IMBD is Amazon. Amazon certainly won't be removing its presence from CA. While I agree that California doing its best to make the whole state unemployed, they will fail in this case.
What I'm saying is: this is a valuable attack surface for someone building a botnet. If most people use the GUI, then it won't matter that the scripts are clean if the GUI is dirty (obviously, just because a window that looks like a command prompt running scripts is displayed, that means nothing if it's all presented by the GUI).
There have been attempts to hijack Linux distros before, and hijacking Windows update is a key prize.
The attacker assured me "the GUI is really just a front end for some scripts". The attacker assured me the screen I see is "a standard command prompt where you can simply look at the screen and see its just calling the MSFT update servers".
This is the risk here. Has it been audited by security professionals? Do they have a process in place to discover that their code repo was hacked? The same applies to Linux distros, of course, where there have been issues (though few have been discovered).
To be fair, they're probably as secure as the MS bits they're built on, but still it's overall a sorry state of affairs.
I'd think it's better to not be resorting to violence to resolve a violation of social protocol.
You seem to be missing the entire point here. It's not about what you think. It's about what the guys at that bar you walk into wearing a camera think. And they're not reading Slashdot.
But they do act predictably. If you go out in a storm with no rain gear, you're going to get soaked. Don't do that. If you insist on bringing a camera around people who don't think that's reasonable, it's not going to end well. Don't do that.
How you feel about that is about as important as how you feel about the weather.
Of course, you lose the security updates if you do that too. Whether that's massively important to you depends on how often you run executables downloaded from the Internet, and what TCP/IP services you run on your computer.
Your security beliefs are about 10 years out of date, unless you consider JS to be an "executable downloaded from the Internet". Almost all malware targeted at home computers is "no click required": mostly malicious JS, but occasionally PDF, or even jpg (remember what that was a joke?), served via ad networks.
So "whether that's massively important to you" depends on whether the machine is used to visit any web sites that serve ads, unless you completely disable JS.
no security updates might be the better of two evils, especially if you don't use IE or Edge
Is MS combining OS and browser updates (and Office?) here? Or is it only the OS updates in the cumulative patch? (Pretty sure the browser and Office patches are regularly rolled into cumulative updates already, but independent ones).
2K had it right, no question. I never went down the Win95 road - I just used NT 4.0 as that was a very modern server OS for home use back in the day (when Linux was Slackware on 32 floppies). But Win2K gave NT a real UI, and a wide selection of games worked.
Somewhat unrelated, but how do you buy BackupExec these days? It seems to have moved to a new owner (again - I think this is the 9th), and they don't seem to be selling it directly, or even have pricing info.
Yes - IME you're totally screwed if your network stack is hosed, or you accidentally have the same IP address or hostname as another machine. What a mess.
So how do we know WSUS Offline isn't primarily a malware vector? This seems like the very best way to build a botnet: hijack Windows Update. Or, even if they're honest, what a target!
MS has clearly lost its way when 3rd-party Windows distros start looking like the best security practice.
You'll find that, throughout most societies, throughout most of history, blatantly breaking core social expectations will get your ass kicked. Complaining about it to the police after the fact (who likely won't care or act) won't change that.
limited participation blockchain is redundant because the trust is already established by the exclusivity of the system.
Imagine that not all of the participants turn out to be honest. Or, imagine this is finance, and 0% of the participants are honest.
Majority-signing works well when the majority are honest, even if a substantial minority are not. It also works well when everyone is dishonest, but very unlikely to collude. This is solving a different problem than Bitcoin tries to solve. This is an implementation of "mutual auditing", not an alternative currency.
The thing that establishes trust on bitcoin is that no one miner can easily own a large portion of the compute power on the system,
Perhaps. I think it's possible the NSA has the compute power to take over bitcoin, After all the NSA had "ASIC miners" for at least 7 years before BTC existed. (You don't think the NSA published SHA-2 before they had ASICs, do you?)
Human population has expanded tremendously in the last part of those 800,000 years, and all of us consume oxygen.
It's worth remembering that Earth's total biomass is: * 99.9% Prokaryote bacteria * 0.1% Other (mostly plankton)
The tiny remainder that's not bacteria or plankton is mostly fish. Humans, sure, are reasonably successful within what's left over, but so are cattle, termites, ants, and krill.
In other words: They are doing something completely different, but still call it "blockchain" because that's the current buzzword.
A blockchain with limited participants is still a blockchain. It's as trustworthy as those participants. If the participants all trust one another, or trust the system to protect them from the others, it serves its purpose, even if they are in fact pathologically lying shitsacks like financial companies.
I'm dubious of the "editing", but if it's really just new records that say "this record replaces record XYZ", i.e., it's still write-only except by convention, that's fine too.
Reminds be a bit of what "cloud" should have stood for until it became a generic moniker for simple online storage.
Not sure what you mean here. Sure lots of marketeers talk about "stored in the cloud", but most often that does mean "stored with AWS or Azure, behind the scenes". And there's plenty of "cloud computing" too: more and more distributed scientific jobs are moving that way, as well as naturally-distributed work like animation rendering. Heck, it's the new fad for small software companies to build and test jobs in the cloud.
I have 0 ethical issues pirating content when the company won't take my money. Give me a (practical) way to pay for that thing I want to watch, either directly or through my Netflix sub, and I do. Companies are (finally) wising up to this, and beginning the fight against the legacy of region-specific distribution deals, culture of delaying release in some formats, and so on.
Amazon is greedy for being unwilling to properly ship potentially dangerous goods.
Given this only happened 4 times, I'd bet it's just a process enforcement issue - that is, they have a process to prevent it, but no real incentive to police it.
Therefore, a 60,000 Euro fine is hardly enough to discourage the behavior.
Maybe - it's they're only doing it negligently, that's enough incentive to actually follow the process they (I'm guesing) already have. Or to just fly all the explosives only on the new planes they bought. One of those.
Supreme Court decides what is and what is not constitutional so you see, when you say those things are "unconstitutional", you're simply wrong.
Yes, yes, I know you want a system of government where the voting of the ignorant unwashed peasants is just theater, and a few select royalty actually make the laws. And, congrats, that's basically what we have.
Most of those "excepts": also blatantly unconstitutional. Convenient for the state. But unconstitutional. (The "enemy combatant" thing is fine constitutionally, BTW, except when applied to US citizens, where it's blatantly unconstitutional.)
Except your right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment is ignored if you are given the death penalty in Texas
Not cruel and unusual, merely punishment.
Oh hell yeah, there are exceptions. Those exceptions are what keep us a civil society.
If any of them are, in fact, needed for a civil society, there is a process for amending the constitution. It has been amended a bunch of times, after all. Ignoring it is not the process.
I'm curious. When you "hold the totalitarians at bay", who do you think you're gonna be shooting? Police? Members of the military? Interesting.
Well, two scenarios. For the more likely, have you ever read about Kristallnacht to at least this depth. It wasn't guys in uniform. Hitler didn't officially declare it (but he still declared it cleary enough). Fascism starts with Brownshirts, and the whole point is that they aren't officially part of the government.
For the less likely, if some state government was actually stupid enough to send cops (or worse, troops) around to confiscate guns, it would be a total shitshow. A few recent attempts to register long arms have been wholesale ignored by the people, and the states were wise enough to ignore that. Hopefully, we'll never forget that the last time the governor of Massachusetts sent troops in to disarm the people, it led to bloodshed and ended a day and a half later with the troops driven from the field and 15,000 armed and organized citizens in "a siege line extending from Chelsea, around the peninsulas of Boston and Charlestown, to Roxbury, effectively surrounding Boston on three sides". A year and a half later not just the governor, but 100% of the government had been replaced. But some people are determined to ignore history, so you never know.
And a broken ceramic plate can be scalpel sharp. Mayan obsidian blades can be sharper than it's possible to sharpen steel. The fancy new ones are just less sharp and more durable, but if just you wanted a knife for use in one attack that had no metal, that's literally stone age technology.
Slashdot Mirror
16-bit @ 44 KHz was "good enough" for the average Joe.
And by that you mean "mathematically proven to capture everything the human ear can hear". But I'm sure your cables are danceable.
IMBD is Amazon. Amazon certainly won't be removing its presence from CA. While I agree that California doing its best to make the whole state unemployed, they will fail in this case.
What I'm saying is: this is a valuable attack surface for someone building a botnet. If most people use the GUI, then it won't matter that the scripts are clean if the GUI is dirty (obviously, just because a window that looks like a command prompt running scripts is displayed, that means nothing if it's all presented by the GUI).
There have been attempts to hijack Linux distros before, and hijacking Windows update is a key prize.
Fungi it the great unknown. It could be as much as 25%. It's hard to find a good overall breakdown, even of just plankton.
What's scary is that among mammals, and land-based verterbrates overall, humans and their domestic animals are the majority of the biomass.
Yes, but my whole point is that's like 0.01% of biomass. Don't confuse the familiar with the important.
Add our machines, which an order of magnitude more active than we are.
Crops are similar, though they go the other way with oxygen. But even at 10x, it's still a rounding error.
The attacker assured me "the GUI is really just a front end for some scripts". The attacker assured me the screen I see is "a standard command prompt where you can simply look at the screen and see its just calling the MSFT update servers".
This is the risk here. Has it been audited by security professionals? Do they have a process in place to discover that their code repo was hacked? The same applies to Linux distros, of course, where there have been issues (though few have been discovered).
To be fair, they're probably as secure as the MS bits they're built on, but still it's overall a sorry state of affairs.
I'd think it's better to not be resorting to violence to resolve a violation of social protocol.
You seem to be missing the entire point here. It's not about what you think. It's about what the guys at that bar you walk into wearing a camera think. And they're not reading Slashdot.
But they do act predictably. If you go out in a storm with no rain gear, you're going to get soaked. Don't do that. If you insist on bringing a camera around people who don't think that's reasonable, it's not going to end well. Don't do that.
How you feel about that is about as important as how you feel about the weather.
I prefer not to be carried away, thinking "but I was right" as I lose consciousness. Better to just not be a titanic asshole in the first place.
Of course, you lose the security updates if you do that too. Whether that's massively important to you depends on how often you run executables downloaded from the Internet, and what TCP/IP services you run on your computer.
Your security beliefs are about 10 years out of date, unless you consider JS to be an "executable downloaded from the Internet". Almost all malware targeted at home computers is "no click required": mostly malicious JS, but occasionally PDF, or even jpg (remember what that was a joke?), served via ad networks.
So "whether that's massively important to you" depends on whether the machine is used to visit any web sites that serve ads, unless you completely disable JS.
no security updates might be the better of two evils, especially if you don't use IE or Edge
Is MS combining OS and browser updates (and Office?) here? Or is it only the OS updates in the cumulative patch? (Pretty sure the browser and Office patches are regularly rolled into cumulative updates already, but independent ones).
2K had it right, no question. I never went down the Win95 road - I just used NT 4.0 as that was a very modern server OS for home use back in the day (when Linux was Slackware on 32 floppies). But Win2K gave NT a real UI, and a wide selection of games worked.
Somewhat unrelated, but how do you buy BackupExec these days? It seems to have moved to a new owner (again - I think this is the 9th), and they don't seem to be selling it directly, or even have pricing info.
Yes - IME you're totally screwed if your network stack is hosed, or you accidentally have the same IP address or hostname as another machine. What a mess.
So how do we know WSUS Offline isn't primarily a malware vector? This seems like the very best way to build a botnet: hijack Windows Update. Or, even if they're honest, what a target!
MS has clearly lost its way when 3rd-party Windows distros start looking like the best security practice.
Wow, not reading TFA is expected, not reading TFS is common, but not reading the post you reply to?
You'll find that, throughout most societies, throughout most of history, blatantly breaking core social expectations will get your ass kicked. Complaining about it to the police after the fact (who likely won't care or act) won't change that.
limited participation blockchain is redundant because the trust is already established by the exclusivity of the system.
Imagine that not all of the participants turn out to be honest. Or, imagine this is finance, and 0% of the participants are honest.
Majority-signing works well when the majority are honest, even if a substantial minority are not. It also works well when everyone is dishonest, but very unlikely to collude. This is solving a different problem than Bitcoin tries to solve. This is an implementation of "mutual auditing", not an alternative currency.
The thing that establishes trust on bitcoin is that no one miner can easily own a large portion of the compute power on the system,
Perhaps. I think it's possible the NSA has the compute power to take over bitcoin, After all the NSA had "ASIC miners" for at least 7 years before BTC existed. (You don't think the NSA published SHA-2 before they had ASICs, do you?)
Human population has expanded tremendously in the last part of those 800,000 years, and all of us consume oxygen.
It's worth remembering that Earth's total biomass is:
* 99.9% Prokaryote bacteria
* 0.1% Other (mostly plankton)
The tiny remainder that's not bacteria or plankton is mostly fish. Humans, sure, are reasonably successful within what's left over, but so are cattle, termites, ants, and krill.
If a person wants or expects privacy, I believe that the onus is upon them to take measures to sufficient degree
They do. They beat the crap out of glassholes. Sufficient measures thus taken, effective privacy is restored.
)there's no rational basis to be worried about it
Says you. Most people see it differently.
When I want privacy, I go somewhere private. I step outside, however... and it's fair game.
Says you. Most people see it differently.
In other words: They are doing something completely different, but still call it "blockchain" because that's the current buzzword.
A blockchain with limited participants is still a blockchain. It's as trustworthy as those participants. If the participants all trust one another, or trust the system to protect them from the others, it serves its purpose, even if they are in fact pathologically lying shitsacks like financial companies.
I'm dubious of the "editing", but if it's really just new records that say "this record replaces record XYZ", i.e., it's still write-only except by convention, that's fine too.
Reminds be a bit of what "cloud" should have stood for until it became a generic moniker for simple online storage.
Not sure what you mean here. Sure lots of marketeers talk about "stored in the cloud", but most often that does mean "stored with AWS or Azure, behind the scenes". And there's plenty of "cloud computing" too: more and more distributed scientific jobs are moving that way, as well as naturally-distributed work like animation rendering. Heck, it's the new fad for small software companies to build and test jobs in the cloud.
His (and my) cost of "TV" went up 25%, from $8 to $10, when Netflix's grandfathering ended.
So you have no ethical issues pirating content?
I have 0 ethical issues pirating content when the company won't take my money. Give me a (practical) way to pay for that thing I want to watch, either directly or through my Netflix sub, and I do. Companies are (finally) wising up to this, and beginning the fight against the legacy of region-specific distribution deals, culture of delaying release in some formats, and so on.
Google would likely to keep the employees, and in a few months announce that GTwitter will join the 60 or so services in the Google graveyard.
Microsoft would likely keep the employees at firs, destroy the product through mismanagement, then close any remote offices and fire anyone there.
Verizon would likely fire everyone immediately, and then bill them each $9000 for data overages.
Amazon is greedy for being unwilling to properly ship potentially dangerous goods.
Given this only happened 4 times, I'd bet it's just a process enforcement issue - that is, they have a process to prevent it, but no real incentive to police it.
Therefore, a 60,000 Euro fine is hardly enough to discourage the behavior.
Maybe - it's they're only doing it negligently, that's enough incentive to actually follow the process they (I'm guesing) already have. Or to just fly all the explosives only on the new planes they bought. One of those.
Supreme Court decides what is and what is not constitutional so you see, when you say those things are "unconstitutional", you're simply wrong.
Yes, yes, I know you want a system of government where the voting of the ignorant unwashed peasants is just theater, and a few select royalty actually make the laws. And, congrats, that's basically what we have.
Most of those "excepts": also blatantly unconstitutional. Convenient for the state. But unconstitutional. (The "enemy combatant" thing is fine constitutionally, BTW, except when applied to US citizens, where it's blatantly unconstitutional.)
Except your right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment is ignored if you are given the death penalty in Texas
Not cruel and unusual, merely punishment.
Oh hell yeah, there are exceptions. Those exceptions are what keep us a civil society.
If any of them are, in fact, needed for a civil society, there is a process for amending the constitution. It has been amended a bunch of times, after all. Ignoring it is not the process.
I'm curious. When you "hold the totalitarians at bay", who do you think you're gonna be shooting? Police? Members of the military? Interesting.
Well, two scenarios. For the more likely, have you ever read about Kristallnacht to at least this depth. It wasn't guys in uniform. Hitler didn't officially declare it (but he still declared it cleary enough). Fascism starts with Brownshirts, and the whole point is that they aren't officially part of the government.
For the less likely, if some state government was actually stupid enough to send cops (or worse, troops) around to confiscate guns, it would be a total shitshow. A few recent attempts to register long arms have been wholesale ignored by the people, and the states were wise enough to ignore that. Hopefully, we'll never forget that the last time the governor of Massachusetts sent troops in to disarm the people, it led to bloodshed and ended a day and a half later with the troops driven from the field and 15,000 armed and organized citizens in "a siege line extending from Chelsea, around the peninsulas of Boston and Charlestown, to Roxbury, effectively surrounding Boston on three sides". A year and a half later not just the governor, but 100% of the government had been replaced. But some people are determined to ignore history, so you never know.
And a broken ceramic plate can be scalpel sharp. Mayan obsidian blades can be sharper than it's possible to sharpen steel. The fancy new ones are just less sharp and more durable, but if just you wanted a knife for use in one attack that had no metal, that's literally stone age technology.