You're kind of missing the point then. The goal of these books is not to "commoditize" hacking, it is to give those with an interest in the subject a foot in the door to the world.
It's no different than a betty crocker cook book. The recipies are there to illustrate the basic skills and information needed for the task at hand. It is left to the reader to expand that knowledge into their own recipies later on.
Many kids these days are growing up in a world where everything they own is a black box with mysterious circuit boards and a few wires inside. Long gone are the days where a kid would be given one of those "build your own radio" kits, or a computer is shipped to you as a box of parts. Exploring the innards of a device is considered backwards now, and even frowned upon.. you're instead supposed to just throw it away and buy a new one if it breaks. Many electronics are so complex anymore that a newbie trying to extract interesting pieces and doing something with them results in useless slag.
Don't view this book as cheapening your "hacker status".. but view it as an effort to open up the world to people that aren't part of it.
I've sought two jobs since these resume sites appeared, and both times I did in fact end up with a job. So in that sense they worked.. though I must admit it's been a bit over two years since my last foray.
However, the site itself didn't put me in contact with employers. I never had a single employer contact me. Who DID contact me was headhunters, and lots of them.
In the end a job is a job, doesn't matter how you get it but the sentiment that jobfinder sites are ineffective at doing what they advertise doesn't seem inaccurate. You could achieve the same results by seeking out local headhunting agencies and applying by more traditional methods.
Re:This existed long before the DMCA...
on
FBI Anti-Piracy Seal
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> deserve the same level of copyright protection, so why not?
That's why this logo is stupid, printing a silly message is NOT protection. It's just a scare tactic.
>.. is why I prefer python over perl. The resulting code is soo much cleaner.
Yes but you have to admit that perl has a certain charm about it.
Haven't you ever sat there staring at a subroutine, thinking to yourself "man I sure wish I could just hold shift and slide my finger over the number row to get this done"? Then gone on and painstakingly crafted what you wanted to do in whatever strict language you were actually working in?;)
Maybe it's just me. But every time I sit down and promise myself to write a new script all tidy and clean in python, about five minutes into it I'm muttering "if this were perl I coulda been DONE by now" and quickly revert back to old faithful.
> Won't this just inspire more spammers to pursue > virus, trojan and spyware-oriented methods of > spamming?
Fine by me.. that puts them soundly into the lawbreaking category. Which means that after you track them down and actually find someone operating inside the borders of your country, you can DO something about it.
Since the laws being passed in the US are clearly indicative that spam is and will always be in an impossible to regulate grey area, the next best solution is to make spamming so difficult that only outlaws can do it.
> Instead, how about doing some research of your own in order to come to a conclusion?
At some point, that's not a feasible suggestion. With the glut of information that is readily available these days, there has got to be a point where such a system will break down. There are only so many hours in a day available. Jokes about pounding reload on slashdot all day aside, even if one studied 24 hours a day there's no way they could keep up on a fraction of the issues that are plauging this world.
At some point, some of the information you recieve will have to be distilled down to sound bites that come from a third party. You will HAVE to put some amount of trust in someone to do it fairly.
And these days, I'd be more inclined to listen to nobel winners than the bush administration.;)
> To make a good story, you have to usually cut into the time you're actually playing the game (cut scenes, etc).
Not always. Think back to Marathon. The terminals were part of the game, and were the major source of all the characterization. They were for the most part the "cutscenes" of the game, but they never EVER felt like one. Your mission info, the story line, the reasons the player should care about the story, everything, game from those simple text terminals. Finding a terminal was like a breath of fresh air, in the back of your head you were hoping THIS one would finally answer all the questions. But no, it just presented new problems.
Marathon was also amazing in the sense that it never really told you who you are. There were hints, which fans have since endlessly debated, but it left wiggle room for a player to assign his own values and virtues to the character he's playing. Marathon's sucessor in spirit, Halo, gives a decent example of how easy the balance is to screw up. Don't get me wrong I had a blast running through Halo the first time, but it is nowhere near the caliber of what Marathon was.
It's quite simple to summarize: Games cannot be missions with an obvious point A to point B. Even if there is only one route through a map, the player needs to be able to feel like he's charting his own course and cannot be aware of what is around the next corner. Marathon did that, Halo did not (well except in that map where you first discovered the Flood, that was an amazing mission).
Games these days are too commonly a narrative. It permits you do take care of the details of running from room to room but the story always tells you who you are and what is going to happen in well defined doses. The mark of a great game is one that does this, but doesn't reveal that it is doing so to the player. Games have to leave the "cutscenes" to dictating the problems of the current situation, and leave the resolutions to the actual play. If a game finds itself finishing a mission with a "tells all" narrative, it has failed.
5 inches is actually an inch and a half shorter than what I was told the average was back in junior high. This came from suppposedly authoritive information during sex ed.
I bet there's some fun conspiracy out there, some Illuminati-type group of small dicked educators who are trying to bolster their self image by reporting a lower average.
Dunno if we're playing the same Halo or this isn't what you were suggesting, but the Halo engine doesn't look a "few years old" to me at all.
At least in my case, Halo has only run slow due to poor hardware or bad drivers. These days (due soley to buying a dx9 capable card) I can run the game today with all options revved to max, albeit at an 800x600 resolution. The game looks stunning. Metal surfaces shimmer, headlights paint bump-mapped patches on walls they pass over, tank rounds spew dirt into the air, and sunlight glimmers through the tree leaves.
This stuff hasn't been done before, has it? Halo is cutting edge stuff. There are ALWAYS people who have problems with the latest and greatest, because their computer isn't.
Granted I'm speaking from a PC user viewpoint so I'll admit there's probably problems with the Mac release that I'm entirely ignorant of. But the engine itself is not "3 years old" like some prefer to claim.
> Now come on, this computer is less than a year old > and yet it wont play a game that was made a few > years ago.
But it wasn't made a few years ago. Sure, it released on the xbox a ways back, but as far as your mac is concerned it's a brand new cutting edge game.
It has rendering features that prior to the mac/pc release, did not exist in any other game. It uses features that Doom3 and HL2 are heavily reliant on.. neither of which you can buy yet.
That's not to say there aren't some speed issues, the next update of PC Halo promises some real advances in efficiency. But mac/pc Halo is only an "old" game by virtue of it's artistic content.
Probably pretty simple to explain away.. they know that a common way of obfuscating emails is to put "NOSPAM" or something to that effect in the address.
So when they parse their address list, rather than writing a good filter that gets rid of the 'NOSPAM' field, they just drop any address that has 'SPAM' in it.
Maybe they took one look at the regex manual and decided it was "too hard".;)
I know the game was always sort of a "sleeper" that never broke it big like heavy hitters such as Starcraft did, but Myth was still incredibly well done, and I've never come across a person who flat out didn't like it.
It's strongest quality was mostly the fact that it cut out all the annoying resource gathering and just let you work on the strategy part of killing your enemies.
I was hoping the ideas it brought to the genre would catch on (I think maybe Sacrifice is the only game I've played since that comes close) but it never caught on.
Doesn't change that it was an awesome game though.. I would have replaced that stinker 'Age of Empires' with Myth on that list any day.;)
> many of the machines at Fermilab are admin'ed by physics postdocs and grad students.
Yes but you forget to mention the rabid (to their credit) security team the lab has. The sniffers they have set up are effective.
It usually takes them less than 24 hours to identify a machine that has traffic patterns beyond the norm, often within one or two hours they can blackhole a port if warranted and hunt down the owner of the machine.
Previously I would have called it suicide to operate a largely unfirewalled network at a site of this scale, but they really do do a good job at it.
> unless the xbox can display 1600x1200 on any TV.
Doesn't really mean much, since it is in fact a "live" render. It's not like they set up that scene in blender and set the renderer lose on it for a few hours.
That image was created in real time, all those effects do in fact exist. The final resolution of the image is a bit of a non-issue.
I think it's more a comment on how something humans were all patting themselves on the back for developing, plants have been doing for millions of years.
> So when you go outside you grab your ear-muffs in preference to your coat do you?
Actually you'd be surprised. I'm not advocating anyone tossing their coat aside and just wearing a hat all day but the effect is definetly there.. wearing something over your ears has a big impact on how warm you feel.
I suspect it's mostly psychological though, because despite how you feel your body would still be susceptible to hypothermia.
Growing up in alaska, I would often just put on a hat when going outside briefly and didn't feel like dressing up.. usually to drag garbage to the curb or starting a car to warm it up.
Due to an unwillingness to shell out more cash for what I feel should have been part of the original product, I never bought the rush hour expansion. I did buy SC4 though, the promise of all the new transportation methos drew me in like a moth to flame.
Unfortuneatley, the traffic model blew ass. There were a multitude of problems when trying to ferry people between different regions, sims were too stupid to take a highway unless it fell on their shortest path algorhythm (they would prefer to take narrow local streets even if the highway would have been faster), and don't even get me started on the braindead decision for the only way to have "busy" commercial zones was to have red traffic right next to them (duh?!). Some of the simulator variables were odd too, wasn't traffic modelled as if all cars were moving at 30mph or somesuch?
Did rush hour really fix this at all? Reading the feature list, it just seemed like a stop gap measure bolted on to try and cover some of the flaws.
I know traffic is hard and Maxis did a decent job with the game, but the flaws made it damn near impossible to build a "real" city.. invariably the game turned into a micromanagement nightmare as you bulldozed roads to try and convince the sims to take more intelligent paths. Almost all my cities wound up being groups of individual "pods" that used limited routes to funnel sims into more desireable travel modes.
I'm not a city planner, but this approach mimics no real world city I've ever witnessed.
> Should there be an exemption for folks who have legitimate use? Sure.
Screw that, there should be an exemption for the folks who made the software. I'm not a fan of big government but if this currency detection really is just a CYA policy then perhaps a law protecting software houses from prosecution is in order. Provided said company is not "supporting" the crime in question of course (aka Napster).
We don't take gun companies to court do we? Automobile makers don't get fined when a drunk driver kills someone do they? Why should software companies be awarded the rare worry of being slapped for what their customers do?
just tie some twine to the tail of the space shuttle as it goes up, of course.
Then you tie a slightly heavier cable to the twine, and have the guys on the space shuttle start tugging it up.
Once that's up, tie an even heavier cable to the second cable.. and start tugging. Repeat until you have a properly sized cable in place for your elevator.
I was gonna pitch this idea to NASA a few years ago but they never called me back.;(
Slashdot Mirror
You're kind of missing the point then. The goal of these books is not to "commoditize" hacking, it is to give those with an interest in the subject a foot in the door to the world.
It's no different than a betty crocker cook book. The recipies are there to illustrate the basic skills and information needed for the task at hand. It is left to the reader to expand that knowledge into their own recipies later on.
Many kids these days are growing up in a world where everything they own is a black box with mysterious circuit boards and a few wires inside. Long gone are the days where a kid would be given one of those "build your own radio" kits, or a computer is shipped to you as a box of parts. Exploring the innards of a device is considered backwards now, and even frowned upon.. you're instead supposed to just throw it away and buy a new one if it breaks. Many electronics are so complex anymore that a newbie trying to extract interesting pieces and doing something with them results in useless slag.
Don't view this book as cheapening your "hacker status".. but view it as an effort to open up the world to people that aren't part of it.
I've sought two jobs since these resume sites appeared, and both times I did in fact end up with a job. So in that sense they worked.. though I must admit it's been a bit over two years since my last foray.
However, the site itself didn't put me in contact with employers. I never had a single employer contact me. Who DID contact me was headhunters, and lots of them.
In the end a job is a job, doesn't matter how you get it but the sentiment that jobfinder sites are ineffective at doing what they advertise doesn't seem inaccurate. You could achieve the same results by seeking out local headhunting agencies and applying by more traditional methods.
> deserve the same level of copyright protection, so why not?
That's why this logo is stupid, printing a silly message is NOT protection. It's just a scare tactic.
> .. is why I prefer python over perl. The resulting code is soo much cleaner.
;)
Yes but you have to admit that perl has a certain charm about it.
Haven't you ever sat there staring at a subroutine, thinking to yourself "man I sure wish I could just hold shift and slide my finger over the number row to get this done"? Then gone on and painstakingly crafted what you wanted to do in whatever strict language you were actually working in?
Maybe it's just me. But every time I sit down and promise myself to write a new script all tidy and clean in python, about five minutes into it I'm muttering "if this were perl I coulda been DONE by now" and quickly revert back to old faithful.
I think it just lends support to the recursive-acronym method of naming projects. ;)
If they'd called themseves GAM (GAM ain't Mandrake) would they be having this problem? Or MIN (Mozilla is MIN)? Yeah I didn't think so.
> Won't this just inspire more spammers to pursue
> virus, trojan and spyware-oriented methods of
> spamming?
Fine by me.. that puts them soundly into the lawbreaking category. Which means that after you track them down and actually find someone operating inside the borders of your country, you can DO something about it.
Since the laws being passed in the US are clearly indicative that spam is and will always be in an impossible to regulate grey area, the next best solution is to make spamming so difficult that only outlaws can do it.
> Instead, how about doing some research of your own in order to come to a conclusion?
;)
At some point, that's not a feasible suggestion. With the glut of information that is readily available these days, there has got to be a point where such a system will break down. There are only so many hours in a day available. Jokes about pounding reload on slashdot all day aside, even if one studied 24 hours a day there's no way they could keep up on a fraction of the issues that are plauging this world.
At some point, some of the information you recieve will have to be distilled down to sound bites that come from a third party. You will HAVE to put some amount of trust in someone to do it fairly.
And these days, I'd be more inclined to listen to nobel winners than the bush administration.
> To make a good story, you have to usually cut into the time you're actually playing the game (cut scenes, etc).
;)
Not always. Think back to Marathon. The terminals were part of the game, and were the major source of all the characterization. They were for the most part the "cutscenes" of the game, but they never EVER felt like one. Your mission info, the story line, the reasons the player should care about the story, everything, game from those simple text terminals. Finding a terminal was like a breath of fresh air, in the back of your head you were hoping THIS one would finally answer all the questions. But no, it just presented new problems.
Marathon was also amazing in the sense that it never really told you who you are. There were hints, which fans have since endlessly debated, but it left wiggle room for a player to assign his own values and virtues to the character he's playing. Marathon's sucessor in spirit, Halo, gives a decent example of how easy the balance is to screw up. Don't get me wrong I had a blast running through Halo the first time, but it is nowhere near the caliber of what Marathon was.
It's quite simple to summarize: Games cannot be missions with an obvious point A to point B. Even if there is only one route through a map, the player needs to be able to feel like he's charting his own course and cannot be aware of what is around the next corner. Marathon did that, Halo did not (well except in that map where you first discovered the Flood, that was an amazing mission).
Games these days are too commonly a narrative. It permits you do take care of the details of running from room to room but the story always tells you who you are and what is going to happen in well defined doses. The mark of a great game is one that does this, but doesn't reveal that it is doing so to the player. Games have to leave the "cutscenes" to dictating the problems of the current situation, and leave the resolutions to the actual play. If a game finds itself finishing a mission with a "tells all" narrative, it has failed.
IMO that is.
> IIRC, the Amiga did too.
;)
Yes, it did. That rhythmic clicking as it probed for a disk haunts me to this day.
On the A500 it wasn't too bad but on the big boxy 2000 it was like someone kicking off a bass drum every few seconds.
5 inches is actually an inch and a half shorter than what I was told the average was back in junior high. This came from suppposedly authoritive information during sex ed.
I bet there's some fun conspiracy out there, some Illuminati-type group of small dicked educators who are trying to bolster their self image by reporting a lower average.
And done it all in realtime? What games were these? ;)
Not being argumentive, just curious. I wanna check 'em out.
Dunno if we're playing the same Halo or this isn't what you were suggesting, but the Halo engine doesn't look a "few years old" to me at all.
;')
At least in my case, Halo has only run slow due to poor hardware or bad drivers. These days (due soley to buying a dx9 capable card) I can run the game today with all options revved to max, albeit at an 800x600 resolution. The game looks stunning. Metal surfaces shimmer, headlights paint bump-mapped patches on walls they pass over, tank rounds spew dirt into the air, and sunlight glimmers through the tree leaves.
This stuff hasn't been done before, has it? Halo is cutting edge stuff. There are ALWAYS people who have problems with the latest and greatest, because their computer isn't.
Granted I'm speaking from a PC user viewpoint so I'll admit there's probably problems with the Mac release that I'm entirely ignorant of. But the engine itself is not "3 years old" like some prefer to claim.
It is 1 month old.
> Now come on, this computer is less than a year old
> and yet it wont play a game that was made a few
> years ago.
But it wasn't made a few years ago. Sure, it released on the xbox a ways back, but as far as your mac is concerned it's a brand new cutting edge game.
It has rendering features that prior to the mac/pc release, did not exist in any other game. It uses features that Doom3 and HL2 are heavily reliant on.. neither of which you can buy yet.
That's not to say there aren't some speed issues, the next update of PC Halo promises some real advances in efficiency. But mac/pc Halo is only an "old" game by virtue of it's artistic content.
It's a computerized device, right?
;)
Think like a real geek man, just reverse engineer and hack it.. make a tamagotchi "virus" that spreads over the infared port.
Probably pretty simple to explain away.. they know that a common way of obfuscating emails is to put "NOSPAM" or something to that effect in the address.
;)
So when they parse their address list, rather than writing a good filter that gets rid of the 'NOSPAM' field, they just drop any address that has 'SPAM' in it.
Maybe they took one look at the regex manual and decided it was "too hard".
I know the game was always sort of a "sleeper" that never broke it big like heavy hitters such as Starcraft did, but Myth was still incredibly well done, and I've never come across a person who flat out didn't like it.
;)
It's strongest quality was mostly the fact that it cut out all the annoying resource gathering and just let you work on the strategy part of killing your enemies.
I was hoping the ideas it brought to the genre would catch on (I think maybe Sacrifice is the only game I've played since that comes close) but it never caught on.
Doesn't change that it was an awesome game though.. I would have replaced that stinker 'Age of Empires' with Myth on that list any day.
> many of the machines at Fermilab are admin'ed by physics postdocs and grad students.
Yes but you forget to mention the rabid (to their credit) security team the lab has. The sniffers they have set up are effective.
It usually takes them less than 24 hours to identify a machine that has traffic patterns beyond the norm, often within one or two hours they can blackhole a port if warranted and hunt down the owner of the machine.
Previously I would have called it suicide to operate a largely unfirewalled network at a site of this scale, but they really do do a good job at it.
> he probably did not even know that the computer was government owned
.gov suffix, that either speaks poorly of this lad's intelligence, or is not the case.
Considering every machine at the lab has a hostname with a
> unless the xbox can display 1600x1200 on any TV.
Doesn't really mean much, since it is in fact a "live" render. It's not like they set up that scene in blender and set the renderer lose on it for a few hours.
That image was created in real time, all those effects do in fact exist. The final resolution of the image is a bit of a non-issue.
I think it's more a comment on how something humans were all patting themselves on the back for developing, plants have been doing for millions of years.
That's how I read it anyways.
> So when you go outside you grab your ear-muffs in preference to your coat do you?
Actually you'd be surprised. I'm not advocating anyone tossing their coat aside and just wearing a hat all day but the effect is definetly there.. wearing something over your ears has a big impact on how warm you feel.
I suspect it's mostly psychological though, because despite how you feel your body would still be susceptible to hypothermia.
Growing up in alaska, I would often just put on a hat when going outside briefly and didn't feel like dressing up.. usually to drag garbage to the curb or starting a car to warm it up.
Due to an unwillingness to shell out more cash for what I feel should have been part of the original product, I never bought the rush hour expansion. I did buy SC4 though, the promise of all the new transportation methos drew me in like a moth to flame.
Unfortuneatley, the traffic model blew ass. There were a multitude of problems when trying to ferry people between different regions, sims were too stupid to take a highway unless it fell on their shortest path algorhythm (they would prefer to take narrow local streets even if the highway would have been faster), and don't even get me started on the braindead decision for the only way to have "busy" commercial zones was to have red traffic right next to them (duh?!). Some of the simulator variables were odd too, wasn't traffic modelled as if all cars were moving at 30mph or somesuch?
Did rush hour really fix this at all? Reading the feature list, it just seemed like a stop gap measure bolted on to try and cover some of the flaws.
I know traffic is hard and Maxis did a decent job with the game, but the flaws made it damn near impossible to build a "real" city.. invariably the game turned into a micromanagement nightmare as you bulldozed roads to try and convince the sims to take more intelligent paths. Almost all my cities wound up being groups of individual "pods" that used limited routes to funnel sims into more desireable travel modes.
I'm not a city planner, but this approach mimics no real world city I've ever witnessed.
> Should there be an exemption for folks who have legitimate use? Sure.
Screw that, there should be an exemption for the folks who made the software. I'm not a fan of big government but if this currency detection really is just a CYA policy then perhaps a law protecting software houses from prosecution is in order. Provided said company is not "supporting" the crime in question of course (aka Napster).
We don't take gun companies to court do we? Automobile makers don't get fined when a drunk driver kills someone do they? Why should software companies be awarded the rare worry of being slapped for what their customers do?
Products (such as LEGO) are not vampires. Staking them does not kill them, and in the business world it actually means the opposite.
;)
Been marathon watching the latest Buffy DVD release too much?
just tie some twine to the tail of the space shuttle as it goes up, of course.
;(
Then you tie a slightly heavier cable to the twine, and have the guys on the space shuttle start tugging it up.
Once that's up, tie an even heavier cable to the second cable.. and start tugging. Repeat until you have a properly sized cable in place for your elevator.
I was gonna pitch this idea to NASA a few years ago but they never called me back.