hydrogen bomb).
If, on the other hand, the recovery succeeded, it'd be hard to say exactly where they might use their booty -- it could be anything from blowing up Tehran (teach them a lesson about nukes) to showing Oklahoma what a real militia can do.
Militia is such a generic term....
A society's media is it's eyes and ears. When your eyes and ears see
and hear, for you something other than the truth, then your society can
quickly get into a state similar to a person going delusional.
This is the situation whether we're talking about WMD's the Iran
Hostage 'crisis' (my first media beef), health care or whether Kerry's
medals are more important than Bush's lies about Iraq.
When the press is more interested in Janet Jackson's nipples than
world affairs and local politics, that's rather like me watching the
butt of the girl that just passed me and walking into a light pole
(or traffic).
It's the same thing for intelligence services... It's the reason
why the US Military was so interested in satellite-killer technology;
stealth aircraft and GPS selective-service. It's also why, when they
went into Iraq in 1991 radar installations were pretty much the first
things to be taken out followed by missile sites and air bases....
If the enemy can't see you, they can't defend against you.
Similarly: When Bush and Blair got so pedantic about wanting 'proof'
of WMD's that their respective intelligence services started ignoring
their own rules of intelligence triage, they put their own countries into
a delusional state and left the rest of the world seeing double.
It's why The US put so much money into VOA during the cold war and
why propaganda is considered a tool of war. The truth is nowhere as
important as what you can get your enemy to believe.
As our media sources get distracted by the hunt for money, our
societal eyesight gets fuzzy. If you want a healthy society, you need a
healthy and independent media. A democracy making decisions based
on bad media is like a blind man driving in traffic: If traffic is light
or you're driving a tank, you'll be OK until you find a cliff. I think
that the US has been like this... The country is essentially a tank.
The countries that have gotten run over so far have been felt like bumps.
Iraq may be the first sign that there's a cliff up ahead, or a deep lake.
If you read the first paragraph of the article: This is Maureen O'Gara reporting on her own report. (lends a little bit more authority, you see, writing about your report than just writing the report itself).
She is also so blatently pro-SCO that I'm sending her a form to register as a paid lobbyist.
My first of two favorite quotes are the one about SCO settign up their legal papers archive "so people won't have to go to Groklaw and read its anti-SCO philippics."
Phillipics is a reference to the anchient greek politician (and possible insurgent) who was rabidly against King Philip of Macedonia's attempts to take over the Greek empires (Philip was the father of Alexander the Great). kdict finds the definition: Any discourse or declamation abounding in
acrimonious invective.
My other favorite quote reads:
At the risk of practicing law without a license - and with due reverence for Cravath, Swaine's abilities to move the ball even you're looking plum at it - this motion and its little friends look like one of those red herrings that may fetch IBM a lot of PR yardage, but may not ultimately score a touchdown.
No that's not a typo on my part in the 'plum' reference. I think she's been watching to much Beverly Hillbillies and is trying to sound 'down home'. Dunno 'bout you, but that whole description sounds a lot more to me like SCO's tactic than IBM's. (( We'll see what the judge says on that point )).
In the meantime, If SCO tries to do yet another mid-course 'correction' and claim that the lawsuit that started out as a broad copyright case, then was always just about the contract claims is now about fraud (and never really was about anything else), Judge Kiball just might be willing to accept an IBM motion for sanction under the 'frivolous and vexatious prosecution' rule.
If you read O'Gara's other articles (please avoid clicking on any of the ad links), you might just understand that she's now one of the very few (probably well-paid) SCO sh(r)ills left willing to cheer for the home team. In fact, that may be part of the reason why she's now quoting herself -- there may be no other pro-sco boosters available to quote who don't officially work for SCOG.
The Palm easter egg should be easy enough to display in a portable manner, and there should be some number of panel members who will have their own palm that they can test it on.
Then point out that, instead of running an Easter Egg and Taxi across your screen, if you were dealing with a E-ballot box, it could have brought up a screen allowing you to modify the vote count.
This cannot be tested for after delivery because, no matter what testing regime you come up with and execute, I can come up with an easter egg that will be missed by that regime. (This actually fits the mathematical definition of 'infinite').
Question:
Should we be willing to bet our democracy on the hope that nobody would pay to do what is provably possible? More importantly: should we place our nation, states and municipalities at the mercy of the people who would be willing to engage in such a usurpation of democracy?
As you have not agreed to the license within you are free to do (within reason) what you want with it, including selling it.
Well, if you haven't accepted it, then you haven't accepted it. Doesn't matter if it's a 'no resale' clause or a 'no litigate' clause.
My understanding is that here is not (currently) much agreement on whether shrink-wrap EULAs are binding, so where you file the suit would probably have a very real effect on your liklihood of success.
Perhaps not a whole episode, but I can definitely see it as being a side-point to an episode: To whit:
A visitor to springfield is going with Homer to the bar.
Visitor: Where are we going?
Homer: We're going to the bar.
Visitor: Well didn't we just pass the Quick-E-Mart?
Homer: Yeah.
Visitor: Well, I thought that the bar was right next to the Quick-E-Mart.
Homer: It was yesterday but today it's somewhere else.
Visitor: So the bar moved last night.
Homer: No. It didn't move. It's just.. not where it was yesterday.
Visitor: How do you know that?
Homer: I dunno.. I just... know. But it doesn't matter, I mean, it all makes sense.
Visitor: It makes sense to you Homer: Well of course it makes sense to me. If it didn't make sense to me, then who would it make sense to.
(pause)
Homer: OK: You see that Nuclear power plant over there?
Visitor: Yeah...
Homer: Well, I work there, and I used to live right next to it. but now I don't.
Visitor: When did you move?
Homer: That's the whole point! We didn't move. We just don't live next to it any more. -- and I'm glad, too I really didn't like the smell.
Visitor: the nuclear power plant smells?
Homer: well, the change room does. I keep leaving my dirty socks there. After a while the smell can get overpowering.
Visitor: I see... SO how long does it take to get to the bar now?
Homer: Long enough for us to have this conversation... And I guess we're almost done now,
Visitor: and how do you know that?
Homer: Two reasons: One is that I'm getting tired of it -- you ask more questions than my kids do. And the other is that.. Where here. Wohoo!
Now shutup and let's go drink.
I don't strongly disagre with you... being 'only' twice as deadly as ethanol isn't that bad, but it looks like you could have some really bad side effects long before you get a fatal dose.
In any case, I've suffered intoxication by solvents (I was painting natural gas holding tanks at the time), and I remember doing rather strange things during that time. I have no idea what intoxication by isopropyl would have you doing, and I don't want to find out.
Also: it sounds like he has a handfull of computers to clean. I'd expect we'd be talking a couple of litres or gallons of isopropyl to do it in a reasonably efficient manner.... That allows a lot more room for both intoxication/poisoning and for fire/explosion than you get in most lab environments.
That adds in another point: In the case of an indoor explosion, my biggest fear wouldn't be the explosion itself but, rather suffocation afterwards. In that context, I like the 'well ventilated; that outdoors supplies.
er, um, that's 1 gram/m^3 (980mg), or about 1000 timed below your original estimate -- in fact, I'm not a chemist, but I'm guessing that that's below it's vapor pressure. . The sheet also indicates that isopropyl can be harmful thru skin contact or breathing, while ethanol generally needs to be ingested to cause problems.
From the looks of things, it's only about twice as deadly as isopropanol for acute exposure, although it appears to cause
far more problems before that point.
This is not a close-detail kind of job. You're mostly just going to be rinsing these things with isopropyl. Obviously, you need enough light to work in, but it's a safety tradoff -- the more light you have, the harder any flames will be to see.
I haven't tested this, but working under sodium lights (which generate mostly yellow) might give you the best of both worlds (lots of light to work with, but almost none of it blue).
Rubbing alcohol is not necessarily just isopropyl and water. Sometimes (or usually) it's also cut with glycol (or other jells which cut down the drying nature of isopropyl). In a couple of cases, I've seen it be an ethanol mix.
In any case, I'd also second the suggestion of using 99% isopropyl. it's relatively safe on most electronics, and about as cheap as rubbing alcohol (but a little bit harder to get hold of).
But as for doing this job inside, NO WAY!. Not unless you have access to a fume hood. The LAST thing you want to do is poison yourself with the fumes. You're far better of to do it somewhere outside, and a few metres away from anything flamable and even further from anything that generates sparks I'd even suggest doing it after dusk. That way, if you do manage to light the stuff on fire, you'll have some hope of noticing it before you have 3rd degree burns over vast parts of your body.
For safety, I'd suggest having a workmate standing by with a water hose (and a sprayer with a hand-trigger that lets you have the tap turned on for fast response).. uphill and upwind if at all possible. Chances are (s)he won't have to do anything, but it's far better to have him/her present and bored, than missing and needed.
As if the Russions would allow FBI agents (or any Americans) in their nuclear weapons facilities.
Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, what was left of the Evil empire (eastern version) was having a very difficult time dealing with dismantling their old weapons systems. What everybody was scared shitless of was that the (now out of work) soldiers and scientists would end up selling weapons and weapons-grad, uhm, parts to the highest bidder (with no regard to nationality or purpose).
So the US ended up paying to help the former soviet states dismantle many of their former weapons systems.
In any case, a friend of mine ended up working for a company that was assigned to the project.
A Canadian, paid by the Americans to work on a Russian nuclear weapons system.
For me, the part of about FBI helping to clean up a soviet Weapons research lab is actuall the second most believable part of the story. (the most believable being that a plastic tent might actually do the job.(especially if you could set it up so that the smelly side had negative air pressure.
It makes complete sense to me that you don't get paid for time that you don't work -- but if you've been putting in extra hours, anyways, then it's time for the company to eat it's own crow. (rather than mandating that the 'makeup clock starts now', which is what it sounds like.)
As for retaliation for not risking your life for a non emergency-critical job, Them's probably lawsuit words.
In Canada, I think that most provinces have rules that don't allow employers to force employes to put their safety at risk. I can't predict what's the case in the US, but I'd hope so.
Pandoras vox forgot to mention that, in many third world countries, the water that many people get is pretty nasty. Even if the formula was up to first-world snuff, many kids die because the water mixed in with the formula has all sorts of greeblies in it that they haven't built up an immunity to yet.
Truth of the matter is: If you're in the third world and you're not rich enough to afford really good water (and know about the evils of formula), you're probably going to be better off finding a friend you can pay to breast feed your kid. Chances are it'll be both cheaper and healthier.
It's one thing to sell baby formula to people who need it. It's another thing entirely to market it to people who'se kids are probably going to get sick from eating the stuff.
(while telling them precisely the opposite)
The fact that it's a "green" energy is really just a nice side effect. India is presumably doing it because it's much cheaper than trying to fix a the massive problems in their power grid.
That's why places like Indonesia had a strong cell phone culture long before it became as big in North America -- they didn't have a choice.
It's SOOOO much easier to pop a microwave antenna and a cell tower on a pole somewhere and give everybody a cell phone than it is to run a wire to every house and end up with non-mobile service.
The only reason why wireline phone service is (was) cheaper than cell phones is that the vast majority of the infrastructure has been in place and paid for for decades. As a (phone company manager) friend of mine once said, once you've paid for the overhead, the rest of the usage is almost pure profit".
I can see similar effects taking place WRT 'off-grid' power production. If there's no grid to be off of, then it's a no-brainer.
When you've got over a billion people in something 1/3 the size of the US, you can't really afford to be as careless with the environment as we are in North America.
As a friend of mine once commented: "If everybody in China started started using Toilet Paper like we do, The Planet would run out of trees in 4 years."
I think that that's a bit of an exageration, but it gets the point across.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine --- but once , say I put up that proxy,
How many people would know how to look for it and use it? Also: countries like China seems to like blocking connections to open proxys, so even those people in China who knew how to find and use my proxy would soon lose access.
You poor bastard.... They'll probably conclude that you're Muslim, then... and that's way, way worse .
You don't defend the statue of liberty from 'terrorist attack' by covering it with 10 million pounds of styrofoam. It defeats the whole purpose...
Just like making a website designed to help citizens abroad vote unavailable to most citizens abroad defeats the whole purpose of having the site there far more effectively than any theoretical attack would.
It seems to be Bush administration standard practice to do the terrorists' job for them.
The Department of Defence claims that they don't have the knowledge and equipment to defend one single website???!!!
Phreak!
So when do they change their name to Department of the Defenceless?
Next up: ..... (Cripes... My absurdity generator can't come up with a more absurd analogy to this!)
Now that you mention it: This is stupid. If I was going to hack the site, I wouldn't use a public Proxy, I'd buy a fleet of US-based Zombie boxes (at $0.15 each) and do my hacking from one of them.
Site updates can be done by cycling the webserver and swapping out the CD.
At that point, you'd pretty much need to attain root access to deface the box. If you remove everything that's not necessary to serving the site, you remove most of the capability for rooting the box.
DO you really think that the military would block their own networks?? Given their excuse (fear of hackers), do yuo think that they'd admit that their own network was compromised by hackers (even if it was)??
Because the CIA reads Al Jazeera.
When you're serious about security, knowing what your enemy thinks is important. -- more important, even than hiding their version of 'the truth' from your friends.
That's not too far from my more serious fear: If this thing is left on the ocean bottom in 12 feet of water, somebody with nefarious purposes may try and recover it.
Now, I'm pretty sure that no 'friends of bin-ladin' woul probably be allowed anywhere near that thing right now, but some right-wing militia members might decide to, uhm, 'go fishin'....
If this low-budget recovery failed, worst case is that we might find out (the hard way) whether the military was hiding the truth about the bomb's "Radiation trigger" (apparently a small nuke inside the hydrogen bomb).If, on the other hand, the recovery succeeded, it'd be hard to say exactly where they might use their booty -- it could be anything from blowing up Tehran (teach them a lesson about nukes) to showing Oklahoma what a real militia can do.
Militia is such a generic term....
This is the situation whether we're talking about WMD's the Iran Hostage 'crisis' (my first media beef), health care or whether Kerry's medals are more important than Bush's lies about Iraq.
When the press is more interested in Janet Jackson's nipples than world affairs and local politics, that's rather like me watching the butt of the girl that just passed me and walking into a light pole (or traffic).
It's the same thing for intelligence services... It's the reason why the US Military was so interested in satellite-killer technology; stealth aircraft and GPS selective-service. It's also why, when they went into Iraq in 1991 radar installations were pretty much the first things to be taken out followed by missile sites and air bases.... If the enemy can't see you, they can't defend against you.
Similarly: When Bush and Blair got so pedantic about wanting 'proof' of WMD's that their respective intelligence services started ignoring their own rules of intelligence triage, they put their own countries into a delusional state and left the rest of the world seeing double.
It's why The US put so much money into VOA during the cold war and why propaganda is considered a tool of war. The truth is nowhere as important as what you can get your enemy to believe.
As our media sources get distracted by the hunt for money, our societal eyesight gets fuzzy. If you want a healthy society, you need a healthy and independent media. A democracy making decisions based on bad media is like a blind man driving in traffic: If traffic is light or you're driving a tank, you'll be OK until you find a cliff. I think that the US has been like this... The country is essentially a tank. The countries that have gotten run over so far have been felt like bumps. Iraq may be the first sign that there's a cliff up ahead, or a deep lake.
She is also so blatently pro-SCO that I'm sending her a form to register as a paid lobbyist.
My first of two favorite quotes are the one about SCO settign up their legal papers archive "so people won't have to go to Groklaw and read its anti-SCO philippics."
Phillipics is a reference to the anchient greek politician (and possible insurgent) who was rabidly against King Philip of Macedonia's attempts to take over the Greek empires (Philip was the father of Alexander the Great). kdict finds the definition: Any discourse or declamation abounding in acrimonious invective.
My other favorite quote reads:
No that's not a typo on my part in the 'plum' reference. I think she's been watching to much Beverly Hillbillies and is trying to sound 'down home'. Dunno 'bout you, but that whole description sounds a lot more to me like SCO's tactic than IBM's. (( We'll see what the judge says on that point )).In the meantime, If SCO tries to do yet another mid-course 'correction' and claim that the lawsuit that started out as a broad copyright case, then was always just about the contract claims is now about fraud (and never really was about anything else), Judge Kiball just might be willing to accept an IBM motion for sanction under the 'frivolous and vexatious prosecution' rule.
If you read O'Gara's other articles (please avoid clicking on any of the ad links), you might just understand that she's now one of the very few (probably well-paid) SCO sh(r)ills left willing to cheer for the home team. In fact, that may be part of the reason why she's now quoting herself -- there may be no other pro-sco boosters available to quote who don't officially work for SCOG.
But you know that already!
Then point out that, instead of running an Easter Egg and Taxi across your screen, if you were dealing with a E-ballot box, it could have brought up a screen allowing you to modify the vote count.
This cannot be tested for after delivery because, no matter what testing regime you come up with and execute, I can come up with an easter egg that will be missed by that regime. (This actually fits the mathematical definition of 'infinite').
Question:
Should we be willing to bet our democracy on the hope that nobody would pay to do what is provably possible? More importantly: should we place our nation, states and municipalities at the mercy of the people who would be willing to engage in such a usurpation of democracy?
Well, if you haven't accepted it, then you haven't accepted it. Doesn't matter if it's a 'no resale' clause or a 'no litigate' clause.
My understanding is that here is not (currently) much agreement on whether shrink-wrap EULAs are binding, so where you file the suit would probably have a very real effect on your liklihood of success.
A visitor to springfield is going with Homer to the bar.
In any case, I've suffered intoxication by solvents (I was painting natural gas holding tanks at the time), and I remember doing rather strange things during that time. I have no idea what intoxication by isopropyl would have you doing, and I don't want to find out.
Also: it sounds like he has a handfull of computers to clean. I'd expect we'd be talking a couple of litres or gallons of isopropyl to do it in a reasonably efficient manner.... That allows a lot more room for both intoxication/poisoning and for fire/explosion than you get in most lab environments.
That adds in another point: In the case of an indoor explosion, my biggest fear wouldn't be the explosion itself but, rather suffocation afterwards. In that context, I like the 'well ventilated; that outdoors supplies.
From the looks of things, it's only about twice as deadly as isopropanol for acute exposure, although it appears to cause far more problems before that point.
I haven't tested this, but working under sodium lights (which generate mostly yellow) might give you the best of both worlds (lots of light to work with, but almost none of it blue).
In any case, I'd also second the suggestion of using 99% isopropyl. it's relatively safe on most electronics, and about as cheap as rubbing alcohol (but a little bit harder to get hold of).
But as for doing this job inside, NO WAY! . Not unless you have access to a fume hood. The LAST thing you want to do is poison yourself with the fumes. You're far better of to do it somewhere outside, and a few metres away from anything flamable and even further from anything that generates sparks I'd even suggest doing it after dusk. That way, if you do manage to light the stuff on fire, you'll have some hope of noticing it before you have 3rd degree burns over vast parts of your body.
For safety, I'd suggest having a workmate standing by with a water hose (and a sprayer with a hand-trigger that lets you have the tap turned on for fast response).. uphill and upwind if at all possible. Chances are (s)he won't have to do anything, but it's far better to have him/her present and bored, than missing and needed.
Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, what was left of the Evil empire (eastern version) was having a very difficult time dealing with dismantling their old weapons systems. What everybody was scared shitless of was that the (now out of work) soldiers and scientists would end up selling weapons and weapons-grad, uhm, parts to the highest bidder (with no regard to nationality or purpose).
So the US ended up paying to help the former soviet states dismantle many of their former weapons systems.
In any case, a friend of mine ended up working for a company that was assigned to the project.
A Canadian, paid by the Americans to work on a Russian nuclear weapons system.
For me, the part of about FBI helping to clean up a soviet Weapons research lab is actuall the second most believable part of the story. (the most believable being that a plastic tent might actually do the job.(especially if you could set it up so that the smelly side had negative air pressure.
The resto of the story kinda, well, stinks.
As for retaliation for not risking your life for a non emergency-critical job, Them's probably lawsuit words.
In Canada, I think that most provinces have rules that don't allow employers to force employes to put their safety at risk. I can't predict what's the case in the US, but I'd hope so.
Truth of the matter is: If you're in the third world and you're not rich enough to afford really good water (and know about the evils of formula), you're probably going to be better off finding a friend you can pay to breast feed your kid. Chances are it'll be both cheaper and healthier.
It's one thing to sell baby formula to people who need it. It's another thing entirely to market it to people who'se kids are probably going to get sick from eating the stuff. (while telling them precisely the opposite)
I'm trying to decide whether that deserves a 'funny' mod, or 'insightful'
(both?)
That's why places like Indonesia had a strong cell phone culture long before it became as big in North America -- they didn't have a choice.
It's SOOOO much easier to pop a microwave antenna and a cell tower on a pole somewhere and give everybody a cell phone than it is to run a wire to every house and end up with non-mobile service.
The only reason why wireline phone service is (was) cheaper than cell phones is that the vast majority of the infrastructure has been in place and paid for for decades. As a (phone company manager) friend of mine once said, once you've paid for the overhead, the rest of the usage is almost pure profit".
I can see similar effects taking place WRT 'off-grid' power production. If there's no grid to be off of, then it's a no-brainer.
As a friend of mine once commented: "If everybody in China started started using Toilet Paper like we do, The Planet would run out of trees in 4 years."
I think that that's a bit of an exageration, but it gets the point across.