Since this is sponsored by the government, and obviously is something that would be instantly picked up by anti-virus software, what are the possibilities of the government making deals with anti-virus companies to NOT detect Magic Lantern? After all, if one "victim" is running active virus protection, bye bye magic lantern.
What about a search warrant?
Random thought: There is probably already a back door built into windows for this purpose... the result of many meetings between the DOD, FBI, CIA, and microsoft.
You're right... and thats exactly the point I was trying to make. By "physical security", I also meant to include the personnel that will be around this equipment. Those people must be held in a high level of trust with a number of safeguards in place, such as inspections upon entry and exit of government facilities.
Building a private network isn't a big deal. I think the government could build an encrypted WAN without much effort. I think the biggest challenge to security is going to be on the physical front... meaning that every piece of network equipment must be in a secure location. This includes every router and bridge in every network shack along the WAN lines. Wouldn't want any 1337 hax0r5 to come along with a patch cable and bring down the government network. Since guarding every inch of wire is impossible, point to point connections must be made with fiber line so it can't be tapped like copper.
None of this even begins to consider the physical local machine security... government workers shouldn't be alowed to bring any media from home, no incoming modem lines, etc.
Lots to think about. If GB wants to cut me a check, I'll begin the engineering work tomorrow.
State government are getting into online services... in Maine, our "e-government" services go by the name "InforME", which is obviously a play on the word "inform" and the state initials. Sometimes, I wonder if they really meant "in for me".
The state has all kinds of cool services...usefull stuff, like being able to re-register my car online, and access to common forms.
What amazes me most about the whole idea of "e-government", is that somehow it gets done. State governments are bloated with red-tape, yet somehow they've managed to get an online system.
I don't expect the same from the federal goverment because they're too bloated to get out their own way. I'm amazed that the government doesn't colapse under its own weight. Perhaps this is one of the great wonders of the world.
The idea of using radiant cooling isn't really a new concept in computing... people have been using radiators with liquid cooling implimentations for quite a while.
I clicked the link to space.com to read the article. When the page loaded, the big central advertisement was for "Star Wars: Phantom Menace" videos... Kinda threw me off for a moment. Perhaps I haven't recovered yet beause I'm posting this here. hmmm
WOW! Clipper! I programmed in Clipper back when Summer '87 was released, and then on into the early 90's. I worked on several apps, including a payroll program used by a banks and a criminal justice database for law enforcement.
There was a/. post a few months ago about the "clipper chip", and I made a sly "summer '87" remark, but I don't think anybody here understood it;)
Well, you've touched on part of it. Yes, part of our problem is that we've pushed along a 15 year old DOS app... but, DOS really *is* a problem for us.
1. Dependency on legacy libraries.
2. Legacy Btrieve database support, which is difficult to impliment on modern systems because the database vender doesn't support the legacy databases.
3. DOS executible segment size limits have been reached, meaning our application is really too large for DOS. (800,000 lines of code in 500+ modules)
4. Reliance on outdated ASM code for CPU idle calls, which causes 100% CPU usage on win2k systems.
I agree that DOS isn't necessarily all of the problem. In fact, besides "DOS", there are applications in which a console interface is advantageous, specifically with heavy DATA apps.
regards
DOS Could have survived
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
MS-DOS could have survived, if back in the early 90's, Microsoft had wanted to continue developing it. They made it obsolete by choice... I'm sure they could have easily turned it into a multitasking, 32 bit, networked OS, and still could have put a GUI on top of that.
Here's my reality... and I'm not kidding about this, but feel free to mod up to "funny".
I work for a software company, maintaining 15 year old DOS Software. The company is owned by older people that can't move fast enough to be in this industry... but somehow, we're still managing to sell this software to unsuspecting people.
We have 2 applications... both of which are touted as "high-end", mission critical apps. A typical installation could cost the client somewhere around $50,000 USD, sometimes more. Here's what they get:
1. A nasty DOS app written in Qbasic, using a Btrieve database on a Novell Server, all running over our favorite protocol, IPX.
Sounds good? Well, its my nightmare!!!
When win2k was released, a lot of little things in our DOS app stopped working. Our company's president refused to believe that MS-DOS was anything less than cutting edge. Now that XP was released, and more things are broken, our company's president refuses to believe that microsoft would abandon DOS.
Anyway, enough rambling about this. Its a sad fact that there are companies STILL working with DOS programs. Sad. Even worse, is that I'm typing here, rather than working on that Qbasic crap.
We did something similar in my high school chemistry class several years ago. We were allowed to use chemical reactions as a source for the propulsion. We had a 2 lane "water drag track", and were given 1 soda bottle, and some basic supplies, like rubber bands, balloons, soda straws, etc.
The easiest rig to build, and the most common, was simply the soda bottle with a rubber stopper in the opening. The rubber stopper had a hole in it, which would function as an outlet... the bottle would then be filled with the infamous vinegar and baking soda mix. This provided enough fuel for long lasting propulsion, while being simple. One of the biggest problems with this design however, is the outlet on the bottle was usually above water. To acheive optimal propulsion with this method, the best thing is to make sure the jet is below the water line.
Another method (and the winning method) was to completely seal the bottle with a full rubber stopper. The bottle was filled with the infamous (and bad smelling) baking soda & vinegar mix, and promptly plugged with the stopper. After about 2 minutes of building pressure, the stopper would fire out of the bottle, propelling it forward with great velocity. There were some minor problems keeping the boat in the water, but that was the winning design.
Fancy designs don't work... some over-acheivers were inclined to build more complex designs, incorporating a lot of internal parts, etc. Go for the K.I.S.S theory! (Keep It Simple Stupid).
If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that these mysterious "security fixes" are probably to fix the recent root exploit. I'd imagine that AC would do this, that way there is a secure 2.2 kernel that users can move to. The 2.2 series is very actively used, (not everybody uses 2.4) and this makes sense.
As for the DMCA, what a pile of crap! I'm an american, I have the right of free speech. The right of free speech supercedes the DMCA. Period.
Interesting analysis... in Windows Explorer, did you compare against the "thumbnail view"? I believe the "thumbnail view" is roughly equivalent to Nautilus' concept of previewing each document instead of an icon. Its a great idea, just needs to be a *lot* faster!
Great idea! Of course, this does bring back nostalgic memories of the BBS days. My first BBS was a part time, single line, running on on an XT with 2 floppy drives and 300 baud. A few years later, I had a 2 line bad-boy running on a 386 with 8Mb ram @ 9600 baud (which was quite expensive BTW).
Anyway, I love ascii/ansi art. If I were to put ascii art on display, I wouldn't mess around with monitors, old computers, etc. I would have a quality commercial printer make them into gigantic prints. That way, in order to view them, people would have to stand a way back from the actual print. I think by doing that, it would not only show the art, but would emphasize the granularity and essence of ascii art, especially with block character drawings.
There are several ways that prints could be made... best bet would be to create accurate representations of each character in the 80x25 grid for the printer. Or, you could break each 80x25 cell down into its 8x8 pixel representation according to the actual system character layouts in the BIOS, and then print those purposefully "blocky" so that the sub-blocks will be visible in each character. Poor man's solution... take a hi-res digital photo of your monitor, and have it enlarged.
I've got a small apache server running on the "dirty front lines" of the internet... right in the middle of the 2nd largest cable network in the US, where every tom, dick and harry goes nuts with p2p, porn, spam, and of course, IIS without having a clue about anything significant.
Anyway, my current NIMDA stats: 55,522 hits in the access_log, and they've only slowed down noticeably within the past week. 196 so far today, and today isn't over yet.
I've successfully been able to shut down some of these machines remotely by randomly picking IPs from the log, checking for either open SMB shares or win2k remote administration. With either of those, especially since these sysops are usually the height of insecurity, its been quite easy to contribute my part of NIMDA disinfection.
1. will automatically send Web surfers to an MSN search engine if a Web address cannot be located, rather than resorting to the standard "page not found" message
Ever hear of MSN autosearch? Microsoft has had the MSN search deviously built into their browsers since at least win2k, maybe before. That isn't a new feature of XP. I was able to turn that "feature" off in my browser, (option burried very deeply and obscure), but somehow it re-enabled itself about a week later.
... to quote from a recent edition of The Onion, "Holy Fucking Shit!" I truly believe Microsoft has lost their collective marbles. Might be a good time to invest in straight jacket stocks.
Lets not forget...
on
Palm OS Spinoff
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Lets not forget they recently picked up BeOS... I have a feeling that Palm is either staging their deaths, or trying gain some new market position in a brilliant manner. Its going to be really interesting to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this is sponsored by the government, and obviously is something that would be instantly picked up by anti-virus software, what are the possibilities of the government making deals with anti-virus companies to NOT detect Magic Lantern? After all, if one "victim" is running active virus protection, bye bye magic lantern.
What about a search warrant?
Random thought: There is probably already a back door built into windows for this purpose... the result of many meetings between the DOD, FBI, CIA, and microsoft.
You're right... and thats exactly the point I was trying to make. By "physical security", I also meant to include the personnel that will be around this equipment. Those people must be held in a high level of trust with a number of safeguards in place, such as inspections upon entry and exit of government facilities.
Building a private network isn't a big deal. I think the government could build an encrypted WAN without much effort. I think the biggest challenge to security is going to be on the physical front... meaning that every piece of network equipment must be in a secure location. This includes every router and bridge in every network shack along the WAN lines. Wouldn't want any 1337 hax0r5 to come along with a patch cable and bring down the government network. Since guarding every inch of wire is impossible, point to point connections must be made with fiber line so it can't be tapped like copper.
None of this even begins to consider the physical local machine security... government workers shouldn't be alowed to bring any media from home, no incoming modem lines, etc.
Lots to think about. If GB wants to cut me a check, I'll begin the engineering work tomorrow.
I hope the Museum of Broken Packets can adequately catalog its own slashdotting.
State government are getting into online services... in Maine, our "e-government" services go by the name "InforME", which is obviously a play on the word "inform" and the state initials. Sometimes, I wonder if they really meant "in for me".
The state has all kinds of cool services...usefull stuff, like being able to re-register my car online, and access to common forms.
What amazes me most about the whole idea of "e-government", is that somehow it gets done. State governments are bloated with red-tape, yet somehow they've managed to get an online system.
I don't expect the same from the federal goverment because they're too bloated to get out their own way. I'm amazed that the government doesn't colapse under its own weight. Perhaps this is one of the great wonders of the world.
Well, that explains why I overheard this last week:
.pleeeeeeeeease can I have one?"
"Mommy, I want an accoustic kitty...
The idea of using radiant cooling isn't really a new concept in computing... people have been using radiators with liquid cooling implimentations for quite a while.
Something very odd just happened...
I clicked the link to space.com to read the article. When the page loaded, the big central advertisement was for "Star Wars: Phantom Menace" videos... Kinda threw me off for a moment. Perhaps I haven't recovered yet beause I'm posting this here. hmmm
WOW! Clipper! I programmed in Clipper back when Summer '87 was released, and then on into the early 90's. I worked on several apps, including a payroll program used by a banks and a criminal justice database for law enforcement.
/. post a few months ago about the "clipper chip", and I made a sly "summer '87" remark, but I don't think anybody here understood it ;)
There was a
Well, you've touched on part of it. Yes, part of our problem is that we've pushed along a 15 year old DOS app... but, DOS really *is* a problem for us.
1. Dependency on legacy libraries.
2. Legacy Btrieve database support, which is difficult to impliment on modern systems because the database vender doesn't support the legacy databases.
3. DOS executible segment size limits have been reached, meaning our application is really too large for DOS. (800,000 lines of code in 500+ modules)
4. Reliance on outdated ASM code for CPU idle calls, which causes 100% CPU usage on win2k systems.
I agree that DOS isn't necessarily all of the problem. In fact, besides "DOS", there are applications in which a console interface is advantageous, specifically with heavy DATA apps.
regards
MS-DOS could have survived, if back in the early 90's, Microsoft had wanted to continue developing it. They made it obsolete by choice... I'm sure they could have easily turned it into a multitasking, 32 bit, networked OS, and still could have put a GUI on top of that.
It just wasn't in their best interested to do so.
Here's my reality... and I'm not kidding about this, but feel free to mod up to "funny".
I work for a software company, maintaining 15 year old DOS Software. The company is owned by older people that can't move fast enough to be in this industry... but somehow, we're still managing to sell this software to unsuspecting people.
We have 2 applications... both of which are touted as "high-end", mission critical apps. A typical installation could cost the client somewhere around $50,000 USD, sometimes more. Here's what they get:
1. A nasty DOS app written in Qbasic, using a Btrieve database on a Novell Server, all running over our favorite protocol, IPX.
Sounds good? Well, its my nightmare!!!
When win2k was released, a lot of little things in our DOS app stopped working. Our company's president refused to believe that MS-DOS was anything less than cutting edge. Now that XP was released, and more things are broken, our company's president refuses to believe that microsoft would abandon DOS.
Anyway, enough rambling about this. Its a sad fact that there are companies STILL working with DOS programs. Sad. Even worse, is that I'm typing here, rather than working on that Qbasic crap.
c:\> del *.*
Be warned... I learned the hard way.
Hmm... think long and hard about that one! I'm not even stoned, and its messing with my mind.
"Knowledge Synthesis"... doesn't that defeat the point of "knowledge"? whoa.
>/dev/null
We did something similar in my high school chemistry class several years ago. We were allowed to use chemical reactions as a source for the propulsion. We had a 2 lane "water drag track", and were given 1 soda bottle, and some basic supplies, like rubber bands, balloons, soda straws, etc.
The easiest rig to build, and the most common, was simply the soda bottle with a rubber stopper in the opening. The rubber stopper had a hole in it, which would function as an outlet... the bottle would then be filled with the infamous vinegar and baking soda mix. This provided enough fuel for long lasting propulsion, while being simple. One of the biggest problems with this design however, is the outlet on the bottle was usually above water. To acheive optimal propulsion with this method, the best thing is to make sure the jet is below the water line.
Another method (and the winning method) was to completely seal the bottle with a full rubber stopper. The bottle was filled with the infamous (and bad smelling) baking soda & vinegar mix, and promptly plugged with the stopper. After about 2 minutes of building pressure, the stopper would fire out of the bottle, propelling it forward with great velocity. There were some minor problems keeping the boat in the water, but that was the winning design.
Fancy designs don't work... some over-acheivers were inclined to build more complex designs, incorporating a lot of internal parts, etc. Go for the K.I.S.S theory! (Keep It Simple Stupid).
If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that these mysterious "security fixes" are probably to fix the recent root exploit. I'd imagine that AC would do this, that way there is a secure 2.2 kernel that users can move to. The 2.2 series is very actively used, (not everybody uses 2.4) and this makes sense.
As for the DMCA, what a pile of crap! I'm an american, I have the right of free speech. The right of free speech supercedes the DMCA. Period.
Interesting analysis... in Windows Explorer, did you compare against the "thumbnail view"? I believe the "thumbnail view" is roughly equivalent to Nautilus' concept of previewing each document instead of an icon. Its a great idea, just needs to be a *lot* faster!
Great idea! Of course, this does bring back nostalgic memories of the BBS days. My first BBS was a part time, single line, running on on an XT with 2 floppy drives and 300 baud. A few years later, I had a 2 line bad-boy running on a 386 with 8Mb ram @ 9600 baud (which was quite expensive BTW).
Anyway, I love ascii/ansi art. If I were to put ascii art on display, I wouldn't mess around with monitors, old computers, etc. I would have a quality commercial printer make them into gigantic prints. That way, in order to view them, people would have to stand a way back from the actual print. I think by doing that, it would not only show the art, but would emphasize the granularity and essence of ascii art, especially with block character drawings.
There are several ways that prints could be made... best bet would be to create accurate representations of each character in the 80x25 grid for the printer. Or, you could break each 80x25 cell down into its 8x8 pixel representation according to the actual system character layouts in the BIOS, and then print those purposefully "blocky" so that the sub-blocks will be visible in each character. Poor man's solution... take a hi-res digital photo of your monitor, and have it enlarged.
Great idea, I hope you succeed with it!
I've got a small apache server running on the "dirty front lines" of the internet... right in the middle of the 2nd largest cable network in the US, where every tom, dick and harry goes nuts with p2p, porn, spam, and of course, IIS without having a clue about anything significant.
Anyway, my current NIMDA stats: 55,522 hits in the access_log, and they've only slowed down noticeably within the past week. 196 so far today, and today isn't over yet.
I've successfully been able to shut down some of these machines remotely by randomly picking IPs from the log, checking for either open SMB shares or win2k remote administration. With either of those, especially since these sysops are usually the height of insecurity, its been quite easy to contribute my part of NIMDA disinfection.
Hey! I invented that about 6 months ago... it was an idea I had while drunk one night. Then I figured, whats the point?
1. will automatically send Web surfers to an MSN search engine if a Web address cannot be located, rather than resorting to the standard "page not found" message
Ever hear of MSN autosearch? Microsoft has had the MSN search deviously built into their browsers since at least win2k, maybe before. That isn't a new feature of XP. I was able to turn that "feature" off in my browser, (option burried very deeply and obscure), but somehow it re-enabled itself about a week later.
Since c|net started this on Oct. 17th, the 2nd installment is available also.
m l
You can read it here: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201-7502765-0.ht
They want to attract younger drivers? Did you see that thing in the picture?!?! They want to attract younger drivers?!!?? Hello?
Best way to attract younger drivers is to NOT make a car that looks like a giant ass.
... to quote from a recent edition of The Onion, "Holy Fucking Shit!" I truly believe Microsoft has lost their collective marbles. Might be a good time to invest in straight jacket stocks.
Lets not forget they recently picked up BeOS... I have a feeling that Palm is either staging their deaths, or trying gain some new market position in a brilliant manner. Its going to be really interesting to watch.