You can imagine it, the 'top brass' person gets loaded into his little pod (presumably windowless) and then gets hoicked into the back of the C130. Bump, bump, thud... 37" plasma screen accepted, this mode of travel is as bad as how illegal immigrants travel and a tad antisocial. What type of person would want to travel like that in the first place? Sounds a bit silly. Regarding the general expense, the outlay is nothing compared to the $2 billion (or is it $11 billion) currently being spent upgrading the doomsday planes that only ever saw any real action on 9/11 - but *that* was denied somewhat... More generally, Air Force 1 and the rest of the U.S. fleet is beginning to look like a bad movie-set accessory. Soon Roman Abramovich will be getting an Airbus A380 as a personal jet, to go with the 767 and 737 (for small runways).
"We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile."
Why is it that only people that don't use Facebook know that it is a datamining operation setup by the outsourced CIA, namely In-Q-Tel? Tell that to a Facebook person and they think you are one of those tin-hat wearing types. Ho hum...
If you go with 'pure' Fedora and some trusty instructions then you should be able to get less than a minute boot time, even with venerable hardware. Furthermore, you should be able to setup the box quickly. Here are some instructions you may want to borrow:
You can customise how you setup your networking from there. Other tips: install server rather than workstation (no X-display) and tweak the BIOS so that it does not tick through the RAM or search for floppy/CD drives.
The advantage of Fedora is that it is standard enough for others to use without any 'sudo' nonsense at every turn and there are no proprietary-code-kernal-blobs to load.
Clean shut-downs are needed if you don't want corrupted disks or long boot times - make sure the on/off switch gets handled in the BIOS and O/S to do that correctly before you take the monitor away.
Drat. The proposal is in Pointless Document Format (PDF) and the animations are in penguin unfriendly 'Apple' format. What's wrong with HTML and uploading to Youtube? Niggles aside, the FREE simulator sounds cool: http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/orbiter.htm Must give that a go when I fire up Windows... One idea that is missing from the proposal is a living module filled with fuel, to be abandoned somewhere in space, once the fuel/oxidiser has been used. This could be a way to build a space-hotel with extra rooms getting sent up with every launch.
Remembering the notebook is easy - it is heavy. The powercord, now that's different. With notebook batteries lasting all of ten minutes on an older machine the power cord and transformer block become vital to remember. True pro's will have two of these though, one for work, one for home. Again, this can lead to problems - visit a company, fire up the PC for a presentation and where's the power cord? One left at home, another left at work. The best solution is to have the transformer built into the notebook - as per early Toshiba's - however that makes the notebook weigh more in the reviews (where the brick is conveniently not part of the review).
I really do not understand this spam thing. I would be surprised if anyone ever buys anything after reading a spam email. Is there really a huge demand for the prescription meds that get 'advertised' in every inbox every day? Has anyone ever been busted for selling them online in spam emails? It must be relatively easy for the perps to be caught, but it does not seem to happen.
Bill gates was going to fix the spam problem, what happen? Nothing. If people hijacked the radio airwaves to sell prescription meds there would be an instant response from the authorities. Why can email communications be allowed to be rendered effectively useless due to sheer volume of spam?
There are vested interests in the spam, and given the amount of money in A/V software I have my suspicions. Time for Linux users to launch a class action against those retards that use that pretend operating system known as Windows. They are the disease and should not be allowed on the interwebs with their inherently unsafe machines and petty hangups.
Come on guys - it is not the Cold War any more. It's not G7+1 any more. At the G8 they all sit around the same table. This year the new idea was to control pirate material on the interwebs.
My B.S. detectors have gone up and that 'Russian IP traffic story' stinks of a cover story. That 'DNS bug' story whiffs a bit too.
Call me suspicious, but why is piratebay down? Is it because it is in Sweden and their government are now playing ball?
If that is the situation - no more torrents - then that is tedious. I will have to manually upgrade 100's of early nineties limited edition 12" records to MP3, as will everyone else with sizeable vinylariums. This is a bad thing for the artists that put their work out on small vinyl-only record labels that are no longer in existence.
Those records cost vastly more than what today's record companies can charge for X-Factor boy bands and other such junk. Furthermore, without torrents shared by fans those traxxx are gone for good - total unobtanium. For example, Rising High Records. The record label owner is dead, each 12" single cost UKP 3.99 - 4.99 and the dedicated fan bought them all the first time round. The true fan would gladly pay for the MP3's, but, are these records available for sale in MP3 form? Nope.
What about the typing? Original UNIX had as few characters as possible for commands, e.g. 'vi', 'ls', 'top', 'df'. The reason for this was not just because core-memory was all that was available, typing mattered too. Why force all your users to type in lengthy names for machine names? At a guess the poster has a few servers and lots of workstations. The servers can be given short, easy to remember names. Planets will do when starting out, as will mythical beasts, LoTR or animal names. When it comes to workstations nobody needs to know what their machine is actually called, so you can have I.T. Dept friendly names that have the service tags in them.
AVG is probably why we have this post this week. There were a lot of timeouts last week, although Grisoft was not the only problemo. For a while Virgin Media customers in the UK lost a couple of continents last week, with the U.S.A. and Australia dropping off the map. I had to read Pravda instead of Slashdot for an hour or two...
My backup route actually worked fine and I was just in the middle of getting a squid proxy server of my own up and running when the network problems magically fixed themselves. There are lessons to be learned, if you need your internet more than is healthy then you also need a backup plan. This could be a wifi sharing agreement with the neighbours or a proxy server at work that you can dial into at home. The internet does not dynamically re-route stuff when there is a problem with a major link. This is a problem. I thought we would have TCP/IP over ATM or something like that to solve that by now.
Back in 1998 that other great hero of our times 'Bill Clinton' was having issues in the White House. Then something happened in Africa and what was the response? Bomb make believe terror training camps in far-off-istan and a Sudanese medicine factory. This factory sold to all kinds of places in the developing world, including Iraq under the oil-for-medicines thing that was imposed on them.
If born-with-a-million-dollars Gates really cared about improving the situation in the developing world then he would ask his government to put this one factory back together again and apologize.
Stuff the B+M foundation. Let's allow the developing world to develop. They don't want handouts. They wasn't even poor until us colonialists looted and pillaged everything. A level playing field of fair not free trade is all that's needed.
Same goes for everything these 'NGO's' have been up to over the last few years. You shouldn't be buying a clean conscience by handing them a few bits of loose change from whatever pile of worthless green bits of paper you get given every month.
Remember when W first came in and how we would all get rich on the long boom, not needing savings or a pension plan, just a portfolio of stocks? It didn't work. The economy does not grow for ever and the days of charities sitting on piles of interest bearing cash will have to come to an end much like the pension plans proposed back in the dot com era.
Microsoft does nicely out of the military. He could put something in the EULA to rule that out and single-handedly bring on an end to the arms-trade and your culture of militarism. Or maybe we cannot have such dreams in an 'imperfect world'.
In the UK the same-old, same-old let's-drive-everywhere television producers have moved on to Microsoft Virtual Earth this year. It is a slight improvement on the hand-coloured 'maps' prepared by clueless graphic artists of previous years - cartography does get involved with the M$ Virtual Earth and those 'Mountain High' maps were getting a bit old.
Unless you have mythTV I would not bother to tune in. The adverts are quite tedious, it seems like they are going for five minutes of ads every ten minutes this year, with more minutes lost after the break with a re-cap of what the story is so far.
Multi-channel television was not supposed to be like this. A decade ago the talk was that you would be able to choose your own camera angles at a football match or other event, not watch what the fat-controller chose to cut up. If ever there was a sporting event that needs to buck up it's ideas on how the television rights get flogged on, it is the Tour de France. I am glad the guys at Google are trying to bring some innovation to this event, but nobody is pushing the envelope, are they?
Jaded? Definitely. I detest how fans of this event get force fed car adverts by the same old autoholic broadcasters. I think I will go cycling instead.
If the police will not help you then set it to up/download dubious content. They will be round like a shot. You might get nicked visiting a FBI kiddie-porn honey trap during your research for this though... Maybe try the RIAA. Claim that it has downloaded an Amy Winehouse track or something like that.
I thought poetry was the unique preserve of left-leaning intellectuals until I discovered the music of Carla Bruni. Somehow she found poetry compatible with the instincts of the neo-conservative and set it all to music. Lots of people seem happy to file share her music, not that I will be 'daring' to do so myself. Unique amongst the politicians Sarkozy has a vested interest in file sharing. It will be interesting to see if this ever gets a mention.
'Now I'll be on the FBi watch list..." - oh if only you knew...
Just as I was posting a reply my Virgin Broadband drops off the net. Only the paranoid survive and after I checked up my backup connection to the interwebs and ran a traceroute or two I almost had one of those paranoid moments! I even paused my torrents in case they had cut me off already (they do have boxes to slow down p2p users).
Where was I, another poisonous comment:
I forgot about circuses and bread. This year the UK are not in the football so we don't even have circuses. Don't get me started on bread, that's getting a bit expensive these-a-days.
In my earlier post I forgot to mention that the ACPA was originally proposed at the Gleneagles meeting of the G8. That was the one on the eve of the 7/7 London bombings, widely regarded as weird at the time and not investigated a great deal thereafter.
At or around the same time there was 'Sideshow Bob' Geldof making the same speech that he always makes with the exact same false promises. They called it Live G8 Aid or something like that - a circus if ever there was one. The next day it was back to The War Against Terrorism with the distinctly weird 7/7 thing. Theoretically I could pervert my mind to believe that was all it was cracked up to be, but the mental effort is too hard. There were too many bad guys running terror exercises that were exactly like the act of terror that actually happened, much like the story we don't talk about...
Getting back to ACPA, the official story is that the Japanese proposed it at Gleneagles. I don't wish to be dismissive of Japanese music and film, however, it strikes me as odd that they should be the ones wanting to lock down intellectual property rights.
'Sideshow Bob' had his sidekick Bono with him at Gleneagles. Allegedly they were the ones representing *us* and speaking to power, placing the 'let's feed the starving Afrikaans' spiel on the table. Bono was also the person that tried to get the 'three downloads and your broadband gets cut off' idea to be accepted a little while back. I now suspect that he had an entirely different agenda at the G8 meeting, namely to place ACPA on the table. He has the vested interests, not the Japanese.
If there is to be a peasants revolt over all of this I would not be surprised if the entire U2 back catalog was burned on the streets. To make their vulgar trite rubbish available as a default torrent could also become a popular armchair protest at or around the same time as the barricades get manned...
I am glad that the war against the G8 is now in the front cyber-lawn and so many people are saying WTF? Seems that a lot of folks here don't think *they* have a chance. Let's see if attitudes change when the storm-troopers kick down doors of student dorms to search and destroy the wifi routers...
This has been on the go in secret for a while. At the G8 they just rubber stamp the done deal. The wikileaks article is quite scary (RTFA) but what is weird is that you have to go to Wikileaks and download dodgy TIFF files to find out about it. Where's the democracy in that?
Bring on the stormtroopers. I am going to see how many peers, seeds and leeches drop off over the next month. Just fear alone might shut down P2P viability. Let's see... Virgin media subscribers are going to tidy up their act, Google/Youtube is going to get cleared up and now this. All the news is in cyber-space today, shame the real economy has fallen off of a very large cliff...
How do we setup a P2P network that goes wi-fi to wi-fi with no need for ISP's, governments and snitches? It's time for web 3.0...
I thought that AVG were good guys like Google that put their customers first rather than the neo-conservative fascists that bought the White House. It's all the other A/V companies that scare me. Maybe all has changed since they acquired Linkscanner.
Let me tell you how I feel about the other guys. It all started with Cyberstorm I, back in 2006.
The Department of Homeless Insecurity claim that their exercises are on an imaginary parallel internet housed somewhere in the basement of the Pentagon (or somewhere like that). I personally believe that Cyberstorm I exercise was live although I do not wish to prove that, just speculate...
To my knowledge AVG/Grisoft were not a participant in Cyberstorm, however Symantec, M$, Cisco and other commercial players were. There were some really horrible viruses that did the rounds at the time, blackmailing people into believing that all their secrets had been passed on with the virus. Another twist was that the computer would 'self-destruct' at the end of the month. Viruses made it into the news at the time, hospitals having scanners put out and such like. I was amazed at how sophisticated those viruses were. They stripped out all A/V protection, deleting the files and registry entries. Obviously a script kiddy in somewhere like Hungary could have written them, but I thought the level of sophistication and timing was odd.
The whole idea of Cyberstorm 1 was to test whether an online anti-government word of mouth campaign could be contained. The government would not want the truth about how we got into this war to get out, and it was on the basis of Cyberstorm I that informed Rumsfeld that 'The War Against Terrorism' was here for 75 years or so. Rumsfeld was correct to focus on Cyberstorm instead of Iraq, but it could have been instrumental in his 'demise'.
Coupled with the 'not' live exercise was 'Full Spectrum Dominance', i.e. different stories in security blogs about what the viruses were about. I think the exercise lasted a fortnight or so, and a week or two before the exercise officially started. Cyberstorm II had a deeper focus on spoof blogs and 'Full Spectrum Dominance', however, I did not 'participate' in that one...
If AVG are now playing ball with the Department of Homeless Insecurity then the 4th generational cyber-warfare scene is getting hotter and hotter.
Warfare has always been information warfare, remember 'Enigma'? It matters more than anything that grunts with bullets and bombs. Warfare is notionally about an external threat, however, it is always about control of the domestic population. An internal threat is a lot, lot worse than an external one for the guys in the palaces. Cyberstorm has a political motive, no matter how flowery the official language. In all warfare - online or otherwise - there is propaganda and fog of war. Fog of war means that nobody really knows what is going on. Hence, only wildly speculative hypothesis can be used to make sense of it all - hard facts don't happen and pukka adversaries run feints. Nonetheless, the Department of Homeland Insecurity do hint at this in their official spiel:
"The Cyber Storm II scenario will be executed by persistent, fictitious adversaries with a distinct political and economic agenda. The Cyber Storm II adversary will use sophisticated attack vectors to create a large-scale incident requiring players to focus on response."
The judge said that they could not get their billion dollars in punitive dollars...
Before that YouTube/Google did not take down the 100000 videos that Viacom asked them to take down.
If you think about it, the 'spooks' already know what you watch. There is no conspiracy to get you, this is beef between Viacom and Google. The latest twist is that they want to know who is uploading their shows. If you watch something that just so happens to theirs then you have only committed a small thoughtcrime, maybe unwittingly.
It is a big day on the cyber-frontier, it's getting all 4th generational though. I think it is time for the citizenry to take back the net, with a wi-fi peer to peer 'darknet' that uses no centralised infrastructure.
Ever tried backing up the Buffalo?
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 1
The Buffalo nowadays has hot-swap drives. The older ones do not and you need to take out 27 screws to get to the drives. That's okay if you have the afternoon spare, however, it is a real pain when another drive fails the following week. That happened to me and I was not pleased. Backing up the Buffalo over the network took a whole weekend and it would not be able to do this to a local drive, i.e. plugged into the USB port. It even had problems with a Buffalo drive plugged in. The only way to do it was with a Linux machine - the M$ powertoy for syncing drives would not do it (and I blame those Apple resource files...). Eventually we moved to a homebrew solution that re-used an old server. We stuck in a SATA card and four 750Gb drives, added SAMBA shares and used the Linux to do the RAID. A complete backup was needed so we setup a different machine with 'spare' drives in it and used 'rsync' to do the honours when nobody was in the office. This meant that we could also get back recently deleted files:-) The Buffalo is a tempting offer due to the bang per buck, however, the homebrew was a better deal. We also got to re-use hardware, a good thing to do if you want to at least pretend to be 'green'.
This has been the best story on/. in ages. It does not seem that everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder on the al-qaeda story - do al-qaeda exist or don't they exist? With a real enemy it is possible to verify if the propaganda is genuine. Some simple questions just need to be asked:
1. When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)? 2. Where was it produced (localization)? 3. By whom was it produced (authorship)? 4. From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)? 5. In what original form was it produced (integrity)? 6. What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)?
To date most if not all al-qaeda videos get dropped off in London, into the hands of the journalist Yosri Fouda. He does not work in the al-jazeera London studio, he has his own seperate office in the Westminster area, a short walk from the MI5/MI6 offices. Yosri Fouda never says where he gets his tapes from, claiming the usual journalist privelige to hide sources. If the UK/USA alliance really wanted to catch the bogeyman then they would just have to watch back the CCTV pictures and track the guy that hands in the tapes.
During the presentation that Colin Powell made to the U.N. he claimed that there was a new UBL tape at al-jazeera. The only problem was that al-jazeera had not received the tape yet. I guess that Yosri Fouda must have been off that day.
To my knowledge all of the post 9/11 al-qaeda nonsense has came from this one source. This is the normal chain of custody - IntelCenter -> Yosri Fouda -> al-jazeera -> MSM ->./(!) Infer this: if there was no Yosri Fouda there would be no UBL videos, therefore no al-qaeda.
My offer, open to anyone on/. is to provide al-qaeda material that is the real stuff, not made up rubbish. I am genuinely interested in that, hence the reward. Clearly I could just say 'that's made up mate' and not pay up, but that's not the way we do things on/. - we are gentlemen here, right?
Now, as for the original article, I see problems on the first line. Abu Hamza. Is he al-qaeda? I don't think so, however, that is implied as he would have to know the secret URL for 'As-Sahab Media'. Let's Google 'Abu Hamza' with the 'I'm feeling lucky!' button. The article returned is from the BBC, let's see if he is merely a hater or the real deal:
"According to Abu Hamza himself, MI5 first contacted him in 1997 shortly after extremists massacred 68 tourists at Luxor, Egypt.
These meetings continued for some years, he told the Old Bailey, and included a warning that he was "walking a tightrope".
---
On 20 January 2003, police raided the building as part of a major investigation into an alleged plot to produce ricin poison. They sealed the mosque and handed it back to the trustees.
Abu Hamza himself was not arrested in connection with that probe. But despite being denied a base, he preached outside its gates every Friday.
This bizarre stand-off between Abu Hamza and the authorities continued into 2004. Then, Washington named Abu Hamza as a "terrorist facilitator with a global reach" and he was arrested pending extradition."
Well, the ricin plot never was. The UK security services were sent on that wild goose chase by former Home Office head 'Blunkett'. Hamza exists (he spent the time whilst locked out of his mosque feeding the ducks in Finsbury Park) yet at the same time the security services see him as "terrorist facilitator with a global reach".
Call me naive but the alleged enemy should have a website for their 'As-Sahab Media', complete with the 1888 questions posed by journalists and 'jihadists'. Where is it, or did I miss something?
For reasons beyond the scope of this comment I believe that 'The War Against Terrorism' (T.W.A.T. - let's stick to the correct acronyms) is running a lot hotter than anyone on/. are capable of imagining. We are relatively close to the seventh anniversary and the propaganda offensive ('W's) is being ratcheted up. There is the dreaded building seven report coming out very soon and 'W' wants to nab UBL before leaving office.
So the number cruncher sits in the corner, not a million miles away on the interwebs. I recommend using X-window and the standard VNC options built into your distro. With RH/fedora go to System -> Remote Desktop and set the appropriate options. Then go to your notebook/other PC and then vnc onto it. This all works fine and provides the persistent desktop. Even better, it takes two minutes to setup. Clearly you can also put the server on the internet and use the SSH options listed above, getting rid of SSH 1.0 if you want to be paranoid about man-in-the-middle attacks. Another thing that you might want to consider is running VNC-reflector on another server. This will enable you to record all of your VNC sessions. This is most useful if you cannot remember what you did - just 'play' the VNC data recording back and watch what you did.
I like your analogy. It is a bit like blaming door users for shoplifting.
Nowadays I claim to be totally against pirated software (including music) and I preach the 'pure FOSS' way. In reality I do download from pirate-bay once in a while, usually for things I own already. When I think 'oh, I will have that too' I tend not to actually use/listen/install whatever it was that I downloaded. The same used to happen in the days of mix-tapes - I would never listen to a tape someone gave me, yet I would gladly spend fifty quid on vinyl records that I had never listened to.
I would never listen to a U2 song (or Metallica), however, I would download their entire back-catalogue just to piss them off. Maybe it is time for the P2P community to try and beat the Mozilla most dowloads in a day record. Just think how cool it would be if the Guinness Book of Records had:
Most downloads in one day: 08 August 08, the entire U2 back-catalogue, number of downloads 8 million...
In the early days of the WWW the idea with popular pages was that they could be cached all over the internet. Your server checks with their server and if it has the page in cache already then that is what gets served up. What happen to that idea and why cannot Wikipedia work like that with only obscure and new pages getting served up from Florida? Those 300 servers are one of the wonders of the world and if you have never made an edit then you should. There must be something you can add to the whole. There has been much talk of other encyclopaedias but I am still waiting.
You had to be rich to afford IRIX. It was possible to get any storage problem solved - if your clients had the money. The guys in post production houses were using IRIX to shift around a lot of full-frame multi-layer video a good fifteen years ago. At the time IRIX was what was needed, not the offerings of IBM, Sun or HP. I guess that HP-UX has moved on since the days of the 'PA-RISC' chip but it is late to the Linux party where even SGI'd legendary XFS doesn't get much of a mention. It is yet another file system.
The screen bulb dims over time. Compared to a new notebook the screen on this baby is dull. A new CCFL will require skill to solder in or cost money. If this can be done then a full refurbishment can be made to get it back to scratch. As for swapping hard drives, it is easier to make a 10G space, defrag the hard drive and install linux. An extra drive can be mounted on USB to get shared disk space between the XP and Penguin. The 'user files' can be migrated onto there. Batteries are also important, not to mention power cords. Only worth doing if the model is a classic. One day these will be collectable and if the CCFL+batteries are sorted now then the notebook makes the transition from junk to of-value. Failing that, the notebook can be used even if the keyboard, screen and batteries are duff running a home server for mythtv and anything else. A Dyndns address in the router is all that is needed for that and time installing linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine the video with that (or the Millenium Falcon) on the assembly line...
You can imagine it, the 'top brass' person gets loaded into his little pod (presumably windowless) and then gets hoicked into the back of the C130. Bump, bump, thud... 37" plasma screen accepted, this mode of travel is as bad as how illegal immigrants travel and a tad antisocial. What type of person would want to travel like that in the first place? Sounds a bit silly.
Regarding the general expense, the outlay is nothing compared to the $2 billion (or is it $11 billion) currently being spent upgrading the doomsday planes that only ever saw any real action on 9/11 - but *that* was denied somewhat...
More generally, Air Force 1 and the rest of the U.S. fleet is beginning to look like a bad movie-set accessory. Soon Roman Abramovich will be getting an Airbus A380 as a personal jet, to go with the 767 and 737 (for small runways).
Remember what you read when you signed up?
"We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile."
Why is it that only people that don't use Facebook know that it is a datamining operation setup by the outsourced CIA, namely In-Q-Tel? Tell that to a Facebook person and they think you are one of those tin-hat wearing types. Ho hum...
If you go with 'pure' Fedora and some trusty instructions then you should be able to get less than a minute boot time, even with venerable hardware. Furthermore, you should be able to setup the box quickly. Here are some instructions you may want to borrow:
http://www.improvedsource.com/view.php/Linux-System/2/
You can customise how you setup your networking from there. Other tips: install server rather than workstation (no X-display) and tweak the BIOS so that it does not tick through the RAM or search for floppy/CD drives.
The advantage of Fedora is that it is standard enough for others to use without any 'sudo' nonsense at every turn and there are no proprietary-code-kernal-blobs to load.
Clean shut-downs are needed if you don't want corrupted disks or long boot times - make sure the on/off switch gets handled in the BIOS and O/S to do that correctly before you take the monitor away.
Drat. The proposal is in Pointless Document Format (PDF) and the animations are in penguin unfriendly 'Apple' format. What's wrong with HTML and uploading to Youtube?
Niggles aside, the FREE simulator sounds cool: http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/orbiter.htm Must give that a go when I fire up Windows...
One idea that is missing from the proposal is a living module filled with fuel, to be abandoned somewhere in space, once the fuel/oxidiser has been used. This could be a way to build a space-hotel with extra rooms getting sent up with every launch.
Remembering the notebook is easy - it is heavy. The powercord, now that's different. With notebook batteries lasting all of ten minutes on an older machine the power cord and transformer block become vital to remember. True pro's will have two of these though, one for work, one for home.
Again, this can lead to problems - visit a company, fire up the PC for a presentation and where's the power cord? One left at home, another left at work. The best solution is to have the transformer built into the notebook - as per early Toshiba's - however that makes the notebook weigh more in the reviews (where the brick is conveniently not part of the review).
I really do not understand this spam thing. I would be surprised if anyone ever buys anything after reading a spam email. Is there really a huge demand for the prescription meds that get 'advertised' in every inbox every day? Has anyone ever been busted for selling them online in spam emails? It must be relatively easy for the perps to be caught, but it does not seem to happen.
Bill gates was going to fix the spam problem, what happen? Nothing. If people hijacked the radio airwaves to sell prescription meds there would be an instant response from the authorities. Why can email communications be allowed to be rendered effectively useless due to sheer volume of spam?
There are vested interests in the spam, and given the amount of money in A/V software I have my suspicions. Time for Linux users to launch a class action against those retards that use that pretend operating system known as Windows. They are the disease and should not be allowed on the interwebs with their inherently unsafe machines and petty hangups.
Come on guys - it is not the Cold War any more. It's not G7+1 any more. At the G8 they all sit around the same table. This year the new idea was to control pirate material on the interwebs.
My B.S. detectors have gone up and that 'Russian IP traffic story' stinks of a cover story. That 'DNS bug' story whiffs a bit too.
Call me suspicious, but why is piratebay down? Is it because it is in Sweden and their government are now playing ball?
If that is the situation - no more torrents - then that is tedious. I will have to manually upgrade 100's of early nineties limited edition 12" records to MP3, as will everyone else with sizeable vinylariums. This is a bad thing for the artists that put their work out on small vinyl-only record labels that are no longer in existence.
Those records cost vastly more than what today's record companies can charge for X-Factor boy bands and other such junk. Furthermore, without torrents shared by fans those traxxx are gone for good - total unobtanium. For example, Rising High Records. The record label owner is dead, each 12" single cost UKP 3.99 - 4.99 and the dedicated fan bought them all the first time round. The true fan would gladly pay for the MP3's, but, are these records available for sale in MP3 form? Nope.
RIAA 1, Obscure-Under-ground-Culture-of-Yesteryear 0.
What about the typing? Original UNIX had as few characters as possible for commands, e.g. 'vi', 'ls', 'top', 'df'. The reason for this was not just because core-memory was all that was available, typing mattered too. Why force all your users to type in lengthy names for machine names?
At a guess the poster has a few servers and lots of workstations. The servers can be given short, easy to remember names. Planets will do when starting out, as will mythical beasts, LoTR or animal names.
When it comes to workstations nobody needs to know what their machine is actually called, so you can have I.T. Dept friendly names that have the service tags in them.
AVG is probably why we have this post this week. There were a lot of timeouts last week, although Grisoft was not the only problemo. For a while Virgin Media customers in the UK lost a couple of continents last week, with the U.S.A. and Australia dropping off the map. I had to read Pravda instead of Slashdot for an hour or two...
My backup route actually worked fine and I was just in the middle of getting a squid proxy server of my own up and running when the network problems magically fixed themselves. There are lessons to be learned, if you need your internet more than is healthy then you also need a backup plan. This could be a wifi sharing agreement with the neighbours or a proxy server at work that you can dial into at home. The internet does not dynamically re-route stuff when there is a problem with a major link. This is a problem. I thought we would have TCP/IP over ATM or something like that to solve that by now.
Back in 1998 that other great hero of our times 'Bill Clinton' was having issues in the White House. Then something happened in Africa and what was the response? Bomb make believe terror training camps in far-off-istan and a Sudanese medicine factory. This factory sold to all kinds of places in the developing world, including Iraq under the oil-for-medicines thing that was imposed on them.
If born-with-a-million-dollars Gates really cared about improving the situation in the developing world then he would ask his government to put this one factory back together again and apologize.
Stuff the B+M foundation. Let's allow the developing world to develop. They don't want handouts. They wasn't even poor until us colonialists looted and pillaged everything. A level playing field of fair not free trade is all that's needed.
Same goes for everything these 'NGO's' have been up to over the last few years. You shouldn't be buying a clean conscience by handing them a few bits of loose change from whatever pile of worthless green bits of paper you get given every month.
Remember when W first came in and how we would all get rich on the long boom, not needing savings or a pension plan, just a portfolio of stocks? It didn't work. The economy does not grow for ever and the days of charities sitting on piles of interest bearing cash will have to come to an end much like the pension plans proposed back in the dot com era.
Microsoft does nicely out of the military. He could put something in the EULA to rule that out and single-handedly bring on an end to the arms-trade and your culture of militarism. Or maybe we cannot have such dreams in an 'imperfect world'.
In the UK the same-old, same-old let's-drive-everywhere television producers have moved on to Microsoft Virtual Earth this year. It is a slight improvement on the hand-coloured 'maps' prepared by clueless graphic artists of previous years - cartography does get involved with the M$ Virtual Earth and those 'Mountain High' maps were getting a bit old.
Unless you have mythTV I would not bother to tune in. The adverts are quite tedious, it seems like they are going for five minutes of ads every ten minutes this year, with more minutes lost after the break with a re-cap of what the story is so far.
Multi-channel television was not supposed to be like this. A decade ago the talk was that you would be able to choose your own camera angles at a football match or other event, not watch what the fat-controller chose to cut up. If ever there was a sporting event that needs to buck up it's ideas on how the television rights get flogged on, it is the Tour de France. I am glad the guys at Google are trying to bring some innovation to this event, but nobody is pushing the envelope, are they?
Jaded? Definitely. I detest how fans of this event get force fed car adverts by the same old autoholic broadcasters. I think I will go cycling instead.
If the police will not help you then set it to up/download dubious content. They will be round like a shot. You might get nicked visiting a FBI kiddie-porn honey trap during your research for this though...
Maybe try the RIAA. Claim that it has downloaded an Amy Winehouse track or something like that.
I thought poetry was the unique preserve of left-leaning intellectuals until I discovered the music of Carla Bruni. Somehow she found poetry compatible with the instincts of the neo-conservative and set it all to music. Lots of people seem happy to file share her music, not that I will be 'daring' to do so myself.
Unique amongst the politicians Sarkozy has a vested interest in file sharing. It will be interesting to see if this ever gets a mention.
'Now I'll be on the FBi watch list..." - oh if only you knew...
Just as I was posting a reply my Virgin Broadband drops off the net. Only the paranoid survive and after I checked up my backup connection to the interwebs and ran a traceroute or two I almost had one of those paranoid moments! I even paused my torrents in case they had cut me off already (they do have boxes to slow down p2p users).
Where was I, another poisonous comment:
I forgot about circuses and bread. This year the UK are not in the football so we don't even have circuses. Don't get me started on bread, that's getting a bit expensive these-a-days.
In my earlier post I forgot to mention that the ACPA was originally proposed at the Gleneagles meeting of the G8. That was the one on the eve of the 7/7 London bombings, widely regarded as weird at the time and not investigated a great deal thereafter.
At or around the same time there was 'Sideshow Bob' Geldof making the same speech that he always makes with the exact same false promises. They called it Live G8 Aid or something like that - a circus if ever there was one. The next day it was back to The War Against Terrorism with the distinctly weird 7/7 thing. Theoretically I could pervert my mind to believe that was all it was cracked up to be, but the mental effort is too hard. There were too many bad guys running terror exercises that were exactly like the act of terror that actually happened, much like the story we don't talk about...
Getting back to ACPA, the official story is that the Japanese proposed it at Gleneagles. I don't wish to be dismissive of Japanese music and film, however, it strikes me as odd that they should be the ones wanting to lock down intellectual property rights.
'Sideshow Bob' had his sidekick Bono with him at Gleneagles. Allegedly they were the ones representing *us* and speaking to power, placing the 'let's feed the starving Afrikaans' spiel on the table. Bono was also the person that tried to get the 'three downloads and your broadband gets cut off' idea to be accepted a little while back. I now suspect that he had an entirely different agenda at the G8 meeting, namely to place ACPA on the table. He has the vested interests, not the Japanese.
If there is to be a peasants revolt over all of this I would not be surprised if the entire U2 back catalog was burned on the streets. To make their vulgar trite rubbish available as a default torrent could also become a popular armchair protest at or around the same time as the barricades get manned...
I am glad that the war against the G8 is now in the front cyber-lawn and so many people are saying WTF? Seems that a lot of folks here don't think *they* have a chance. Let's see if attitudes change when the storm-troopers kick down doors of student dorms to search and destroy the wifi routers...
This has been on the go in secret for a while. At the G8 they just rubber stamp the done deal. The wikileaks article is quite scary (RTFA) but what is weird is that you have to go to Wikileaks and download dodgy TIFF files to find out about it. Where's the democracy in that?
Bring on the stormtroopers. I am going to see how many peers, seeds and leeches drop off over the next month. Just fear alone might shut down P2P viability. Let's see... Virgin media subscribers are going to tidy up their act, Google/Youtube is going to get cleared up and now this. All the news is in cyber-space today, shame the real economy has fallen off of a very large cliff...
How do we setup a P2P network that goes wi-fi to wi-fi with no need for ISP's, governments and snitches? It's time for web 3.0...
I thought that AVG were good guys like Google that put their customers first rather than the neo-conservative fascists that bought the White House. It's all the other A/V companies that scare me. Maybe all has changed since they acquired Linkscanner.
Let me tell you how I feel about the other guys. It all started with Cyberstorm I, back in 2006.
The Department of Homeless Insecurity claim that their exercises are on an imaginary parallel internet housed somewhere in the basement of the Pentagon (or somewhere like that). I personally believe that Cyberstorm I exercise was live although I do not wish to prove that, just speculate...
To my knowledge AVG/Grisoft were not a participant in Cyberstorm, however Symantec, M$, Cisco and other commercial players were. There were some really horrible viruses that did the rounds at the time, blackmailing people into believing that all their secrets had been passed on with the virus. Another twist was that the computer would 'self-destruct' at the end of the month. Viruses made it into the news at the time, hospitals having scanners put out and such like. I was amazed at how sophisticated those viruses were. They stripped out all A/V protection, deleting the files and registry entries. Obviously a script kiddy in somewhere like Hungary could have written them, but I thought the level of sophistication and timing was odd.
The whole idea of Cyberstorm 1 was to test whether an online anti-government word of mouth campaign could be contained. The government would not want the truth about how we got into this war to get out, and it was on the basis of Cyberstorm I that informed Rumsfeld that 'The War Against Terrorism' was here for 75 years or so. Rumsfeld was correct to focus on Cyberstorm instead of Iraq, but it could have been instrumental in his 'demise'.
Coupled with the 'not' live exercise was 'Full Spectrum Dominance', i.e. different stories in security blogs about what the viruses were about. I think the exercise lasted a fortnight or so, and a week or two before the exercise officially started. Cyberstorm II had a deeper focus on spoof blogs and 'Full Spectrum Dominance', however, I did not 'participate' in that one...
If AVG are now playing ball with the Department of Homeless Insecurity then the 4th generational cyber-warfare scene is getting hotter and hotter.
Warfare has always been information warfare, remember 'Enigma'? It matters more than anything that grunts with bullets and bombs. Warfare is notionally about an external threat, however, it is always about control of the domestic population. An internal threat is a lot, lot worse than an external one for the guys in the palaces. Cyberstorm has a political motive, no matter how flowery the official language. In all warfare - online or otherwise - there is propaganda and fog of war. Fog of war means that nobody really knows what is going on. Hence, only wildly speculative hypothesis can be used to make sense of it all - hard facts don't happen and pukka adversaries run feints. Nonetheless, the Department of Homeland Insecurity do hint at this in their official spiel:
"The Cyber Storm II scenario will be executed by persistent, fictitious adversaries with a distinct political and economic agenda. The Cyber Storm II adversary will use sophisticated attack vectors to create a large-scale incident requiring players to focus on response."
http://www.dhs.gov/xprepresp/training/gc_1204738760400.shtm
The document on Cryptome is a must read as this shows the whole game plan. It's scary:
http://cryptome.org/cyberstorm.pdf
Note that they is talking anti-globalisation, not al-make-believe or the Chinese or the Estonians...
A press release story from the time:
"Original Cyberstorm 1 bulletin (AP, Feb. 10, 2006):
The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond
Notionally there is a billion dollars at stake:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080311-judge-to-viacom-no-punitive-damages-in-youtube-case.html
The judge said that they could not get their billion dollars in punitive dollars...
Before that YouTube/Google did not take down the 100000 videos that Viacom asked them to take down.
If you think about it, the 'spooks' already know what you watch. There is no conspiracy to get you, this is beef between Viacom and Google. The latest twist is that they want to know who is uploading their shows. If you watch something that just so happens to theirs then you have only committed a small thoughtcrime, maybe unwittingly.
It is a big day on the cyber-frontier, it's getting all 4th generational though. I think it is time for the citizenry to take back the net, with a wi-fi peer to peer 'darknet' that uses no centralised infrastructure.
The Buffalo nowadays has hot-swap drives. The older ones do not and you need to take out 27 screws to get to the drives. That's okay if you have the afternoon spare, however, it is a real pain when another drive fails the following week. That happened to me and I was not pleased. :-)
Backing up the Buffalo over the network took a whole weekend and it would not be able to do this to a local drive, i.e. plugged into the USB port. It even had problems with a Buffalo drive plugged in. The only way to do it was with a Linux machine - the M$ powertoy for syncing drives would not do it (and I blame those Apple resource files...).
Eventually we moved to a homebrew solution that re-used an old server. We stuck in a SATA card and four 750Gb drives, added SAMBA shares and used the Linux to do the RAID. A complete backup was needed so we setup a different machine with 'spare' drives in it and used 'rsync' to do the honours when nobody was in the office. This meant that we could also get back recently deleted files
The Buffalo is a tempting offer due to the bang per buck, however, the homebrew was a better deal. We also got to re-use hardware, a good thing to do if you want to at least pretend to be 'green'.
This has been the best story on /. in ages. It does not seem that everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder on the al-qaeda story - do al-qaeda exist or don't they exist?
With a real enemy it is possible to verify if the propaganda is genuine. Some simple questions just need to be asked:
1. When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)?
2. Where was it produced (localization)?
3. By whom was it produced (authorship)?
4. From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)?
5. In what original form was it produced (integrity)?
6. What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)?
To date most if not all al-qaeda videos get dropped off in London, into the hands of the journalist Yosri Fouda. He does not work in the al-jazeera London studio, he has his own seperate office in the Westminster area, a short walk from the MI5/MI6 offices. Yosri Fouda never says where he gets his tapes from, claiming the usual journalist privelige to hide sources. If the UK/USA alliance really wanted to catch the bogeyman then they would just have to watch back the CCTV pictures and track the guy that hands in the tapes.
During the presentation that Colin Powell made to the U.N. he claimed that there was a new UBL tape at al-jazeera. The only problem was that al-jazeera had not received the tape yet. I guess that Yosri Fouda must have been off that day.
To my knowledge all of the post 9/11 al-qaeda nonsense has came from this one source. This is the normal chain of custody - IntelCenter -> Yosri Fouda -> al-jazeera -> MSM -> ./(!)
Infer this: if there was no Yosri Fouda there would be no UBL videos, therefore no al-qaeda.
My offer, open to anyone on /. is to provide al-qaeda material that is the real stuff, not made up rubbish. I am genuinely interested in that, hence the reward. Clearly I could just say 'that's made up mate' and not pay up, but that's not the way we do things on /. - we are gentlemen here, right?
Now, as for the original article, I see problems on the first line. Abu Hamza. Is he al-qaeda? I don't think so, however, that is implied as he would have to know the secret URL for 'As-Sahab Media'. Let's Google 'Abu Hamza' with the 'I'm feeling lucky!' button. The article returned is from the BBC, let's see if he is merely a hater or the real deal:
"According to Abu Hamza himself, MI5 first contacted him in 1997 shortly after extremists massacred 68 tourists at Luxor, Egypt.
These meetings continued for some years, he told the Old Bailey, and included a warning that he was "walking a tightrope".
---
On 20 January 2003, police raided the building as part of a major investigation into an alleged plot to produce ricin poison. They sealed the mosque and handed it back to the trustees.
Abu Hamza himself was not arrested in connection with that probe. But despite being denied a base, he preached outside its gates every Friday.
This bizarre stand-off between Abu Hamza and the authorities continued into 2004. Then, Washington named Abu Hamza as a "terrorist facilitator with a global reach" and he was arrested pending extradition."
Well, the ricin plot never was. The UK security services were sent on that wild goose chase by former Home Office head 'Blunkett'. Hamza exists (he spent the time whilst locked out of his mosque feeding the ducks in Finsbury Park) yet at the same time the security services see him as "terrorist facilitator with a global reach".
Call me naive but the alleged enemy should have a website for their 'As-Sahab Media', complete with the 1888 questions posed by journalists and 'jihadists'. Where is it, or did I miss something?
For reasons beyond the scope of this comment I believe that 'The War Against Terrorism' (T.W.A.T. - let's stick to the correct acronyms) is running a lot hotter than anyone on /. are capable of imagining. We are relatively close to the seventh anniversary and the propaganda offensive ('W's) is being ratcheted up. There is the dreaded building seven report coming out very soon and 'W' wants to nab UBL before leaving office.
So the number cruncher sits in the corner, not a million miles away on the interwebs. I recommend using X-window and the standard VNC options built into your distro. With RH/fedora go to System -> Remote Desktop and set the appropriate options. Then go to your notebook/other PC and then vnc onto it. This all works fine and provides the persistent desktop. Even better, it takes two minutes to setup.
Clearly you can also put the server on the internet and use the SSH options listed above, getting rid of SSH 1.0 if you want to be paranoid about man-in-the-middle attacks.
Another thing that you might want to consider is running VNC-reflector on another server. This will enable you to record all of your VNC sessions. This is most useful if you cannot remember what you did - just 'play' the VNC data recording back and watch what you did.
I like your analogy. It is a bit like blaming door users for shoplifting.
Nowadays I claim to be totally against pirated software (including music) and I preach the 'pure FOSS' way. In reality I do download from pirate-bay once in a while, usually for things I own already. When I think 'oh, I will have that too' I tend not to actually use/listen/install whatever it was that I downloaded. The same used to happen in the days of mix-tapes - I would never listen to a tape someone gave me, yet I would gladly spend fifty quid on vinyl records that I had never listened to.
I would never listen to a U2 song (or Metallica), however, I would download their entire back-catalogue just to piss them off. Maybe it is time for the P2P community to try and beat the Mozilla most dowloads in a day record. Just think how cool it would be if the Guinness Book of Records had:
Most downloads in one day: 08 August 08, the entire U2 back-catalogue, number of downloads 8 million...
In the early days of the WWW the idea with popular pages was that they could be cached all over the internet. Your server checks with their server and if it has the page in cache already then that is what gets served up. What happen to that idea and why cannot Wikipedia work like that with only obscure and new pages getting served up from Florida?
Those 300 servers are one of the wonders of the world and if you have never made an edit then you should. There must be something you can add to the whole.
There has been much talk of other encyclopaedias but I am still waiting.
You had to be rich to afford IRIX. It was possible to get any storage problem solved - if your clients had the money. The guys in post production houses were using IRIX to shift around a lot of full-frame multi-layer video a good fifteen years ago. At the time IRIX was what was needed, not the offerings of IBM, Sun or HP.
I guess that HP-UX has moved on since the days of the 'PA-RISC' chip but it is late to the Linux party where even SGI'd legendary XFS doesn't get much of a mention. It is yet another file system.
The screen bulb dims over time. Compared to a new notebook the screen on this baby is dull. A new CCFL will require skill to solder in or cost money. If this can be done then a full refurbishment can be made to get it back to scratch.
As for swapping hard drives, it is easier to make a 10G space, defrag the hard drive and install linux. An extra drive can be mounted on USB to get shared disk space between the XP and Penguin. The 'user files' can be migrated onto there.
Batteries are also important, not to mention power cords. Only worth doing if the model is a classic. One day these will be collectable and if the CCFL+batteries are sorted now then the notebook makes the transition from junk to of-value.
Failing that, the notebook can be used even if the keyboard, screen and batteries are duff running a home server for mythtv and anything else. A Dyndns address in the router is all that is needed for that and time installing linux.