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User: SethJohnson

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  1. Re:malware = local on Backdoor Discovered In Netgear and Linkys Routers · · Score: 2

    If you can already infect inside computers, do you really need to hack the router?

    The first computer is compromised via email spam, spearfishing, drive-by browser vulnerability, etc. That computer is the beachhead for the attack on the router.

    The router is then used to compromise all the other computers on the network. DNS is the easiest way. When the other users attempt to access URL's for Microsoft Outlook webmail, bank accounts, etc. the router misdirects them to fake websites that capture their login credentials or attempt drive-by browser exploits, etc.

  2. malware = local on Backdoor Discovered In Netgear and Linkys Routers · · Score: 5, Informative

    Attacking the router from inside the network is only a matter of infecting a computer inside the network.

    Then the compromised computer is used to modify the DNS settings.

    Then the whole network depending on the router to provide proper DNS is now visiting whatever hosts the attackers desire.

  3. Re:Glad I am not one of the crew on that ship... on Helicopter Rescue For All Passengers Aboard Antarctic Research Ship · · Score: 1

    Yeah, after watching that clip, I don't have a lot of sympathy for these folks. How about kill and eat the dog you've raised from a puppy and then come back and cry to us about missing a banana milkshake.

  4. Re:Glad I am not one of the crew on that ship... on Helicopter Rescue For All Passengers Aboard Antarctic Research Ship · · Score: 2

    Don't worry about the crew. They'll be fine. Getting stuck in the ice for weeks or months is par for the course down there. Seriously. This whole episode was only remotely newsworthy because they had a large number of passengers and perhaps not enough food for a long-term stay with comfortably-sized rations.

    I just read the book about Ernest Shackleton's voyage, and their epic journey really puts this stuck vessel in perspective. Dudes were in a wooden ship that got stuck in that ice and the hull was crushed. Those guys didn't make it back to England for 3 years, living on the ice in tents, sailing rowboats through incredibly rough seas, and doing it all with very crude clothes, tools, and equipment. The book is appropriately titled "Endurance" after the ship they set sail in.

  5. Re:News for Nerds? on Are Tablets Replacing Notebook Computers? (Video) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I thought exactly the same thing. It's like the staff at Slashdot don't recognize that its audience would collectively know a million times more about this topic than the goofball at "tabtimes.com" would.

    This kind of post is disrespectful to the audience. It's the kind of thing that drives it away and then you're left with mainstream audience who doesn't know crap about tablets. How profitable is advertising to them? Probably not as much as advertising to people who routinely configure Cisco routers or select cloud platforms for enterprise application deployments.

  6. Re:Methods, not intel on Former CIA/NSA Head: NSA Is "Infinitely" Weaker As a Result of Snowden's Leaks · · Score: 1

    Luckily for the NSA, the guardian hasn't said anything about specific operations or people involved.

    I think the Angela Merkel personal cellphone tap was a pretty specific operation. That seemed to be the "oh, shit!" moment for people worldwide.

  7. Guaranteed interview bait for Seattle on Ask Slashdot: Why So Hard Landing Interviews In Seattle Versus SoCal? · · Score: 1

    At the top of the resume, type these words exactly:

    "Objective: CEO position where I can eliminate Windows RT and Windows Phone from our product offerings."

  8. skeptic is writing season 5 of Walking Dead on Mathematical Model of Zombie Epidemics Reveals Two Types of Living-Dead Strains · · Score: 1

    Driving one of this into a hoard would simply shred the zombies. An even better effect would be the same kind of mechanism, but with the shaft horizontal and the weights spinning in the horizontal plane. Guaranteed to crush skulls.

    Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

  9. I take exception with you describing Bill Murray's showbiz career as dying. What other SNL cast member has had as many successful movie roles as Bill Murray? Nobody.

  10. Re:The end of an era. on John Carmack Leaves id Software · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wouldn't shock me to see him do a new start up company in the mobile games space and re-invest himself in Armadillo Aerospace again.

    Armadillo Aerospace lost the race for the SpaceX prize. It didn't develop any compelling intellectual property that set it much apart from the other commercial offerings in space travel, so it's become an also-ran. There are no plans for it to do much of anything unless another tycoon comes along and injects vast sums of cash. Carmack is done floating it with his own personal wealth.

    His new passion is Oculus Rift. He brings great momentum to that project.

    His presence at iD and Oculus probably became strained due to Oculus wanting to be platform & engine independent, while iD would obviously want priority compatibility built into Oculus for their engine.

  11. not speaking to the real issue on British Intelligence Responds To Slashdot About Man-in-Middle Attack · · Score: 2

    Trainee-

    You are an apologist for an overreach of which you don't seem to fully comprehend or appreciate.

    In the early days of these Snowden releases, Senator Nancy Pelosi represented your perspective. She downplayed the NSA programs saying there was full Congressional oversight and she had been aware of them through her briefings and they were ok.

    Every week she was asked by reporters, "Did you know about such-and-such, and did you approve of it?" Early on she answered "Yes" to these queries. But somewhere along the way before it was revealed the NSA had tapped Angela Merkel's personal cellphone, Senator Pelosi realized there was a lot she didn't know about. The NSA had played her and her peers for fools. Now Senator Pelosi doesn't field those questions from reporters about oversight and what she had approved.

    I predict as you learn more about the activities and programs of the NSA, you'll change your tune as well.

  12. Re:Great, now arrest em. on Atlanta Man Shatters Coast-to-Coast Driving Record, Averaging 98MPH · · Score: 1

    You're absolutely right. He picked a junker of a supercar. According to this article, the AMG CL55 is one of the fastest-depreciating automobiles available. Its starting price tag is $120,000, but with 115,000 miles on the clock, it probably cost less than $10,000 for the initial purchase.

  13. Re:So, in court .. on Atlanta Man Shatters Coast-to-Coast Driving Record, Averaging 98MPH · · Score: 1

    everything he's publicly said and displayed is freely admissible.

    It's also all recantable.

    There are many crimes for which a person may not be charged unless a police officer witnesses the act. Speeding is probably one of them.

  14. Re:Technology is hard and dangerous on Toyota's Killer Firmware · · Score: 5, Informative

    The metal is so much thicker on those old cars, we had to use a sledge hammer instead of a normal body work hammer to take the dent back out

    I apologize if I'm stating the obvious here...

    Most older products were over-built for durability because there were not methodologies for engineering minimum material for the required applications. Cars and other things were built with thicknesses of material that were tested and known to work. To reduce that thickness risked approaching an unknown threshold for failure. Trial-and-error was used where budgets allowed to reduce material, but this was an expensive process and in most cases the manufacturer chose to overbuild.

    In more recent years, computer modeling has enabled engineers to load test structural designs so that the product can be built with the minimum amount of material required to satisfy the desired application. This benefits the producer, the consumer, and the scrap yard, while delivering overall efficiency.

  15. Re:Only one more step left... on Dell Is Now a Private Company Again · · Score: 2

    4. Or he has colluded with Icahn to depress the stock price such that the company is valued less than what he can get by chopping it and selling the components off. Between that number and $24.9 billion lies his profit.

  16. Re:Not bad on Dell Is Now a Private Company Again · · Score: 1

    Rudy speaks the truth here.

    I'll even take it a few steps forward. Michael Dell has probably already collected a whole list of price quotes from entities offering to buy up these assets and that page of numbers adds up to at least a dollar more than $24.9 billion. He's going to slash jobs galore, then sell the valuable parts on Craigslist or Ebay.

  17. the cloud killed hosting providers on Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Complete Hosting Providers? · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Consolidation has killed the hosting business that you describe.

    The big players like hostgator and godaddy have snapped up the business that used to be distributed across thousands of web hosting businesses. The cost of providing support has made it impossible for the smaller players to compete with them.

    And then there's the cloud. Companies like Digital Ocean and Ram Node are offering complete virtual server packages for the same price as a web host only used to provide (~$5.00 / month). Not only can you host an unlimited number of domains, you can run your own email, ftp, proxy, et. al. You can even host bittorrents or streaming radio stations.

    More functionality at the same price. They have no way to compete other than to radically change their service offerings.

  18. Re:Long-time, no chat on To Beat Spam Filters, Look Like A Spammer? · · Score: 1

    I apologize for the weak humor in that comment. I don't have a mySpace account, either, but it seems that all mySpace users would by default be connected with a guy named 'Tom' who was one of the founders of the company. 'Tom' was friends with everyone on the service.

  19. Long-time, no chat on To Beat Spam Filters, Look Like A Spammer? · · Score: 1

    Tom,

    Hey, it's been a while. Remember me? We were friends on MySpace a few years back. I've moved on to a new social service. Do you want to join me on Friendster?

    Take care,

    Seth

  20. original unlikely driveable on land on Elon Musk Making a Working Version of James Bond's Submersible Car · · Score: 3, Informative

    The original submarine that Musk bought was a lightweight shell that housed a scuba diver inside. It was not watertight. It was propelled by battery-powered propellers controlled by the diver. This is why the windows were covered with the louvers- so the audience couldn't see that James and his lady weren't just sitting inside the car breathing air.

    Musk is going to have to create an entirely separate construction if he wants something that can withstand the torque of the Tesla drivetrain and support passengers, etc. It will be easier starting with a Lotus Esprit and then making it into a watertight submersible than the other way around.

    I much rather see billionaires spend their money on pursuits like this than building superyachts to park in Monaco. Kudos to Musk!

  21. Re:Who wants email hosted by Federal Government? on Brazil Announces Secure Email To Counter US Spying · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, let's suppose SERPRO has a very generous $50 million available to spare to this kind of stuff. That's 200x less than NSA's budget. In short, whatever SERPRO manages to do the NSA will be able to break in a matter of weeks, if not days.

    No disrespect intended, but I suspect you hastily assembled this post from off-the-shelf thoughts.

    Crypto and security in general do not have a $1=$1 relationship to the resources required to defeat it. Even in the physical world, most padlocks are cheaper than the bolt crackers or angle grinders required to cut them. In terms of cryptography, a budget of $50 million could EASILY produce a system that would cost the NSA $TRILLIONS to break. I highly doubt an NSA-defeating system would cost $50 million to build from scratch.

  22. Re:A big problem on D-Link Router Backdoor Vulnerability Allows Full Access To Settings · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Certainly, DNS would be a pretty quick way to abuse all devices on the other side of the router. It might be detected when the owner verifies the settings themselves or watches their own network traffic and observes the DNS lookups hitting the wrong destination. It's likely that this would have set off red flags before now. Many anti-malware packages check for DNS redirections, for example.

    Being able to manipulate the router's config interface would allow an external entity the ability to upload a new firmware to the router. The new firmware would offer the attacker switches to flip at will that would enable packet sniffing of all traffic and man-in-the-middle SSL attacks. Organized crime / NSA (redundant to mention both, I know) seek no deeper capabilities than this.

    You bring up a great point of smaller establishments running WiFi on D-Link equipment. Perhaps their SSID's should be modified to read, "HACKED BY NSA - DO NOT USE!"

  23. Re:Dumber and dumber on Ford Showcases Self-Parking Car Technology · · Score: 2

    I would assume the same was said when our society developed the internal combustion engine and relegated horses out to pasture.

  24. Re:John McAfee's REAL Latest Project: on John McAfee's Latest Project: Shielding Against Surveillance · · Score: 1

    I agree with what you're saying here in relation to those reality tv shows. But out of respect to a true genius observer of culture, please refrain from comparing MacAfee to Hunter Thompson. Sure, they both abused drugs, but I wouldn't agree that MacAfee has the intellect that Thompson did in his heyday.

  25. Re: I do not understand why this is a story on Somebody Stole 7 Milliseconds From the Federal Reserve · · Score: 2

    If the person caught doing this wants to claim he did NOT have insider information, he'll have to explain how he managed to obtain the information prior to the information actually being released, regardless of when he executed the trade.

    In this country, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, not the defendant. In this situation, the trader could easily say that they prepared the trade in advance based on circumstantial evidence that convinced them to make the bet. The SEC would need to compile other information documenting the insider access. The timing of the trades is of little consequence without a supporting collection of evidence.