You could also skip flash entirely and buy a very small hard drive. I've got a 60-gig USB drive from Apricorn that I carry around in my pocket, with an AES-encrypted root filesystem. Performance isn't spectacular, but it's certainly usable.
A company called DataDomain makes a very similar product that they claim averages 20:1 compression for backups. It's real, has been shipping for some time, and generally works as advertised. The trick to getting such good compression is in the kind of data you're storing. If you run three backups in a week, the amount of actual changed data each time will be very small. Of course, if you just try to use a DataDomain box or similar as general-purpose storage for your MP3s, you're going to get very limited benefit out of it.
Sorry, but malware has been found in the wild that will screen capture, say, a 100x100 pixel area around your mouse cursor every time you click. As soon as a technique becomes widespread enough, it starts an arms race.
No, it's all about a new class of "context aware" attacks which the author believes will have a much higher rate of success than the current ones (50% versus an estimated 3% now). You can disagree with the author's conclusions, but the article is at least talking about something I hadn't heard of before.
I recently inherited an obscure Dell laptop with a broken keyboard. It's a P3-633 with decent RAM and disk, but a new keyboard is $75, so I set it up with xvkbd on-screen keyboard. The keyboard starts when gdm starts, so as long as you don't need to leave X it works fine. Not a perfect solution, but it's the difference between a useless laptop and one that's at least usable.
I'll see your KDE, XFCE4, xmms and mplayer, and raise you enlightenment, evolution, gaim, mysql, postgres, rhythmbox and nethack, and throw in apt-style package management.
I work in a university environment, and maintain four shell servers for general student, staff and faculty use. It's also never a good idea to assume you're safe because a certain vulnerability is local-only, since attackers often combine a "harmless" local attack with a "harmless" unpriveledged remote attack to great effect.
Solar Designer released the Openwall patch to kernel 2.4.26 on April 17th, three days after the kernel itself was released. That's pretty active maintainance if not development of new features. I like it because it tends to be more conservative than many other security patches out there.
Voice Over:
This man is William Gates... writer of code.
In a few moments, he will have written the worst code in the world... and, as a consequence, he will die... laughing.
It was obvious that this code was lethal...
no one could read it and live...
All through the spring of '04 we had translators working to try and produce a Visual Basic version of the code. They worked on one word each for greater safety. One of them saw two words of the code and spent several weeks in hospital. But apart from that things went pretty quickly, and we soon had the code by April, in a form which decent programmers couldn't understand but which the MSCEs could.
Legend of the Rangers also pretty much sucked. I'd rather see the episode of Crusade that was supposed to have Bestor in it. (Google for the script if you're interested)
I guess I can't really blame SciFi for killing that one off though, since even the original Babylon 5 had ratings problems and was almost canceled after season 4.
I believe many UF students get shell accounts on shared servers, correct? Since these servers aren't on the dorm nets and can't easily have their bandwidth limited, I think the correct workaround is to run PPP over SSH from the shell server to your dorm machine.
What a strange idea... I suppose for some, super-high-security systems, keeping users from running any of their own binaries is useful, but it utterly nullifies one of the UNIX model's major advantages, namely that users can install and run their own applications.
Because I use a few alternative applications, almost no system that I use is going to have everything I want installed. I can pester the admin, or I can just build a copy and put it in $HOME/bin.
Besides, anyone who's really determined can just write their malicious code in an interpreted language and then do "/usr/bin/perl < badprog.pl".
First, my post was intended in a lighthearted spirit. Second, a little hysteria never hurt anybody as long as that's all it is. The terrorism thing has gone way beyond hysteria at this point. Hacking paranoia doesn't really qualify either, since it's not really a threat. Nobody's going to write a believable book about the world ending because every website in the world get 0wnz0r3d simultaneously.
The 70's and 80's produced volumes of work predicting robots subjugating mankind to their
will.
And so you want to stop the paranoia that leads to this kind of work? While not all the books you're probably talking about were good, the list of classics written as a response to fear of a cataclysm is pretty extensive: 1984, Brave New World, Farenheight 451, The Martian Chronicles, Canticle for Leibowitz, Cat's Cradle, etc.
So I say if a little healthy mass-hysteria about genetic engineering or nanotech is required to create great apocalyptic literature, it's a small price to pay.
Re:Red Dwarf fans?
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Lister: I've done it.
Holly: Done what?
Lister: Erased Agatha Christie.
Holly: Who's she, then?
Lister: Holly, you just asked me to erase all Agatha Christie novels from your memory.
Holly: Why should I do that? I've never heard of her.
Lister: You've never heard of her because I've just erased her from your smegging memory.
Holly: What'd you do that for?
Lister: You asked me to!
Holly: When?
Lister: Just now!
Holly: I don't remember this.
You'll need a machine slightly bigger than an RJ45 plug, but it's no difficult task. One of those Briq or similar machines would be ideal. You'll specifically need two ethernet cards, one of which you can set the MAC address for.
Find a desktop machine used by someone clueless somewhere you can be alone for a while. This one's especially easy with an insider connection.
Set one of your machine's ethernet cards' MAC address to the desktop's MAC address.
Find somewhere to hide the box between the desktop and whatever it plugs into. In the wall or ceiling is best. You'll need something to invert the pin order on the inside cable.
Bring up the desktop's IP address on the external network. Bring up an address on the same subnet on the internal network, with the netmask set so only that address uses that network. Turn on NAT to the internal network. Enable port forwarding for any services the desktop is running (Windows filesharing, etc).
Start SSH on the least suspicious port you can find that's not firewalled.
Now the network administrator sees the same number of machines, the same MAC address, and (almost) the same ports open on the machine. If the desktop gets turned off frequently, you can even schedule your machine to not run SSH until late at night, when it also stops responding to pings, getting it passed over by most portscanners.
Slashdot Mirror
You could also skip flash entirely and buy a very small hard drive. I've got a 60-gig USB drive from Apricorn that I carry around in my pocket, with an AES-encrypted root filesystem. Performance isn't spectacular, but it's certainly usable.
So ngrep, in other words? It's not as though this is particularly new or exciting technology.
Also, Linux programmers don't go to prison, they just get put in a chroot jail.
A company called DataDomain makes a very similar product that they claim averages 20:1 compression for backups. It's real, has been shipping for some time, and generally works as advertised. The trick to getting such good compression is in the kind of data you're storing. If you run three backups in a week, the amount of actual changed data each time will be very small. Of course, if you just try to use a DataDomain box or similar as general-purpose storage for your MP3s, you're going to get very limited benefit out of it.
Sorry, but malware has been found in the wild that will screen capture, say, a 100x100 pixel area around your mouse cursor every time you click. As soon as a technique becomes widespread enough, it starts an arms race.
Or just rewrite your filenames in Chicken.
No, it's all about a new class of "context aware" attacks which the author believes will have a much higher rate of success than the current ones (50% versus an estimated 3% now). You can disagree with the author's conclusions, but the article is at least talking about something I hadn't heard of before.
I recently inherited an obscure Dell laptop with a broken keyboard. It's a P3-633 with decent RAM and disk, but a new keyboard is $75, so I set it up with xvkbd on-screen keyboard. The keyboard starts when gdm starts, so as long as you don't need to leave X it works fine. Not a perfect solution, but it's the difference between a useless laptop and one that's at least usable.
Blastwave CSW
I work in a university environment, and maintain four shell servers for general student, staff and faculty use. It's also never a good idea to assume you're safe because a certain vulnerability is local-only, since attackers often combine a "harmless" local attack with a "harmless" unpriveledged remote attack to great effect.
"We use a secret angle on our Type 23 frigates which enables our ships to reduce their radar signature to an absolute minimum." (emphasis added)
WTF? There are only so many angles in the first place, and can't you just look at the ship to figure it out?
Solar Designer released the Openwall patch to kernel 2.4.26 on April 17th, three days after the kernel itself was released. That's pretty active maintainance if not development of new features. I like it because it tends to be more conservative than many other security patches out there.
Custom-built quiet PCs. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just think it's a good idea and am probably going to buy one.
This man is William Gates... writer of code. In a few moments, he will have written the worst code in the world... and, as a consequence, he will die... laughing.
It was obvious that this code was lethal... no one could read it and live...
All through the spring of '04 we had translators working to try and produce a Visual Basic version of the code. They worked on one word each for greater safety. One of them saw two words of the code and spent several weeks in hospital. But apart from that things went pretty quickly, and we soon had the code by April, in a form which decent programmers couldn't understand but which the MSCEs could.
I guess I can't really blame SciFi for killing that one off though, since even the original Babylon 5 had ratings problems and was almost canceled after season 4.
I believe many UF students get shell accounts on shared servers, correct? Since these servers aren't on the dorm nets and can't easily have their bandwidth limited, I think the correct workaround is to run PPP over SSH from the shell server to your dorm machine.
I recommend International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yar.
Never get to fall in love
Never get to be cool
Although really, the last two are inevitably the result of geeking pretty much anywhere.
Because I use a few alternative applications, almost no system that I use is going to have everything I want installed. I can pester the admin, or I can just build a copy and put it in $HOME/bin.
Besides, anyone who's really determined can just write their malicious code in an interpreted language and then do "/usr/bin/perl < badprog.pl".
First, my post was intended in a lighthearted spirit. Second, a little hysteria never hurt anybody as long as that's all it is. The terrorism thing has gone way beyond hysteria at this point. Hacking paranoia doesn't really qualify either, since it's not really a threat. Nobody's going to write a believable book about the world ending because every website in the world get 0wnz0r3d simultaneously.
And so you want to stop the paranoia that leads to this kind of work? While not all the books you're probably talking about were good, the list of classics written as a response to fear of a cataclysm is pretty extensive: 1984, Brave New World, Farenheight 451, The Martian Chronicles, Canticle for Leibowitz, Cat's Cradle, etc.
So I say if a little healthy mass-hysteria about genetic engineering or nanotech is required to create great apocalyptic literature, it's a small price to pay.
Lister: I've done it.
Holly: Done what?
Lister: Erased Agatha Christie.
Holly: Who's she, then?
Lister: Holly, you just asked me to erase all Agatha Christie novels from your memory.
Holly: Why should I do that? I've never heard of her.
Lister: You've never heard of her because I've just erased her from your smegging memory.
Holly: What'd you do that for?
Lister: You asked me to!
Holly: When?
Lister: Just now!
Holly: I don't remember this.
Indeed. Slut.
-
Find a desktop machine used by someone clueless somewhere you can be alone for a while. This one's especially easy with an insider connection.
-
Set one of your machine's ethernet cards' MAC address to the desktop's MAC address.
- Find somewhere to hide the box between the desktop and whatever it plugs into. In the wall or ceiling is best. You'll need something to invert the pin order on the inside cable.
- Bring up the desktop's IP address on the external network. Bring up an address on the same subnet on the internal network, with the netmask set so only that address uses that network. Turn on NAT to the internal network. Enable port forwarding for any services the desktop is running (Windows filesharing, etc).
-
Start SSH on the least suspicious port you can find that's not firewalled.
Now the network administrator sees the same number of machines, the same MAC address, and (almost) the same ports open on the machine. If the desktop gets turned off frequently, you can even schedule your machine to not run SSH until late at night, when it also stops responding to pings, getting it passed over by most portscanners.