Re:Badass compression algorithm?
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Share The Pi!
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· Score: 2
Oooooh; I can feel a practical example coming on!
Let's just choose a nice little string to look for. Hmmmm, how about "deCSS". Now, running that one through my hex editor comes up with the hexadecimal digits for each letter of 6F 70 43 53 53. Converting that, in turn, to good old base 10 gives us 111 112 67 83 83. With leading zeros added and the whole lot concatenated you get the number 111,112,067,083,083. Phew!
Now, as previous posters have mentioned, to find a string of n digits you're probably going to have to look thru n digits (I think the other posters made this point clearer than I did). Oof! This means that to find the string deCSS you're probably going to have to go through something like 10^14 digits first. That's 100 trillion (if I counted correctly).
Otherwise, fine idea there.
Other stuff that could be found
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Share The Pi!
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· Score: 3
C'mon; there's gotta be some other moderators out there with funny/insightful points going spare that could be well used on the parent post : )
Other possible things that we could find -
Trademarked names, e.g. Disney(TM), Microsoft(TM), McDonalds(TM), etc.
A complete recording of Master Of Puppets in MP3 format.
Various satirical jokes about George W.
A complete DivX of Star Wars : Episode 3 (found 1 month before the movie is released). Or for that matter, a better Episode 1.
A circle, drawn in "1"s, when the number is examined in base 11 (nod to the late Carl Sagan).
Word documents are easy if you don't care about formatting - just look at the end and the text should be there. And I heard (elsewhere on/.) that the exact amount of crud to stip off the front is 137216 bytes, but I've not bothered testing that out yet.
I got a.zip yesterday (the second file I've got so far) that had been turned into a.pif, but when I looked at the archive under Linux I had no problem viewing it, and was even able to listen to the really lame midi file in there without needing to do a damn thing to the infectious file.
Basically, you're pretty safe poking around at these under Linux (they're aimed at Win/Outlook users after all). Though since I don't have a permanent net connection and I do have ps -aux and kill -9 I can rest pretty safe : )
Code Red propagates itself throughout the month until somewhere near the end (19th, IIRC) when it starts to attack whitehouse.gov.
Remember; there was no major problem with Code Red until it was almost time for it to attack last time around because it hadn't infected enough hosts. This is not yet over and will get progressively worse throughout the month.
That is, of course, assuming that Gibson was right yesterday when he said it will still be active....
My most recent job interview (they should let me know how I did within the week) spent most of their time trying to determine how well I work in a team, and asking me questions like "When was a time you had to convince others of your viewpoint", but I didn't get asked a single technical question. Granted, I'm fresh(ish) from university, so this sort of question, geared towards work-place experience was difficult to answer seeing as I've got very little work-place experience. Don't mess candidates around too much with stuff like that - that's what their references are for.
Technical stuff is all very well, but you might try coming up with some logic questions too to see how they perform in unknown situations (once you know how to solve a problem it's much quicker to fix than if you have to figure it out).
Just do what I do; utterly fail to save up for that latest bit of kit. Every game I've bought in the past year has supported my TNT2 M64 chipset. Sure, I can't render something like Shreck on my machine, but since I blew the graphics card money on beer I can't tell the difference.
Hell, Half Life and Doom are barely distinguishable from each other if your beer-goggles are thick enough. And it doesn't matter if the frame-rate slows down thru lack of processing power - your reactions are already terrible from the booze.
Yet again, beer is the cause of, and solution to one of life's problems (thanks to Homer for the [slightly paraphrased] quote).
...the typical user will double-click on whatever icon...
You've clearly never tried to show my parents how to do anything. Single click? Sure. Triple (or even quadruple) click? Sure. Double click so slowly that you edit the name of the icon? Sure. But a regular double click is a rare beast indeed (yes, I have tried altering the click-speed, but their click-fingers keep changing speed).
Unless they're clicking on links on a web page of course, and then they double click every single time (despite having been told not to by me repeatedly for the past 6 years).
Isn't this the same sort of illegal action that Microsoft has gotten in trouble for already?
Damn; you beat me to the post ; )
But seriously, yeah, as I understood it (and I've read a lot about the MS case, as I suspect a lot of other people here have) one of the main problems was that MS was bundling IE with Windows. You couldn't get Windows without IE, so why would anyone bother installing Netscape? This was an anti-competitive move by Microsoft.
I don't see how shoving MSN down people's throats is any different from this. Granted, they needed to respond to AOL, but I don't think this was a fair way to do so.
If Taco et al post the direct link themselves then they're encouraging people to circumvent the NYTimes registration system (read; profitable user profiling system). The NYT wouldn't like this very much, and might even threaten to sue. So the/. editors are obliged to play nice. OTOH, the comments posted on this site are in a legislative grey-area since (from the small print) "Comments are owned by the Poster". That little sentence is the Slashdot team washing their hands of responsibility for what people post (though whether this would hold in court is questionable since the comments are still being published on Slashdot).
Which is why you have to wait for a karma whore to post a reg-less link or details of a phony account (I think I saw one around comment #3 with ID: slashdot2000i PASSWORD: slashdot2000).
It may seem slightly cowardly, but at least the site is still up and running. Then again, just think of the international geek backlash if anyone tried to shut Slashdot down....
Everyone seems to be focusing on K&R (expensive, very thin for a computing book, yet absolutely essential).
But I'd put Computer Networking by Andrew Tanenbaum ahead of K&R. It's well written - not too much like a textbook, humourous in places, with good thought provoking examples (e.g. at what point does a station wagon full of tapes speeding down the highway become a higher bandwith carrier than a T1 cable?). And my copy is a few years old and still relevant (which, as we all know, is a very rare thing).
Good for beginners, good for experts. Buy this book.
Yeah, that rings a bell. IIRC it was ruled that the cops were effectively searching the house without a warrant - the tech simply enabled them to do this from outside. Following on from that precedent, I guess Van Eck Phreaking could be considered to be bugging someone at a distance.
However, since the FBI are accused of not seeking clearance to run this "wiretap", I'm guessing they wouldn't bother if this was illegal or not either. And since it's a passive, non-invasive process, you'd never know they were doing it until they tried to use it as evidence : (
Speaking of Spy Hunter, MS have left a clone of it, called Dev Hunter, as an Easter Egg in Excel 2000 (it's way more fun than that stupid flight simulator from 97). See, they're not totally evil : )
Spacewar came before Pong, but wasn't very sucessful. Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari, ported Spacewar, but it wasn't too successful (it had *gasp* instructions), so he made a game simple enough for "a drunk in a bar" to play - Pong. See http://www.pong-story.com/atpong1.htm for more info.
In short, no. Do a search on TEMPEST or Van Eck Phreaking for more info, but the pixels switching on and off in an LCD screen will generate EM radiation too. In fact, I've even heard of people picking up data straight from the printed circuits on graphic cards and turning it into a useable display, so you don't even need the target machine to have a screen. Creepy, eh?
Basically, there's 3 good ways to overcome this that I'm aware of:
Make sure your display is gibberish. Unfortunately this makes it kinda difficult to use : )
Set up something to broadcast a load of EM white noise to drown-out the signal from your machine.
Only use your machine from inside a big thick metal box (to block the signal), and make sure that you take a portable power supply in there with you (signals can even propagate down the power supply cable).
In a wider sense, it's the practice of hiding data in other data (typically a lot of other data to make it harder to find), but still being able to retrieve it on demand.
Phew, thank God for this. Big Brother and Survivor have just finished here in the UK - I need somewhere else to get my fix of reality TV. Question is; do they get rewarded with booze/food/etc. if they complete their tasks correctly, and get such privileges witheld if they're unsucessful?
And how does the system of voting people out work? I couldn't find anything on the site about it.
This was a truly beautiful hack. I'm so incredibly tempted to build one now - could've really used it yesterday as I had a party and Britain was actually sunny and warm for once. Now if he could just come up with some way to incorporate this into a BBQ.
I wonder how many other people here are now tempted to try something as potentially dangerous as this now.
Yeah, and it's kinda shaped like the hand-print switch-thingy that Arnie used to set off all the air in Total Recall. It's clearly some huge and unnecessarily complicated conspiracy.
"What's even worse is when companies go under. Consider this........ some vulture comes along and buys their lists with your name and personal info and in turn sells it to several other companies just drooling over the new people to spam"
Well, that'd suck for sure, but I think that getting spam would be preferable to some b*stard getting all my personal details including my CC number, running up a huge bill, opening accounts in my name and leaving them overdrawn, and basically screwing up my credit forever.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure what he meant was that he can't use email ; )
Let's just choose a nice little string to look for. Hmmmm, how about "deCSS". Now, running that one through my hex editor comes up with the hexadecimal digits for each letter of 6F 70 43 53 53. Converting that, in turn, to good old base 10 gives us 111 112 67 83 83. With leading zeros added and the whole lot concatenated you get the number 111,112,067,083,083. Phew!
Now, as previous posters have mentioned, to find a string of n digits you're probably going to have to look thru n digits (I think the other posters made this point clearer than I did). Oof! This means that to find the string deCSS you're probably going to have to go through something like 10^14 digits first. That's 100 trillion (if I counted correctly).
Otherwise, fine idea there.
Other possible things that we could find -
I got a .zip yesterday (the second file I've got so far) that had been turned into a .pif, but when I looked at the archive under Linux I had no problem viewing it, and was even able to listen to the really lame midi file in there without needing to do a damn thing to the infectious file.
Basically, you're pretty safe poking around at these under Linux (they're aimed at Win/Outlook users after all). Though since I don't have a permanent net connection and I do have ps -aux and kill -9 I can rest pretty safe : )
Remember; there was no major problem with Code Red until it was almost time for it to attack last time around because it hadn't infected enough hosts. This is not yet over and will get progressively worse throughout the month.
That is, of course, assuming that Gibson was right yesterday when he said it will still be active....
And don't start hyping sircam - I'm enjoying reading private documents ; )
Technical stuff is all very well, but you might try coming up with some logic questions too to see how they perform in unknown situations (once you know how to solve a problem it's much quicker to fix than if you have to figure it out).
Hell, Half Life and Doom are barely distinguishable from each other if your beer-goggles are thick enough. And it doesn't matter if the frame-rate slows down thru lack of processing power - your reactions are already terrible from the booze.
Yet again, beer is the cause of, and solution to one of life's problems (thanks to Homer for the [slightly paraphrased] quote).
Yeah, but if it's a sparkling beverage (lager, champagne, Coca-Cola) it'll fizz right out of the glass!
Perhaps this could be a monthly competition. Assuming, of course, that anyone can get through the infection storm to post to it.
Oh, and I'd like to propose a name for the inevitable next worm that just won't die - The Lazarus Worm. Cool, eh?
Unless they're clicking on links on a web page of course, and then they double click every single time (despite having been told not to by me repeatedly for the past 6 years).
But seriously, yeah, as I understood it (and I've read a lot about the MS case, as I suspect a lot of other people here have) one of the main problems was that MS was bundling IE with Windows. You couldn't get Windows without IE, so why would anyone bother installing Netscape? This was an anti-competitive move by Microsoft.
I don't see how shoving MSN down people's throats is any different from this. Granted, they needed to respond to AOL, but I don't think this was a fair way to do so.
Which is why you have to wait for a karma whore to post a reg-less link or details of a phony account (I think I saw one around comment #3 with ID: slashdot2000i PASSWORD: slashdot2000).
It may seem slightly cowardly, but at least the site is still up and running. Then again, just think of the international geek backlash if anyone tried to shut Slashdot down....
And for once it's not because I was sleeping in lectures ; )
But I'd put Computer Networking by Andrew Tanenbaum ahead of K&R. It's well written - not too much like a textbook, humourous in places, with good thought provoking examples (e.g. at what point does a station wagon full of tapes speeding down the highway become a higher bandwith carrier than a T1 cable?). And my copy is a few years old and still relevant (which, as we all know, is a very rare thing).
Good for beginners, good for experts. Buy this book.
However, since the FBI are accused of not seeking clearance to run this "wiretap", I'm guessing they wouldn't bother if this was illegal or not either. And since it's a passive, non-invasive process, you'd never know they were doing it until they tried to use it as evidence : (
Speaking of Spy Hunter, MS have left a clone of it, called Dev Hunter, as an Easter Egg in Excel 2000 (it's way more fun than that stupid flight simulator from 97). See, they're not totally evil : )
Spacewar came before Pong, but wasn't very sucessful. Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari, ported Spacewar, but it wasn't too successful (it had *gasp* instructions), so he made a game simple enough for "a drunk in a bar" to play - Pong. See http://www.pong-story.com/atpong1.htm for more info.
Basically, there's 3 good ways to overcome this that I'm aware of:
- Make sure your display is gibberish. Unfortunately this makes it kinda difficult to use : )
- Set up something to broadcast a load of EM white noise to drown-out the signal from your machine.
- Only use your machine from inside a big thick metal box (to block the signal), and make sure that you take a portable power supply in there with you (signals can even propagate down the power supply cable).
Yes, it's time to be paranoid.Actually, hiding messages in images is just one application of steganography - a while back there was a story about a girl who did a science project about hiding a message in the DNA of a pigeon (http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/14/1924204.sht ml).
In a wider sense, it's the practice of hiding data in other data (typically a lot of other data to make it harder to find), but still being able to retrieve it on demand.
Hey, you forgot the cameo in Scream 3 (they're on the studio tour and Jay hits on Gail Weathers) which served exactly no purpose whatsoever.
And how does the system of voting people out work? I couldn't find anything on the site about it.
I wonder how many other people here are now tempted to try something as potentially dangerous as this now.
Yeah, and it's kinda shaped like the hand-print switch-thingy that Arnie used to set off all the air in Total Recall. It's clearly some huge and unnecessarily complicated conspiracy.