And can I do what about this? Apparently, the first tech person was, indeed, a moron, and we've been cleaning up their mess ever since. I've personally re-written 70% of the ASP code for the web, and about 33% of the internal applications. EVERYONE agrees that this needs to be done, but management won't give us the go-ahead because they're afraid it'll kill the system.
The place where I work has had this hole in place since it started using IIS a few years ago. Since then, we've grown to have two HUGE websites, both running off of a 300+ gig database, as well as a huge array of support programs. Guess what? ALL of them log in using sa with no password. Guess what? ALL of them have to be changed. Guess what? Noone wants to do it because if something broke in the process, we'd be dead in the water. Nevermind that we WILL be dead in the water when someone finally hacks us.
Ahem... NO. I can give you a damned good counter to the "only criminals have something to hide" schtick right now. I'm a professed pervert - specifically, I'm into BDSM (bondage, sadomasochism, that sort of fun 'kinky stuff'). Now, while I personally am perfectly fine with broadcasting this to the world, and choose to accept any difficulty this causes me, there are some people who choose not to, and I respect that - there's a LOT of people who don't understand that consentual power play does not equal rape, much like there are a lot of people who don't understand that being a homosexual does not mean that you're a pedophile. I have personally been implicated in more than one sexual assault case for no other reason than because it was common knowledge that I was into 'kinky sex', and the local authorities associated this with being a rapist. My civil liberties were violated because of totally legal and irrelevant practices that some people prejudicially decided made me a 'bad person'. And while I have no problem with PEOPLE knowing everything about me, I would prefer that AGENCIES have as difficult a time as possible clicking a few boxes on a form and saying "round up everyone who eats oatmeal and drives more than 30 miles a day to work in for questioning; our recent psych profile says these people are 3x more likely to be rapists." Fuck that.
All of which are actual harm against actual people, and should be treated as such. I'm not saying that these things shouldn't be punished, merely that they should be punished as befitting the actual benefit/harm they cause the people affected by them.
And I, on the other hand, feel that financial loss shouldn't even be CONSIDERED - Human harm (both physical and psychological) should be the first AND final consideration. What's best for PEOPLE - not best for faceless corporate entities, governments, or machines.
I wholeheartedly disagree. ALL crime, whether it's cyber or meat, should be measured against how much actual harm was caused to actual human beings. Corporate, government and idealistic interests should be secondary to the benefit and well-being of actual thinking, feeling human beings.
So let's do something. Have 'em hand over transcripts of their server logs; I've got a full-on Tiger team (not for employ, and they're not all on one team; they're my friends - but they damned well know what they're doing) - let's sift through this crap and find the bastards. While we're at it, anyone who's able to, let's sift through the source code to their site and figure out how to keep crap like this from happening WITHOUT killing the freedoms that sites like this offer.
Heck, why stop with open-source, distributed-development software? Let's go for distributed-development network infrastructure and policing as well. This was obviously perpetrated for purely malicious purpose and for no good reason, so let's find the bastards and show them what for.
The trouble is, if a site like ebay, hotmail, or amazon (or even slashdot) is that they have companies making money off of them - and thus, if you try to take them down, you will have a VERY competent and well-paid legal team after your ass. It's much safer to find a site that a lot of people give a lot of emotional, as opposed to financial, investment to, and destroy THAT - you'll piss off nearly as many people (which is really the point, isn't it?), but there's far less of a risk of retribution.
Heh. Yet another illustration that humans, in general, are far more concerned with making other people suffer than in bettering themselves. After all, it's FUN to hurt people and break things!;)
Exactly. It's all about how much damage you can cause the world at large for the least amount of effort. People ENJOY doing this sort of thing to each other, and the more difficult you make it for them to do so, the more they realize they CAN do it and the harder they try to circumvent your attempts to keep them nice and civil. And any attempts to instigate self-policing lead to bullying, bigotry, or genocide. Heh. I love humanity.
Well, if we could generate realistic ray-traced faces on the fly, and couple them to motion-capture devices and good voice actors, we could stop having to hire news anchors based on their looks.
Doesn't really work; games like Battletech/Mechwarrior were based around this concept, and cheating in them is rampant. The primary problem is that 99% of the 'PK-ers', 'cheaters' and 'hackers' aren't out to make themselves better - they're out to make everyone else WORSE. It's just another form of bullying, and it's done precisely BECAUSE people don't like it.
Bleh. It's not about winning, it's about making the other guy lose. Winning is TOTALLY irrelevant to making some other guy so pissed off that he stops playing - or, if you can get away with it in the real world, so helpless and despondent that he kills himself. Spend 2 days in kindergarten if you don't believe this is the default mentality of humankind.
This would actually be cool if it were officially incorporated into the engine, but as a third-party utility, the.dll/.so nature of the release just SCREAMS 'security hole'. Besides which, as a binary mod, the mp3 features are completely inaccessible to any other mod authors who might want to take advantage of them, unless they ALSO compile a.dll/.so. The whole point of.qvm (Quake Virtual Machine) files was to allow for a single set of mod files that would be truly cross-platform, while not sacrificing speed in the same way that most virtual machines (*cough* Java) do. The Quake Virtual Machine is optimized to JUST run those commands pertinent to Quake 3 Arena, thus lessening speed and memory footprint concerns. But I digress. I guess the point I'm trying to make is, even though.dll/.so releases allow you to do Really Cool Things(tm) with the Quake 3 Arena engine, we REALLY shouldn't be encouraging their proliferation - it's only a matter of time before some yahoo clandescinely repeats Ironman Quake (a Quake2 mod where instead of dying or taking damage, hits caused random files to be deleted from your machine and corrupts random areas of memory, and the game ends when your machine is no longer capable of operating). Of course, none of this would be a problem if id had opened up more of their engine to the qvm suite, and provided more functions for the low-level manipulation of media (sound, graphics, etc.) - and a qvm-friendly means of dll registration and plug-ins would also be nice. Id software could easily allow third-party dll/so developers to 'register' their source (either open or closed) with id, thus making that dll a 'trusted' plug-in with a registered checksum, file size, and entry handle. As long as each individual DLL enhances only one or two things, and certain functions (like low-level, generic file access and such) are agreed to NEVER be allowed in a DLL/SO release, it shouldn't be too hard to administrate this, and would lead to a MUCH more extensible game engine. It's probably not possible to do this for Q3A, but hopefully the Doom 3 engine will be a bit more mod-friendly.
Well, what the hell do you want to do about it? NOTHING we do can keep people from devolving; if we remove one outlet, they will find another. Yes, people are vicious, savage brutes, who enjoy nothing more than inflicting misery upon each other - but I'd far rather they be inflicting virtual misery on each other's pixelated representations on a computer screen, than actually sodomizing them with a broken, splintered baseball bat. And of all the kids I had to grow up with, the most physically violent were the ones who DIDN'T play video games.
Heck, that's EASY. For that matter, you could do all that for under $50k - just launch an 0.6kg bag of sand retrograde into the geosynch band, with a tiny cherrybomb in the middle of it, and you should be able to take out just about every geosynch satellite in orbit, PLUS keep anyone from launching any more for a few good years. Now THAT'S some extortion money.
It's simply called a "detached retina"; nasty thing to have happen. And even with laser surgery, it's often not very reliably correctable. The thing is, the eye is a VERY delicate and complicated piece of machinery; any attempt to futz around with it can cause serious problems.
You know... I don't mean to sound bitter, here, but I've never had anything of mine moderated one way or another - when my mentioning of the backbone cabal just got moderated by -1 for being a troll. Now, your response to my comment, doing nothing but praising my comment, got a +1. Yet my original comment got nada. I'm currently a negative-karma bastich, and I can't see what I'm doing or saying that's much different than what most of the other non-trolls do or say. Where am I missing the boat? Anyone who wants to explain this to me is more than willing to, and I humbly apologize for taking up bandwidth and/or taking this off-topic.
*shrug* I suppose it's my own damned fault for trying to be witty. Although I find it funny that, after several attempts to be "insightful" and express my views on various subjects - only to be TOTALLY ignored by the moderation system - I finally get noticed when I just go for a quicky, and immediately get slapped down as a troll.;) what I SHOULD have posted was:
Except, unfortunately, life IS like that. An' I don't like it any more than the rest of you men - I was harrassed, threatened, verbally and physically assaulted my entire grade school and high school life. It sucks. I nearly committed suicide twice, and I know one or two friends that actually did - they got out the only way they knew they could, and I like to think that, finally, they ARE at peace. That's the damned problem, though. We're so hyped-up on the sanctity of life that we won't let people opt out of living - people who the rest of the world has already decided are totally worthless; people who EVERYONE AROUND THEM SEES AS EXISTING FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN TO PROVIDE THEM WITH PERSONAL AMUSEMENT AS PUNCHING BAGS. What the hell kind of life is that? To wake up any morning, be forced to go out into the world, knowing that the only reason why people haven't just offed you yet is that your cries and pleas for help amuse them? The real social problem with teenage suicide is that it reminds us all of an exceptionally unpleasant fact, one that we'd all rather just ignore: Growing up sucks, and being an adult sucks almost as bad. Few ever achieve happiness, and the rest either live in their misery or delude themselves that they really are happy, after all, painting on hollow smiles and crying themselves to sleep every night. When you wake up tomorrow morning, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, "Where did I say I was going to be today, when I was 6?" Then let me know whether you start crying.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Software is just Software.
And DNA is just Software, too.
The Bible is software.
The laws of physics could theoretically be considered software, but at this point the definition starts to stretch a bit.
And can I do what about this? Apparently, the first tech person was, indeed, a moron, and we've been cleaning up their mess ever since. I've personally re-written 70% of the ASP code for the web, and about 33% of the internal applications. EVERYONE agrees that this needs to be done, but management won't give us the go-ahead because they're afraid it'll kill the system.
Why does this make me a moron?
The place where I work has had this hole in place since it started using IIS a few years ago. Since then, we've grown to have two HUGE websites, both running off of a 300+ gig database, as well as a huge array of support programs. Guess what? ALL of them log in using sa with no password. Guess what? ALL of them have to be changed. Guess what? Noone wants to do it because if something broke in the process, we'd be dead in the water. Nevermind that we WILL be dead in the water when someone finally hacks us.
I'm in Dilbert Hell!
Ahem... NO. I can give you a damned good counter to the "only criminals have something to hide" schtick right now. I'm a professed pervert - specifically, I'm into BDSM (bondage, sadomasochism, that sort of fun 'kinky stuff'). Now, while I personally am perfectly fine with broadcasting this to the world, and choose to accept any difficulty this causes me, there are some people who choose not to, and I respect that - there's a LOT of people who don't understand that consentual power play does not equal rape, much like there are a lot of people who don't understand that being a homosexual does not mean that you're a pedophile. I have personally been implicated in more than one sexual assault case for no other reason than because it was common knowledge that I was into 'kinky sex', and the local authorities associated this with being a rapist. My civil liberties were violated because of totally legal and irrelevant practices that some people prejudicially decided made me a 'bad person'. And while I have no problem with PEOPLE knowing everything about me, I would prefer that AGENCIES have as difficult a time as possible clicking a few boxes on a form and saying "round up everyone who eats oatmeal and drives more than 30 miles a day to work in for questioning; our recent psych profile says these people are 3x more likely to be rapists." Fuck that.
Simple question: how does one code/construct a PQA?
All of which are actual harm against actual people, and should be treated as such. I'm not saying that these things shouldn't be punished, merely that they should be punished as befitting the actual benefit/harm they cause the people affected by them.
And I, on the other hand, feel that financial loss shouldn't even be CONSIDERED - Human harm (both physical and psychological) should be the first AND final consideration. What's best for PEOPLE - not best for faceless corporate entities, governments, or machines.
I wholeheartedly disagree. ALL crime, whether it's cyber or meat, should be measured against how much actual harm was caused to actual human beings. Corporate, government and idealistic interests should be secondary to the benefit and well-being of actual thinking, feeling human beings.
So let's do something. Have 'em hand over transcripts of their server logs; I've got a full-on Tiger team (not for employ, and they're not all on one team; they're my friends - but they damned well know what they're doing) - let's sift through this crap and find the bastards. While we're at it, anyone who's able to, let's sift through the source code to their site and figure out how to keep crap like this from happening WITHOUT killing the freedoms that sites like this offer.
Heck, why stop with open-source, distributed-development software? Let's go for distributed-development network infrastructure and policing as well. This was obviously perpetrated for purely malicious purpose and for no good reason, so let's find the bastards and show them what for.
The trouble is, if a site like ebay, hotmail, or amazon (or even slashdot) is that they have companies making money off of them - and thus, if you try to take them down, you will have a VERY competent and well-paid legal team after your ass. It's much safer to find a site that a lot of people give a lot of emotional, as opposed to financial, investment to, and destroy THAT - you'll piss off nearly as many people (which is really the point, isn't it?), but there's far less of a risk of retribution.
Heh. Yet another illustration that humans, in general, are far more concerned with making other people suffer than in bettering themselves. After all, it's FUN to hurt people and break things! ;)
Exactly. It's all about how much damage you can cause the world at large for the least amount of effort. People ENJOY doing this sort of thing to each other, and the more difficult you make it for them to do so, the more they realize they CAN do it and the harder they try to circumvent your attempts to keep them nice and civil. And any attempts to instigate self-policing lead to bullying, bigotry, or genocide. Heh. I love humanity.
Well, if we could generate realistic ray-traced faces on the fly, and couple them to motion-capture devices and good voice actors, we could stop having to hire news anchors based on their looks.
Doesn't really work; games like Battletech/Mechwarrior were based around this concept, and cheating in them is rampant. The primary problem is that 99% of the 'PK-ers', 'cheaters' and 'hackers' aren't out to make themselves better - they're out to make everyone else WORSE. It's just another form of bullying, and it's done precisely BECAUSE people don't like it.
Bleh. It's not about winning, it's about making the other guy lose. Winning is TOTALLY irrelevant to making some other guy so pissed off that he stops playing - or, if you can get away with it in the real world, so helpless and despondent that he kills himself. Spend 2 days in kindergarten if you don't believe this is the default mentality of humankind.
This would actually be cool if it were officially incorporated into the engine, but as a third-party utility, the .dll/.so nature of the release just SCREAMS 'security hole'. Besides which, as a binary mod, the mp3 features are completely inaccessible to any other mod authors who might want to take advantage of them, unless they ALSO compile a .dll/.so. The whole point of .qvm (Quake Virtual Machine) files was to allow for a single set of mod files that would be truly cross-platform, while not sacrificing speed in the same way that most virtual machines (*cough* Java) do. The Quake Virtual Machine is optimized to JUST run those commands pertinent to Quake 3 Arena, thus lessening speed and memory footprint concerns. But I digress. I guess the point I'm trying to make is, even though .dll/.so releases allow you to do Really Cool Things(tm) with the Quake 3 Arena engine, we REALLY shouldn't be encouraging their proliferation - it's only a matter of time before some yahoo clandescinely repeats Ironman Quake (a Quake2 mod where instead of dying or taking damage, hits caused random files to be deleted from your machine and corrupts random areas of memory, and the game ends when your machine is no longer capable of operating). Of course, none of this would be a problem if id had opened up more of their engine to the qvm suite, and provided more functions for the low-level manipulation of media (sound, graphics, etc.) - and a qvm-friendly means of dll registration and plug-ins would also be nice. Id software could easily allow third-party dll/so developers to 'register' their source (either open or closed) with id, thus making that dll a 'trusted' plug-in with a registered checksum, file size, and entry handle. As long as each individual DLL enhances only one or two things, and certain functions (like low-level, generic file access and such) are agreed to NEVER be allowed in a DLL/SO release, it shouldn't be too hard to administrate this, and would lead to a MUCH more extensible game engine. It's probably not possible to do this for Q3A, but hopefully the Doom 3 engine will be a bit more mod-friendly.
Why is it physicists always have the most horribly punnishing senses of humor?
Why not just give the people with a base thirst for violence the outlet of killing off all the other people with a base thirst for violence? ;)
"They should never have changed beauty and truth quarks to bottem and top. I think they lose their charm." *GROAN*
Well, what the hell do you want to do about it? NOTHING we do can keep people from devolving; if we remove one outlet, they will find another. Yes, people are vicious, savage brutes, who enjoy nothing more than inflicting misery upon each other - but I'd far rather they be inflicting virtual misery on each other's pixelated representations on a computer screen, than actually sodomizing them with a broken, splintered baseball bat. And of all the kids I had to grow up with, the most physically violent were the ones who DIDN'T play video games.
Heck, that's EASY. For that matter, you could do all that for under $50k - just launch an 0.6kg bag of sand retrograde into the geosynch band, with a tiny cherrybomb in the middle of it, and you should be able to take out just about every geosynch satellite in orbit, PLUS keep anyone from launching any more for a few good years. Now THAT'S some extortion money.
It's simply called a "detached retina"; nasty thing to have happen. And even with laser surgery, it's often not very reliably correctable. The thing is, the eye is a VERY delicate and complicated piece of machinery; any attempt to futz around with it can cause serious problems.
You know... I don't mean to sound bitter, here, but I've never had anything of mine moderated one way or another - when my mentioning of the backbone cabal just got moderated by -1 for being a troll. Now, your response to my comment, doing nothing but praising my comment, got a +1. Yet my original comment got nada. I'm currently a negative-karma bastich, and I can't see what I'm doing or saying that's much different than what most of the other non-trolls do or say. Where am I missing the boat? Anyone who wants to explain this to me is more than willing to, and I humbly apologize for taking up bandwidth and/or taking this off-topic.
How many times do we have to tell you people,
THERE IS NO CABAL
Except, unfortunately, life IS like that. An' I don't like it any more than the rest of you men - I was harrassed, threatened, verbally and physically assaulted my entire grade school and high school life. It sucks. I nearly committed suicide twice, and I know one or two friends that actually did - they got out the only way they knew they could, and I like to think that, finally, they ARE at peace. That's the damned problem, though. We're so hyped-up on the sanctity of life that we won't let people opt out of living - people who the rest of the world has already decided are totally worthless; people who EVERYONE AROUND THEM SEES AS EXISTING FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN TO PROVIDE THEM WITH PERSONAL AMUSEMENT AS PUNCHING BAGS. What the hell kind of life is that? To wake up any morning, be forced to go out into the world, knowing that the only reason why people haven't just offed you yet is that your cries and pleas for help amuse them? The real social problem with teenage suicide is that it reminds us all of an exceptionally unpleasant fact, one that we'd all rather just ignore: Growing up sucks, and being an adult sucks almost as bad. Few ever achieve happiness, and the rest either live in their misery or delude themselves that they really are happy, after all, painting on hollow smiles and crying themselves to sleep every night. When you wake up tomorrow morning, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, "Where did I say I was going to be today, when I was 6?" Then let me know whether you start crying.