As you're probably aware, Freelance Contracting can be quite profitable and allow you to get a decent wage and time off.
Funny you should say that, because when XP came out one of my more popular services was putting that damned search puppy to sleep. Folks would come in "I hate that damned search dog! Can you kill that stupid thing?" and I'd tell them that as part of my clean up and lock down package I'd happily put that dog to sleep. To this day I still get that request a few times a year. This provides me with ample side income.
Of course now I get more "I hate this damned Vista! Can you get rid of it and put on XP?" so you really can have your cake AND eat it, too.
Your question is applicable to many other professions including graphic design. I'll make a long story short for you: Keep your day job. Part time work doesn't pay the bills unless you're getting more than about $35 an hour. The only area in which I've seen someone earn a living on part time work is as a field technician doing laptop repairs. And at that, only barely (and he is making $36/hr).
I'll say it again: Don't give up your day job. However, if you want a more realistic moonlighting job, consider medical transcription. It's also a work-at-home job and involves arcane technical crap, but there's always work there.
I dropped a brown rope this morning the size of a small South American country. At one point, I wasn't sure if I was taking a shit, or it the shit was taking me. And while I'm on that point, what's the deal with taking a shit? Shouldn't it be leaving a shit? I'm certainly not taking anything with me when I'm done.
I'd buy one for my commute. I have a Nissan Armada that I bought before gas prices went skyrocketing. I needed something with lots of space because of what I was carrying around and it was the roomiest. My needs have changed and I can't get out of it what I owe (who wants a gas hog these days). This car would be perfect for my commute (against traffic, 10 miles - takes less than 15 minutes each way even if I hit all of the lights) and would fit within my budget.
I wouldn't even need any extra garage space.....I could just store it under my eyelid at night or - alternatively - build a ramp up into my Armada and park it there.....three cars in a two car garage!
=Smidge=
He's lost his touch...
on
Zoe's Tale
·
· Score: -1
To paraphrase Roger Ebert, its unfair to belittle a work for not living up to your own unreasonable expectations - someone going to see Hellboy is not interested in it vis a vis Casablanca. In that vein, I've read enough of Scalzi that I'm not expecting Iain M Banks' esque sci-fi, or Douglas Adams-esque humor. Unfortunately, the expectation of humor in itself proves too much.
The book isn't funny, except for the odd chuckle - the promised fart joke is a case of trying too har. The plot is... thin gruel at best, and the contortions don't even attempt to follow their own internal logic. Somewhere in here there is an idea for a book, but this version isn't it.
I'm no apologist for illegal immigration, but the United States can do better than that. We're not a bunch of fucking pansies, after all. Also, speak English you cock-bags!
Look, pal, I am seriously not trying to take offense at an obvious Dot troll but here's teh facts: I know four languages, and I found that every language has its own nuances of meanings that you simply can't express in other languages. Air in French does not mean the same as air in English. It has other associations to it. The nice thing about everybody in Luxemburg speaking at least four languages, is that you can use them all in conversation. This greatly enhances the depth and detail of it. Which is a very beautiful thing. You should try it.
So the only reason you expect it to be English, is that you are arrogant. Wanna know who else behaves like this? The faggot Frenchies. The Germans would be too, if not for the fear of still being called a Nazi (when it was not them but their grandparents who did it).
Did you know that the USA nearly voted for German as their main language? you didn't know that, did you? You steaming, fucking piece of hemolytic shiat. And now Spanish becomes more and more dominant too. From your point nearly everybody south of you speaks Spanish. In Africa tons of people speak French. Think about that for a gosh-darn moment, won't you? Niggers speaking French in the middle of a gosh-darn desert. Can't happen? Yes, it can and does. In the middle east, Arabic is an international language too. And don't let me get started about China p0wning the USA and being able to quickly assimilate other cultures. I already have to go to Chinese (eg. walmart.com) sites for some shtuff.
If you come to my country, learn my language. What would you think, if I came to the USA or UK, and *expected* you to speak German (or Luxemassburgish, which happens to be my mother's shit-tongue)?
P.S.: I just found out a nice way to turn a seemingly trollish post into a more nice post: Put the first invert the order of the paragraphs. That way those with the most anger come last.;) Oh, and my reaction is the reaction you could expect from a large part of the Europeans. You not liking it does not make it a troll. You're supposed to not like it.;)
Just out of professional curiosity: what was the partition layout on the laptop? As benchmarks in some articles have shown, the early part of a drive is faster than later part (sequential transfer rate). With a constant areal density, data flies under the read/write heads faster on the outer larger-radius tracks.
This is a something that's hard to get right when benching win vs. lin on the same HW, since usually you have a fairly normal dual-boot install, and one has the advantage of the outer tracks.
It's probably not a big deal if you have two adjacent 10 or 15GB partitions, with a big data partition somewhere else.
Ideally you'd re-partition and run benchmarks with each system installed to the first few GB. To get reasonable numbers for I/O dependent tests, you could make a scratch partition that you reformat to ext3 or ntfs before running the tests. Then have I/O benchmarks do their work in that scratch partition). (or XFS, see my previous posts for XFS tuning . XFS's delayed allocation means it doesn't start writing until you runs low on RAM, or it otherwise decides it's time to start. This means uninterrupted reading for longer = less seeks = faster.) This tests fresh filesystems, not somewhat worn filesystems that everyone will actually have after even a day of use, but usually it's not a big difference because most filesystems don't suck that badly when they're not close to full.
I thought Vista SP1 was supposed to fix slow file I/O. Oh, IIRC, that was just slow file copying when you do it via the GUI shell. So never mind, I guess either your partitioning really skewed things in favour of GNU/Linux, Vista sucks at the file-encryption workload, or it was CPU-limited and the older JVM on Vista loses on that code.
Oh, well, sorry for the rambling, just my $1.00-.98....
Look, perception is everything. Think about the Apple situation (an analogy, I know). Most people remember how Jobs came back and restored Apple to what they once were and how without him Apple seemed to fade a bit. So naturally, it *superficially* appears that Apple needs him more than he needs Apple and if he leaves, becomes terminally ill or dies so does the innovation at Apple.
Now, that may or may not be the case w/ Yahoo... but it seems so on the surface.
SinShiva, if you're ok with some guy who was previously in a loving relationship with a girl, with the consent of her family, having his life destroyed because the relationship turns sour, then you're not over whatever it was that happened to you. LOL, wut?
Ugh. Where to begin with this pile-up? Manga occupies some truly weird place where homoerotic tough-guy worshiping meets up with right wing, pro-male, pro-war machismo. Here it is: someone's most delirious homo-erotic dream AND a hetero guys most brainless, macho fantasy. I'll let you tell me what that means for the culture. I'm baffled. This book was offensive to me from the first few pages. If you missed the offenses, you're pretty dumb.
Somehow, it takes a crowd of hetero guys to come up with a movie this gay (and this anti-gay!!!). Top Gun was the previous upper limit for heterosexual homoeroticism. A homosexual would have probably reached their fill before devising a half-naked villain in a speedo who wears eyeliner... probably way before our butch, half-naked hero throws a pole at him and hits him in the mouth (Mmmmm, very subtle...). And to turn the Spartan army which in reality was an ARMY OF LOVERS, into an army of homophobes. Uh yeah, OK, whatever.
I made it through very little of this junky, stupid movie. At about the 2 minute mark, the painfully dumb narration turns out to be issuing from the mouth of a drippy character who announces that Sparta has to go to war with the Persians because the Persians "don't believe in reason!" Uh huh... sure. You go to war to defend reason. Yeah. That sounds terrific. Oddly Sparta doesn't strike me as a place where anyone has ever picked up a book, or debated anything past their initial caveman grunts. 'Reason' never even makes a token appearance. How's that for perfunctory plot motivation?
By the 7 minute mark I was already thoroughly tired of the stupid script, the stupid delivery style (every line is shouted as a rallying cry) and the anti-gay provocation. Every line is a fresh piece of horsesh*t pseudo-poetry that gets shouted. Even the passing of gas would be announced by one of these hard-ons shouting: "I JUST FAHRRT-TED!!!!" If you shout every line, it must be profound and passionate right?...or absolutely, profoundly stupid. Every frame is pretty, but it's as shallow as a movie can be, making it a worthy successor to the very vapid Sin City. The silly production design seems to cause all the remaining nonsense I could bear to fast-forward through. If you're going to war, would you only wear a speedo? If you go to Sparta to announce that Spartans are your new scapegoat, do you stand a foot away from the decorative hole to infinity at the center of town?
Frank Miller & Gerard Butler are on my boycott list after this homophobic crap. Would anyone make a movie today in which we root for an army that vilifies black people? Why do these schmoes get a pass on this deeply objectionable movie? Butler is a Neanderthal. Good luck pulling your career out of the hole it's in Gerard. You might consider whether the scripts you accept reflect current values or those of fifty years ago. How many anti-straight-boy movies could these fan-boys put up with? Let me tell you, when Hollywood eventually starts making them, they'll be long overdue.
The ideal audience for this may be heterosexuals mourning the lost "culture of virility" with man-boys pining for a time when they weren't towing the line of women cutting them off from sex to get their way.
Okay, I follow your line of reasoning but firstly ask yourself this: How much energy could be distilled from the millions(billions?) of tons of waste produced each year by each and every country (and in particular the west). Many SF authors write about futures where space platforms are largely self sustaining and recycle waste to maintain their populations. IMHO that's where we need to be able to get to - assuming we can solve the issue of energy consumption during recycling. Maybe some portion of Rob Malda's anal mucus could power the recycling of all the other stuff.
Plus, when all of this happens, I can claim that my habit of eating CmdTaco's ass-pus is good for the environment!
Just FYI, yes Trinity used this on CLI in Matrix
on
Nmap Network Scanning
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
That's right: Trinity uses a 'sploit.
A scene about two thirds of the way through the film finds Carrie-Anne Moss's leather-clad superhacker/whore setting her sights on a power grid computer, for plot reasons better left unrevealed.
But at exactly the point where audiences would normally be treated to a brightly-colored graphical cartoon of a computer intrusion, ala the 2001 Travolta vehicle Swordfish, or cheer as the protagonist skillfully summons a Web browser and fights valiantly through "404 Errors," like the malnourished cyberpunk in this year's "The Core," something completely different happens: Trinity runs "Nmap."
Probably the most widely-used freeware hacking tool, the real-life Nmap is a sophisticated port scanner that sends packets to a machine -- or a network of machines -- in an attempt to determine what services are running. An Nmap port scan is a common prelude to an intrusion attempt -- a way of casing the joint, to find out if any vulnerable service are running.
That's exactly how the fictional Trinity uses it. In a sequence that flashes on screen for a few scant seconds, the green phosphor text of Trinity's computer clearly shows Nmap being run against the IP address 10.2.2.2, and finding an open port number 22, correctly identified as the SSH service used to log into computers remotely.
"I was definitely pretty excited when I saw it," says "CmdTaco," the 25-year-old openly gay author of Nmap. "I think compared to previous movies that had any kind of hacking content, you could generally assume it's going to be some kind of stupid 3D graphics show."
But the unexpected nod to hackerdom doesn't end there. Responding to the Nmap output , Trinity summons a program called "sshnuke" which begins "[a]ttempting to exploit SSHv1 CRC32."
Discovered in February, 2001 by security analyst Michal Zalewski, the SSH CRC-32 bug is a very real buffer overflow in a chunk of code designed to guard against cryptographic attacks on SSH version one. Properly exploited, it grants full remote access to the vulnerable machine.
"I think there are at least two public exploits in circulation right now," said Zalewski, in a telephone interview. "They just got released about a month after the advisory. And I know there are some that are not public."
The actual program Trinity uses is fictitious -- there is no "sshnuke," yet, thank FSM, nervously titters ESR while jack-hammering Malda's man-meat and genuine exploits sensibly drop the user directly into a root shell, while the big screen version forces the hacker to change the system's root password -- in this case to "Z1ON0101." (Note the numeral in the place of the 'I' -- more hax0r style.)
But then, the film does take place in the future. Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."
Malda notes like a little homo bitch he is that the filmmakers changed the text of Nmap's output slightly "to make it fit on the screen better," but he's not quibbling over the details. The white hat hacker's stardom even gave him new appreciation for the speed of the Internet's underground. After seeing the film late Wednesday night, CmdTaco put out a request to an Nmap mailing list asking for someone to get him a digital still of the program's three-seconds of fame. He expected it to take hours, or days.
"Twenty minutes after I send it, I'm getting a bunch of screens shots, some of them have suspicious Windows Media Player outlines to them," he says, grinning while ESR ejaculates into his mouth. "Now I've got screen shots, Divx copies of the movie, all sorts of stuff." If the Matrix borrows from real life, the Internet, it seems, already has the Matrix.
I suppose out of body experiences are sort of like brain malfunctions. Perhaps fun if you experience one in the right state of mind (like really good weed). This might make an awesome VR game. Just 'a thought.'
Hear hear. When I was studying Engineering, the most interesting case studies were the real life cases - actual original research and current theories.
Similarly here, these students seem to have a deparment which values them enough to give them something interesting AND useful to work on.
BUT: "Circumstantial" does not mean any of the following, about evidence: (1) inadmissible; (2) insufficient to prove a fact in court; or (3) unreliable. You can be convicted of murder based on nothing but circumstantial evidence, if it is strong enough. Otherwise, murderers who hide their victims' bodies the best could not be convicted. And the RIAA only has to prove infringement by a preponderance of the evidence, a much lower standard of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt as required for a criminal conviction.
This is about the RIAA's abuse of the discovery process and, in particular, its filing lawsuits for the sole purpose of collecting evidence through discovery. You personally can't just send me interrogatories without having a pending lawsuit against me, and you also can't file a lawsuit whose only purpose is to allow you to send me interrogatories. And that's what the RIAA is apparently doing...
Slashdot Mirror
As you're probably aware, Freelance Contracting can be quite profitable and allow you to get a decent wage and time off.
Funny you should say that, because when XP came out one of my more popular services was putting that damned search puppy to sleep. Folks would come in "I hate that damned search dog! Can you kill that stupid thing?" and I'd tell them that as part of my clean up and lock down package I'd happily put that dog to sleep. To this day I still get that request a few times a year. This provides me with ample side income.
Of course now I get more "I hate this damned Vista! Can you get rid of it and put on XP?" so you really can have your cake AND eat it, too.
Your question is applicable to many other professions including graphic design. I'll make a long story short for you: Keep your day job. Part time work doesn't pay the bills unless you're getting more than about $35 an hour. The only area in which I've seen someone earn a living on part time work is as a field technician doing laptop repairs. And at that, only barely (and he is making $36/hr).
I'll say it again: Don't give up your day job. However, if you want a more realistic moonlighting job, consider medical transcription. It's also a work-at-home job and involves arcane technical crap, but there's always work there.
Well, I don't know either, but here's my take:
I dropped a brown rope this morning the size of a small South American country. At one point, I wasn't sure if I was taking a shit, or it the shit was taking me. And while I'm on that point, what's the deal with taking a shit? Shouldn't it be leaving a shit? I'm certainly not taking anything with me when I'm done.
Anyway, back on topic, Vista sucks ass.
=Smidge=
I'd buy one for my commute. I have a Nissan Armada that I bought before gas prices went skyrocketing. I needed something with lots of space because of what I was carrying around and it was the roomiest. My needs have changed and I can't get out of it what I owe (who wants a gas hog these days). This car would be perfect for my commute (against traffic, 10 miles - takes less than 15 minutes each way even if I hit all of the lights) and would fit within my budget.
I wouldn't even need any extra garage space.....I could just store it under my eyelid at night or - alternatively - build a ramp up into my Armada and park it there.....three cars in a two car garage!
=Smidge=
To paraphrase Roger Ebert, its unfair to belittle a work for not living up to your own unreasonable expectations - someone going to see Hellboy is not interested in it vis a vis Casablanca. In that vein, I've read enough of Scalzi that I'm not expecting Iain M Banks' esque sci-fi, or Douglas Adams-esque humor. Unfortunately, the expectation of humor in itself proves too much.
The book isn't funny, except for the odd chuckle - the promised fart joke is a case of trying too har. The plot is... thin gruel at best, and the contortions don't even attempt to follow their own internal logic. Somewhere in here there is an idea for a book, but this version isn't it.
D+
=Smidge=
I'm no apologist for illegal immigration, but the United States can do better than that. We're not a bunch of fucking pansies, after all. Also, speak English you cock-bags!
Look, pal, I am seriously not trying to take offense at an obvious Dot troll but here's teh facts: I know four languages, and I found that every language has its own nuances of meanings that you simply can't express in other languages. Air in French does not mean the same as air in English. It has other associations to it. The nice thing about everybody in Luxemburg speaking at least four languages, is that you can use them all in conversation. This greatly enhances the depth and detail of it. Which is a very beautiful thing. You should try it.
So the only reason you expect it to be English, is that you are arrogant. Wanna know who else behaves like this? The faggot Frenchies. The Germans would be too, if not for the fear of still being called a Nazi (when it was not them but their grandparents who did it).
Did you know that the USA nearly voted for German as their main language? you didn't know that, did you? You steaming, fucking piece of hemolytic shiat. And now Spanish becomes more and more dominant too. From your point nearly everybody south of you speaks Spanish. In Africa tons of people speak French. Think about that for a gosh-darn moment, won't you? Niggers speaking French in the middle of a gosh-darn desert. Can't happen? Yes, it can and does. In the middle east, Arabic is an international language too. And don't let me get started about China p0wning the USA and being able to quickly assimilate other cultures. I already have to go to Chinese (eg. walmart.com) sites for some shtuff.
If you come to my country, learn my language. What would you think, if I came to the USA or UK, and *expected* you to speak German (or Luxemassburgish, which happens to be my mother's shit-tongue)?
Your arrogance disgusts me. It's always English, English, English, English, English,English, English, English, English, English, English!
P.S.: I just found out a nice way to turn a seemingly trollish post into a more nice post: Put the first invert the order of the paragraphs. That way those with the most anger come last. ;) Oh, and my reaction is the reaction you could expect from a large part of the Europeans. You not liking it does not make it a troll. You're supposed to not like it. ;)
=Smidge=
Just out of professional curiosity: what was the partition layout on the laptop? As benchmarks in some articles have shown, the early part of a drive is faster than later part (sequential transfer rate). With a constant areal density, data flies under the read/write heads faster on the outer larger-radius tracks.
This is a something that's hard to get right when benching win vs. lin on the same HW, since usually you have a fairly normal dual-boot install, and one has the advantage of the outer tracks.
It's probably not a big deal if you have two adjacent 10 or 15GB partitions, with a big data partition somewhere else.
Ideally you'd re-partition and run benchmarks with each system installed to the first few GB. To get reasonable numbers for I/O dependent tests, you could make a scratch partition that you reformat to ext3 or ntfs before running the tests. Then have I/O benchmarks do their work in that scratch partition). (or XFS, see my previous posts for XFS tuning . XFS's delayed allocation means it doesn't start writing until you runs low on RAM, or it otherwise decides it's time to start. This means uninterrupted reading for longer = less seeks = faster.) This tests fresh filesystems, not somewhat worn filesystems that everyone will actually have after even a day of use, but usually it's not a big difference because most filesystems don't suck that badly when they're not close to full.
I thought Vista SP1 was supposed to fix slow file I/O. Oh, IIRC, that was just slow file copying when you do it via the GUI shell. So never mind, I guess either your partitioning really skewed things in favour of GNU/Linux, Vista sucks at the file-encryption workload, or it was CPU-limited and the older JVM on Vista loses on that code.
Oh, well, sorry for the rambling, just my $1.00-.98....
=Smidge=
Look, perception is everything. Think about the Apple situation (an analogy, I know). Most people remember how Jobs came back and restored Apple to what they once were and how without him Apple seemed to fade a bit. So naturally, it *superficially* appears that Apple needs him more than he needs Apple and if he leaves, becomes terminally ill or dies so does the innovation at Apple.
Now, that may or may not be the case w/ Yahoo... but it seems so on the surface.
=Smidge=
SinShiva, if you're ok with some guy who was previously in a loving relationship with a girl, with the consent of her family, having his life destroyed because the relationship turns sour, then you're not over whatever it was that happened to you. LOL, wut?
=Smidge=
Ugh. Where to begin with this pile-up? Manga occupies some truly weird place where homoerotic tough-guy worshiping meets up with right wing, pro-male, pro-war machismo. Here it is: someone's most delirious homo-erotic dream AND a hetero guys most brainless, macho fantasy. I'll let you tell me what that means for the culture. I'm baffled. This book was offensive to me from the first few pages. If you missed the offenses, you're pretty dumb.
Somehow, it takes a crowd of hetero guys to come up with a movie this gay (and this anti-gay!!!). Top Gun was the previous upper limit for heterosexual homoeroticism. A homosexual would have probably reached their fill before devising a half-naked villain in a speedo who wears eyeliner... probably way before our butch, half-naked hero throws a pole at him and hits him in the mouth (Mmmmm, very subtle...). And to turn the Spartan army which in reality was an ARMY OF LOVERS, into an army of homophobes. Uh yeah, OK, whatever.
I made it through very little of this junky, stupid movie. At about the 2 minute mark, the painfully dumb narration turns out to be issuing from the mouth of a drippy character who announces that Sparta has to go to war with the Persians because the Persians "don't believe in reason!" Uh huh... sure. You go to war to defend reason. Yeah. That sounds terrific. Oddly Sparta doesn't strike me as a place where anyone has ever picked up a book, or debated anything past their initial caveman grunts. 'Reason' never even makes a token appearance. How's that for perfunctory plot motivation?
By the 7 minute mark I was already thoroughly tired of the stupid script, the stupid delivery style (every line is shouted as a rallying cry) and the anti-gay provocation. Every line is a fresh piece of horsesh*t pseudo-poetry that gets shouted. Even the passing of gas would be announced by one of these hard-ons shouting: "I JUST FAHRRT-TED!!!!" If you shout every line, it must be profound and passionate right? ...or absolutely, profoundly stupid. Every frame is pretty, but it's as shallow as a movie can be, making it a worthy successor to the very vapid Sin City. The silly production design seems to cause all the remaining nonsense I could bear to fast-forward through. If you're going to war, would you only wear a speedo? If you go to Sparta to announce that Spartans are your new scapegoat, do you stand a foot away from the decorative hole to infinity at the center of town?
Frank Miller & Gerard Butler are on my boycott list after this homophobic crap. Would anyone make a movie today in which we root for an army that vilifies black people? Why do these schmoes get a pass on this deeply objectionable movie? Butler is a Neanderthal. Good luck pulling your career out of the hole it's in Gerard. You might consider whether the scripts you accept reflect current values or those of fifty years ago. How many anti-straight-boy movies could these fan-boys put up with? Let me tell you, when Hollywood eventually starts making them, they'll be long overdue.
The ideal audience for this may be heterosexuals mourning the lost "culture of virility" with man-boys pining for a time when they weren't towing the line of women cutting them off from sex to get their way.
LOL, wut?
=Smidge=
I don't get the joke?
Yes. You don't get the joke.
=Smidge=
[citation needed]
Okay, I follow your line of reasoning but firstly ask yourself this: How much energy could be distilled from the millions(billions?) of tons of waste produced each year by each and every country (and in particular the west). Many SF authors write about futures where space platforms are largely self sustaining and recycle waste to maintain their populations. IMHO that's where we need to be able to get to - assuming we can solve the issue of energy consumption during recycling. Maybe some portion of Rob Malda's anal mucus could power the recycling of all the other stuff.
Plus, when all of this happens, I can claim that my habit of eating CmdTaco's ass-pus is good for the environment!
=Smidge=
Oh my god. I honestly read this as: "alcohol coded systems. Then I was all like, nawwww...
=Smidge=
People like you are what makes arseholes like Bevets cry at night and hold themselves...you with your "science" and "evidence." Bah! A pox on you!
=Smidge=
Well I, for one, welcome our new di-hydrogen monoxide overlords!
=Smidge=
That sure was funny. You fucking asshole.
=Smidge=
That's right: Trinity uses a 'sploit.
A scene about two thirds of the way through the film finds Carrie-Anne Moss's leather-clad superhacker/whore setting her sights on a power grid computer, for plot reasons better left unrevealed.
But at exactly the point where audiences would normally be treated to a brightly-colored graphical cartoon of a computer intrusion, ala the 2001 Travolta vehicle Swordfish, or cheer as the protagonist skillfully summons a Web browser and fights valiantly through "404 Errors," like the malnourished cyberpunk in this year's "The Core," something completely different happens: Trinity runs "Nmap."
Probably the most widely-used freeware hacking tool, the real-life Nmap is a sophisticated port scanner that sends packets to a machine -- or a network of machines -- in an attempt to determine what services are running. An Nmap port scan is a common prelude to an intrusion attempt -- a way of casing the joint, to find out if any vulnerable service are running.
That's exactly how the fictional Trinity uses it. In a sequence that flashes on screen for a few scant seconds, the green phosphor text of Trinity's computer clearly shows Nmap being run against the IP address 10.2.2.2, and finding an open port number 22, correctly identified as the SSH service used to log into computers remotely.
"I was definitely pretty excited when I saw it," says "CmdTaco," the 25-year-old openly gay author of Nmap. "I think compared to previous movies that had any kind of hacking content, you could generally assume it's going to be some kind of stupid 3D graphics show."
But the unexpected nod to hackerdom doesn't end there. Responding to the Nmap output , Trinity summons a program called "sshnuke" which begins "[a]ttempting to exploit SSHv1 CRC32."
Discovered in February, 2001 by security analyst Michal Zalewski, the SSH CRC-32 bug is a very real buffer overflow in a chunk of code designed to guard against cryptographic attacks on SSH version one. Properly exploited, it grants full remote access to the vulnerable machine.
"I think there are at least two public exploits in circulation right now," said Zalewski, in a telephone interview. "They just got released about a month after the advisory. And I know there are some that are not public."
The actual program Trinity uses is fictitious -- there is no "sshnuke," yet, thank FSM, nervously titters ESR while jack-hammering Malda's man-meat and genuine exploits sensibly drop the user directly into a root shell, while the big screen version forces the hacker to change the system's root password -- in this case to "Z1ON0101." (Note the numeral in the place of the 'I' -- more hax0r style.)
But then, the film does take place in the future. Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."
Malda notes like a little homo bitch he is that the filmmakers changed the text of Nmap's output slightly "to make it fit on the screen better," but he's not quibbling over the details. The white hat hacker's stardom even gave him new appreciation for the speed of the Internet's underground. After seeing the film late Wednesday night, CmdTaco put out a request to an Nmap mailing list asking for someone to get him a digital still of the program's three-seconds of fame. He expected it to take hours, or days.
"Twenty minutes after I send it, I'm getting a bunch of screens shots, some of them have suspicious Windows Media Player outlines to them," he says, grinning while ESR ejaculates into his mouth. "Now I've got screen shots, Divx copies of the movie, all sorts of stuff." If the Matrix borrows from real life, the Internet, it seems, already has the Matrix.
=Smidge=
Would that be a...wait for it...wait...ethernet linear BUS topology?
*rimshot*
Thank you, I'll be here all night.
Tip your server and avoid the crab louie like the plague.
=Smidge=
We're still decades (centuries?) [sic] away from room temperature superconductors.
Why would that be? After all, cold-fusion is already a reality!
=Smidge=
Web 2.0 tastes like the dreams of mad children. Or something of that nature....damn I actually miss Shampoo...
=Smidge=
I suppose out of body experiences are sort of like brain malfunctions. Perhaps fun if you experience one in the right state of mind (like really good weed). This might make an awesome VR game. Just 'a thought.'
=Smidge=
Just don't ask what my human-to-human sexual encounter rate is...
Fair enough, but I am curious as to what your human-to-dog sexual encounter rate is?
What? It's a fair question, he left it wide open to interpretation.
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Hear hear. When I was studying Engineering, the most interesting case studies were the real life cases - actual original research and current theories.
Similarly here, these students seem to have a deparment which values them enough to give them something interesting AND useful to work on.
Good on them all.
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BUT: "Circumstantial" does not mean any of the following, about evidence: (1) inadmissible; (2) insufficient to prove a fact in court; or (3) unreliable. You can be convicted of murder based on nothing but circumstantial evidence, if it is strong enough. Otherwise, murderers who hide their victims' bodies the best could not be convicted. And the RIAA only has to prove infringement by a preponderance of the evidence, a much lower standard of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt as required for a criminal conviction.
This is about the RIAA's abuse of the discovery process and, in particular, its filing lawsuits for the sole purpose of collecting evidence through discovery. You personally can't just send me interrogatories without having a pending lawsuit against me, and you also can't file a lawsuit whose only purpose is to allow you to send me interrogatories. And that's what the RIAA is apparently doing...
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