Uh... the French have nukes too... Remember a year or two ago they got a huge amount of protests over them doing nuclear weapons testing in Southeast Asia... Of course the US has a lot more nukes than the French do, probably more powerful nukes, and probably a lot better delivery capability... But we are talking nukes here... Even one or two on-target to US cities or interests would be a bad thing... For that matter, a bad thing for anyone downwind of the fallout...
Unless they have a warrant, you shouldn't even give them that. Ask them who they are looking for. If it isn't you, and the person they are looking for isn't there, tell them to go away.
Of course, Steve Jackson Games was publishing a manual as part of the game in question that also served as a guide to hacking/cracking.
Obviously you don't know much about this case. If you've ever seen the book in question and you have any knowledge of computers, you'd know that although it purported to be such in game terms, it certainly was no more useful a 'guide to hacking' in the real world than would be a William Gibson novel.
Now its possible, if not entirely likely that the SS (Secret Service -- the particular branch of jackbooted thugs involved in the Steve Jackson case) thought that the book actually contained 'a guide to hacking' because they were at that time completely clueless when it came to computers. However, the problem is that publishing hacking instructions, even more-or-less accurate ones, isn't necessarily against the law. If it were, 2600, which had already been publishing for 6 years at the time of the Steve Jackson raid would have been out of business by then. Not that 2600 is a really great source of hacking/cracking how-to information, but it is certainly better than Lloyd Blankenship's manuscript was.
It's unfortunate, but just plain true, that people who linger around the culture 'on the edge' sometimes find themselves burned. They should quit being crybabies when the flame occasionally licks them.
Anyone who posits that playing GURPS or reading William Gibson novels qualifies as being 'on the edge' is likely to look pretty silly. The fact that people in law enforcement can't tell the difference is kind of scary.
Isn't that a violation of your fifth amendment rights?
You must be operating under the delusion that the entire bill of rights hasn't been eroded by the fascist/stalinist bastards in Washington in the name of the 'war on drugs'.
Iowa State had the ABC (Atanasoff/Berry Computer) in 1939. ENIAC's designers based part of their work on the ABC, and in fact the ABC was central to the voiding of some of UNIVAC's (the commercial offspring of ENIAC) patents as the outcome of a 1973 court decision. Many people credit John Vincent Atanasoff as the father of the electronic digital computer.
Congratulations, you just figured out how to spend 2.5 times as much by replacing an experienced < $100,000 salaried employee with a $250,000+ 'paper expert'. And make no mistake about it, you need someone full time to administer servers, especially ones that require as much tweaking and twiddling and handholding to keep running properly and reliably as NT/IIS does.
Vendor sponsored multiple guess 'certification' programs like MCSE are pretty nearly worthless for determining quality. While there may be a lot of MCSEs out there, how many of them really have good applied knowledge, experience and problem solving skills?
Microsoft is selling the PHB's a false economy with the way they try to make it out that any idiot out there can administer NT/W2K. And hiring consultants for this sort of thing is just plain foolish $ wise anyway.
While an Ak-47 would sound cool, I doubt any geek could fire it more than once or twice.
Are you kidding? I've seen 6 to 9 year olds firing an AK-47. The younger ones only had a little trouble holding onto it. Your average 12 year old wouldn't have problems controlling one -- ask Vietnam vets, a lot of the VC were that young, and in general southeast asians are smaller than people of northern european or african american ancestry like most american GIs were.
Most geeks probably couldn;t fire a Shotgun (moreless pick it up)
WTF? How freaking heavy do you think a shotgun is? A Remington 870 weighs a lot less than a 17" monitor, and I've seen plenty of geeks pick one of those up.
Contrary to the myths purveyed by the media, AK-47's are neither particularly large, nor particularly powerful. The thing that makes them such a classic design is they are simple, reliable and easy to manufacture.
I'm not the original poster, but I've put several thousand rounds through an AK-47 (specifically a Poly-Tech Legend).
Or are you just looking for a sexy-sounding weapon, and couldn't remember how tospell Kalishnikov? Or that they're even the same?
I ask, because lots of people on slashdot are just talking out of their asses.
And a lot of people on here aren't.
That, and anyone with any real weapons experience would know that 12-gauges make for much more AOL-cd-blasting fun.
Now that is a matter of opinion. While I'm sure that AOL CD's pretty much immediately disintegrate when hit by a 12 guage, there isn't nearly so much challenge to that as there would be to be able to hit them with a rifle. Well, unless you were using slugs in the 12 guage.
Who cares whether you can put little holes through them at great distances, when you can instead blow them into little bits, and they make for interesting clay-substitutes on the range.
Now you've got my curiosity up... I may just have to go out and try both and see which one really is more fun.
While I'm at it, I might just have to do some comparisons as to different rounds....22LR, 9mm,.40S&W,.308,.223,.30-06, etc.
Actually, of anything I have access to, the.22LR would be the biggest challenge... it is a small pocket automatic with a 2" barrel...:-)
I went down and got one after reading the article on Slashdot. Then I proceeded to to over to Freshmeat and find the Linux driver and a Perl module... Oh yea... those letters really stopped me from using a CueCat on my Linux box...
These are all good questions, which I think the FBI should answer. Even so, I don't know that I'd trust their answer without having the code be public, or at least having a group of people whom the computing community trusts look at the code. Something with as serious a consequences as this needs public scrutiny to make sure it is doing what it is supposed to, and only what it is supposed to. It is the latter that I am most concerned with.
The parts of Kansas I've driven through had gentle rolling hills (either wheat or sunflowers as far as the eye could see) much like southern Iowa. Northern Iowa is much more flat than that. Kansas is close, but overall, I'd say that Iowa and Nebraska are more flat than Kansas. Just about every other state I can think of has exceptions with more terrain.
Iowa is in the midwestern part of the US. While technically most of the US speaks something that is often referred to as 'english', it generally isn't expected to adhere to the standards of the 'Queen's English'. And as gor poor grammar, it is hardly something that is relegated to or stereotypical of hicks alone. Some of the worst grammar I see is perpetrated by east or west coasters.
And yes, my grammar isn't perfect. So sue me. And while you are at it, you might try a little attitude adjustment.
The problem many small rural communities face is slowly dwindling population as all of the capable younger people move away as soon as they are able. One of the reasons that the smart younger people leave is that there is a lack of things for them to do. While the Internet may not be a necessity, it is certainly something that is quickly becomming something that many people feel deprived if they don't have access to.
Places that have grain elevators in Iowa usually have small towns (300 to 5000 population typically) near them. That is the target market for this sort of thing. Many of these small towns have dialup access (often through the NetINS monopoly -- which is affilliated with most of the rural cooperative and independant telcos), but very few of them have either any significant competition for dialup service nor any other higher speed access available.
The north central and northwestern part of Iowa is very flat. Southern Iowa has gentle rolling hills, but is still fairly flat. Northeastern Iowa is somewhat more hilly, but far from what most people would consider mountainous. If you compare the lowest point in Iowa to the highest point, you aren't talking about that many feet of difference. You have to look at things comparatively to other places that have much more terrain than Iowa does... Even many of Iowa's neighboring states such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and South Dakota have significantly more rugged terrain. Tell me a state that is more flat overall than Iowa... About the only one that springs to mind as a possibility is Nebraska... Even Illinois has the tailings of the Ozarks across its southern portion...
They are trying to make it difficult to find. Even if it is widely available overseas, if no US sites have links to it, it will be more difficult to find. I predict that their next course of action will be to try to strongarm the search engines to filter out pages that have it from search results and reject query requests for it. If they are allowed to get away with that, it will be a far more damaging precedent than anything they've done so far.
Individual automobile engines are much less efficient than power plants.
True, but when you add that to the innefficiency of electric motors and gear reduction systems and the weight of storage batteries, that is less of an issue than you might think.
The transference of electric power not an issue.
I don't believe that for a minute. There are significant losses in transmission and in storage loss.
Creating electrical power at a power plant and driving electric cars will always create less pollution than driving cars with internal combustion engines.
I've seen eco-nuts say that, but I haven't seen anything that would persuade me to believe that given today's technology that its true.
It is not just moving the problem somewhere else, that is a common misconception.
I think the common misperception is the opposite. As I said before, if you get your electric power from hydroelectric, solar, wind or nuclear, then it might be true, otherwise, it doesn't seem to add up that way.
Unless your electric source is from hydroelectric, wind power or solar power (and not that much of the US's electric power does), then an electric car may cause more pollution than a gasoline powered car. Why? If you are burning coal or natural gas to produce electricity, and then you have to transmit that power a long distance (which has a lot of loss), and then you have to store that electricity in batteries (which are inefficient, and cause pollution to make and dispose of), then your net pollution might be higher than just burning gasoline. Nuclear power is cleaner than coal or natural gas (although it still has waste disposal problems), but it is highly unpopular with the type of mindless eco-nuts who are likely to buy an electric vehicle.
I think too many people think that if there isn't smoke coming out of a tailpipe something is clean, and they don't stop to connect smoke coming out of a smokestack at a power plant miles away with the electric vehicle. Its at best just moving the problem somewhere else.
Most file based intrusion detection systems let you specify what directories/files are/aren't checked for changes. Something like user's files in their home directory would probably not be something that would be watched. Other stuff like log files would also be excluded, because they are expected to change. Things like executables in/bin/usr/bin and config files in/etc are examples of the things that are important to watch for modifications to.
Unfortunately, this means that there are still places that intruders can hide files, but it doesn't mean that this type of tool isn't useful.
You are missing the point... You should do intrusion detection after the fact, as well as take whatever prevention measures you can such as turning off unnecessary services, etc. If you really want to keep your systems secure, there is no such thing as overkill...
Teaching environment-dependant debugger tricks in a general programming class is a pretty dubious concept. While being able to assume that you have a consistant environment may make things easier for the instructor, it is often doing a disservice to the students, many of which will find that when they get to the real world they will end up working with more than a few different environments in the future. If you are more able to adapt to different environments and aware of pitfalls to avoid when writing code as far as portability goes, I think you are going to be better off in the long run.
Think about it this way, if this is a general college course, you should probably be teaching programming language, concepts, algorithms and problem solving skills rather than teaching how to use a specific tool. It is hard enough to cram enough concepts, algorithms and problem solving skills into a semester without spending time messing with vendor-specific tricks. Teaching how to use a specific tool is probably the place of a vendor sponsored/affiliated training class of some sort, the kind that is 3-5 days and intended for people who already know the base language and generic programming techniques.
If they're successful in stopping linking to DeCSS source (which will be virtually impossible), will they go on to keep search engines from searching for or displaying search results containing links to the DeCSS source code? Could the search engines even comply very easily?
A quick search for 'DeCSS source code' on Google shows that the DeCSS source code can be downloaded from literally dozens of places, many of which are outside the US.
It seems like every time they try to remove content from the web like this, it just pops back up somewhere else, and often more of it than before.
If they can't get the search engines not to return hits on searches, will MPAA or DVD-CCA try to shut down every web site that is found in the search engines, even those outside the US?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... the French have nukes too... Remember a year or two ago they got a huge amount of protests over them doing nuclear weapons testing in Southeast Asia... Of course the US has a lot more nukes than the French do, probably more powerful nukes, and probably a lot better delivery capability... But we are talking nukes here... Even one or two on-target to US cities or interests would be a bad thing... For that matter, a bad thing for anyone downwind of the fallout...
Unless they have a warrant, you shouldn't even give them that. Ask them who they are looking for. If it isn't you, and the person they are looking for isn't there, tell them to go away.
Of course, Steve Jackson Games was publishing a manual as part of the game in question that also served as a guide to hacking/cracking.
Obviously you don't know much about this case. If you've ever seen the book in question and you have any knowledge of computers, you'd know that although it purported to be such in game terms, it certainly was no more useful a 'guide to hacking' in the real world than would be a William Gibson novel.
Now its possible, if not entirely likely that the SS (Secret Service -- the particular branch of jackbooted thugs involved in the Steve Jackson case) thought that the book actually contained 'a guide to hacking' because they were at that time completely clueless when it came to computers. However, the problem is that publishing hacking instructions, even more-or-less accurate ones, isn't necessarily against the law. If it were, 2600, which had already been publishing for 6 years at the time of the Steve Jackson raid would have been out of business by then. Not that 2600 is a really great source of hacking/cracking how-to information, but it is certainly better than Lloyd Blankenship's manuscript was.
It's unfortunate, but just plain true, that people who linger around the culture 'on the edge' sometimes find themselves burned. They should quit being crybabies when the flame occasionally licks them.
Anyone who posits that playing GURPS or reading William Gibson novels qualifies as being 'on the edge' is likely to look pretty silly. The fact that people in law enforcement can't tell the difference is kind of scary.
Isn't that a violation of your fifth amendment rights?
You must be operating under the delusion that the entire bill of rights hasn't been eroded by the fascist/stalinist bastards in Washington in the name of the 'war on drugs'.
Yes, I am feeling cynical today.
Iowa State had the ABC (Atanasoff/Berry Computer) in 1939. ENIAC's designers based part of their work on the ABC, and in fact the ABC was central to the voiding of some of UNIVAC's (the commercial offspring of ENIAC) patents as the outcome of a 1973 court decision. Many people credit John Vincent Atanasoff as the father of the electronic digital computer.
Damnit, should have previewed... :-(
Congratulations, you just figured out how to spend 2.5 times as much by replacing an experienced < $100,000 salaried employee with a $250,000+ 'paper expert'. And make no mistake about it, you need someone full time to administer servers, especially ones that require as much tweaking and twiddling and handholding to keep running properly and reliably as NT/IIS does.
Vendor sponsored multiple guess 'certification' programs like MCSE are pretty nearly worthless for determining quality. While there may be a lot of MCSEs out there, how many of them really have good applied knowledge, experience and problem solving skills?
Microsoft is selling the PHB's a false economy with the way they try to make it out that any idiot out there can administer NT/W2K. And hiring consultants for this sort of thing is just plain foolish $ wise anyway.
Congratulations, you just figured out how to spend 2.5 times as much by replacing an experienced
While an Ak-47 would sound cool, I doubt any geek could fire it more than once or twice.
Are you kidding? I've seen 6 to 9 year olds firing an AK-47. The younger ones only had a little trouble holding onto it. Your average 12 year old wouldn't have problems controlling one -- ask Vietnam vets, a lot of the VC were that young, and in general southeast asians are smaller than people of northern european or african american ancestry like most american GIs were.
Most geeks probably couldn;t fire a Shotgun (moreless pick it up)
WTF? How freaking heavy do you think a shotgun is? A Remington 870 weighs a lot less than a 17" monitor, and I've seen plenty of geeks pick one of those up.
Contrary to the myths purveyed by the media, AK-47's are neither particularly large, nor particularly powerful. The thing that makes them such a classic design is they are simple, reliable and easy to manufacture.
Have you ever actually fired an AK-47?
.22LR, 9mm, .40S&W, .308, .223, .30-06, etc.
.22LR would be the biggest challenge... it is a small pocket automatic with a 2" barrel... :-)
I'm not the original poster, but I've put several thousand rounds through an AK-47 (specifically a Poly-Tech Legend).
Or are you just looking for a sexy-sounding weapon, and couldn't remember how tospell Kalishnikov? Or that they're even the same?
I ask, because lots of people on slashdot are just talking out of their asses.
And a lot of people on here aren't.
That, and anyone with any real weapons experience would know that 12-gauges make for much more AOL-cd-blasting fun.
Now that is a matter of opinion. While I'm sure that AOL CD's pretty much immediately disintegrate when hit by a 12 guage, there isn't nearly so much challenge to that as there would be to be able to hit them with a rifle. Well, unless you were using slugs in the 12 guage.
Who cares whether you can put little holes through them at great distances, when you can instead blow them into little bits, and they make for interesting clay-substitutes on the range.
Now you've got my curiosity up... I may just have to go out and try both and see which one really is more fun.
While I'm at it, I might just have to do some comparisons as to different rounds...
Actually, of anything I have access to, the
Vote with your feet. If you don't like the working conditions where you are, there are plenty of places you can get the same money for 40 hours.
Sheesh. Some idiot actually bid $9.99 for a Cue:Cat on ebay...
I went down and got one after reading the article on Slashdot. Then I proceeded to to over to Freshmeat and find the Linux driver and a Perl module... Oh yea... those letters really stopped me from using a CueCat on my Linux box...
These are all good questions, which I think the FBI should answer. Even so, I don't know that I'd trust their answer without having the code be public, or at least having a group of people whom the computing community trusts look at the code. Something with as serious a consequences as this needs public scrutiny to make sure it is doing what it is supposed to, and only what it is supposed to. It is the latter that I am most concerned with.
Kansas.
The parts of Kansas I've driven through had gentle rolling hills (either wheat or sunflowers as far as the eye could see) much like southern Iowa. Northern Iowa is much more flat than that. Kansas is close, but overall, I'd say that Iowa and Nebraska are more flat than Kansas. Just about every other state I can think of has exceptions with more terrain.
Iowa is in the midwestern part of the US. While technically most of the US speaks something that is often referred to as 'english', it generally isn't expected to adhere to the standards of the 'Queen's English'. And as gor poor grammar, it is hardly something that is relegated to or stereotypical of hicks alone. Some of the worst grammar I see is perpetrated by east or west coasters.
And yes, my grammar isn't perfect. So sue me. And while you are at it, you might try a little attitude adjustment.
The problem many small rural communities face is slowly dwindling population as all of the capable younger people move away as soon as they are able. One of the reasons that the smart younger people leave is that there is a lack of things for them to do. While the Internet may not be a necessity, it is certainly something that is quickly becomming something that many people feel deprived if they don't have access to.
Places that have grain elevators in Iowa usually have small towns (300 to 5000 population typically) near them. That is the target market for this sort of thing. Many of these small towns have dialup access (often through the NetINS monopoly -- which is affilliated with most of the rural cooperative and independant telcos), but very few of them have either any significant competition for dialup service nor any other higher speed access available.
The north central and northwestern part of Iowa is very flat. Southern Iowa has gentle rolling hills, but is still fairly flat. Northeastern Iowa is somewhat more hilly, but far from what most people would consider mountainous. If you compare the lowest point in Iowa to the highest point, you aren't talking about that many feet of difference. You have to look at things comparatively to other places that have much more terrain than Iowa does... Even many of Iowa's neighboring states such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and South Dakota have significantly more rugged terrain. Tell me a state that is more flat overall than Iowa... About the only one that springs to mind as a possibility is Nebraska... Even Illinois has the tailings of the Ozarks across its southern portion...
They are trying to make it difficult to find. Even if it is widely available overseas, if no US sites have links to it, it will be more difficult to find. I predict that their next course of action will be to try to strongarm the search engines to filter out pages that have it from search results and reject query requests for it. If they are allowed to get away with that, it will be a far more damaging precedent than anything they've done so far.
Individual automobile engines are much less efficient than power plants.
True, but when you add that to the innefficiency of electric motors and gear reduction systems and the weight of storage batteries, that is less of an issue than you might think.
The transference of electric power not an issue.
I don't believe that for a minute. There are significant losses in transmission and in storage loss.
Creating electrical power at a power plant and driving electric cars will always create less pollution than driving cars with internal combustion engines.
I've seen eco-nuts say that, but I haven't seen anything that would persuade me to believe that given today's technology that its true.
It is not just moving the problem somewhere else, that is a common misconception.
I think the common misperception is the opposite. As I said before, if you get your electric power from hydroelectric, solar, wind or nuclear, then it might be true, otherwise, it doesn't seem to add up that way.
Unless your electric source is from hydroelectric, wind power or solar power (and not that much of the US's electric power does), then an electric car may cause more pollution than a gasoline powered car. Why? If you are burning coal or natural gas to produce electricity, and then you have to transmit that power a long distance (which has a lot of loss), and then you have to store that electricity in batteries (which are inefficient, and cause pollution to make and dispose of), then your net pollution might be higher than just burning gasoline. Nuclear power is cleaner than coal or natural gas (although it still has waste disposal problems), but it is highly unpopular with the type of mindless eco-nuts who are likely to buy an electric vehicle.
I think too many people think that if there isn't smoke coming out of a tailpipe something is clean, and they don't stop to connect smoke coming out of a smokestack at a power plant miles away with the electric vehicle. Its at best just moving the problem somewhere else.
Most file based intrusion detection systems let you specify what directories/files are/aren't checked for changes. Something like user's files in their home directory would probably not be something that would be watched. Other stuff like log files would also be excluded, because they are expected to change. Things like executables in /bin /usr/bin and config files in /etc are examples of the things that are important to watch for modifications to.
Unfortunately, this means that there are still places that intruders can hide files, but it doesn't mean that this type of tool isn't useful.
You are missing the point... You should do intrusion detection after the fact, as well as take whatever prevention measures you can such as turning off unnecessary services, etc. If you really want to keep your systems secure, there is no such thing as overkill...
Teaching environment-dependant debugger tricks in a general programming class is a pretty dubious concept. While being able to assume that you have a consistant environment may make things easier for the instructor, it is often doing a disservice to the students, many of which will find that when they get to the real world they will end up working with more than a few different environments in the future. If you are more able to adapt to different environments and aware of pitfalls to avoid when writing code as far as portability goes, I think you are going to be better off in the long run.
Think about it this way, if this is a general college course, you should probably be teaching programming language, concepts, algorithms and problem solving skills rather than teaching how to use a specific tool. It is hard enough to cram enough concepts, algorithms and problem solving skills into a semester without spending time messing with vendor-specific tricks. Teaching how to use a specific tool is probably the place of a vendor sponsored/affiliated training class of some sort, the kind that is 3-5 days and intended for people who already know the base language and generic programming techniques.
If they're successful in stopping linking to DeCSS source (which will be virtually impossible), will they go on to keep search engines from searching for or displaying search results containing links to the DeCSS source code? Could the search engines even comply very easily?
A quick search for 'DeCSS source code' on Google shows that the DeCSS source code can be downloaded from literally dozens of places, many of which are outside the US.
It seems like every time they try to remove content from the web like this, it just pops back up somewhere else, and often more of it than before.
If they can't get the search engines not to return hits on searches, will MPAA or DVD-CCA try to shut down every web site that is found in the search engines, even those outside the US?