VHS movies in Australia already have an extremely lengthy copyright notice that is specifically designed to be played at fast forward and still impart it's propaganda. I had not rented a new release in awhile so was I in for a surprise. The old copyright notice was still there, plus a new one from the "Federation Against Copyright Theft". It featured a glowing-red eyed psychotic making frenzied movements with a branding iron from a blacksmith's oven stamping CD's and other paraphenlia. His movements were similiar to the way a mentally retarded person acts when they are confused or upset, scattering CD's everywhere, etc. The voice over claimed 'pirates' fund terrorism AND drugs and that THEY MUST BE STOPPED. More hysteria for soccer moms everywhere. I've seen mainstream media pick up on this meme too. As the wise George Castanza once said: "Remember Jerry, It's not a lie if you believe it".
He took a reporter and presumably obtained a DHCP lease on the county's LAN and he's tried as a hacker? Everyone in IT Security knows that nobody does anything unless they are publicly embarrased about it. In the case of Microsoft, sometimes not even then. Taking a reporter also seems like a good way to prove your intentions are honourable. I guess unless I am missing some critical aspect of the case the lesson here for the patriotic American to learn is that if you see a hole in the country's critical infrastructure, you should ignore it and move on. I wouldn't want to be this guy. If there is this much fuss over an insecure 802.11b access point I can just imagine the trouble you could get in for walking around Los Alamos.
One of the PostgreSQL developers is at Linux.conf.au right now. During his talk on Wednesday he mentioned this and that Oracle accused the.org registry guys of "criminial negligence" if they switched to PostgreSQL over Oracle. All I can say is: "HAH!" Feeling the pressure...
Linus is currently attending Linux.conf.au here in Australia. So far the conference has been great with an excellent Q&A session yesterday with Linus, Tridge, and Bdale Garbee. Topics discussed included women in IT, 2.2 vs 2.4 kernel stability, TCPA, patents, and 2.6 kernel release dates (any day now;) ) and the name of the immininent 2.6 kernel maintainer (first initial A.) Also Linus dressed up in a penguin suit for the first time.
It's suprising no one has posted a full summary, it will probably go up after the conference ends. Stay tuned. There were some gems in the Q&A alone.
1. Revisioning. The ability to use different patch levels or versions. The ability to see how much space these different versions are taking up. Hard drive space is cheap, and I'm amazed an enterprise customer hasn't demanded this yet from Red Hat.
2. Security Policy. RPMS and other package formats sometimes come with scripts to do necessary post-install stuff. It would be nice to have a seperate userspace library to handle the 'common' things that might be in these scripts like running ldconfig or mkfontdir. This way, it would be simple enough for the rpm tool to give you a rundown of what 'actions' needs to be done to install this application security-policy wise. Ideally most scripts would become superfluos and only used it really odd situations. And in those odd cases you can read through the script yourself.
I hope they have fixed Bochs.bochsrc config file parser. In 1.4.1 (the last release) in certain parts of the file you have to write "romimage: file=path/to/somewhere" and other places just write "floppya: 1_44=/path/to/somewhere/" with no file directive. Annoying for newbies. I did get Minix booting on top of Bochs on top of Linux. I should have tried Minix->Bochs->UML->Linux but I didn't bother. Shows the usefulness of good interfaces.
Slightly OT, but this is probably useful to fellow/.'ers:
Like many of you, I once bought some domains from Dotster, during the time they were advertising their services on Slashdot. After getting spam pestering me to buy more domains, I stopped dealing with them.
About a week ago, I logged into my Dotster account to see what domains I have left. I was shocked to see that next to all my domains was a checkbox that said "Auto-Renew" and was checked! I guess now that the domain name gold rush is over stealing money under the guise of a service is now considered a legitimate tactic by these sleazeballs.
NIST does this too. For a different reason though. To help forensic examiners eliminate non-important data in a suspect's computer. They use 4 different hash algorithms (MD5, SHA-1, CRC32, and one other), so good luck finding a collision for all 4. They were giving out copies of the CD-hashdb at an InfoSec conference I was at recently.
Great. Now that I know IDG==WILEY, I won't buy Wiley books either. If they respond further to Nester's letter all he has to do is point them at this website, Ulysses for Dummies, and tell them to buzz off. That site has been up for 4 years. Judges tend to see through this kind of bullshit and hammer lawyers doing this kind of inconsistent crap.
I'm getting far too cynical in my old age, but I just don't believe it. First, as the article pointed out, the odds are huge. I'd like to think this was a scientist teaching his daughter how easily the foolish media is manipulated. Eg. Like Joey Skaggs does. The meteorite in the picture appears to be about the size of her 14 year old thumb. She states: "I saw it fall from above roof height". We don't know her height, and the distance to the roof, so we can't calculate the arc tangent. Let's say she was staring into the sky with her head tilted at a 60 degrees angle upwards. (an odd angle for a head to be at). Also, her head was also staring in the CORRECT direction (360 degrees) and SPOTTED the meteorite, and still it hit her? Hmmm. Kids do like to exaggerate when something happens to them. Possible, but astronomically unprobable.
Comment from a KDE developer.
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I haven't written Konqueror or anything like that, but I have submitted a few decent sized patches to a couple of KDE apps that have been accepted. And I think this is just great. It is exactly what Linux needs to break into mainstream. The people who won't like it will be the Suse and Mandrake's of the world who won't like RedHat raising the usability bar so significantly. This should have been done along time ago IMHO. I can't wait for this to be released stable.
You are talking about elliptical curve cryptography. ECC and hyperelliptic curve crypto can be implemented on _conventional_ commodity PC hardware and it's thought the algorithms should be more efficient then RSA. The biggest problem with ECC at the moment is that ECC specific crypto algorithms haven't stood the test of time and peer review like some of the conventional ciphers (RSA, 3DES) have.
Seriously. The naringin in grapefruit prevents the breakdown of xanthines in the liver. The net effect is that certain pharmacological substances last longer. It works with other drugs too. It can conceivably contribute to OD-type situations as well. Also, as someone above said, the amino acid tyrosine also will potentiate the effects, as will other substances. Bodybuilders use this for dieting and have known about this for years. They are after all mostly walking lab experiments
1. Hire a team of unethical programmers. 2. Have them dream up obvious ideas that they lack the skill to actually implement. 3. Hire a team of unethical lawyers. (oxymoron?) 4. Start Patenting. 5. Email/Sue infringers of your ideas. Start with cheap licenses that will likely be less then the other company's legal fees. (Unlike you, exploiting the legal system will not be their core business). Now as you increase your bankroll, increase your cost of licensing. 6. Become filthy rich. 7. The economoy grinds to a 1920's depression era-like halt.
A few points from a former 'insider'. I worked in a casino for 6 months before I left in disgust. Before being hired, I had the naieve view of casinos being glamorous exciting places. They are not. The casino business is about feeding off the compulsive behaviour of regular people. The place the casino makes most of it's money is in the slot machines which typically administer 'rewards' (money) in a perfect variable ratio reinforcement scheme. It is a science that has been known and used for training animals for years. Now everyone knows who the worst addicts are. They are the slot players who shit in their pants, piss into plants nearby so they don't have to leave their machine. (Yes, this is quite common). But these people never get barred or thrown out. Why not? Because they are the most reliable source of the casino's income. Even the provision in many areas of asking to be "self-tresspassed" is a joke because the way it's done most people will never go through with it or be able to circumvent it. In a casino, surveillance is "THE" department. They are like the CIA of the casino. This is not an exaggeration. They don't usually eat or fratrenize with the other employees (they aren't allowed), their identities are kept secret and they get all the cool toys. They are extensively trained in the art of cheating, so they can spot it. And it's very cool. Some of the techniques that have been developed over the years are incredibly cunning and could only have come from the most devious of minds. This is what card counters are up against. They are like robin hoods and nobody deserves it more then the greedy pigs that own casinos. There are too few IMHO. I hope more people try to hack these dirty bastards.
Google tracks the operating systems used to access itself. Scroll down the page here to see 1% of queries coming from Linux boxen compared to 46% for Windows 98. This is probably a pretty accurate representation of desktop penetration for Linux. Of course it doesn't take into account server penetration, which is probably quite a bit higher.
The problem with stuff like this is that someone could conceivably remove key scenes from something like Schindler's list, and make it look like, hey - Hitler wasn't such a bad guy after all or that the holocaust didn't happen. Eg. Guard hits prisoner. Prisoner fights back. (delete first scene). Guard shoots prisoner.
1.) valgrind (recently covered on slashdot) 2.) printf() 3.) gdb 4.) lint 5.) the proprietary debugger you mentioned. 6.) modify the thread library. (a niceties of open source/free software) 7.) modify your OS. (look into UML
Generally some combination of these should allow you to solve any programming problem on linux.
I find it amusing that a poster above calls everyone else illiterate for not reading the original post and then provides a link to a Transition System Analyzer for JAVA (the original poster is using C++)
Putting in a fake email address (mine was dicklessjoe@dick.org) will get you the meetup location without email confirmation. In my case, it's about 500M from my workplace, so I will drop in.
Newsworthiness/Rejected Stories
on
.NET for Apache
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wish Slashdot had a Rejected Stories feed. If a story announcing a press release that is a preannoucement of another press release is worth reporting on, isn't my story on the George Bush's plan to recruit 1 in 24 Americans as citizen spies newsworthy? That's more informants than the East German Stasi had at their peak.
What really needs to happen is a basic rethinking of a physician's role. Modern doctors are taught to be expensive pattern matching machine's that input a patient's symptoms, process it through the Physician's Desk Reference, and spit out a usually symptomatic treatment based on the drug of the month. Very little is actually done to treat the underlying disease. The ideal system would be a situation in which doctors collaborate (the killer P2P app?) to share information and build complex disease and treatment models.
People have too much faith in cryptography. History has shown us that every major encryption algorithm has been broken. The simple Vernham cipher (aka One-time-pad) is the _only_ cryptosystem that can be proven mathematically to be secure beyond all doubt. Considering the radio link can be jammed, or DDOS'ed, the best case scenario is that these planes will be turned into stupid, expensive missles. The worst case scenario is probably unthinkable. The Germans lost WWII because of their belief in the infallibility of Enigma.
This "interview" is pretty self serving for ChessBase GmBh and Frederick Friedel, it's principal. It basically is structured around the theme of legitmizing Fritz as the leading chess engine (over Deep Blue - which has since been disassembled) with a bit of fluff on chess politics thrown in. Sigh - well, I guess it sells more copies of Fritz v7
Check out chess interfaces eboard for gnome and knights for KDE. And don't forget to play on FICS
Another impressive release from the KDE folks. KDE continues to be the best deskop environment for those of us who like dark themes. To briefly digress, I am suprised at how many people use the default color scheme that Windows popularized [bright background, with black foreground text]. To me this is like staring into a lightbulb. I find a black background with grey/whitish foreground text to be much easier on the eyes after you get used to it. So I was initially horrified when I booted up KMail and noticed the columned list widget had every second line with a white background! However after checking with a KDE developer, I found out there is a switch in KControl:Look and Feel to shut this off. It's the "Alternate background colour in lists" attribute, and it's the only one that can't be modified by clicking on the preview above, because there isn't a columned list widget in the picture. You need to set it by clicking on it manually in KControl. KMail has had alot of bugfixes. All the bugs I have found previously have now been fixed. Konqueror continues to break stuff that was working before, and fix stuff that was not working. Actually, my "customized accessibility stylesheet" is the only thing that stopped working. I also had to adjust to changes to the Sidebar. It required modifying my use of Konqueror, but the design changes are in general evolutionary and well thought out. Konqueror seems alot faster now too. Other then that, there is alot more eye candy such as moving icons in Konqueror. Fortunately all this can be turned off. Overall, a great release!
Slashdot Mirror
VHS movies in Australia already have an extremely lengthy copyright notice that is specifically designed to be played at fast forward and still impart it's propaganda. I had not rented a new release in awhile so was I in for a surprise. The old copyright notice was still there, plus a new one from the "Federation Against Copyright Theft". It featured a glowing-red eyed psychotic making frenzied movements with a branding iron from a blacksmith's oven stamping CD's and other paraphenlia. His movements were similiar to the way a mentally retarded person acts when they are confused or upset, scattering CD's everywhere, etc. The voice over claimed 'pirates' fund terrorism AND drugs and that THEY MUST BE STOPPED.
More hysteria for soccer moms everywhere. I've seen mainstream media pick up on this meme too. As the wise George Castanza once said: "Remember Jerry, It's not a lie if you believe it".
He took a reporter and presumably obtained a DHCP lease on the county's LAN and he's tried as a hacker? Everyone in IT Security knows that nobody does anything unless they are publicly embarrased about it. In the case of Microsoft, sometimes not even then. Taking a reporter also seems like a good way to prove your intentions are honourable.
I guess unless I am missing some critical aspect of the case the lesson here for the patriotic American to learn is that if you see a hole in the country's critical infrastructure, you should ignore it and move on.
I wouldn't want to be this guy. If there is this much fuss over an insecure 802.11b access point I can just imagine the trouble you could get in for walking around Los Alamos.
It would be useful to know BSA "target" cities. Then local LUG's could coincide their InstallFests during the same months.
One of the PostgreSQL developers is at Linux.conf.au right now. During his talk on Wednesday he mentioned this and that Oracle accused the .org registry guys of "criminial negligence" if they switched to PostgreSQL over Oracle. All I can say is: "HAH!" Feeling the pressure...
Linus is currently attending Linux.conf.au here in Australia. So far the conference has been great with an excellent Q&A session yesterday with Linus, Tridge, and Bdale Garbee. Topics discussed included women in IT, 2.2 vs 2.4 kernel stability, TCPA, patents, and 2.6 kernel release dates (any day now ;) ) and the name of the immininent 2.6 kernel maintainer (first initial A.) Also Linus dressed up in a penguin suit for the first time.
It's suprising no one has posted a full summary, it will probably go up after the conference ends. Stay tuned. There were some gems in the Q&A alone.
Here are some features that would be good.
1. Revisioning. The ability to use different patch levels or versions. The ability to see how much space these different versions are taking up. Hard drive space is cheap, and I'm amazed an enterprise customer hasn't demanded this yet from Red Hat.
2. Security Policy. RPMS and other package formats sometimes come with scripts to do necessary post-install stuff. It would be nice to have a seperate userspace library to handle the 'common' things that might be in these scripts like running ldconfig or mkfontdir. This way, it would be simple enough for the rpm tool to give you a rundown of what 'actions' needs to be done to install this application security-policy wise. Ideally most scripts would become superfluos and only used it really odd situations. And in those odd cases you can read through the script yourself.
I hope they have fixed Bochs .bochsrc config file parser. In 1.4.1 (the last release) in certain parts of the file you have to write "romimage: file=path/to/somewhere" and other places just write "floppya: 1_44=/path/to/somewhere/" with no file directive. Annoying for newbies.
I did get Minix booting on top of Bochs on top of Linux. I should have tried Minix->Bochs->UML->Linux but I didn't bother. Shows the usefulness of good interfaces.
Slightly OT, but this is probably useful to fellow /.'ers:
Like many of you, I once bought some domains from Dotster, during the time they were advertising their services on Slashdot.
After getting spam pestering me to buy more domains, I stopped dealing with them.
About a week ago, I logged into my Dotster account to see what domains I have left. I was shocked to see that next to all my domains was a checkbox that said "Auto-Renew" and was checked! I guess now that the domain name gold rush is over stealing money under the guise of a service is now considered a legitimate tactic by these sleazeballs.
You have been warned !
NIST does this too. For a different reason though. To help forensic examiners eliminate non-important data in a suspect's computer. They use 4 different hash algorithms (MD5, SHA-1, CRC32, and one other), so good luck finding a collision for all 4. They were giving out copies of the CD-hashdb at an InfoSec conference I was at recently.
Great. Now that I know IDG==WILEY, I won't buy Wiley books either. If they respond further to Nester's letter all he has to do is point them at this website, Ulysses for Dummies, and tell them to buzz off. That site has been up for 4 years. Judges tend to see through this kind of bullshit and hammer lawyers doing this kind of inconsistent crap.
Corporate Standover Tactics for Dummies
I'm getting far too cynical in my old age, but I just don't believe it. First, as the article pointed out, the odds are huge. I'd like to think this was a scientist teaching his daughter how easily the foolish media is manipulated. Eg. Like Joey Skaggs does. The meteorite in the picture appears to be about the size of her 14 year old thumb. She states: "I saw it fall from above roof height". We don't know her height, and the distance to the roof, so we can't calculate the arc tangent. Let's say she was staring into the sky with her head tilted at a 60 degrees angle upwards. (an odd angle for a head to be at). Also, her head was also staring in the CORRECT direction (360 degrees) and SPOTTED the meteorite, and still it hit her?
Hmmm. Kids do like to exaggerate when something happens to them. Possible, but astronomically unprobable.
I haven't written Konqueror or anything like that, but I have submitted a few decent sized patches to a couple of KDE apps that have been accepted.
And I think this is just great. It is exactly what Linux needs to break into mainstream. The people who won't like it will be the Suse and Mandrake's of the world who won't like RedHat raising the usability bar so significantly. This should have been done along time ago IMHO.
I can't wait for this to be released stable.
You are talking about elliptical curve cryptography. ECC and hyperelliptic curve crypto can be implemented on _conventional_ commodity PC hardware and it's thought the algorithms should be more efficient then RSA. The biggest problem with ECC at the moment is that ECC specific crypto algorithms haven't stood the test of time and peer review like some of the conventional ciphers (RSA, 3DES) have.
Seriously. The naringin in grapefruit prevents the breakdown of xanthines in the liver. The net effect is that certain pharmacological substances last longer. It works with other drugs too. It can conceivably contribute to OD-type situations as well. Also, as someone above said, the amino acid tyrosine also will potentiate the effects, as will other substances. Bodybuilders use this for dieting and have known about this for years. They are after all mostly walking lab experiments
1. Hire a team of unethical programmers.
2. Have them dream up obvious ideas that they lack the skill to actually implement.
3. Hire a team of unethical lawyers. (oxymoron?)
4. Start Patenting.
5. Email/Sue infringers of your ideas. Start with cheap licenses that will likely be less then the other company's legal fees. (Unlike you, exploiting the legal system will not be their core business). Now as you increase your bankroll, increase your cost of licensing.
6. Become filthy rich.
7. The economoy grinds to a 1920's depression era-like halt.
A few points from a former 'insider'. I worked in a casino for 6 months before I left in disgust.
Before being hired, I had the naieve view of casinos being glamorous exciting places. They are not. The casino business is about feeding off the compulsive behaviour of regular people. The place the casino makes most of it's money is in the slot machines which typically administer 'rewards' (money) in a perfect variable ratio reinforcement scheme. It is a science that has been known and used for training animals for years.
Now everyone knows who the worst addicts are. They are the slot players who shit in their pants, piss into plants nearby so they don't have to leave their machine. (Yes, this is quite common). But these people never get barred or thrown out. Why not? Because they are the most reliable source of the casino's income. Even the provision in many areas of asking to be "self-tresspassed" is a joke because the way it's done most people will never go through with it or be able to circumvent it.
In a casino, surveillance is "THE" department. They are like the CIA of the casino. This is not an exaggeration. They don't usually eat or fratrenize with the other employees (they aren't allowed), their identities are kept secret and they get all the cool toys. They are extensively trained in the art of cheating, so they can spot it. And it's very cool. Some of the techniques that have been developed over the years are incredibly cunning and could only have come from the most devious of minds. This is what card counters are up against. They are like robin hoods and nobody deserves it more then the greedy pigs that own casinos. There are too few IMHO. I hope more people try to hack these dirty bastards.
Google tracks the operating systems used to access itself. Scroll down the page here to see 1% of queries coming from Linux boxen compared to 46% for Windows 98. This is probably a pretty accurate representation of desktop penetration for Linux. Of course it doesn't take into account server penetration, which is probably quite a bit higher.
The problem with stuff like this is that someone could conceivably remove key scenes from something like Schindler's list, and make it look like, hey - Hitler wasn't such a bad guy after all or that the holocaust didn't happen. Eg. Guard hits prisoner. Prisoner fights back. (delete first scene). Guard shoots prisoner.
1.) valgrind (recently covered on slashdot)
2.) printf()
3.) gdb
4.) lint
5.) the proprietary debugger you mentioned.
6.) modify the thread library. (a niceties of open source/free software)
7.) modify your OS. (look into UML
Generally some combination of these should allow you to solve any programming problem on linux.
I find it amusing that a poster above calls everyone else illiterate for not reading the original post and then provides a link to a Transition System Analyzer for JAVA (the original poster is using C++)
Putting in a fake email address (mine was dicklessjoe@dick.org) will get you the meetup location without email confirmation. In my case, it's about 500M from my workplace, so I will drop in.
I wish Slashdot had a Rejected Stories feed. If a story announcing a press release that is a preannoucement of another press release is worth reporting on, isn't my story on the George Bush's plan to recruit 1 in 24 Americans as citizen spies newsworthy? That's more informants than the East German Stasi had at their peak.
What really needs to happen is a basic rethinking of a physician's role. Modern doctors are taught to be expensive pattern matching machine's that input a patient's symptoms, process it through the Physician's Desk Reference, and spit out a usually symptomatic treatment based on the drug of the month. Very little is actually done to treat the underlying disease.
The ideal system would be a situation in which doctors collaborate (the killer P2P app?) to share information and build complex disease and treatment models.
People have too much faith in cryptography. History has shown us that every major encryption algorithm has been broken. The simple Vernham cipher (aka One-time-pad) is the _only_ cryptosystem that can be proven mathematically to be secure beyond all doubt.
Considering the radio link can be jammed, or DDOS'ed, the best case scenario is that these planes will be turned into stupid, expensive missles. The worst case scenario is probably unthinkable.
The Germans lost WWII because of their belief in the infallibility of Enigma.
This "interview" is pretty self serving for ChessBase GmBh and Frederick Friedel, it's principal. It basically is structured around the theme of legitmizing Fritz as the leading chess engine (over Deep Blue - which has since been disassembled) with a bit of fluff on chess politics thrown in. Sigh - well, I guess it sells more copies of Fritz v7
Check out chess interfaces eboard for gnome and knights for KDE. And don't forget to play on FICS
Another impressive release from the KDE folks. KDE continues to be the best deskop environment for those of us who like dark themes. To briefly digress, I am suprised at how many people use the default color scheme that Windows popularized [bright background, with black foreground text]. To me this is like staring into a lightbulb. I find a black background with grey/whitish foreground text to be much easier on the eyes after you get used to it.
So I was initially horrified when I booted up KMail and noticed the columned list widget had every second line with a white background! However after checking with a KDE developer, I found out there is a switch in KControl:Look and Feel to shut this off. It's the "Alternate background colour in lists" attribute, and it's the only one that can't be modified by clicking on the preview above, because there isn't a columned list widget in the picture. You need to set it by clicking on it manually in KControl.
KMail has had alot of bugfixes. All the bugs I have found previously have now been fixed. Konqueror continues to break stuff that was working before, and fix stuff that was not working. Actually, my "customized accessibility stylesheet" is the only thing that stopped working. I also had to adjust to changes to the Sidebar. It required modifying my use of Konqueror, but the design changes are in general evolutionary and well thought out. Konqueror seems alot faster now too. Other then that, there is alot more eye candy such as moving icons in Konqueror. Fortunately all this can be turned off. Overall, a great release!