Depends on the car too. If the car has power assisted brakes or not, and how powerful the car is.
If the power assist runs out or fails, you're probably screwed.
On cars with power assisted brakes if you can stand up easily (and aren't too short or sitting in a weird driving position), you should be able to exert the maximum brake at least once or twice (till the power assist runs out - at full throttle many cars stop recharging the assist).
5. HOW TO PUT THE PRIUS INTO NEUTRAL TO GO THROUGH A CAR WASH:
The car must be in the ready mode, and instead of just tapping the joystick as one does to put it in reverse or drive, tap and hold it on neutral for a second or so. The car will stay in neutral for the entire time it is being washed. The reason the car has this feature is so you don't accidentally bump the joystick while driving, and throw yourself into neutral. They thought of everything!
Which shows the driver successfully using neutral.
Maybe Toyota should start to build in their cars (if they don't already) is something like those airplane "black boxes". That said if that little joystick fails and fails the wrong way, the car+black box might not be able to tell the difference between a failed joystick and "driver error":).
> it's at least plausible that an economy could exist whereby the essentials to support billions of human lives in decent conditions could be generated with almost no input of human labor. > All living humans could get all of their needs, and most of their wants taken care of with little effort on their part.
Not if a few living humans want it all and get it:).
To me the conclusion of that story is a bit unrealistic since there will remain unpleasant and yet nonmindless things to do, and neither humans nor Strong AIs[1] may want to do them. So there has to be some way of getting either to do it.
Enslavement must be avoided. Because one day there may be stuff that's way smarter and more capable than us.
[1] And AI smart enough to do those things may be smart enough to not want to.
> Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?
We? What's this "we" business?
You better hope the AIs and PostHumans keep us around as pets and treat us well.
We don't and can't expect that much from our beloved pets. We know we can't expect them to design complex systems etc.
In contrast there are lots of species that have gone extinct either through active intervention, or "Oops, we didn't notice they were getting wiped out till they are gone".
So be careful and wise when you take steps towards building Strong AIs, or deciding what sort of posthumans you want.
> Manual transmission drivers don't have three feet, they can't hold the break, clutch and gas at the same time
Most manual transmission cars have a parking brake. On a steep incline you are supposed to use the parking brake. Then you balance the clutch and throttle with your feet before you release the brake with your hand.
Theoretical rollback for drivers who can pass a non-joke driving test legally = zero.
And on non so steep inclines, if you are familiar with the vehicle, you can go from full clutch+ full brake to enough clutch+throttle to not stall and not rollback at all.
> Even so, rollback isn't usually more then a foot or so even for inexperienced drivers.
Rollback for inexperienced drivers can be past the bottom end of the incline/hill, or till the vehicle behind them, whichever comes first.
Rollback for sloppy drivers may be a foot or two. There are lots of sloppy drivers.
The ubuntu apparmor template allows firefox to read and write from/to too many places in the user's home directory.
Go look again and see:
# allow read and write to all user's files, except explicitly denied ones
@{HOME}/ r,
@{HOME}/** rw,
@{HOME}/Desktop/** rw,
It's a "neither here nor there" template - that is not strict enough to be secure, nor loose enough to be acceptable to users who prefer convenience over security.
Go look at the template again but this time from the point of view of: "Assuming firefox is taken over by a hacker, what can you safely allow it to access - e.g. read, write, modify?".
OK to access (read/change) all your documents? Yes the.ssh directory is blocked but how about the other files and directories with names starting with "."?
If the apparmor template is still not safe in the case where firefox has been taken over, why bother having it in the first place?
> if you want to actually receive incoming traffic from the outside world, you're going to have to use iptables to make the appropriate adjustment. Only the superuser can do that.
Ubuntu 9.10 allows all traffic by default, ufw is available but from what I see it is not activated by default. OpenSUSE starts SuSEfirewall2 by default. I have no stats but my guess is Ubuntu is more popular than OpenSUSE (yast was pretty crappy - slow and used lots of RAM for package management, I haven't bothered to check if they've finally fixed that).
If you do not need root/full system privileges, it's not that hard to write a cross platform bot:). Making http and TCP connections, and sending UDP packets is the same if you use something like perl/python:). If the AV people just assumed that all py2exe or pp stuff is malware they'd have lots of false positives.
OSX may be worth targeting nowadays, or at least in the near future. Lots of flaws, lower security than windows, significant market share.
Yeah. I was rather disappointed with the story. I thought this site was supposed to be "News For Nerds", not "News For People Who Just Discovered How to Change The SSID Late Last Year".
There's just so much stuff you could do when someone is using a network under your control, and not using secure connections for everything (which is likely for most people).
You could change lots of advert pictures/banners (many years ago, I did that for April Fool's day, no I didn't get fired, hey I saved the company some bandwidth - and back then IIRC the whole company was sharing dial-up internet or something really slow).
You could insert a link to a javascript program that causes something animated to move about on the screen. Doesn't have to be as flashy as what you see on facebook when you use the konami code.
Or even embed scary/strange noises, depending on what time/date it is:).
There's no need for all that, just pick an unpatched firefox bug to get in. There have been more than a few.
So now you're in as the user with full user privileges. You can use apparmor to sandbox firefox but in most popular linux distros firefox is not sandboxed by default ( unlike say IE8 on Windows 7 which has some sandboxing). Ubuntu provides an apparmor template for firefox but you need to tweak it in order to actually make it secure (otherwise it doesn't really do enough for security - can read and write from/to too many locations! Yes making it secure would restrict you to saving/open files from just a few places, but why bother having an insecure security template when you are already turning it off by default?). Firefox even makes it hard for you to run it as a separate user process.
Full user privileges is enough for most botnets to run. The malware can listen on ports, make outbound network connections. It can restart itself using cron or at, or by modifying.bashrc to alias popular commands to a malware executable (which could perform the commands but also run itself). Sure a few paranoid geeks might notice, but the rest? I doubt they might notice in time. Maybe you could alias alias itself and ps so they'll show sanitized output;).
The malware could also alias stuff like sudo and su if it needs root privileges.
The truth is, most malware authors don't bother with attacking "Desktop Linux", not because it is more secure than Windows (it's not that much more secure). It's because there's not much point having a really tiny botnet.
"Server Linux" on the other hand can be worth attacking because the servers themselves often store the actual "Jewels" and might have high bandwidth connections.
People who think Ubuntu is so much more secure than Windows (from a technical POV) are either in denial or ignorant.
> Good luck running PERL or Python on a windows machine without finding a way to install either on the system first;)
Search for py2exe or pp.
There are plenty of python and perl programs that run on win32 without requiring perl or python to be installed. Yeah the resulting exe is kinda big, but nowadays there are plenty of huge webpages... The updates don't all have to be as big.
The search terms don't have to stay the same once new instructions are downloaded.
And the instructions do not have to be tied to one particular set of search terms - the various breeds of malware out there could be posting/uploading/spamming/hosting the instructions with the search terms for that breed's generation of malware.
Yes some strains might die out, but the fittest ones might survive for a while...
Might be hard to maintain control over all of the breeds though... But I doubt any of them will achieve "Skynet" status;).
In terms of $$$$$$$ obtained, I think the finance bunch have been doing pretty well. And lower risk too. When they supposedly screwed up they still got bonuses.
All it takes is to not have a conscience or being able to fool yourself that you are actually adding lots more value than you are taking out.
As the title of one book says: "Where Are the Customers' Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street".
If I wrote malware (I don't), I'd use google, other search engines and maybe even twitter (but that's probably covered by search engines nowadays) to search for new instructions:). So you could post the instructions "anywhere" in the world along with keywords. The search engines would find it. Naturally you'd check the signatures to see if the instructions are valid.
I'd also write the malware in perl. Pretty easy to do such stuff with perl - can also fork and run the instructions in an eval (if you think people are going to crack your malware). It'll be interesting to see how the AV people cope with TIMTOWTDI. Probably trivial to whip up equivalents in python or similar.
Such malware could run on windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX:).
Laws should not be passed just based on how they are to be used.
They should be passed based on how they can be abused. If there are too many ways they can be abused (or if the impact of abuse is high), they should not be passed.
The last I checked lots of adults play stuff like bejeweled, minesweeper, solitaire, sudoku, farmville. That sort of stuff.
I don't think the majority of adults want to play games with so much "real emotional depth" or "lots of sex and violence".
The evidence is they don't want those sort of games.
Similarly, it's only a small percentage of moviegoers who go for movies with "real emotional depth" or movies with "lots of explicit sex and violence". The rest go for stuff like Avatar, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Carribean.
The gamemakers and moviemakers seem to like to make lots of stuff that people don't want that much, and then blame "the pirates" for poor sales.
Either they are really out of touch with their audience, or they have some other agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
> And I can look at where in the sky the sun is
Doesn't work in Manchester, UK.
Yes I've been there. You only see the Sun at the news-stands, and the day before your final exams...
Depends on the car too. If the car has power assisted brakes or not, and how powerful the car is.
If the power assist runs out or fails, you're probably screwed.
On cars with power assisted brakes if you can stand up easily (and aren't too short or sitting in a weird driving position), you should be able to exert the maximum brake at least once or twice (till the power assist runs out - at full throttle many cars stop recharging the assist).
I'm guessing it's because the UK has lots of cameras especially in cities. London has thousands of CCTVs.
But of course that's different because the public don't get to see those camera recordings.
And they go conveniently blank/missing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes#Missing_CCTV_footage
Seems going into neutral on the Prius isn't so simple.
Neutral is software controlled on the Prius. How reliable that is, I don't know.
From: http://scottelkin.com/prius/34-prius-tips-you-may-not-know/
5. HOW TO PUT THE PRIUS INTO NEUTRAL TO GO THROUGH A CAR WASH:
The car must be in the ready mode, and instead of just tapping the joystick as
one does to put it in reverse or drive, tap and hold it on neutral for a second
or so. The car will stay in neutral for the entire time it is being washed. The
reason the car has this feature is so you don't accidentally bump the joystick
while driving, and throw yourself into neutral. They thought of everything!
See also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II_03lbr-Jw
Which shows the driver successfully using neutral.
Maybe Toyota should start to build in their cars (if they don't already) is something like those airplane "black boxes". That said if that little joystick fails and fails the wrong way, the car+black box might not be able to tell the difference between a failed joystick and "driver error" :).
> it's at least plausible that an economy could exist whereby the essentials to support billions of human lives in decent conditions could be generated with almost no input of human labor.
> All living humans could get all of their needs, and most of their wants taken care of with little effort on their part.
Not if a few living humans want it all and get it :).
See: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
To me the conclusion of that story is a bit unrealistic since there will remain unpleasant and yet nonmindless things to do, and neither humans nor Strong AIs[1] may want to do them. So there has to be some way of getting either to do it.
Enslavement must be avoided. Because one day there may be stuff that's way smarter and more capable than us.
[1] And AI smart enough to do those things may be smart enough to not want to.
> Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?
We? What's this "we" business?
You better hope the AIs and PostHumans keep us around as pets and treat us well.
We don't and can't expect that much from our beloved pets. We know we can't expect them to design complex systems etc.
In contrast there are lots of species that have gone extinct either through active intervention, or "Oops, we didn't notice they were getting wiped out till they are gone".
So be careful and wise when you take steps towards building Strong AIs, or deciding what sort of posthumans you want.
> Manual transmission drivers don't have three feet, they can't hold the break, clutch and gas at the same time
Most manual transmission cars have a parking brake. On a steep incline you are supposed to use the parking brake. Then you balance the clutch and throttle with your feet before you release the brake with your hand.
Theoretical rollback for drivers who can pass a non-joke driving test legally = zero.
And on non so steep inclines, if you are familiar with the vehicle, you can go from full clutch+ full brake to enough clutch+throttle to not stall and not rollback at all.
> Even so, rollback isn't usually more then a foot or so even for inexperienced drivers.
Rollback for inexperienced drivers can be past the bottom end of the incline/hill, or till the vehicle behind them, whichever comes first.
Rollback for sloppy drivers may be a foot or two. There are lots of sloppy drivers.
Which articles were that?
The one I saw was this:
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_unintended_acceleration-tech_dept
The speed where brakes+full throttle didn't eventually stop the car was 120mph.
And their conclusion:
http://www.caranddriver.com/news/car/10q1/toyota_recall_scandal_media_circus_and_stupid_drivers-editorial
No that's not what I'm talking about.
.ssh directory is blocked but how about the other files and directories with names starting with "."?
The ubuntu apparmor template allows firefox to read and write from/to too many places in the user's home directory.
Go look again and see:
# allow read and write to all user's files, except explicitly denied ones
@{HOME}/ r,
@{HOME}/** rw,
@{HOME}/Desktop/** rw,
It's a "neither here nor there" template - that is not strict enough to be secure, nor loose enough to be acceptable to users who prefer convenience over security.
Go look at the template again but this time from the point of view of: "Assuming firefox is taken over by a hacker, what can you safely allow it to access - e.g. read, write, modify?".
OK to access (read/change) all your documents? Yes the
If the apparmor template is still not safe in the case where firefox has been taken over, why bother having it in the first place?
> if you want to actually receive incoming traffic from the outside world, you're going to have to use iptables to make the appropriate adjustment. Only the superuser can do that.
:). Making http and TCP connections, and sending UDP packets is the same if you use something like perl/python :). If the AV people just assumed that all py2exe or pp stuff is malware they'd have lots of false positives.
Ubuntu 9.10 allows all traffic by default, ufw is available but from what I see it is not activated by default. OpenSUSE starts SuSEfirewall2 by default. I have no stats but my guess is Ubuntu is more popular than OpenSUSE (yast was pretty crappy - slow and used lots of RAM for package management, I haven't bothered to check if they've finally fixed that).
If you do not need root/full system privileges, it's not that hard to write a cross platform bot
OSX may be worth targeting nowadays, or at least in the near future. Lots of flaws, lower security than windows, significant market share.
Revival?
How many of the viewers actually wanted to watch his video in this "revival"?
He thinks he should get paid more than 16 bucks because pranksters were _inflicting_ his video on very many unsuspecting people?
This is a bit newer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWnNtUCngXw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtUBv_UOCXM&feature=related
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid%C5%8D_Senshi_Gundam:_Senj%C5%8D_no_Kizuna :).
Yeah. I was rather disappointed with the story. I thought this site was supposed to be "News For Nerds", not "News For People Who Just Discovered How to Change The SSID Late Last Year".
:).
There's just so much stuff you could do when someone is using a network under your control, and not using secure connections for everything (which is likely for most people).
You could change lots of advert pictures/banners (many years ago, I did that for April Fool's day, no I didn't get fired, hey I saved the company some bandwidth - and back then IIRC the whole company was sharing dial-up internet or something really slow).
You could insert a link to a javascript program that causes something animated to move about on the screen. Doesn't have to be as flashy as what you see on facebook when you use the konami code.
Or even embed scary/strange noises, depending on what time/date it is
Instead the story is about changing SSIDs...
There's no need for all that, just pick an unpatched firefox bug to get in. There have been more than a few.
.bashrc to alias popular commands to a malware executable (which could perform the commands but also run itself). Sure a few paranoid geeks might notice, but the rest? I doubt they might notice in time. Maybe you could alias alias itself and ps so they'll show sanitized output ;).
So now you're in as the user with full user privileges. You can use apparmor to sandbox firefox but in most popular linux distros firefox is not sandboxed by default ( unlike say IE8 on Windows 7 which has some sandboxing). Ubuntu provides an apparmor template for firefox but you need to tweak it in order to actually make it secure (otherwise it doesn't really do enough for security - can read and write from/to too many locations! Yes making it secure would restrict you to saving/open files from just a few places, but why bother having an insecure security template when you are already turning it off by default?). Firefox even makes it hard for you to run it as a separate user process.
Full user privileges is enough for most botnets to run. The malware can listen on ports, make outbound network connections. It can restart itself using cron or at, or by modifying
The malware could also alias stuff like sudo and su if it needs root privileges.
The truth is, most malware authors don't bother with attacking "Desktop Linux", not because it is more secure than Windows (it's not that much more secure). It's because there's not much point having a really tiny botnet.
"Server Linux" on the other hand can be worth attacking because the servers themselves often store the actual "Jewels" and might have high bandwidth connections.
People who think Ubuntu is so much more secure than Windows (from a technical POV) are either in denial or ignorant.
I'm fine with sending some people (e.g. politicians) to Mars (or the Moon if Mars is too expensive).
Options are one-way or return.
FWIW:
VotedOffThePlanet.com
and:
VoteThemOffThePlanet.com
are available.
So go ahead someone start up the TV reality show.
You don't even need to actually send them - you could explicitly say it's a joke. People might still vote anyway...
> Good luck running PERL or Python on a windows machine without finding a way to install either on the system first ;)
Search for py2exe or pp.
There are plenty of python and perl programs that run on win32 without requiring perl or python to be installed. Yeah the resulting exe is kinda big, but nowadays there are plenty of huge webpages... The updates don't all have to be as big.
The search terms don't have to stay the same once new instructions are downloaded.
;).
And the instructions do not have to be tied to one particular set of search terms - the various breeds of malware out there could be posting/uploading/spamming/hosting the instructions with the search terms for that breed's generation of malware.
Yes some strains might die out, but the fittest ones might survive for a while...
Might be hard to maintain control over all of the breeds though... But I doubt any of them will achieve "Skynet" status
Anyone know the original IP address(es) of cryptome.org?
I haven't been to that site for a while, so it's not in my logs...
Not as fun as this:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
You might even purposely not secure your wifi ;).
In terms of $$$$$$$ obtained, I think the finance bunch have been doing pretty well. And lower risk too. When they supposedly screwed up they still got bonuses.
All it takes is to not have a conscience or being able to fool yourself that you are actually adding lots more value than you are taking out.
As the title of one book says: "Where Are the Customers' Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street".
If I wrote malware (I don't), I'd use google, other search engines and maybe even twitter (but that's probably covered by search engines nowadays) to search for new instructions :). So you could post the instructions "anywhere" in the world along with keywords. The search engines would find it. Naturally you'd check the signatures to see if the instructions are valid.
:).
I'd also write the malware in perl. Pretty easy to do such stuff with perl - can also fork and run the instructions in an eval (if you think people are going to crack your malware). It'll be interesting to see how the AV people cope with TIMTOWTDI. Probably trivial to whip up equivalents in python or similar.
Such malware could run on windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX
Laws should not be passed just based on how they are to be used.
They should be passed based on how they can be abused. If there are too many ways they can be abused (or if the impact of abuse is high), they should not be passed.
I wonder what would happen if someone makes an inflatable airport (toy or otherwise)...
Already if you want to blow up churches you can go here: http://www.inflatablechurch.com/
> Windows XP you know. An OS from 2003 or something.
From 2001 (oct 2001 retail release).
OpenSolaris is "dead man walking".
The last I checked lots of adults play stuff like bejeweled, minesweeper, solitaire, sudoku, farmville. That sort of stuff.
I don't think the majority of adults want to play games with so much "real emotional depth" or "lots of sex and violence".
The evidence is they don't want those sort of games.
Similarly, it's only a small percentage of moviegoers who go for movies with "real emotional depth" or movies with "lots of explicit sex and violence". The rest go for stuff like Avatar, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Carribean.
The gamemakers and moviemakers seem to like to make lots of stuff that people don't want that much, and then blame "the pirates" for poor sales.
Either they are really out of touch with their audience, or they have some other agenda.