"With a manual system, it takes hundreds of people to count the vote. Sure, it takes more time, buit I can wait."
Unfortunately, the Republicans couldn't.
8 hours after the polls had closed in all states, and votes were coming in, and paper/provisional/absentee ballots were being counted (a process which can take up to 11 days, especially with overseas ballots and "paper" mail), Bush was quoted as saying "This process is taking far too long."
An hour later, he publically announced that he was making his acceptance speech. This was before Kerry had tossed in the towel. Many believe Kerry was forced to cede the election to Bush because of this one point.
Bush couldn't wait for the actual votes to be counted (and since he can't forge paper ballots as easily as he already provably forged votes in the voting machines), it would have destabilized his "victory", so he rushed in and claimed he had already won.
The rest of us, including Avi Rubin, know the difference. There are hundreds of thousands of ballots still uncounted. Many of them in many counties, will clearly show that Kerry had a much larger number of wins than Bush in many states. Added all together, Kerry had quite a few more electoral votes than our corrupt media would have you believe.
"Friday, November 5, 2004 Posted: 7:49 AM EST (1249 GMT)
LITTLE EGG HARBOR, New Jersey (AP) -- The target was an object on the ground well within the confines of the Warren Grove firing range, a 2,400-acre scrub pine expanse used by the military to train pilots in bombing and strafing techniques.
But when the heavy gun in the left wing of an Air National Guard F-16 fighter jet fired Wednesday night, it sent 25 rounds of 20mm ammunition smashing through the roof and zinging off the asphalt parking lot of the Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School 3 1/2 miles from the range."
"...so the *AA trying to sue someone for downloading [insert crappy pop album here] would only be able to sue for that particular infringment, and they wouldn't be able to prove the user has 10,000 other albums on their system."
No, but it DOES allow them to see every single IP address of every single peer, seed, and client using that.torrent... which gives them enough ammo to go to ISPs and begin scaring people with threat letters.
"How do they do it? Simple: They start downloading the file, and it gives them a list of all the IP addresses they're peering with."
This is easy to solve with a PKI system. Simply only allow users who are on your personal keyring, and who have signed your keyring, to download the.torrent, which is encrypted by that public key which they now have in their possession.
Unless you have DMCA co-conspirators on your keyring, you should remain clean. It also allows you to remove anyone from your keyring at any time, to revoke their ability to continue to peer or download from your tracker.
We've been happily using BitTorrent to distribute all of our releases for almost two years now. We've served up over 97GiB in the last 5 months for our current release. Pretty funny, considering its really just a tiny little Palm application. On release weeks, we generally serve up 8-10GiB/night over http, and quite a bit less over BitTorrent. I'm hoping to flip those values, so BitTorrent becomes the main distribution medium.
I even took the time to write a Plucker BitTorrent mini-FAQ for the users who are misinformed about the technology itself. We've had great success overall, but it has definately tapered off. When we make our next release, it'll spike to 3-5GiB/day served up as before.
You can see some of our snazzy usage graphs of the BitTorrent traffic as well.
I also modified our tracker so you could sort and click to download the files directly from the tracker webpage itself, instead of using the normal download page from our site. Thanks to some helpful http and rsync mirrors, the load is spread out nicely, and the mirror links are randomized to make sure it spreads evenly.
If anyone is interested in seeding for us, or being an http or rsync mirror for Plucker, please contact me.
"There is quite a hell of difference between being able to read the unlinked but otherwise unharmed data and having to gut the disk to put it into some specialistic tool."
Gut the disk? Surely you jest. I've personally done security forensics on many recovered drives in S&S raids, and there are a lot of amateur techniques attempted to "erase" data. Most of them don't work. Unless the actual drive electronics are damaged, you don't have to "gut the drive" to get the data back, up to 7 low-level formats deep.
If the drive has had other measures taken to erase, destroy, or obfuscate the data, you might have to pull off platters and cleanroom the drive, but that is very very very rare.
Its as simple as booting to clean media, duplicating the drive, and pulling the data out, with tools as simple as using 'ls'. They may not be openly available to the public, but these tools ARE available to professionals in the security industry.
The other interesting tidbit, is that almost all people who erase their data partitions to try to "erase their tracks", ALWAYS forget to do the same thing to the swap partition or files. OOPS!
"If you are in a pinch, you can first do a "cat/dev/zero >/dev/hda"."
Actually, that won't do anything. You can recover and restore data from up to 7 low-level formats deep. If you use/dev/zero, you're not making it any harder to recover that data, and you're not really "erasing" anything at all. Use something with entropy.
If you're in a pinch, do the following:
count=10; for in in `seq 0 $count`; do cat/dev/urandom >/dev/hda; done;
"Which means we would probably end up with President George Bush and Vice-President John Edwards. That'd be a hoot."
Not quite (from electoral-vote.com).
Should the election end up in the Supreme Court, it is not known whether Rehnquist will particpate in the case and vote on the outcome. Should he decline to participate due to ill health, the deadlock in the country might end up in a Court itself deadlocked 4-4. In such an event, the lower court ruling stands but no legal precedent is set. An alternative scenario is that Chief Justice Rehnquist resigns and that President Bush makes a recess appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation. If Bush were to appoint a new justice without Senate confirmation who then cast the deciding vote to make Bush president I fear for the future of the country.
"For whatever reason, there were a ton of people just staring at that one placard. Noone demonstrating, saying anything, but just staring and thinking."
And the even more amazing thing is... most people don't even realize that its the second time that the WTC has been attacked by the same foreign terrorists, under a Bush president. Both presidents also went directly for Saddam during their presidency.
"It's a noble idea, but you are relying on the honor system with strangers, of different political leanings no less."
Unfortunately, our entire election process, from the top-down is also based on the honor system. How do you know that your vote is being counted? How do you know your neighbor's absentee ballot was counted?
Answer: You don't, you "trust" that it is working the way you think it is.
"If you want more 3rd party candidates toss your local election votes to them, help a green be your mayor, or on your city council."
Actually, there is already a better idea. Vote Swapping. Basically voters in swing states are trading their votes for Green/Indy party candidates to Republicans in strongly Right states. The swing voter votes for Kerry, in exchange for the Right voter voting for Nader (or Cobb).
This, solves the age-old problem of "Nader taking votes from Kerry", in this case. The strongly-Right state remains Right, the swing state leans more to the Left, and Nader's percentage of votes goes up, without hurting Kerry at all.
There are something like 20,000 people who are signed up and doing this for this election alone, and the number of people doing it is growing every election.
But I agree with your points. We need to get some Senate, Congress, and House Green/Indy representation in place first, otherwise having a Green/Indy candidate elected for President, will mean nothing, because he won't have the support of anyone in his cabinet to affect change.
"Yeay... Linux encourages people to pirate Windows just the same as Windows encourages people to pirate PhotoShop. Whatever."
Thank you for agreeing with me, and with thousands of others. When Ballmer publically said that Linux on PCs incourages Windows piracy, I almost spit my soda out of my nose.
"Does he think that cheaper hardware will make copying software harder to do?"
No, but it will allow Microsoft to penetrate these markets even deeper by providing those $100.00 PCs with a slimmed-down version of the Windows operating system, of course. (Granted, those $100.00 PCs will also be used to run Linux, if they get to be that cheap, which furthers Microsoft's own assertion that Linux on PCs allow people to pirate Windows).
It also falls in line with their previously-stated goals to populate third-world countries with these PCs as well. Those countries can't afford it in their budgets, but if you make the cost of the PC $100.00 or "near-free", at some level, you can get more copies of Microsoft Windows into more people's hands.
"Presto, you mouse can now traverse from the laptop to the first desktop to the second desktop. You will probably want to start a real WM at this point. Any app you launch will be run on the local machine (d1), but can be dragged to any of the other machine's displays."
Ok, then this is completely useless and redundant to me. I use x2vnc that accomplishes the same thing, but is also cross-OS-compatible.
In order for Xdmx to work on 3 machines, it requires 3 identically-configured boxes with X and all of the related tools and configuration loaded. That's a LOT more hardware, configuration, and tinkering than just plugging in a second or third monitor and running Xinerama across them.
Also, since I'd have to set up a full-blown OS + GUI on each machine, why not just use x2vnc and use the OS native on the machine itself, or start another X session on my local machine, and export it to the display on the remote machine.
Either their docs/FAQ is misleading, or the tool doesn't do what you're saying it does...
According to their Getting Started page, they require that the other servers you intend on running Xdmx against, all be running Linux, all booted into X, and logged in as a valid user.
But then that isn't running virtual desktops, or dual-headed. Its VNC.
How do I launch an app from my laptop, using Xdmx, to another Linux server, running a completely different instance of X? According to their literature on the website, this isn't possible. I have to launch the same app on both machines, but they're different copies of the same app, on different drives.
That isn't multi-head, that's just VNC, essentially.
Or did I miss something?
Re:did they fix the problems?
on
DSPAM v3.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"the database did grow huge. when my single user server with 128 mb had to use a 512 mb spam token database, performance was terrible. even with the tools included I could not do anything to fix the issue."
Did you run the nightly and weekly purge scripts, as documented? (purge.sql for your DBI driver)
Did you also change the model to TUM from the default? (MUCH more accurate results over TOE or TEFT in our case, and we get a lot of spam!)
"dspam knows only yes or now, there is no usable value that gives you some grey information. as a result, I had to check all those spam postings for false positives."
I'm not sure what this means, but I've never personally had this problem. dspam gives each spam a percentage, which I can sort on using the web interface. Those with a lower percentage "might be" spam, but need to be checked. Those with a higher percentage (confidence), ARE spam. After 6 months of running dspam, I hardly ever check the quarantine now, because they're all spam. Its learned what is and what is not spam, and delivers accordingly.
I, like you, used SA for a year or two, and had it trained down to a 2.0 threshold (from the default of 5.0). I also had over 300 custom rulesets that blocked based on incoming subject at the MTA side, before even accepting the mail message and sending it to SA. I also used 13 RBLs. We were getting over 5,000 incoming spam a day, and about a dozen would slip through to the user's mailboxes. After 2 years and all of that, we were only at about 90% effectiveness (and yes, my SA rulesets were kept updated all the time)
After 2 weeks of using dspam, we were already at 98%, and not a single spam had slipped through to any user's mailbox. Granted, in the early period of using it for us, some messages were marked as False Positives, but that hasn't happened for ANY user in several months now.
We also stopped using the custom MTA rulesets, and don't use any RBLs either.
dspam absolutely blows away SA (currently, until/unless SA changes) in our particular subset of the mail we receive.
Read it again. It transmits usage patterns, heuristics about the nature of your content, aggregated with the other information collected from other users of the tool, and so on... with the intended target of improving ad relevance as served to you, when you use Google. It caches (tracks) what you search for when using Google, and it also caches (tracks) what your own local files and content contain, as they pertain to the tool's functionality.
It may not be sending your emails or files back to Google, but it is certainly sending back what types of data those files contain, and how often you use them, etc.
That to me, is just as dangerous. It allows them to build a "profile" of how you use your computer, and how you use the Internet, and for what purposes, and what "kind" of data your computer is used to manage, search for, and transmit.
The paranoid few might say thats a really short leap from having a government office (like the DHS) step right into place, and request this information, so they can see who is "most-likely" a threat, or a terrorist, or someone likely to become the next Malvo or McVeigh.
"Once the Google search technology is installed for free on a personal computer, it will transmit basic data daily about usage patterns. For example, it will tell the company how often Google is being used to search personal computers, how often it is used to search the Web, and how often simultaneous searches are done. Google lets users opt out of sending some usage data, but not all of it.
However, Mayer said the data collected will be aggregated so that the company knows where to focus its efforts on upgrading the search technology. She emphasized that the daily up-loading will not transmit any personal information to Google and said it is typical for major software programs that offer voluntary upgrades and fixes for bugs to capture that sort of information as a matter of routine."
"Google Desktop isn't spyware, because it makes what it is doing clear before you install it. Of course it reads your files; that's how Google works. As long as my data doesn't go back to Google, I couldn't care less."
Except that it DOES transmit some of that information back to Google (and partners).
"Once the Google search technology is installed for free on a personal computer, it will transmit basic data daily about usage patterns. For example, it will tell the company how often Google is being used to search personal computers, how often it is used to search the Web, and how often simultaneous searches are done. Google lets users opt out of sending some usage data, but not all of it.
However, Mayer said the data collected will be aggregated so that the company knows where to focus its efforts on upgrading the search technology. She emphasized that the daily up-loading will not transmit any personal information to Google and said it is typical for major software programs that offer voluntary upgrades and fixes for bugs to capture that sort of information as a matter of routine."
"When I pointed this out, you replied that that was precisely the point of Coral and that everybody should use it because of that. Because, apparently, broken images and incomplete caches of popular pages are a good thing.
This must be some new definition of "works perfectly for sites that are either down, overloaded or inacessible" that I was not previously aware of."
Please go back and re-read my original post which started this thread. I think you missed the point of the whole discussion.
If the Slashdot editors had used the Coralized URL when they posted the story, the VERY FIRST person to hit the link in the story's header, would have caused the Coral network to start distributing all of the content from dvdanswers. From there, EVERY Slashdot user that hits the URL further encourages that dispersion.
By the time the site itself was Slashdotted off (if at all), the content would still be available through the Coral network.
THAT is precisely the point of Coral. Using the Coralized URL after the site has already been slashdotted off the net, is of course going to result in failures, which is what you've seen.
The use of the Coralized URL should happen before the Slashdot editors post the story for public consumption.
"What about just using http://www.mirrordot.org/ ? It does the same for us, works behind a firewall and is designed just for slashdot. Ah and no one has to change a link. Let the others post and use Mirrordot to visit the pages."
The problem isn't that Slashdot itself can't be reached, its that the sites linked from Slashdot can't be reached.
Case in point: This exact story on mirrordot, links directly to the dvdanswers.com site, which was slashdotted.
Or did I miss some invisible rewrite/proxy magic glue in there somewhere?
The use of port 8090 is largely a relic of our beta deployment on PlanetLab, given that it is a shared test-bed. We hope to switch to using port 80 as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience; in the short-term, if you can't access port 8090 due to a local firewall and still wish to use Coral, try finding an open web proxy running on port 80. For example, Google for the search term "cgiproxy start".
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the Republicans couldn't.
8 hours after the polls had closed in all states, and votes were coming in, and paper/provisional/absentee ballots were being counted (a process which can take up to 11 days, especially with overseas ballots and "paper" mail), Bush was quoted as saying "This process is taking far too long."
An hour later, he publically announced that he was making his acceptance speech. This was before Kerry had tossed in the towel. Many believe Kerry was forced to cede the election to Bush because of this one point.
Bush couldn't wait for the actual votes to be counted (and since he can't forge paper ballots as easily as he already provably forged votes in the voting machines), it would have destabilized his "victory", so he rushed in and claimed he had already won.
The rest of us, including Avi Rubin, know the difference. There are hundreds of thousands of ballots still uncounted. Many of them in many counties, will clearly show that Kerry had a much larger number of wins than Bush in many states. Added all together, Kerry had quite a few more electoral votes than our corrupt media would have you believe.
No, but it DOES allow them to see every single IP address of every single peer, seed, and client using that .torrent... which gives them enough ammo to go to ISPs and begin scaring people with threat letters.
This is easy to solve with a PKI system. Simply only allow users who are on your personal keyring, and who have signed your keyring, to download the .torrent, which is encrypted by that public key which they now have in their possession.
Unless you have DMCA co-conspirators on your keyring, you should remain clean. It also allows you to remove anyone from your keyring at any time, to revoke their ability to continue to peer or download from your tracker.
I even took the time to write a Plucker BitTorrent mini-FAQ for the users who are misinformed about the technology itself. We've had great success overall, but it has definately tapered off. When we make our next release, it'll spike to 3-5GiB/day served up as before.
You can see some of our snazzy usage graphs of the BitTorrent traffic as well.
I also modified our tracker so you could sort and click to download the files directly from the tracker webpage itself, instead of using the normal download page from our site. Thanks to some helpful http and rsync mirrors, the load is spread out nicely, and the mirror links are randomized to make sure it spreads evenly.
If anyone is interested in seeding for us, or being an http or rsync mirror for Plucker, please contact me.
Gut the disk? Surely you jest. I've personally done security forensics on many recovered drives in S&S raids, and there are a lot of amateur techniques attempted to "erase" data. Most of them don't work. Unless the actual drive electronics are damaged, you don't have to "gut the drive" to get the data back, up to 7 low-level formats deep.
If the drive has had other measures taken to erase, destroy, or obfuscate the data, you might have to pull off platters and cleanroom the drive, but that is very very very rare.
Its as simple as booting to clean media, duplicating the drive, and pulling the data out, with tools as simple as using 'ls'. They may not be openly available to the public, but these tools ARE available to professionals in the security industry.
The other interesting tidbit, is that almost all people who erase their data partitions to try to "erase their tracks", ALWAYS forget to do the same thing to the swap partition or files. OOPS!
Actually, that won't do anything. You can recover and restore data from up to 7 low-level formats deep. If you use /dev/zero, you're not making it any harder to recover that data, and you're not really "erasing" anything at all. Use something with entropy.
If you're in a pinch, do the following:
Not quite (from electoral-vote.com).
Should the election end up in the Supreme Court, it is not known whether Rehnquist will particpate in the case and vote on the outcome. Should he decline to participate due to ill health, the deadlock in the country might end up in a Court itself deadlocked 4-4. In such an event, the lower court ruling stands but no legal precedent is set. An alternative scenario is that Chief Justice Rehnquist resigns and that President Bush makes a recess appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation. If Bush were to appoint a new justice without Senate confirmation who then cast the deciding vote to make Bush president I fear for the future of the country.
There is no such thing as "throwing away your vote", if you actually vote.
Please go take a basic Civics or Government class and learn what it means to vote.
And the even more amazing thing is... most people don't even realize that its the second time that the WTC has been attacked by the same foreign terrorists , under a Bush president. Both presidents also went directly for Saddam during their presidency.
You don't hear THAT on the news though.
Unfortunately, our entire election process, from the top-down is also based on the honor system. How do you know that your vote is being counted? How do you know your neighbor's absentee ballot was counted?
Answer: You don't, you "trust" that it is working the way you think it is.
Here you go: http://votepair.org/
Actually, there is already a better idea. Vote Swapping . Basically voters in swing states are trading their votes for Green/Indy party candidates to Republicans in strongly Right states. The swing voter votes for Kerry, in exchange for the Right voter voting for Nader (or Cobb).
This, solves the age-old problem of "Nader taking votes from Kerry", in this case. The strongly-Right state remains Right, the swing state leans more to the Left, and Nader's percentage of votes goes up, without hurting Kerry at all.
There are something like 20,000 people who are signed up and doing this for this election alone, and the number of people doing it is growing every election.
But I agree with your points. We need to get some Senate, Congress, and House Green/Indy representation in place first, otherwise having a Green/Indy candidate elected for President, will mean nothing, because he won't have the support of anyone in his cabinet to affect change.
Thank you for agreeing with me, and with thousands of others. When Ballmer publically said that Linux on PCs incourages Windows piracy, I almost spit my soda out of my nose.
No, but it will allow Microsoft to penetrate these markets even deeper by providing those $100.00 PCs with a slimmed-down version of the Windows operating system, of course. (Granted, those $100.00 PCs will also be used to run Linux, if they get to be that cheap, which furthers Microsoft's own assertion that Linux on PCs allow people to pirate Windows).
It also falls in line with their previously-stated goals to populate third-world countries with these PCs as well. Those countries can't afford it in their budgets, but if you make the cost of the PC $100.00 or "near-free", at some level, you can get more copies of Microsoft Windows into more people's hands.
--
Support Plucker, buy some gear!
Ok, then this is completely useless and redundant to me. I use x2vnc that accomplishes the same thing, but is also cross-OS-compatible.
In order for Xdmx to work on 3 machines, it requires 3 identically-configured boxes with X and all of the related tools and configuration loaded. That's a LOT more hardware, configuration, and tinkering than just plugging in a second or third monitor and running Xinerama across them.
Also, since I'd have to set up a full-blown OS + GUI on each machine, why not just use x2vnc and use the OS native on the machine itself, or start another X session on my local machine, and export it to the display on the remote machine.
I still don't get what Xdmx buys me at all.
Either their docs/FAQ is misleading, or the tool doesn't do what you're saying it does...
According to their Getting Started page, they require that the other servers you intend on running Xdmx against, all be running Linux, all booted into X, and logged in as a valid user.
But then that isn't running virtual desktops, or dual-headed. Its VNC.
How do I launch an app from my laptop, using Xdmx, to another Linux server, running a completely different instance of X? According to their literature on the website, this isn't possible. I have to launch the same app on both machines, but they're different copies of the same app, on different drives.
That isn't multi-head, that's just VNC, essentially.
Or did I miss something?
Did you run the nightly and weekly purge scripts, as documented? (purge.sql for your DBI driver)
Did you also change the model to TUM from the default? ( MUCH more accurate results over TOE or TEFT in our case, and we get a lot of spam!)
I'm not sure what this means, but I've never personally had this problem. dspam gives each spam a percentage, which I can sort on using the web interface. Those with a lower percentage "might be" spam, but need to be checked. Those with a higher percentage (confidence), ARE spam. After 6 months of running dspam, I hardly ever check the quarantine now, because they're all spam. Its learned what is and what is not spam, and delivers accordingly.
I, like you, used SA for a year or two, and had it trained down to a 2.0 threshold (from the default of 5.0). I also had over 300 custom rulesets that blocked based on incoming subject at the MTA side, before even accepting the mail message and sending it to SA. I also used 13 RBLs. We were getting over 5,000 incoming spam a day, and about a dozen would slip through to the user's mailboxes. After 2 years and all of that, we were only at about 90% effectiveness (and yes, my SA rulesets were kept updated all the time)
After 2 weeks of using dspam, we were already at 98%, and not a single spam had slipped through to any user's mailbox. Granted, in the early period of using it for us, some messages were marked as False Positives, but that hasn't happened for ANY user in several months now.
We also stopped using the custom MTA rulesets, and don't use any RBLs either.
dspam absolutely blows away SA (currently, until/unless SA changes) in our particular subset of the mail we receive.
Read it again. It transmits usage patterns, heuristics about the nature of your content, aggregated with the other information collected from other users of the tool, and so on... with the intended target of improving ad relevance as served to you, when you use Google. It caches (tracks) what you search for when using Google, and it also caches (tracks) what your own local files and content contain, as they pertain to the tool's functionality.
It may not be sending your emails or files back to Google, but it is certainly sending back what types of data those files contain, and how often you use them, etc.
That to me, is just as dangerous. It allows them to build a "profile" of how you use your computer, and how you use the Internet, and for what purposes, and what "kind" of data your computer is used to manage, search for, and transmit.
The paranoid few might say thats a really short leap from having a government office (like the DHS) step right into place, and request this information, so they can see who is "most-likely" a threat, or a terrorist, or someone likely to become the next Malvo or McVeigh.
I don't know about your OS, but mine does not send my usage data to third parties.
Except that it DOES transmit some of that information back to Google (and partners).
Please go back and re-read my original post which started this thread. I think you missed the point of the whole discussion.
If the Slashdot editors had used the Coralized URL when they posted the story, the VERY FIRST person to hit the link in the story's header, would have caused the Coral network to start distributing all of the content from dvdanswers. From there, EVERY Slashdot user that hits the URL further encourages that dispersion.
By the time the site itself was Slashdotted off (if at all), the content would still be available through the Coral network.
THAT is precisely the point of Coral. Using the Coralized URL after the site has already been slashdotted off the net, is of course going to result in failures, which is what you've seen.
The use of the Coralized URL should happen before the Slashdot editors post the story for public consumption.
Is this any clearer for you now?
Your comment makes no sense. To what are you referring? Coral works perfectly, for sites that are either down, overloaded, or inaccessible.
The problem isn't that Slashdot itself can't be reached, its that the sites linked from Slashdot can't be reached.
Case in point: This exact story on mirrordot, links directly to the dvdanswers.com site, which was slashdotted.
Or did I miss some invisible rewrite/proxy magic glue in there somewhere?
From the FAQ: