You'd likely do better to complain to the FTC about unwanted calls
The problem with that strategy is that the FTC has no jurisdiction over the sale of toll-free number service. So even with the do-not-call list under FTC control, they can't do much to actually determine who is behind a number.
And with phone scammers taking advantage of the complete lack of oversight on the toll-free system, it is useless to use the do-not-call list to get someone to stop calling. Currently that person will just get a new toll-free number and the game starts all over again.
I have had the unfortunate need to try to contact the friendly FCC lately, due to unwanted phone calls (they are the communications commission, after all). I can tell you that they are every bit as frustrating to work with as the DMV, minus the efficiency and courteous service.
Though the most frustrating aspect of the FCC, from my vantage point, is their lack of concern for accountability of phone customers. If you compare phone registration to domain name registration, you'll find that phone registration has all the built-in obfuscation that computer spammers have dreamed about. Toll-free numbers, in particular, have protected identity information.
If you get a call from a toll-free number, you have no good mechanism to determine the owner of the number. There is no central whois-like registry for this number, and the companies that sell the numbers are under no obligation to share information on who is using the numbers they sell.
Want to lodge a complaint with the FCC? Fill out their automated form, and you'll see an automated response later. It won't likely address your complaint. And if you call their own number (888-call-fcc), you'll wait for some time and then receive no help.
Frankly, KMart is a shining example of customer service in contrast to the FCC.
Yet apparently ICANN is set to go ahead with it, anyways.
Funny, most organizations would be opposed to taking action that reduces their own authority (which is one obvious effect of selling gTLDs) - but of course with the prospect of seeing a small, immediate infusion of cash from the process, ICANN is all over it.
Funny, in the name of profit, we are moving towards less regulation, less control, less accountability, and more resemblance to lawlessness.
Unfortunately once they make this mistake there is no going back. We'll have unscrupulous registrars selling to criminals all over the world and we'll have zero control over the domains that turn profit on (counterfeit) drugs, (pirated) software, (counterfeit) fashion goods, (stolen) personal identification and the like.
I doubt the government really cares about the expense of it. Millions of dollars could be set on fire and likely congress wouldn't even bother calling the fire department.
Millions of lives not wasted locked up in jail.
I always find this argument interesting. The people who are in jail on drug offenses are almost without exception people who were pulled in by police because of something they were doing as a result of being on drugs.
Which is why I say that existing enforcement is the same for pot and booze. If I wanted to get baked or drunk in my own home tonight, the risk of getting caught is essentially zero. However, if I did either and then went out in public I could expect to face consequences.
Dangerous drug cartels no longer holding countries like Mexico hostage
I'm not convinced that rolling back the drug laws would really make a meaningful difference one way or the other. From my perspective, drug laws (consider pot or coke for an example) have really the same enforcement as alcohol laws.
That is, your chances of getting picked up solely for possession are almost zero for any of the three (pot, coke, or booze).
Similarly, you can do any of the three in the privacy of your own home without any real chance of being arrested for it while doing it in your home (or almost any other private property for that matter).
Furthermore, the only significant chance you have of being busted for the consumption of any of the three comes when you choose to be in public while under the influence. We don't allow people to drive while under the influence of any of those three substances. If you are caught wandering the streets while under any of them there is a chance you will end up spending the night in jail.
So where is the benefit to legalizing drugs? I don't see it.
So then the people that they rob that happen to be unarmed are non-consequential?
I wish you would stop trying to change the meaning of what I say. For some reason you feel that guns are a worthwhile tool for deterring crime, and you are entitled to your opinion.
But please, do us both a favor and stop mistaking an anti-weapon viewpoint to be analogous to a pro-crime viewpoint. If you are smart enough to read slashdot, you are smart enough to know that is a massive logical fallacy.
the biggest fear of a criminal preying on citizens is that they have a gun
I would think their biggest fear would be of getting caught. But I don't know many criminals first-hand. Do you?
we're not concerned about criminal on criminal violence here, it shouldn't be taken into consideration
I'm not sure why you feel this entered the conversation.
When a criminal is preying on civilians, his primary source of power is his ability to visit violence upon another
Not necessarily. You are again overlooking crimes of opportunity. And being as the topic of discussion in this thread is crimes against the elderly, why would a criminal employ excessive force to commit a crime in that situation?
frowned upon severely in the UK, people with such have to be registered and almost universally face charges no matter who initiated the violence
Citation needed.
Let's say the criminal has a gun, well that's not much different than just being big and strong in a place where guns are illegal
No, actually it is. And again, you need to remember that not all crimes involve the use of force.
the distribution of domestic violence in this country (meaning muggings, robberies, break-in robbery and murder, rape)
What definition of Domestic Violence are you using? The wikipedia link I just gave specifies it as being something between "family members, partners, or ex-partners". I don't see that as the same set of people we were previously discussing in terms of perpetrators and victims.
universally higher in the parts that have draconian gun laws. D.C., NYC, LA, etc. are great examples
I'm sorry, but you cannot study crime in a vacuum. Just because gun laws are more stringent in those places does not mean that crime is more prevalent as a direct result. There are other socio-economic factors that are also in play in those cities that need to be evaluated as well. If all 18 million residents of New York City carried guns, would that significantly alter the crime rate? There is no clear answer to that.
New York or some state that does not as of yet have CCW legislation
I think you need to update your information. New York state does have conceal-carry permits that are available to anyone who doesn't have a record (though New York City is somewhat different than the rest of New York State).
without even having to draw my weapon
So then it didn't matter if you had a Glock, an air pistol, or a cap gun, did it? You may have been able to accomplish the same without a weapon holstered at all, if you were able to convince the other party that you were reaching for something, yes?
Two of those instances were gang bangers alluding to having a gun and demanding money
And where and when were you that you encountered "gang bangers"? And can you imagine a situation where an elderly person would be there alone under the same circumstances?
The third was a drunk wanting to fight
If you can't talk a drunk out of fighting without using a gun, I would say you could stand to bone up on your social skills.
A registrant certainly has the right to register.cn domain names and provide only Chinese characters, without having to convert to Latin characters (which they may not know)
Which is exactly my point. A spammer can register a domain in.cn, then host a site in English in that.cn domain, and spamvertise for it in English as well. But because it is from a.cn domain, the spammer has no obligation to provide sensible contact information in English.
I don't oppose the Chinese doing registrations in their TLD in their own language. Rather, I want to point out that their ability to do so is an opportunity that spammers can and will exploit to conceal their own identities.
While people mentioned the phishing implications, the spamming importance of the.cn domain should not be overlooked either. I know I am not the only person who has seen a lot of spam on behalf of.cn domains, and I would say the WHOIS data is part of the reason why. For example, look at abcde.cn:
Now how on earth does one contact the owner - or more importantly - the registrar of this domain? Even if you can make sense of the unicode, that is no guarantee that you'll find someone to talk to about this domain.
disclaimer I chose this domain at random, it may or may not be spamvertised or in any way evil.
In contrast, look at the same domain in a.com:
Registrant:
Yinan Wang
Apartment 127
51 Whitworth Street West
Manchester, Lancashire M15EA
United Kingdom
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
So if you were someone looking to set up a spamvertised site to sell discount v!@gra, herbal supplements, knock-off watches, designer shoes, counterfeit handbags, and/or pirated software, which system would you choose for your domain registration information?
We aren't psychic, all we know is that we are being attacked
No, actually you are assuming that you are being attacked. Perhaps you didn't read what I said earlier, so I will reiterate.
Not all crime is violent crime. Not all theft includes violence.
Clearly the situation is different when a weapon is clearly present.
However, it appears that you assume all crimes to be planned. I assert that a significant amount of crime is random - crimes of opportunity are quite common. If a thief on the street has a weapon, then why would they chose to try to rob an elderly person, who likely has less money?
Criminals are using the same types of guns that law-abiding citizens have
Which itself is a loss for the citizens who chose to not carry weapons. The criminals are carrying weapons why? Because there are other people carrying weapons.
The practical limit for weapons for criminals would likely be whatever they can conceal. I don't know if you were trying to make a joke in the RPG comment or not, but no reasonable criminal would attempt common crimes with such a weapon.
If you're going to use hypothetical situations as reasons to outlaw things
Please do us both a favor and go back and re-read what I said before. I never suggested outlawing anything. I expressed my opposition to this new weapon, which I feel is an answer to a question that no reasonable person is asking.
fire a gun, then judge.
I have fired plenty of guns. I happen to be a gun owner, as well. However I also happen to oppose guns as tools of self-defense. I have never met a person who honestly resolved a problem with another person by using a gun.
One problem is that you appear to be assuming that all crimes are planned, or at least are started with some sort of plan in mind from the perpetrator.
Hence you are ignoring completely any crimes of convenience. Do you really believe that every pick-pocketing, purse-snatching, or even robbery begins with a plan? A skilled pick-pocket will lift your wallet without you even knowing they were there. What good is a gun then, if they've already taken what the wanted and ran away?
Similarly, how many home invasions are initiated with the intention of killing the home owner? I know people whose houses were robbed while they were inside, and they never heard or saw the perpetrator. What use is a gun then?
You claim that force is used to help ensure that the victim cannot see the perp or call for assistance. But wouldn't the perp be better off if you didn't even know they were there? If you have a big flat-panel TV in your frontroom, why would the perp go to your bedroom?
"Elderly people are often victimized due to their physical inferiority to their attackers, they are easy targets."
Easy to imagine and agree with
"This is an equalizer"
Only probable if you believe that the attacker's intent is to cause physical harm or death.
"Why would you want to prevent a little old lady from defending herself?"
That question is only valid if you believe that all criminal encounters begin with the criminal intending to cause harm or death, and not just take the little old lady's money or possessions.
If you start arming everyone then the end result with the criminal populace is that they will be better armed. You need to look at what portion of crimes against the elderly are committed with weapons (and included violence from the perpetrator), and then evaluate if putting a weapon in the hands of the victim really would have changed the situation.
Besides, if this gun is to be
"ideal for both the elderly and the physically disabled"
Then how hard would it be for the attacker to overpower the victim and take it from them anyways? At which point the criminal may now have two weapons, as they were already carrying one in anticipation of an armed victim.
I seem to recall a time years ago that a PC manufacturer (perhaps Compaq?) claimed to have developed a keyboard that could recharge a laptop battery by the kinetic energy of the key movement.
Yet for some reason we don't all have those...
Of course, very few people do much typing on their laptops now, but there are some people who presumably could have found it quite useful.
Wow, I don't know if they could be more clueless if they tried. Last month they announced that they want to start selling new gTLDs, and now, in the wake of the widespread presence of bad data in DNS, they are announcing a TLD for more DNS data?
I don't think root login is the problem here (though I agree most reasonable admins disable it). Those of us with more detailed ssh logging will see that these distributed attacks are not attempting root anyways.
As someone pointed out earlier, these attempts are usually doing a dictionary attack of common usernames instead. The general MO here is that for any user name from aaaaaaaa to zzzzzzzz from their list, some number of systems (usually 3-5) will attempt that user name, and then the botnet will move on to the next user name from the dictionary and repeat.
By my logs, anyways, most hacking attempts have given up on root attempts and switched to this method instead. I have many, many, pages of ssh login failures from the botnet dictionary attempts, with just a few directed root attempts scattered in between.
I had seen this on my own system back in July for the first time, and it eventually went away. It kept up for some time, to the point where I decide to write a little script to watch who is trying to come in.
Then it came back last month and I paid a little more attention to what I had been doing before. There was one significant thing that I did just before it (re)started:
I placed an ad on craigslist that had a link back to my own server for information on what I was selling.
We all know that of course the spamming botnets tend to troll craigslist looking for valid email addresses to add to their lists. I would say it appears that the botnets are now looking through craigslist for systems to attack as well.
Not always. Take the original Mini or Beetle for example.
The face of the original Beetle is what inspired Herbie the love bug. While perhaps Herbie didn't have a stupid face, it is hard to really distance a happy, loving smiley face from a submissive one.
Note how Meier was also taking Geodon, which is used for schizophrenia, acute mania, and mixed episodes associated with bipolar disorder
That is stated in the article
She was clearly being affected negatively by the anti-depressant Celexa. Instead of taking her off the medication her doctors gave her more medication!
I could not find anything to support that claim. While indeed the symptoms could have been side-effects of the anti-depressant, it is also possible that those symptoms were present before. The wikipedia article also mentions that she was under the care of a psychiatrist from age 3, so there was probably quite a bit going on that wasn't disclosed in that page.
I agree that the anti-depressants do have negative side-effects for some patients, that has been demonstrated. However, the links you provided don't support your claim of her other psychiatric symptoms being the direct result of those medications.
Why would botnet harvesting be done by domain name anyways? Wouldn't it be easier to collect systems by just running through accessible IP addresses?
And if the botnets are doing double duty by both propagating spam and attempting to hack into systems via ssh, I can tell you from my IP logs at home that most systems in the botnets aren't behind any particular domains.
On top of that, how many languages would you want to sell antivirus software in?
Is this because some idiot(s) let McColo get back online for a number of hours, or was that fallback already in place before the McColo initial shut down?
I would be inclined to believe it to be more of the latter than the former. Why wouldn't the authors of the botnet software want to write something in to allow for the creation of a new botnet control system? These guys aren't idiots, as much as we might like to wish they were. They know that it takes time to amass a botnet, so I would expect they included some way to bring back the botnet, should they get caught somewhere.
need to be talking to each other when they blacklist a site
I might be missing something here, but I rather doubt that botnet control comes down to a specific site anywhere. Didn't they just say that the botnet is now controlled from a different country than before? I'm not sure that any amount of activities from major ISP's would be able to be both tolerable to users and capable of restricting the botnets.
Anyone who is surprised by this, raise your hand. If someone was able to write the requisite application to gather the botnet, one would expect the same programmer to have the foresight to write in a way to re-gather and restart the botnet at a later point in time.
Slashdot Mirror
Ted Stevens was right, just 100 years late!
Or he was just having a flashback from his younger days when he said it...
... Nintendo and literacy. What's next, Smith & Wesson diet supplements?
You'd likely do better to complain to the FTC about unwanted calls
The problem with that strategy is that the FTC has no jurisdiction over the sale of toll-free number service. So even with the do-not-call list under FTC control, they can't do much to actually determine who is behind a number.
And with phone scammers taking advantage of the complete lack of oversight on the toll-free system, it is useless to use the do-not-call list to get someone to stop calling. Currently that person will just get a new toll-free number and the game starts all over again.
I have had the unfortunate need to try to contact the friendly FCC lately, due to unwanted phone calls (they are the communications commission, after all). I can tell you that they are every bit as frustrating to work with as the DMV, minus the efficiency and courteous service.
Though the most frustrating aspect of the FCC, from my vantage point, is their lack of concern for accountability of phone customers. If you compare phone registration to domain name registration, you'll find that phone registration has all the built-in obfuscation that computer spammers have dreamed about. Toll-free numbers, in particular, have protected identity information.
If you get a call from a toll-free number, you have no good mechanism to determine the owner of the number. There is no central whois-like registry for this number, and the companies that sell the numbers are under no obligation to share information on who is using the numbers they sell.
Want to lodge a complaint with the FCC? Fill out their automated form, and you'll see an automated response later. It won't likely address your complaint. And if you call their own number (888-call-fcc), you'll wait for some time and then receive no help.
Frankly, KMart is a shining example of customer service in contrast to the FCC.
We've discussed before just how terrible of an idea it is to start selling gTLDs and let the spammers and con artists start running the entire show.
And there have been more than a few objections on the list about selling gTLDs, as well.
Yet apparently ICANN is set to go ahead with it, anyways.
Funny, most organizations would be opposed to taking action that reduces their own authority (which is one obvious effect of selling gTLDs) - but of course with the prospect of seeing a small, immediate infusion of cash from the process, ICANN is all over it.
Funny, in the name of profit, we are moving towards less regulation, less control, less accountability, and more resemblance to lawlessness.
Unfortunately once they make this mistake there is no going back. We'll have unscrupulous registrars selling to criminals all over the world and we'll have zero control over the domains that turn profit on (counterfeit) drugs, (pirated) software, (counterfeit) fashion goods, (stolen) personal identification and the like.
Millions of dollars
I doubt the government really cares about the expense of it. Millions of dollars could be set on fire and likely congress wouldn't even bother calling the fire department.
Millions of lives not wasted locked up in jail.
I always find this argument interesting. The people who are in jail on drug offenses are almost without exception people who were pulled in by police because of something they were doing as a result of being on drugs.
Which is why I say that existing enforcement is the same for pot and booze. If I wanted to get baked or drunk in my own home tonight, the risk of getting caught is essentially zero. However, if I did either and then went out in public I could expect to face consequences.
Dangerous drug cartels no longer holding countries like Mexico hostage
Somehow I don't see them going out of business.
I'm not convinced that rolling back the drug laws would really make a meaningful difference one way or the other. From my perspective, drug laws (consider pot or coke for an example) have really the same enforcement as alcohol laws.
That is, your chances of getting picked up solely for possession are almost zero for any of the three (pot, coke, or booze).
Similarly, you can do any of the three in the privacy of your own home without any real chance of being arrested for it while doing it in your home (or almost any other private property for that matter).
Furthermore, the only significant chance you have of being busted for the consumption of any of the three comes when you choose to be in public while under the influence. We don't allow people to drive while under the influence of any of those three substances. If you are caught wandering the streets while under any of them there is a chance you will end up spending the night in jail.
So where is the benefit to legalizing drugs? I don't see it.
So then the people that they rob that happen to be unarmed are non-consequential?
I wish you would stop trying to change the meaning of what I say. For some reason you feel that guns are a worthwhile tool for deterring crime, and you are entitled to your opinion.
But please, do us both a favor and stop mistaking an anti-weapon viewpoint to be analogous to a pro-crime viewpoint. If you are smart enough to read slashdot, you are smart enough to know that is a massive logical fallacy.
the biggest fear of a criminal preying on citizens is that they have a gun
I would think their biggest fear would be of getting caught. But I don't know many criminals first-hand. Do you?
we're not concerned about criminal on criminal violence here, it shouldn't be taken into consideration
I'm not sure why you feel this entered the conversation.
When a criminal is preying on civilians, his primary source of power is his ability to visit violence upon another
Not necessarily. You are again overlooking crimes of opportunity. And being as the topic of discussion in this thread is crimes against the elderly, why would a criminal employ excessive force to commit a crime in that situation?
frowned upon severely in the UK, people with such have to be registered and almost universally face charges no matter who initiated the violence
Citation needed.
Let's say the criminal has a gun, well that's not much different than just being big and strong in a place where guns are illegal
No, actually it is. And again, you need to remember that not all crimes involve the use of force.
the distribution of domestic violence in this country (meaning muggings, robberies, break-in robbery and murder, rape)
What definition of Domestic Violence are you using? The wikipedia link I just gave specifies it as being something between "family members, partners, or ex-partners". I don't see that as the same set of people we were previously discussing in terms of perpetrators and victims.
universally higher in the parts that have draconian gun laws. D.C., NYC, LA, etc. are great examples
I'm sorry, but you cannot study crime in a vacuum. Just because gun laws are more stringent in those places does not mean that crime is more prevalent as a direct result. There are other socio-economic factors that are also in play in those cities that need to be evaluated as well. If all 18 million residents of New York City carried guns, would that significantly alter the crime rate? There is no clear answer to that.
New York or some state that does not as of yet have CCW legislation
I think you need to update your information. New York state does have conceal-carry permits that are available to anyone who doesn't have a record (though New York City is somewhat different than the rest of New York State).
without even having to draw my weapon
So then it didn't matter if you had a Glock, an air pistol, or a cap gun, did it? You may have been able to accomplish the same without a weapon holstered at all, if you were able to convince the other party that you were reaching for something, yes?
Two of those instances were gang bangers alluding to having a gun and demanding money
And where and when were you that you encountered "gang bangers"? And can you imagine a situation where an elderly person would be there alone under the same circumstances?
The third was a drunk wanting to fight
If you can't talk a drunk out of fighting without using a gun, I would say you could stand to bone up on your social skills.
A registrant certainly has the right to register .cn domain names and provide only Chinese characters, without having to convert to Latin characters (which they may not know)
Which is exactly my point. A spammer can register a domain in .cn, then host a site in English in that .cn domain, and spamvertise for it in English as well. But because it is from a .cn domain, the spammer has no obligation to provide sensible contact information in English.
I don't oppose the Chinese doing registrations in their TLD in their own language. Rather, I want to point out that their ability to do so is an opportunity that spammers can and will exploit to conceal their own identities.
> whois abcde.cn
Domain Name: abcde.cn
ROID: 20030311s10001s00024435-cn
Domain Status: ok
Registrant Organization: æ±åÂÃ¥ÂååÂææéåÂÃ¥Â
Registrant Name: ÃÂæÂÂå¥
Administrative Email: domain@abcde.cn
Sponsoring Registrar: Ã¥ÃÂÂæÂýÃÂÃÃÂææéåÂÃ¥Â
Name Server:ns1.dns.com.cn
Name Server:ns2.dns.com.cn
Registration Date: 2003-03-17 12:20
Expiration Date: 2010-03-17 12:48
Now how on earth does one contact the owner - or more importantly - the registrar of this domain? Even if you can make sense of the unicode, that is no guarantee that you'll find someone to talk to about this domain.
.com:
disclaimer I chose this domain at random, it may or may not be spamvertised or in any way evil.
In contrast, look at the same domain in a
Registrant:
Yinan Wang
Apartment 127
51 Whitworth Street West
Manchester, Lancashire M15EA
United Kingdom
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc.
(http://www.godaddy.com)
So if you were someone looking to set up a spamvertised site to sell discount v!@gra, herbal supplements, knock-off watches, designer shoes, counterfeit handbags, and/or pirated software, which system would you choose for your domain registration information?
We aren't psychic, all we know is that we are being attacked
No, actually you are assuming that you are being attacked. Perhaps you didn't read what I said earlier, so I will reiterate.
Not all crime is violent crime. Not all theft includes violence.
Clearly the situation is different when a weapon is clearly present.
However, it appears that you assume all crimes to be planned. I assert that a significant amount of crime is random - crimes of opportunity are quite common. If a thief on the street has a weapon, then why would they chose to try to rob an elderly person, who likely has less money?
Criminals are using the same types of guns that law-abiding citizens have
Which itself is a loss for the citizens who chose to not carry weapons. The criminals are carrying weapons why? Because there are other people carrying weapons.
The practical limit for weapons for criminals would likely be whatever they can conceal. I don't know if you were trying to make a joke in the RPG comment or not, but no reasonable criminal would attempt common crimes with such a weapon.
If you're going to use hypothetical situations as reasons to outlaw things
Please do us both a favor and go back and re-read what I said before. I never suggested outlawing anything. I expressed my opposition to this new weapon, which I feel is an answer to a question that no reasonable person is asking.
fire a gun, then judge.
I have fired plenty of guns. I happen to be a gun owner, as well. However I also happen to oppose guns as tools of self-defense. I have never met a person who honestly resolved a problem with another person by using a gun.
He took at 10 pound console and made a 14 pound "portable". Really, why would someone even want to carry it around?
Its neat, sure. But I see it as a solution in search of a problem.
One problem is that you appear to be assuming that all crimes are planned, or at least are started with some sort of plan in mind from the perpetrator.
Hence you are ignoring completely any crimes of convenience. Do you really believe that every pick-pocketing, purse-snatching, or even robbery begins with a plan? A skilled pick-pocket will lift your wallet without you even knowing they were there. What good is a gun then, if they've already taken what the wanted and ran away?
Similarly, how many home invasions are initiated with the intention of killing the home owner? I know people whose houses were robbed while they were inside, and they never heard or saw the perpetrator. What use is a gun then?
You claim that force is used to help ensure that the victim cannot see the perp or call for assistance. But wouldn't the perp be better off if you didn't even know they were there? If you have a big flat-panel TV in your frontroom, why would the perp go to your bedroom?
"Elderly people are often victimized due to their physical inferiority to their attackers, they are easy targets."
Easy to imagine and agree with
"This is an equalizer"
Only probable if you believe that the attacker's intent is to cause physical harm or death.
"Why would you want to prevent a little old lady from defending herself?"
That question is only valid if you believe that all criminal encounters begin with the criminal intending to cause harm or death, and not just take the little old lady's money or possessions.
If you start arming everyone then the end result with the criminal populace is that they will be better armed. You need to look at what portion of crimes against the elderly are committed with weapons (and included violence from the perpetrator), and then evaluate if putting a weapon in the hands of the victim really would have changed the situation.
Besides, if this gun is to be
"ideal for both the elderly and the physically disabled"
Then how hard would it be for the attacker to overpower the victim and take it from them anyways? At which point the criminal may now have two weapons, as they were already carrying one in anticipation of an armed victim.
I seem to recall a time years ago that a PC manufacturer (perhaps Compaq?) claimed to have developed a keyboard that could recharge a laptop battery by the kinetic energy of the key movement.
Yet for some reason we don't all have those...
Of course, very few people do much typing on their laptops now, but there are some people who presumably could have found it quite useful.
mat.tel
The makers of Barbie and other such important toys.
nex.tel
A cell phone provider no longer in existence, since being purchased by Sprint.
all.tel
A cell phone provider soon to be no longer in existence, since having been purchased by Verizon.
Wow, I don't know if they could be more clueless if they tried. Last month they announced that they want to start selling new gTLDs, and now, in the wake of the widespread presence of bad data in DNS, they are announcing a TLD for more DNS data?
What problem are they trying to solve here?
I just block ssh access from anything with .ch .kr or .ru
I would say that in my logs >>99% of addresses don't resolve to anything and show up numeric only.
I don't think root login is the problem here (though I agree most reasonable admins disable it). Those of us with more detailed ssh logging will see that these distributed attacks are not attempting root anyways.
As someone pointed out earlier, these attempts are usually doing a dictionary attack of common usernames instead. The general MO here is that for any user name from aaaaaaaa to zzzzzzzz from their list, some number of systems (usually 3-5) will attempt that user name, and then the botnet will move on to the next user name from the dictionary and repeat.
By my logs, anyways, most hacking attempts have given up on root attempts and switched to this method instead. I have many, many, pages of ssh login failures from the botnet dictionary attempts, with just a few directed root attempts scattered in between.
I had seen this on my own system back in July for the first time, and it eventually went away. It kept up for some time, to the point where I decide to write a little script to watch who is trying to come in.
Then it came back last month and I paid a little more attention to what I had been doing before. There was one significant thing that I did just before it (re)started:
I placed an ad on craigslist that had a link back to my own server for information on what I was selling.
We all know that of course the spamming botnets tend to troll craigslist looking for valid email addresses to add to their lists. I would say it appears that the botnets are now looking through craigslist for systems to attack as well.
Cheap cars have weak, stupid, submissive faces.
Not always. Take the original Mini or Beetle for example.
The face of the original Beetle is what inspired Herbie the love bug. While perhaps Herbie didn't have a stupid face, it is hard to really distance a happy, loving smiley face from a submissive one.
Note how Meier was also taking Geodon, which is used for schizophrenia, acute mania, and mixed episodes associated with bipolar disorder
That is stated in the article
She was clearly being affected negatively by the anti-depressant Celexa. Instead of taking her off the medication her doctors gave her more medication!
I could not find anything to support that claim. While indeed the symptoms could have been side-effects of the anti-depressant, it is also possible that those symptoms were present before. The wikipedia article also mentions that she was under the care of a psychiatrist from age 3, so there was probably quite a bit going on that wasn't disclosed in that page.
I agree that the anti-depressants do have negative side-effects for some patients, that has been demonstrated. However, the links you provided don't support your claim of her other psychiatric symptoms being the direct result of those medications.
the alg it uses to get domain names
Why would botnet harvesting be done by domain name anyways? Wouldn't it be easier to collect systems by just running through accessible IP addresses?
And if the botnets are doing double duty by both propagating spam and attempting to hack into systems via ssh, I can tell you from my IP logs at home that most systems in the botnets aren't behind any particular domains.
On top of that, how many languages would you want to sell antivirus software in?
Is this because some idiot(s) let McColo get back online for a number of hours, or was that fallback already in place before the McColo initial shut down?
I would be inclined to believe it to be more of the latter than the former. Why wouldn't the authors of the botnet software want to write something in to allow for the creation of a new botnet control system? These guys aren't idiots, as much as we might like to wish they were. They know that it takes time to amass a botnet, so I would expect they included some way to bring back the botnet, should they get caught somewhere.
need to be talking to each other when they blacklist a site
I might be missing something here, but I rather doubt that botnet control comes down to a specific site anywhere. Didn't they just say that the botnet is now controlled from a different country than before? I'm not sure that any amount of activities from major ISP's would be able to be both tolerable to users and capable of restricting the botnets.
Anyone who is surprised by this, raise your hand. If someone was able to write the requisite application to gather the botnet, one would expect the same programmer to have the foresight to write in a way to re-gather and restart the botnet at a later point in time.