who wants to be the first to write an app that makes random requests to random
domains constantly so as to screw up their database?
a guy i know asked for something similar earlier today, but his request was...
My vision is a tool that you download a list of "categories" such as:
"pr0n", "web e-mail", "environmentalism", "news", "hacking", "mp3",
etc... and for each category there are thousands of URLs that are just
continuously requested
i modified some spiders i had lying around and came up with a script that does google queries for terms you specify and then follows the searches returned. here is the script. It currently does no error checking and i havent tested it that much, just wrote it this morning, but it could be easily modified to do random queries.
i wrote something that did random queries and created pages from that a few years ago. there are other people who've done similar, like JWZ's webcollage, which he also integrated into Xscreensaver, so running that screensaver will generate constant random traffic.
If you know beforehand that your sensor has a linear sensitivity to
light, but you're shooting for a logarithmic scale, then just apply a transformation to
i don't think that's the problem Reality Master 101 was referring to. i forget my terms and exact figures, but the general idea is like this:
let's say pure black is light level 0 and pure white is level 10. now if traditional film can capture the range from 2-8 then digital film captures 3-7, so digital provides less shadow detail and less highlight detail than traditional film.
Image sensors with Foveon X3 technology gather more light. In a mosaic sensor, each pixel collects only one color out of three, or roughly one-third of the light. The remaining two-thirds of incident light is absorbed by color filters and not used - which is a significant reduction in the efficiency of the pixels. Foveon X3 pixels maximize the use of light since all three colors are collected at each pixel.
Doesn't mention if this also means the range it captures is any greater (whats the technical term for that again?), but i'd like to have a camera that acts like ISO 3200.
Also, this technology has less artifacts because it does not need to do any interpolation. I think that the higher response rate will be a great benefit too; i use a nikon 990 and the wait after taking a shot is crazy. and if this technology helps prolong battery life (less computing, but the main drain is lcd anyways) i'm happier. or i will be once it's in a camera that costs less than $3000.
Personally, i'd love to have a lot more resolution so's i can crop like crazy when necessary. That and i like my Good photos printed out 20x30.
You still get the laser light show, but you might also get to use the drive.
instead of using the drive, how about writing a driver for that drive that interfaces to xmms or your soundcard. then have the platters spin and the head/arm move to the beat. paint the topmost platter with translucent glow in the dark colours.
or make yourself a physical load meter. mount it right to the front of your case. you might also want to cover the top platter with some optical illusions so that when it's spinning it looks wavy or something.
Joe (from the aforementioned laser ligth show) had previously been taping cd's to the drive and seeing how long it would take before one would go flying off, but i convinced him to stop that when a cd section wedged itself into the wall, close to my head.
Re:something tells me this idea is half-baked
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Details like all the careful craftsman work, most of which you wouldn't be able to see onscreen. But having those sorts of details helped
the ACTORS quite a bit. Many of the cast have commented on how much the sets seemed like real places instead of "just a set".
Not to knock LOTR (though i didnt think it was Spectacular, just good), but Blade Runner and 2001 (among others, these are the first i know that did this) both spent a lot of time creating an environment for the actors, not just the viewers; creating such an environment is not revolutionary to LOTR. Blade Runner featured newspapers and magazines with actual falsified articles in them, in locations unseen by the viewers and 2001 had fake futuristic brand names sewn into underwear, to name a couple of unseen details.
oh, and to keep this post on topic, Harrison Ford rocks. if they want E-II to be as good as the originals they need him in them. HARRISON FORD I LOVE YOU AND WANT TO HAVE YOUR BABY!!!!!
well, as long as you tell me you regret having done Six Days, Seven Nights.
I don't know of any high end RAID that uses 10 or 15K rpm drives. (not saying they don't exist, just that it isn't usual to do so) ... Those data centers are what (i'm guessing) 2% of companies need for IT support. The other 98% look for solutions that fit the problem within a certain budget.
Hi nice to meet you. I'm a sysadmin at a community college. Not that high a budget, y'know? Still, we use at least 10k scsi drives in everything we can, 15k for the ones that matter.
We make Good Use of these drives and if they were any slower i would be getting way way too many phone calls.
If you look at Dell's offerings (we buy a lot of dells here) in the server range, it's tough to find something that doesn't come with 10k scsi drives. I think their 350 is the only one that comes with IDE drives.
Going over to Sun's lineup, you'll see that their low-end desktop machines like their SunBlade 100 now have IDE drives in them but everything else has at least 10k scsi or fc drives.
I know plenty of people who run servers off of pc, IDE based hardware, but most of these are either personal sites of fellow geeks. My home mass storage unit has one of those nifty Promise FastTrack100 IDE RAID cards, but that's b/c i can't afford SCSI and the storage is only used by me (well, my friends too when they download my movies/mp3s, but scp'ing via my home net connection will in no way hammer the storage unit). Most server rooms i've been to have the dells or similar equipment with SCSI in them, even the really shitty server rooms with really shitty boxes, those people still use scsi cards & drives.
Of course you're right about cost and use, but in most environments it is essential to plan for the future. Buying more or faster disk than we currently need might seem silly now but sometimes growth occurs inversely proportionate to budget - i'm already regretting not having taken larger bites when i could of b/c some of our servers are becoming seriously underpowered and i dont know if our current budget will let us purchase what we need (but i bet i coulda swung for more when i first bought the server in question).
if they were at war with said country using hardware they supplied, it's better to fight them and have casualties than to lose weapons trade
definitely.
unless i'm a stragetist for a country that is completely self sufficient then i'm going to want to be on good trading relationships with all the countries i need shit from and not have to resort to "oh we sold you the good planes, please keep giving us oil"
plus the revenue from selling abroad is quite valuable - you can't win wars when you're broke.
Really it's no different than a "killswitch"-> By refusing to provide replacement parts
having defective equipment is very different from a trade embargo.
Iran should have realised they needed to stock pile parts or not have been dependant on that equipment.
Trade Embargoes and their effects are the reasons fro some rather great wars - deffective equpiment are reasons for political tensions and possible trade embargo repercussions.
but rather it'd be subtle -> Gosh darnit the amraam
people make livings off of investigating why one side lost a battle/war and will get mighty suspicious when one side's planes all fall apart while the other sides don't. then they'll wonder if it really was maintenance, training, etc. it's a big gamble to say that they'll eventually believe it was due to incompetency and not malicious acts (gee, those planes never fell apart during trainings or skirmishes with other nations, only against the States...)
Then again, if the backdoors were only used at precise moments, in a manner similar to decrypted information during WWII, then it would be feasible to give other nations defective equipment. But it's still a really big gamble - it's a very different thing to say "we broke YOUR codes" from "we broke into OUR equipment that we sold you b/c it sucks"
list of computer events throughout the world?
on
Million Man LAN
·
· Score: 1
Is there any composite list of computer events throughtout the world?
In a couple weeks i'm going to visit Boston for a few days, in June i'll be driving through the west of the U.S.A. and in the fall i'll be travelling throughout latin america. It would be nice to have a composite list of events and happenings of interest to computer geeks, including things like Defcon, Dreamhack, Burning Man, MacWorld Expo, YAPC etc. etc.
...until everyone you could ever care to give your card to has one of these...
and a cuecat to scan in any url/email address from stuff we buy, and a webtv that will auto-get information on stuff on the teevee, and a wearable computer to scan in the billboards we look at and monitor the covnersations we hear, radio stations we listen to, etc for those funny, non-momorable urls.
Sure google will help me find the number one pants manufacturer in terms of marketting, but what's an upstart with an immemorable name to do?
[frisco@host1 frisco]$ uptime
8:35am up 35 days, 26 min, 1 user, load average: 2.02, 2.04, 2.10
[frisco@host1 frisco]$ uname -a
Linux host1 2.4.9-13smp #1 SMP Tue Oct 30 19:57:16 EST 2001 i686 unknown
It's a (mostly) default RH 7.2 install - shouldn't that be asking for trouble? - yet hasn't rebooted since i did some disk rearranging (couldn't afford hot swap on my home machine; yes i do that much processing on my home machine). Load average on this machine is generally at 2, sometimes gets up to 20+ when things go awry.
checking the other machines at work, i see
[frisco@host2 frisco]$ uname -a
Linux host2 2.4.3-12smp #1 SMP Fri Jun 8 14:38:50 EDT 2001 i686 unknown
[frisco@host2 frisco]$ uptime
8:26am up 68 days, 17:04, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
this machine regularly sees 30+ users login at once and run 30+ instances of a web server and have those 30+ people do database/web development on it (it's a student machine so given the time right now its load is low). last reboot was someone trying to fix network issues the wrong way.
We have 2.4 kernels in a dual boot lab which we have trouble with, but that's mostly b/c of the other side of the dual boot. There are also other machines of various configurations running 2.4 here w/o problems.
Anyways, there's your SMP systems with some load on distribution releases of 2.4. Granted, the load isn't 24/7 serving 100+ users each second, but it is there.
Of course that doesn't mean anything save YMMV and that with the multitude of hardware configurations out there, some will work fine and some won't; stories about well-working 2.4 kernels abound, as do stories about 2.4 kernels that suck.
translations into, spanish; then to english, using the fish, we arrive at:
An anonymous program of reading put under connected a PC that fits in its groove
of estereofonia of the car. Spendy in $1k is a bit, but its obtained CD/DVD,
PCMCIA, USB, keyboard, Mic, earpieces, VGA, more. And in addition to being
driven by its car, also it has constructed in GPS. Lots of ideas that cut here
interesting for the people whom it prefers to pass more time in its then cars I;)
It would seem that my car can learn to read for only $1000, and that by learning to read my car can gain a bunch of computer gear too.
MQ was just one example - it *always* happens like this and the PHB's never learn - they still want to pay someone big bucks for nothing.
For me the best was Blackboard (i work at an educational institute).
Someone ordered this prearranged package of a Dell w/ linux preinstalled and paid the extra points for someone to come out and install the hardware, then someone to install the blackboard software. It was a really big important project which required me to work over the holidays (this is at an edu, which is normally closed around xmas).
First the hardware installer. He comes out, opens the box, removes the equipment, plugs everything in, verifies it boots up, then leaves. it was around $1500 for 10 minutes of work.
Then i proceeded to fix up the install - as i recall it was a default 6.2 install with the words "DELL" added here and there - and to go through some stuff blackboard had sent me (make sure mysql, apache, some perl modules are installed on the system).
Next comes the blackboard installer. He sits down at the keyboard and says, "oh, it's a linux system, i'm not very good at that, why don't you do the typing". He hands me a sheet of instructions of what he's supposed to do - at the top is install apache, mysql, some perl modules (ah, that was *his* job) and then download the blackboard package and install that. Takes me about 15 minutes of typing/waiting then everything's done.
"Gee, that was easy" the guy says and leaves. He gets another $1500 for watching over me as i typed.
which checks your Accept_Language HTTP header to see if the primary language is one that babelfish can handle, and if it is redirects you to the bablefish translation of the page, otherwise to the english version.
we must eliminate the biggest boundary of them all - language.
...ask you up front what country you are coming from and then send you to the respective home page
Set your preferred default language in your web browser. Have companies' websites check this first. Netscape, IE, Konqueror, lynx and others already send an Accept-Language header in their web requests.
Determining the language a person wants is a problem with a solution that already exists; no need using ip-geolocation to develop a Rube Goldberg style solution.
Umm...how exactly did you notice this? Were your customer's passwords stored clear-text? Umm...by the way...where was it that you worked, again?
the user calls you up, you ask them for their login, and instead they give you their password.
the user calls you up and immediately starts telling you everything about themselves, including their dog's bladder problems and their password.
the user has tried to login in and since they were having problems, they switched their login with their password... which is then recorded in the logfiles.
Those are the first few ways which come to mind, all of which happen to me on a regular basis; the only time i store the password in clear text is when we send out the original account password.
i think passwords should at least be used in a manner similar to firewall dmz's - that is, one set for the internal servers, one set for the borderline, and one set for external servers (or, servers you have sole root on, servers you share root on, servers you dont have root on). But preferably every acount you have that matters should have a different password than the last
the last thing i want is for someone to be able to post on slashdot as me just because they cracked my credit card password! oh, the horrors!
For me, I use strings of characters based on a keyboard shape. Example: gfhbt makes a sort of star on your keyboard. I add some punctuation in there too of course. You can quickly learn a sort of muscle memory of the movement you make to type it. Doubtless now someone will post explaining how crackers beat this one.
no but, what happens when you move to a dvorak keyboard?!? or a twiddler?!?
my passwords used to be pseudo-anagrams for sentences i could remember, with characters and numbers substituted all around, like !wKP5dhr (no weak password here). Lately i've been randomly generating passwords and figuring out what they meant afterwards. Your gfhbt example looks like "Go Frodo the HoBbiT" to me.
Slashdot Mirror
a guy i know asked for something similar earlier today, but his request was...
My vision is a tool that you download a list of "categories" such as: "pr0n", "web e-mail", "environmentalism", "news", "hacking", "mp3", etc... and for each category there are thousands of URLs that are just continuously requested
i modified some spiders i had lying around and came up with a script that does google queries for terms you specify and then follows the searches returned. here is the script. It currently does no error checking and i havent tested it that much, just wrote it this morning, but it could be easily modified to do random queries.
i wrote something that did random queries and created pages from that a few years ago. there are other people who've done similar, like JWZ's webcollage, which he also integrated into Xscreensaver, so running that screensaver will generate constant random traffic.
i don't think that's the problem Reality Master 101 was referring to. i forget my terms and exact figures, but the general idea is like this:
let's say pure black is light level 0 and pure white is level 10. now if traditional film can capture the range from 2-8 then digital film captures 3-7, so digital provides less shadow detail and less highlight detail than traditional film.
Image sensors with Foveon X3 technology gather more light. In a mosaic sensor, each pixel collects only one color out of three, or roughly one-third of the light. The remaining two-thirds of incident light is absorbed by color filters and not used - which is a significant reduction in the efficiency of the pixels. Foveon X3 pixels maximize the use of light since all three colors are collected at each pixel.
Doesn't mention if this also means the range it captures is any greater (whats the technical term for that again?), but i'd like to have a camera that acts like ISO 3200.
Also, this technology has less artifacts because it does not need to do any interpolation. I think that the higher response rate will be a great benefit too; i use a nikon 990 and the wait after taking a shot is crazy. and if this technology helps prolong battery life (less computing, but the main drain is lcd anyways) i'm happier. or i will be once it's in a camera that costs less than $3000.
Personally, i'd love to have a lot more resolution so's i can crop like crazy when necessary. That and i like my Good photos printed out 20x30.
instead of using the drive, how about writing a driver for that drive that interfaces to xmms or your soundcard. then have the platters spin and the head/arm move to the beat. paint the topmost platter with translucent glow in the dark colours.
or make yourself a physical load meter. mount it right to the front of your case. you might also want to cover the top platter with some optical illusions so that when it's spinning it looks wavy or something.
Joe (from the aforementioned laser ligth show) had previously been taping cd's to the drive and seeing how long it would take before one would go flying off, but i convinced him to stop that when a cd section wedged itself into the wall, close to my head.
my co-worker Joe opened up and mod'ed his hard drive too. didn't require a clean room, but the drive doesn't work too well.
Well, shucks, if they can get linux running on their psion i'm sure they can get Karin doing many more tricks on their Psion.
(no, these aren't completely off topic, but more images from the same dir)
Not to knock LOTR (though i didnt think it was Spectacular, just good), but Blade Runner and 2001 (among others, these are the first i know that did this) both spent a lot of time creating an environment for the actors, not just the viewers; creating such an environment is not revolutionary to LOTR. Blade Runner featured newspapers and magazines with actual falsified articles in them, in locations unseen by the viewers and 2001 had fake futuristic brand names sewn into underwear, to name a couple of unseen details.
oh, and to keep this post on topic, Harrison Ford rocks. if they want E-II to be as good as the originals they need him in them. HARRISON FORD I LOVE YOU AND WANT TO HAVE YOUR BABY!!!!!
well, as long as you tell me you regret having done Six Days, Seven Nights.
er, sorry, my head cold 0w3nz me.
...
Those data centers are what (i'm guessing) 2% of companies need for IT support. The other 98% look for solutions that fit the problem within a certain budget.
Hi nice to meet you. I'm a sysadmin at a community college. Not that high a budget, y'know? Still, we use at least 10k scsi drives in everything we can, 15k for the ones that matter.
We make Good Use of these drives and if they were any slower i would be getting way way too many phone calls.
If you look at Dell's offerings (we buy a lot of dells here) in the server range, it's tough to find something that doesn't come with 10k scsi drives. I think their 350 is the only one that comes with IDE drives.
Going over to Sun's lineup, you'll see that their low-end desktop machines like their SunBlade 100 now have IDE drives in them but everything else has at least 10k scsi or fc drives.
I know plenty of people who run servers off of pc, IDE based hardware, but most of these are either personal sites of fellow geeks. My home mass storage unit has one of those nifty Promise FastTrack100 IDE RAID cards, but that's b/c i can't afford SCSI and the storage is only used by me (well, my friends too when they download my movies/mp3s, but scp'ing via my home net connection will in no way hammer the storage unit). Most server rooms i've been to have the dells or similar equipment with SCSI in them, even the really shitty server rooms with really shitty boxes, those people still use scsi cards & drives.
Of course you're right about cost and use, but in most environments it is essential to plan for the future. Buying more or faster disk than we currently need might seem silly now but sometimes growth occurs inversely proportionate to budget - i'm already regretting not having taken larger bites when i could of b/c some of our servers are becoming seriously underpowered and i dont know if our current budget will let us purchase what we need (but i bet i coulda swung for more when i first bought the server in question).
definitely.
unless i'm a stragetist for a country that is completely self sufficient then i'm going to want to be on good trading relationships with all the countries i need shit from and not have to resort to "oh we sold you the good planes, please keep giving us oil"
plus the revenue from selling abroad is quite valuable - you can't win wars when you're broke.
Really it's no different than a "killswitch"-> By refusing to provide replacement parts
having defective equipment is very different from a trade embargo.
Iran should have realised they needed to stock pile parts or not have been dependant on that equipment.
Trade Embargoes and their effects are the reasons fro some rather great wars - deffective equpiment are reasons for political tensions and possible trade embargo repercussions.
but rather it'd be subtle -> Gosh darnit the amraam
people make livings off of investigating why one side lost a battle/war and will get mighty suspicious when one side's planes all fall apart while the other sides don't. then they'll wonder if it really was maintenance, training, etc. it's a big gamble to say that they'll eventually believe it was due to incompetency and not malicious acts (gee, those planes never fell apart during trainings or skirmishes with other nations, only against the States...)
Then again, if the backdoors were only used at precise moments, in a manner similar to decrypted information during WWII, then it would be feasible to give other nations defective equipment. But it's still a really big gamble - it's a very different thing to say "we broke YOUR codes" from "we broke into OUR equipment that we sold you b/c it sucks"
In a couple weeks i'm going to visit Boston for a few days, in June i'll be driving through the west of the U.S.A. and in the fall i'll be travelling throughout latin america. It would be nice to have a composite list of events and happenings of interest to computer geeks, including things like Defcon, Dreamhack, Burning Man, MacWorld Expo, YAPC etc. etc.
and a cuecat to scan in any url/email address from stuff we buy, and a webtv that will auto-get information on stuff on the teevee, and a wearable computer to scan in the billboards we look at and monitor the covnersations we hear, radio stations we listen to, etc for those funny, non-momorable urls.
Sure google will help me find the number one pants manufacturer in terms of marketting, but what's an upstart with an immemorable name to do?
8:35am up 35 days, 26 min, 1 user, load average: 2.02, 2.04, 2.10
[frisco@host1 frisco]$ uname -a
Linux host1 2.4.9-13smp #1 SMP Tue Oct 30 19:57:16 EST 2001 i686 unknown
It's a (mostly) default RH 7.2 install - shouldn't that be asking for trouble? - yet hasn't rebooted since i did some disk rearranging (couldn't afford hot swap on my home machine; yes i do that much processing on my home machine). Load average on this machine is generally at 2, sometimes gets up to 20+ when things go awry.
checking the other machines at work, i see
[frisco@host2 frisco]$ uname -a
Linux host2 2.4.3-12smp #1 SMP Fri Jun 8 14:38:50 EDT 2001 i686 unknown
[frisco@host2 frisco]$ uptime
8:26am up 68 days, 17:04, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
this machine regularly sees 30+ users login at once and run 30+ instances of a web server and have those 30+ people do database/web development on it (it's a student machine so given the time right now its load is low). last reboot was someone trying to fix network issues the wrong way.
We have 2.4 kernels in a dual boot lab which we have trouble with, but that's mostly b/c of the other side of the dual boot. There are also other machines of various configurations running 2.4 here w/o problems.
Anyways, there's your SMP systems with some load on distribution releases of 2.4. Granted, the load isn't 24/7 serving 100+ users each second, but it is there.
Of course that doesn't mean anything save YMMV and that with the multitude of hardware configurations out there, some will work fine and some won't; stories about well-working 2.4 kernels abound, as do stories about 2.4 kernels that suck.
hell yeah!!!
what are they more likely to steal, a 5 lb laptop or a 100lb monolith???
i've been weighing mine down with lead, cement and chains for just this reason. Aluminum lightweights- phaw!
this thing has more keys than my keyboard! (i use a happy hacker keyboard)
Please note they claim to be able to compress data 100:1, but do not say they can decompress the resultant data back to the original.
By the way, so can i.
Give me your data, of any sort, of any size, and i will make it take up zero space.
Just don't ask for it back.
still, that cover is a nice product shot.
For me the best was Blackboard (i work at an educational institute).
Someone ordered this prearranged package of a Dell w/ linux preinstalled and paid the extra points for someone to come out and install the hardware, then someone to install the blackboard software. It was a really big important project which required me to work over the holidays (this is at an edu, which is normally closed around xmas).
First the hardware installer. He comes out, opens the box, removes the equipment, plugs everything in, verifies it boots up, then leaves. it was around $1500 for 10 minutes of work.
Then i proceeded to fix up the install - as i recall it was a default 6.2 install with the words "DELL" added here and there - and to go through some stuff blackboard had sent me (make sure mysql, apache, some perl modules are installed on the system).
Next comes the blackboard installer. He sits down at the keyboard and says, "oh, it's a linux system, i'm not very good at that, why don't you do the typing". He hands me a sheet of instructions of what he's supposed to do - at the top is install apache, mysql, some perl modules (ah, that was *his* job) and then download the blackboard package and install that. Takes me about 15 minutes of typing/waiting then everything's done.
"Gee, that was easy" the guy says and leaves. He gets another $1500 for watching over me as i typed.
http://translate.blackant.net/
which checks your Accept_Language HTTP header to see if the primary language is one that babelfish can handle, and if it is redirects you to the bablefish translation of the page, otherwise to the english version.
Set your preferred default language in your web browser. Have companies' websites check this first. Netscape, IE, Konqueror, lynx and others already send an Accept-Language header in their web requests.
Determining the language a person wants is a problem with a solution that already exists; no need using ip-geolocation to develop a Rube Goldberg style solution.
Yeah, instead of tarrifs being imposed on the Ukraine, the US government may next deny that country access to any US-based website.
All those poor Ukrainians, unable to read slashdot...
the user calls you up, you ask them for their login, and instead they give you their password.
the user calls you up and immediately starts telling you everything about themselves, including their dog's bladder problems and their password.
the user has tried to login in and since they were having problems, they switched their login with their password... which is then recorded in the logfiles.
Those are the first few ways which come to mind, all of which happen to me on a regular basis; the only time i store the password in clear text is when we send out the original account password.
i think passwords should at least be used in a manner similar to firewall dmz's - that is, one set for the internal servers, one set for the borderline, and one set for external servers (or, servers you have sole root on, servers you share root on, servers you dont have root on). But preferably every acount you have that matters should have a different password than the last
the last thing i want is for someone to be able to post on slashdot as me just because they cracked my credit card password! oh, the horrors!
no but, what happens when you move to a dvorak keyboard?!? or a twiddler?!?
my passwords used to be pseudo-anagrams for sentences i could remember, with characters and numbers substituted all around, like !wKP5dhr (no weak password here). Lately i've been randomly generating passwords and figuring out what they meant afterwards. Your gfhbt example looks like "Go Frodo the HoBbiT" to me.
well shit, then we might as well add angels, unicorns, cyborgs, and other mythical creatures.
oops. that should be X-Box, not PS2.