Is the economy so bad that people are resorting (again, no pun intended) to taking used hotel towels instead of buying their own for a few bucks?
People dont rationalize it like that. They think "boy, this towel would be useful, and Im sure the hotel has tons of spares, and anyways theyve built the cost of losing a few towels into the price of the room, so really Ive already paid for it".
This, right here, is proof that when people want something for free, they will have no problem rationalizing it-- be it free music, or free software, or free towels.
Seems to be lucrative enough; I think ive seen Wushi of team509 in the bounties just about every time. Seems hes making a decent amount of money off of this, esp if its a hobby-- this time around he netted $2500. There may be other folks who focus on this for the bounty, but his name stood out for some reason.
All that aside, how much do you propose Google offer as a reward for what seems to be a weeks worth of hobby time? Isnt it enough that they offer something?
When they say "socially responsible", I wonder if they could substitute the term "fraud". Im fairly certain part of the agreement you make with your ISP for a residential connection is that you will not split the connection off for other households; I wonder if the EFF would consider cable piracy "the socially responsible thing to do". I would also wonder how they would try to make a distinction between the two.
Seriously, the EFF does some awesome stuff, but like RMS, they sometimes go off the deep end on a principled stand. Mod me down, but it seems to me a proper starting point for a principled stand would for folks who really care to find an ISP who explicitly allows such a thing, or sign up as an ISP and distribute free wifi all around. Breaching a contract that you agreed to and then claiming "but im fighting the man" makes you look like a greedy, irresponsible child.
"Inflationary capitalistic expansion", done by a communist country? An obscure reference to Reganomics in a country where it doesn't apply in the slightest?
You telling me theres no private business ownership in China? You might want to rethink calling it communist; it may be so in name, but its not in policy. I think this quote from wikipedia sums it up nicely:
Great. Now teach a 60+ year old lobbyist, who is too resistant to change to switch off of WordPerfect 5.2 to something less dated, how to fire up a VBox session, log into this machine-within-a-machine, how to share files between them, etc etc etc. Im sure he will grasp it all perfectly.
Both of Bush's overseas military deployments WERE authorized by congress, the Afghanistan one by an incredibly non-partisan vote of some 520 to 1. The stated goal of that deployment was to dismantle al-Qaeda. (first paragraph; I'm sure if you cared enough you could find the original declaration and stated purpose)
And I dont intend to state that the Government is our friend; I think that the only way to plan policy in a democratic capitalist society is to walk a careful balance between how few powers we let the gov't have, and how many freedoms we let gigantic corporations have. Its not that governments cant be trusted, its that people cant be trusted, and this has been known for thousands of years. "Absolute power corrupts, absolutely".
That said, I dont feel like crippling "Defense" (capital D, as in "government military") by requiring them to give enemy soldiers / leaders civilian trials; if we did, apart from how ridiculous it would be, it might also be a first among nations in the modern world-- I cannot think of a single other instance where civilian courts were used on enemy combatants before the "war" was over (keeping in mind that even AFTER wars end, most war-crimes trials are tribunals....)
I will agree that there is a delicate line there-- someone in the US who is a citizen, ON US soil, making threats about dismantling the USA, should still receive a civilian trial so far as I can reason. But when someone is on foreign soil, acting as part of the leadership with an organization that we are nominally at war with (though an actual declaration of war was not issued by congress, there was nevertheless a degree of authorization given), I cannot reason out how it makes sense to go to phenomenal effort for our military to capture and detain them, only to bring them to a civilian court, have taxpayers cover the mans attorney, and then allow appeals to spiral up through our civilian court system. Noone would ever be able to win a war if that were the system; it would be absolutely fatal to our ability to defend our country at home or abroad.
I cannot imagine there is a single good reason. All Windows and Linux systems (as well as most well-configured Cisco routers, firewalls, etc; and well-set up routers) use hashed passwords. Windows has to support clients going back 11 years with compatibility, and every single one of them logs in using an NTLM hash; there are no Windows services that I am aware of that store a user/password database unhashed, and it has been this way at LEAST since W2K (and presumably going back to NT, in 199x).
You would have to be reinventing the wheel, and that badly, in order to manage to screw this up; hashed passwords is one of the first things they teach you in any kind of school you would go to.
Fixing the symptoms is the worst thing you could do. Most slashdotters rail about the fact that normal users will never know whats going on, and will therefore lack the ability to raise a complaint; and here all the slashdotters are trying to figure out how to create a technical workaround for this.
Heres what you do, you call them, and tell them youve opted out. When they say theyll work on it, you give them a week, then call again. And again. Then you elevate to a supervisor.
Depending on how much of a principled stand you want to make, you could take them to small claims court, asking for several months worth of service credits; im sure a reasonable attorney could come up with a reason why thats not out of the question, and perhaps get attorney fees as well.
Or, you know, you could spend hours on workarounds, and hope that someone else takes care of it.
Yes, im sure blocking government sites is the perfect way for Mediacom to dodge the bullet on this. A legislator will LOVE seeing that his ISP is tampering with this sort of thing.
How long exactly do you think they could get away with such a thing before being demolished by fines, if they started actively blocking regulatory sites so that users could not read about or exercise their rights?
maybe they wanted to make sure their log in form would work on a web browser without scripting.
Not being a web dev, surely there are webserver modules that will perform the hashing server side; while this would expose you to MITM, at LEAST you wouldnt have a plaintext password stored, and at LEAST you couldnt MITM the consoles.
Theres something delicious to all of this, their getting utterly pwned after laughing at Anon's efforts as feeble. I am not generally one given to schadenfraude, and I certainly hope that nothing serious like identity theft results from all this (probably an empty hope), but Sony really did provoke this.
Encrypting things before you send it is an option with every provider, and some will indeed claim that as a "feature", when it is simply something inherent in any storage system.
As I said, all of these mass market free services will store the key, because otherwise the 50% of users (incl me) who forget their passwords would lose all of their files, and the first blogpost on such an occurrence would tank the company. As long as you understand the trade-off, and dont store super-sensitive stuff on there, its not an issue. And as they said, if you want to store super sensitive stuff, use truecrypt, or encrypted archives (zip, rar, etc), or keepass databases.
I may be wrong, but I do not believe they are telling the truth. Their logon page has a "forgot password" link, which would NOT be possible if they did not have the encryption key. If the key is not stored, and it is a hash of the password, it would be utterly impossible to recover any data without breaking the encryption algorithm or bruteforcing the password.
If you want to know if such claims are honest, just look for a trusty "forgot your password" link. If it allows you to choose a new password, then they are storing the key.
Goebbels would have been tried AFTER the war was over, not before. During the war, I dont think the US, UK, or French militaries would have had any compunctions about executing a hit on Goebbels, Hitler, or any of the other folks in the Nazi leadership. Being in the leadership of a beligerent force does make you fair game for targeting, you know.
And I compared him to Goebbels, because their roles are quite similar, not because I felt a particular need to draw a parallel between their ideologies.
The mistake i believe you are making is that you are confusing the terms "civilian" and "citizen". A US citizen who was to start executing military strikes in cooperation with an opposing military would be perfectly fair game so far as Im concerned; he would no longer be a civilian, and would now be protected by just the Geneva convention and other wartime agreements.
Don't you feel that this is -- and if only just a bit -- like the same thing that makes al-Awlaki so despicable?
Well, perhaps, in the sense that this is essentially war (Im sure he considers it so, at least), and we both want the other dead; what makes him "despicable" is that he would target non-combatant civilians here to accomplish his ends. I do not think he should be treated differently than any other enemy soldier or officer; giving each one a trial before attempting to take them out seems counterintuitive, and Im not sure that anyone has ever done such a thing before in a war.
Generally, you save the trials until after the fighting is over.
Openfiler I think had more potential, as being Linux based things were just easier in general to modify (for me), and there are far more software installation options. It also had a much nicer GUI.
The problems I had with it were that things that had lots of polish and looked like they should work, didnt work right, and I increasingly got the impression that that beautiful GUI covered for a beta backend. It is a good project, but Im a little more trusting of Freenas, as I have gotten the reverse impression for it-- that its GUI is a bit rougher, but its more reliable (buggy USB crashes not withstanding, as thats a FreeBSD bug and outside of their scope).
I will go out on a limb and say that there are no free cloud-hosted file storage services where the hosting company does not have access to the private keys, at least in the stock default configuration (I know that CrashPlan, for example has an option where you can specify your own private key; but it is non-default and comes with a zillion warnings that you will no longer be able to do a "forgot my password").
Slashdot Mirror
Is the economy so bad that people are resorting (again, no pun intended) to taking used hotel towels instead of buying their own for a few bucks?
People dont rationalize it like that. They think "boy, this towel would be useful, and Im sure the hotel has tons of spares, and anyways theyve built the cost of losing a few towels into the price of the room, so really Ive already paid for it".
This, right here, is proof that when people want something for free, they will have no problem rationalizing it-- be it free music, or free software, or free towels.
It is perhaps a sign of the times that I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic, trolling, or sincerely believe what you posted.
Seems to be lucrative enough; I think ive seen Wushi of team509 in the bounties just about every time. Seems hes making a decent amount of money off of this, esp if its a hobby-- this time around he netted $2500. There may be other folks who focus on this for the bounty, but his name stood out for some reason.
All that aside, how much do you propose Google offer as a reward for what seems to be a weeks worth of hobby time? Isnt it enough that they offer something?
When they say "socially responsible", I wonder if they could substitute the term "fraud". Im fairly certain part of the agreement you make with your ISP for a residential connection is that you will not split the connection off for other households; I wonder if the EFF would consider cable piracy "the socially responsible thing to do". I would also wonder how they would try to make a distinction between the two.
Seriously, the EFF does some awesome stuff, but like RMS, they sometimes go off the deep end on a principled stand. Mod me down, but it seems to me a proper starting point for a principled stand would for folks who really care to find an ISP who explicitly allows such a thing, or sign up as an ISP and distribute free wifi all around. Breaching a contract that you agreed to and then claiming "but im fighting the man" makes you look like a greedy, irresponsible child.
"Inflationary capitalistic expansion", done by a communist country? An obscure reference to Reganomics in a country where it doesn't apply in the slightest?
You telling me theres no private business ownership in China? You might want to rethink calling it communist; it may be so in name, but its not in policy. I think this quote from wikipedia sums it up nicely:
The CPC's current policies are fiercely rejected as capitalist by most communists, especially anti-revisionists, and by adherents of the Chinese New Left from within the PRC.
(second to last "history" paragraph; but the entire section might be helpful to read.)
Also,
Save us some time, and please stick to... whatever you specialize in.
It is possible to make your point to GP (which you did) without descending to flamebait.
Sincerely,
Slashdotters
Great. Now teach a 60+ year old lobbyist, who is too resistant to change to switch off of WordPerfect 5.2 to something less dated, how to fire up a VBox session, log into this machine-within-a-machine, how to share files between them, etc etc etc. Im sure he will grasp it all perfectly.
Both of Bush's overseas military deployments WERE authorized by congress, the Afghanistan one by an incredibly non-partisan vote of some 520 to 1. The stated goal of that deployment was to dismantle al-Qaeda. (first paragraph; I'm sure if you cared enough you could find the original declaration and stated purpose)
And I dont intend to state that the Government is our friend; I think that the only way to plan policy in a democratic capitalist society is to walk a careful balance between how few powers we let the gov't have, and how many freedoms we let gigantic corporations have. Its not that governments cant be trusted, its that people cant be trusted, and this has been known for thousands of years. "Absolute power corrupts, absolutely".
That said, I dont feel like crippling "Defense" (capital D, as in "government military") by requiring them to give enemy soldiers / leaders civilian trials; if we did, apart from how ridiculous it would be, it might also be a first among nations in the modern world-- I cannot think of a single other instance where civilian courts were used on enemy combatants before the "war" was over (keeping in mind that even AFTER wars end, most war-crimes trials are tribunals....)
I will agree that there is a delicate line there-- someone in the US who is a citizen, ON US soil, making threats about dismantling the USA, should still receive a civilian trial so far as I can reason. But when someone is on foreign soil, acting as part of the leadership with an organization that we are nominally at war with (though an actual declaration of war was not issued by congress, there was nevertheless a degree of authorization given), I cannot reason out how it makes sense to go to phenomenal effort for our military to capture and detain them, only to bring them to a civilian court, have taxpayers cover the mans attorney, and then allow appeals to spiral up through our civilian court system. Noone would ever be able to win a war if that were the system; it would be absolutely fatal to our ability to defend our country at home or abroad.
Windows version that by the time they did they were irrelevant to anyone but lawyers still using DOS.
HAH, our clients have some of those, and they dont use DOS.
Have you ever tried to get 16 year old software to run on windows 7? Its a lot of fun.
I cannot imagine there is a single good reason. All Windows and Linux systems (as well as most well-configured Cisco routers, firewalls, etc; and well-set up routers) use hashed passwords. Windows has to support clients going back 11 years with compatibility, and every single one of them logs in using an NTLM hash; there are no Windows services that I am aware of that store a user/password database unhashed, and it has been this way at LEAST since W2K (and presumably going back to NT, in 199x).
You would have to be reinventing the wheel, and that badly, in order to manage to screw this up; hashed passwords is one of the first things they teach you in any kind of school you would go to.
Fixing the symptoms is the worst thing you could do. Most slashdotters rail about the fact that normal users will never know whats going on, and will therefore lack the ability to raise a complaint; and here all the slashdotters are trying to figure out how to create a technical workaround for this.
Heres what you do, you call them, and tell them youve opted out. When they say theyll work on it, you give them a week, then call again. And again. Then you elevate to a supervisor.
Depending on how much of a principled stand you want to make, you could take them to small claims court, asking for several months worth of service credits; im sure a reasonable attorney could come up with a reason why thats not out of the question, and perhaps get attorney fees as well.
Or, you know, you could spend hours on workarounds, and hope that someone else takes care of it.
Yes, im sure blocking government sites is the perfect way for Mediacom to dodge the bullet on this. A legislator will LOVE seeing that his ISP is tampering with this sort of thing.
How long exactly do you think they could get away with such a thing before being demolished by fines, if they started actively blocking regulatory sites so that users could not read about or exercise their rights?
maybe they wanted to make sure their log in form would work on a web browser without scripting.
Not being a web dev, surely there are webserver modules that will perform the hashing server side; while this would expose you to MITM, at LEAST you wouldnt have a plaintext password stored, and at LEAST you couldnt MITM the consoles.
Theres something delicious to all of this, their getting utterly pwned after laughing at Anon's efforts as feeble. I am not generally one given to schadenfraude, and I certainly hope that nothing serious like identity theft results from all this (probably an empty hope), but Sony really did provoke this.
It can be done by IP.
Encrypting things before you send it is an option with every provider, and some will indeed claim that as a "feature", when it is simply something inherent in any storage system.
As I said, all of these mass market free services will store the key, because otherwise the 50% of users (incl me) who forget their passwords would lose all of their files, and the first blogpost on such an occurrence would tank the company. As long as you understand the trade-off, and dont store super-sensitive stuff on there, its not an issue. And as they said, if you want to store super sensitive stuff, use truecrypt, or encrypted archives (zip, rar, etc), or keepass databases.
We are at "war" with al-Qaeda. If you dont believe me, check out what they say on the topic.
Wonderful news if true. Thanks for the update; more options in the storage appliance area is always a good thing.
I may be wrong, but I do not believe they are telling the truth. Their logon page has a "forgot password" link, which would NOT be possible if they did not have the encryption key. If the key is not stored, and it is a hash of the password, it would be utterly impossible to recover any data without breaking the encryption algorithm or bruteforcing the password.
If you want to know if such claims are honest, just look for a trusty "forgot your password" link. If it allows you to choose a new password, then they are storing the key.
Its called active desktop, and its alive and well in XP (might have been removed recently). Viruses love to use it.
"Sensationalist Headlines are Killing Slashdot"
Goebbels would have been tried AFTER the war was over, not before. During the war, I dont think the US, UK, or French militaries would have had any compunctions about executing a hit on Goebbels, Hitler, or any of the other folks in the Nazi leadership. Being in the leadership of a beligerent force does make you fair game for targeting, you know.
And I compared him to Goebbels, because their roles are quite similar, not because I felt a particular need to draw a parallel between their ideologies.
The mistake i believe you are making is that you are confusing the terms "civilian" and "citizen". A US citizen who was to start executing military strikes in cooperation with an opposing military would be perfectly fair game so far as Im concerned; he would no longer be a civilian, and would now be protected by just the Geneva convention and other wartime agreements.
Don't you feel that this is -- and if only just a bit -- like the same thing that makes al-Awlaki so despicable?
Well, perhaps, in the sense that this is essentially war (Im sure he considers it so, at least), and we both want the other dead; what makes him "despicable" is that he would target non-combatant civilians here to accomplish his ends. I do not think he should be treated differently than any other enemy soldier or officer; giving each one a trial before attempting to take them out seems counterintuitive, and Im not sure that anyone has ever done such a thing before in a war.
Generally, you save the trials until after the fighting is over.
Openfiler I think had more potential, as being Linux based things were just easier in general to modify (for me), and there are far more software installation options. It also had a much nicer GUI.
The problems I had with it were that things that had lots of polish and looked like they should work, didnt work right, and I increasingly got the impression that that beautiful GUI covered for a beta backend. It is a good project, but Im a little more trusting of Freenas, as I have gotten the reverse impression for it-- that its GUI is a bit rougher, but its more reliable (buggy USB crashes not withstanding, as thats a FreeBSD bug and outside of their scope).
I will go out on a limb and say that there are no free cloud-hosted file storage services where the hosting company does not have access to the private keys, at least in the stock default configuration (I know that CrashPlan, for example has an option where you can specify your own private key; but it is non-default and comes with a zillion warnings that you will no longer be able to do a "forgot my password").