The 'total' mess is that, by the time the boot sector is overwritten, countless other sections of the drive have had random data written to them. The chances of the virus doing other things to cripple a system before it overwrites the boot sector and partition table is pretty high.
Even if you considre that he size of the MBR/PT is a small fraction of a percent of the size of the critical files that the OS can't live without (loader, kernel, device drivers, registry, etc...) so the worm is 2-3 orders of magnitude more likely to cripple the machine on any given write, there's still a lot of data that can get corrupted without forcing you to do a recovery.
What good is recovering data from a system if you can't be sure if any of the data is any good in the first place?
This isn't quite as bad as a suggestion I remember reading about a while back here on/. where the virus actually understands common document formats (like spreadsheets and DBs) and over time slowly alters the data in them without destroying the structure of the file so that, by the time the virus is known and people find out they have it, all of their data (and if it's been any length of time, their backups) are completely untrustworthy.
Actually, the speed isn't all that suprising. If I were a worm developer, I'd spend a few weeks working on a good payload and then, at the last minute, strap an exploit onto the front of it and put it into the wild before anyone gets their boxes fixed. It makes a lot more sense than figuring out the exploit & then trying to craft the rest of the worm around it, which would give sytems time to patch themselves and the effectiveness of your worm would suffer.
Even simpler would be using DD to copy the boot sector and partition table and storing it in a safe place (if nothing else, mailing it to yourself and leaving it on the mail server would work).
Actually it's more like saying "There's something about him in a book over there on teir 5, row 6 that talks about people who murdered children". Now, it might be somebody else with the same name or he might be involved in what went on without having actually murdered a child.
TFA is somewhat vague and I can't tell if he's pissed because his name shows up on pages that talk about bad CPAs and the page summaries might possibly lead somebody with the IQ of an eggplant to assume that those "..."s are meaningless and the whole thing is about him or if he's pissed because google turns up hits for somebody else with the same name.
Really, I don't think, either way, the guy's got a chance in hell.
I have only met a couple of Indians from India who majored in the social sciences or humanity while here. For their perspective, they understood that they wouldn't make much money, and that they were competing with at a severe disadvantage due to the cultural and linguistic differences.
I've noticed this as well... The vast majority of the Indians/Asians here who pursue engineering degrees want nothing to do with our society, culture or people. They just want to get the knowledge/education, the paperwork & leave to make their money.
Contrast this with the Europeans who come over for their education; they actually try to socialize with people not from their nation, they try to gain an understanding and appreciation for American life, they realize that living in another country is a positive experience and not something you have to suffer through in order to get ahead in life.
Then why not outsource them too? Surely, they could do a better job being located more closely to the production of the product than they can across the ocean from the people they lord over.
Oh wait, in the production of apples, where all the work is done by illegal immigrants for sub-minimum-wage, we still have USians calling the shots and directing things. In the production of cotton in days of slavery, we still had well-to-do whites 'managing' the workers. I don't think this has anything to do with "being good at your job", it's just a matter of being on the right side of the exploitation of others.
Funny. Perhaps part of the reason that "Indians outperform the Americans by a ratio of 6-4" has less to do with them being more motivated and more to do with their 'communal' view towards academics. It's not uncommon around here (decent sized university's engineering grad program) to find the Indian students working together in groups of 6 or 8 on assignments (and even worse, take-home tests, where work is supposed to be independant). It's not uncommon to hear one Indian student saying "Yeah... I took that class last year, I kept all the solutions, you want to borrow them?".
Interesting coincidence, one of our core theory courses has been taught almost exclusively by the same prof. for at least the last 10 years. This semester, it's being taught by somebody who hasn't taught it here before (but is definately qualified). Last year, the class was 1/2 to 1/3 Indian (which is about the ratio of MS students in the department). This year, where they can't draw on the work of those who've taken the class in previous years, it's dropped from 10-15 students to 3. I know it proves nothing, but it's still an observation that fits my argument.
So, yeah... it's really easy to outperform somebody who has to think for themselves when you are just given the answers.
Well, the features of the current generation (DX9 shaders) card are approaching the programability required to handle this kind of stuff fairly well. You could design a crisp, sharp-edged model and procedurally, with your shaders, dirty up the textures and put dents in the edges.
A really great demo of DX9 procedural textures I once saw was a fractal zoomer, where the fractal was rendered in real-time by the graphics card. With my Radeon 9600, there was no percievable lag and almost no CPU usage to be able to zoom & pan freely. Granted, there was a limit to the precision of the math so it did get blocky after a certain level, but up until that point, it was v.cool. If you have the hardware, check out what you can really do with it
Re:What about the value of the existing suits?
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 1
The concept of 'fair market value' when eminent domain comes into play is often somewhat different that what 'fair market value' would mean when selling to a private party...
Re:easy ... root for the feds ...
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, a majority of the supercomputer weapons research being done these days involves stabilizing and safely storing the current stockpile of nukes. The rest of it is so that we can stop actually nuking Nevada and New Mexico while still having up to date technology.
Take away their supercomputers and the government won't stop research, they'll just return to blowing up actual bombs.
Re:Expensive Electronics Cheap Scams, not taken do
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm still suprised that eBay lets this go on. Having things like this around where the whole purpose is to separate a sucker from his money implacts the reputation of the whole site.
There's a difference between stretching the truth and making statements that serve no purpose other than to mislead and confuse the consumers. Everyone knows that the burger they see on TV is going to be nicer than the one made by some stoned highschool kid working for minimum wage, but it's going to be essentially the same thing. If a 'real business' consistantly practiced the type of deception that these eBay guys are, they'd never be able to stay in business once word got out. Why is it different online?
Well, being a techie, you always need to remember that NM has more computational power per capita than any other state in the union due to the presence of Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs, each of which has several -big- clusters, as well as the private industry contractors that support them and the military (we've also got nukes...). You also have several big tech companies(Intel is a notable one) around.
There's also the downside to things... quite a bit of poverty, lots of drunk driving accidents, public schools have poor results on standarized tests and the water's not very good.
I've been here a year, and other than the hookers outside my apartment and the roaches inside, I don't ahve much to complain about.
Really, there's a lot of places where you can do this type of thing. The last 2 cities I've lived in have had 'rural' areas reasonably close to the city center.
Albuquerque, where I'm at currently, is still a small enough city that, if you drive more than 30 minutes in any direction on the freeway (and it conveniently has both major N/S and E/W ones) you're outside of town and pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Before Abq, I lived in Seattle and there, too, you could find places that were plenty rural (think multi-acre lots, no city water/sewer and zoning that allows livestock) with only a 60-90min drive to get downtown.
If you remember that only about the 10-20 most populous cities in the US are as overgrown as NYC, LA or DC, not living inside the city or in the 'burbs does not neccessarily mean 'the boonies' (which, to me, means -way- out in BFE, without things like Starbucks or supermarkets anywhere nearby)
Really, what does 'hyperlink' and 'email' add to the claim? People doing phone orders have been using 'confirmation numbers' since the beginning of time. Does doing such a straightforward adaptation of a standard business practice to a new medium really warrant a patent?
Prior art is definately useful, but it seems to me that once you've made the jump to selling things on the web, anyone with half a brain would come to the conclusion that some sort of confirmation/tracking be implemented. Last I checked "painfully obvious, even to a retarded 3-year-old" was a justification for invalidating patents as well...
The thing about the Debian install process is that you don't need all 13 CDs. After you do the base install, you scan the CDs that you feel like using and they get added to your local list of available packages (be it none, 1,2 or all 13). The first 2 CDs cover most of the stuff that you need to get the system working; by the time you get to the last disc, we're talking about some pretty obscure stuff that only has 3 users (2 of them are the devs and the 3rd is the guy making the package).
This is already a pretty reasonable distibution of files on the first 2 discs (the installer, OTOH still needs a lot of work; the new installer is a bit nicer than the old one but it doesn't really work all the time & there's some inconsistancies in it (like when you're partitioning drives, the drive labels in fdisk aren't the same as the names you see when you're assigning mountpoints to drives (which isn't even able to recognize swap devices as such & call them swap by default))) but it could always be perfected a bit. I have to wonder why they can't extract this from the logs on the mirrors tho...
I have to assume you're doing this in windows, since under Linux, if you had the ogg libraries you'd already have a decoder and be doing this with a simple shell script.
So, take just about any decent audio player (such as winamp) that reads Ogg Vorbis and use it to write out WAV files instead of playing to the soundcard (on Winamp it's called the "Nullsoft disk-writer pluging"). Problem solved; you make a playlist, press play & a few seconds later, you're finished.
Don't think that just because you're moving out of the city and into a rural area you're going to be forced to find a job in a rural economy. There are plenty of places in the US that are not the massive sprawl of urbanization that you find out in your part of the country. There are quite a few decently sized cities where you can get out in 'the boonies' with a drive of an hour or so (for example, you can drive from one side of Albuquerque to the other in about 20-30 min in light trafic).
Considering that you're living in a place like DC, where you've probably already got a significant commute, what's the difference, really, between being stuck in traffic for an hour in an overgrown megalopolis and driving that hour at cruising speeds through the areas outside of town?
Even in somewhat larger cities like Seattle (which I just moved from), it's only about 60 miles from the urban core to the edge of the sprawl where you start getting into multi-acre rural lots where people have horses and whatnot.
A vast majority of the stuff that was once released as freeware is now open source. There are a number of reasons behind this; the ubiquity of the internet and its usefulness in collaboration, the increased availability of high quality development tools and the fact that if you're not making money off some code, you might as well release the source.
With that in mind, Audacity, while being a bit more full featured than a simple sound recorder, will take care of what you need.
I think that's the way to do it, except rather than simply saving it locally, have it rewrite the torrents and point clients at a tracker on the proxy. With a little thought, you could have the tracker dynamically adjust WAN traffic based on the number of local clients asking for the file.
It's not just to cut down on bandwidth costs and legal liability on filesharing, a university is full of clueless users. Clamping down on these things limits the potential damage than can result from a compromised machine. If a machine gets infected with some worm that backdoors it, makes it a DDOS zombie or makes it into a spam relay, there's no real harm that can result since anything it'd try to do is already blocked off.
Granted, switching over to web-only is excessive, which is why IT doesn't run the school. If enough people become dissatisfied with their service (and can argue that it 'impacts the educational experience') and are vocal about it, the administration will force IT to open up a bit.
What somebody needs to to is make the tracker/client smart enough to give a preference to clients on the local subnet. For environments like college campuses this would be a major win.
Another possibility would be to have some sort of transparent BT proxy for the network, again the same sorts of bennefits could be achieved (as well as allowing for some sort of whitelist/blacklisting of 'inappropriate' torrents).
Well, if you want to get into it, functional languages are a subset of declarative languages. If you take Prolog and write a program where you only define one variant of each predicate (or use lots of cuts as the first term of a predicate) you get semantics strikingly similar to something like SML (without the typing).
Slashdot Mirror
The 'total' mess is that, by the time the boot sector is overwritten, countless other sections of the drive have had random data written to them. The chances of the virus doing other things to cripple a system before it overwrites the boot sector and partition table is pretty high.
/. where the virus actually understands common document formats (like spreadsheets and DBs) and over time slowly alters the data in them without destroying the structure of the file so that, by the time the virus is known and people find out they have it, all of their data (and if it's been any length of time, their backups) are completely untrustworthy.
Even if you considre that he size of the MBR/PT is a small fraction of a percent of the size of the critical files that the OS can't live without (loader, kernel, device drivers, registry, etc...) so the worm is 2-3 orders of magnitude more likely to cripple the machine on any given write, there's still a lot of data that can get corrupted without forcing you to do a recovery.
What good is recovering data from a system if you can't be sure if any of the data is any good in the first place?
This isn't quite as bad as a suggestion I remember reading about a while back here on
Actually, the speed isn't all that suprising. If I were a worm developer, I'd spend a few weeks working on a good payload and then, at the last minute, strap an exploit onto the front of it and put it into the wild before anyone gets their boxes fixed. It makes a lot more sense than figuring out the exploit & then trying to craft the rest of the worm around it, which would give sytems time to patch themselves and the effectiveness of your worm would suffer.
Even simpler would be using DD to copy the boot sector and partition table and storing it in a safe place (if nothing else, mailing it to yourself and leaving it on the mail server would work).
Actually it's more like saying "There's something about him in a book over there on teir 5, row 6 that talks about people who murdered children". Now, it might be somebody else with the same name or he might be involved in what went on without having actually murdered a child.
TFA is somewhat vague and I can't tell if he's pissed because his name shows up on pages that talk about bad CPAs and the page summaries might possibly lead somebody with the IQ of an eggplant to assume that those "..."s are meaningless and the whole thing is about him or if he's pissed because google turns up hits for somebody else with the same name.
Really, I don't think, either way, the guy's got a chance in hell.
I have only met a couple of Indians from India who majored in the social sciences or humanity while here. For their perspective, they understood that they wouldn't make much money, and that they were competing with at a severe disadvantage due to the cultural and linguistic differences.
I've noticed this as well... The vast majority of the Indians/Asians here who pursue engineering degrees want nothing to do with our society, culture or people. They just want to get the knowledge/education, the paperwork & leave to make their money.
Contrast this with the Europeans who come over for their education; they actually try to socialize with people not from their nation, they try to gain an understanding and appreciation for American life, they realize that living in another country is a positive experience and not something you have to suffer through in order to get ahead in life.
Then why not outsource them too? Surely, they could do a better job being located more closely to the production of the product than they can across the ocean from the people they lord over.
Oh wait, in the production of apples, where all the work is done by illegal immigrants for sub-minimum-wage, we still have USians calling the shots and directing things. In the production of cotton in days of slavery, we still had well-to-do whites 'managing' the workers. I don't think this has anything to do with "being good at your job", it's just a matter of being on the right side of the exploitation of others.
Funny. Perhaps part of the reason that "Indians outperform the Americans by a ratio of 6-4" has less to do with them being more motivated and more to do with their 'communal' view towards academics. It's not uncommon around here (decent sized university's engineering grad program) to find the Indian students working together in groups of 6 or 8 on assignments (and even worse, take-home tests, where work is supposed to be independant). It's not uncommon to hear one Indian student saying "Yeah... I took that class last year, I kept all the solutions, you want to borrow them?".
Interesting coincidence, one of our core theory courses has been taught almost exclusively by the same prof. for at least the last 10 years. This semester, it's being taught by somebody who hasn't taught it here before (but is definately qualified). Last year, the class was 1/2 to 1/3 Indian (which is about the ratio of MS students in the department). This year, where they can't draw on the work of those who've taken the class in previous years, it's dropped from 10-15 students to 3. I know it proves nothing, but it's still an observation that fits my argument.
So, yeah... it's really easy to outperform somebody who has to think for themselves when you are just given the answers.
Well, the features of the current generation (DX9 shaders) card are approaching the programability required to handle this kind of stuff fairly well. You could design a crisp, sharp-edged model and procedurally, with your shaders, dirty up the textures and put dents in the edges.
A really great demo of DX9 procedural textures I once saw was a fractal zoomer, where the fractal was rendered in real-time by the graphics card. With my Radeon 9600, there was no percievable lag and almost no CPU usage to be able to zoom & pan freely. Granted, there was a limit to the precision of the math so it did get blocky after a certain level, but up until that point, it was v.cool. If you have the hardware, check out what you can really do with it
The concept of 'fair market value' when eminent domain comes into play is often somewhat different that what 'fair market value' would mean when selling to a private party...
Actually, a majority of the supercomputer weapons research being done these days involves stabilizing and safely storing the current stockpile of nukes. The rest of it is so that we can stop actually nuking Nevada and New Mexico while still having up to date technology.
Take away their supercomputers and the government won't stop research, they'll just return to blowing up actual bombs.
I'm still suprised that eBay lets this go on. Having things like this around where the whole purpose is to separate a sucker from his money implacts the reputation of the whole site.
There's a difference between stretching the truth and making statements that serve no purpose other than to mislead and confuse the consumers. Everyone knows that the burger they see on TV is going to be nicer than the one made by some stoned highschool kid working for minimum wage, but it's going to be essentially the same thing. If a 'real business' consistantly practiced the type of deception that these eBay guys are, they'd never be able to stay in business once word got out. Why is it different online?
Well, being a techie, you always need to remember that NM has more computational power per capita than any other state in the union due to the presence of Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs, each of which has several -big- clusters, as well as the private industry contractors that support them and the military (we've also got nukes...). You also have several big tech companies(Intel is a notable one) around.
There's also the downside to things... quite a bit of poverty, lots of drunk driving accidents, public schools have poor results on standarized tests and the water's not very good.
I've been here a year, and other than the hookers outside my apartment and the roaches inside, I don't ahve much to complain about.
Yeah... wasn't thinking straight...
Really, there's a lot of places where you can do this type of thing. The last 2 cities I've lived in have had 'rural' areas reasonably close to the city center.
Albuquerque, where I'm at currently, is still a small enough city that, if you drive more than 30 minutes in any direction on the freeway (and it conveniently has both major N/S and E/W ones) you're outside of town and pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Before Abq, I lived in Seattle and there, too, you could find places that were plenty rural (think multi-acre lots, no city water/sewer and zoning that allows livestock) with only a 60-90min drive to get downtown.
If you remember that only about the 10-20 most populous cities in the US are as overgrown as NYC, LA or DC, not living inside the city or in the 'burbs does not neccessarily mean 'the boonies' (which, to me, means -way- out in BFE, without things like Starbucks or supermarkets anywhere nearby)
Really, what does 'hyperlink' and 'email' add to the claim? People doing phone orders have been using 'confirmation numbers' since the beginning of time. Does doing such a straightforward adaptation of a standard business practice to a new medium really warrant a patent?
Prior art is definately useful, but it seems to me that once you've made the jump to selling things on the web, anyone with half a brain would come to the conclusion that some sort of confirmation/tracking be implemented. Last I checked "painfully obvious, even to a retarded 3-year-old" was a justification for invalidating patents as well...
Crap.
s/right-click/middle-click/
The thing about the Debian install process is that you don't need all 13 CDs. After you do the base install, you scan the CDs that you feel like using and they get added to your local list of available packages (be it none, 1,2 or all 13). The first 2 CDs cover most of the stuff that you need to get the system working; by the time you get to the last disc, we're talking about some pretty obscure stuff that only has 3 users (2 of them are the devs and the 3rd is the guy making the package).
This is already a pretty reasonable distibution of files on the first 2 discs (the installer, OTOH still needs a lot of work; the new installer is a bit nicer than the old one but it doesn't really work all the time & there's some inconsistancies in it (like when you're partitioning drives, the drive labels in fdisk aren't the same as the names you see when you're assigning mountpoints to drives (which isn't even able to recognize swap devices as such & call them swap by default))) but it could always be perfected a bit. I have to wonder why they can't extract this from the logs on the mirrors tho...
y'know, if you're using Mozilla, you can just select an addy with the mouse and right-click on it to go there....
Freeware OGG to WAV decoder?
I have to assume you're doing this in windows, since under Linux, if you had the ogg libraries you'd already have a decoder and be doing this with a simple shell script.
So, take just about any decent audio player (such as winamp) that reads Ogg Vorbis and use it to write out WAV files instead of playing to the soundcard (on Winamp it's called the "Nullsoft disk-writer pluging"). Problem solved; you make a playlist, press play & a few seconds later, you're finished.
Don't think that just because you're moving out of the city and into a rural area you're going to be forced to find a job in a rural economy. There are plenty of places in the US that are not the massive sprawl of urbanization that you find out in your part of the country. There are quite a few decently sized cities where you can get out in 'the boonies' with a drive of an hour or so (for example, you can drive from one side of Albuquerque to the other in about 20-30 min in light trafic).
Considering that you're living in a place like DC, where you've probably already got a significant commute, what's the difference, really, between being stuck in traffic for an hour in an overgrown megalopolis and driving that hour at cruising speeds through the areas outside of town?
Even in somewhat larger cities like Seattle (which I just moved from), it's only about 60 miles from the urban core to the edge of the sprawl where you start getting into multi-acre rural lots where people have horses and whatnot.
A vast majority of the stuff that was once released as freeware is now open source. There are a number of reasons behind this; the ubiquity of the internet and its usefulness in collaboration, the increased availability of high quality development tools and the fact that if you're not making money off some code, you might as well release the source.
With that in mind, Audacity, while being a bit more full featured than a simple sound recorder, will take care of what you need.
brilliant.
I think that's the way to do it, except rather than simply saving it locally, have it rewrite the torrents and point clients at a tracker on the proxy. With a little thought, you could have the tracker dynamically adjust WAN traffic based on the number of local clients asking for the file.
It's not just to cut down on bandwidth costs and legal liability on filesharing, a university is full of clueless users. Clamping down on these things limits the potential damage than can result from a compromised machine. If a machine gets infected with some worm that backdoors it, makes it a DDOS zombie or makes it into a spam relay, there's no real harm that can result since anything it'd try to do is already blocked off.
Granted, switching over to web-only is excessive, which is why IT doesn't run the school. If enough people become dissatisfied with their service (and can argue that it 'impacts the educational experience') and are vocal about it, the administration will force IT to open up a bit.
What somebody needs to to is make the tracker/client smart enough to give a preference to clients on the local subnet. For environments like college campuses this would be a major win.
Another possibility would be to have some sort of transparent BT proxy for the network, again the same sorts of bennefits could be achieved (as well as allowing for some sort of whitelist/blacklisting of 'inappropriate' torrents).
Well, if you want to get into it, functional languages are a subset of declarative languages. If you take Prolog and write a program where you only define one variant of each predicate (or use lots of cuts as the first term of a predicate) you get semantics strikingly similar to something like SML (without the typing).