But when a user asks me something about Linux, the LDP is the LAST place I'd tell him to go. It's hard to find anything in there. It gives next to no details on anything useful, is outdated in a LOT of places, and in general, needs to be redone from scratch.
The simple fact is that NO good docs for Linux exist. This is a serious problem that the LDP hasn't been very good at fixing. We need a better way. User contribution is a good idea, if it only worked right. (If any programmers really liked writing docs..:-)
Make sure that if you get an MP3 player, it's flashable to support a different decoding standard. None are yet, as far as I know, but hey..
There's an idea. Build a generic audio playing device, with a flash ROM to hold the decoding software. Then you can release plugin's (well, not really, but okay) to download to the device to change the type of music it will decode. Downside here is that you would need an actual processor in the thing instead of just a hardware decoder. Probably running at a fairly good speed too. Hmm.. Must research this..
This type of protocol would have to handle huge lag.. Think about it.. it's 8 minutes for light to go from here to the Sun, a bit under an hour to Jupiter, right? Pluto is what, a week? The moon is 1 second each way..
Any protocol that can easily cope with even a 2 second ping time, can be used for all sorts of things.. They make mention to cars and such in the article, but basically you can toss them at any moving target and be okay with it. Nice.
>The fact that so many ordinary folks are mystified by computers speaks not to their stupidity, but the crudity of the technology and the limitations of the designers.
No, it speaks to their unwillingness to learn. Using a computer is no more difficult than driving a car. Fixing a computer is a lot harder, but people can drive cars and not be able to fix them either.
It's like anything else. "Don't blame the people, blame the technology" is rubbish. The fact is that the people are at fault for their own ignorance. Computers have existed for 25 years now. Plenty of time to hop on the bandwagon.
No big deal though, the newest generation is growing up in an internet-enabled society. My 6-year old cousin knows more about computers than his parents do.
I would love to have a screen painted into my wall.. That would be great to be able to pop any image onto any wall.. computers in my clothes, well.. I can't really see much use in that. Big deal, so my clothes can change colors, or I can surf the web on my pants leg.. hmmm.. that could be cool.. just dont ask what the pointing device would be.:-)
But a lot of this is just crap. Speculation of the possiblities. Technology is one thing, the consumer market is another. If people don't want computers in their clothes, they won't buy them. And if no one buys them, they stop making them. The world is market-driven. Dont ever think otherwise.
The potential exists to do a lot of things that aren't done because no-one thinks they're very useful. The "computers in clothes" concept is a by-product of researchers making computing devices smaller and smaller, and they need a way to describe possibilities from this. It may or may not actually occur that way.
I see nothing wrong with this kid. He's an 18 year old guy, who has a bit more common sense than those around him. He may be a script kiddie, but who's to say that one day he may not be something more?
Look, he did one of the better hacks there is. It didn't involve any "mad skillz" or anything, but mainly a bit of social engineering. He got onto MTV, didn't he? And yes, while MTV may be lame, everyone deserves their 15 minutes of fame. I applaud the guy for doing something he considers interesting. He got to get out of the rut that so many people in this world are in, and see the world a bit. Good for him!
Hell, if I was given the opportunity to do something like that, I'd be there in a second. Even though I do consider both "Real World" and "Road Rules" to be the two stupidest things on TV these days.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. With a 24 hour/day connection, it's just there, all the time. It's not a matter of "going online".. You're always online. It becomes another thing in the house, like television. You can't imagine being without it.
I was like that until I moved and lost my permanent connection. I need another connection.. ARGH! Losing it is like losing an arm. You never notice how important it really is until you don't have it anymore.
This depends more on the CD-ROM drive than the software used. If you have a good drive that can read Audio CD's in a good way, it'll work under any software. Conversely, if you have a bad drive, that really has problems doing digital copies off an audio cd, then a lot of the software out there will suck. One of the best drives I had (it died a painful death), on old NEC 4x IDE, could read at full 4x speed, every time, using any program, no problems. No skips, ever. This new 40x drive I have can barely read audio cd's at 2x speed, and needs jitter correction. bah.
Apache is a very important piece of software for the Open Source community. Apache is one of the main pieces of software on nearly every Linux box out there. Apache runs over half the world's web servers. I'd say a new release is news. Plus, freshmeat is mostly loaded full of minor version releases of software no one cares about, nor notices. The signal to noise ratio on FM is very low, IMHO.
If that many people hate this type of thing, I suggest making a new section heading called "Software Releases" so that people who don't want to see them can block them out in their preferences.. Pass the suggestion on to CmdrTaco yourself. I'm tired today for some reason...
They'll realize that ASP is a bloated, worthless, broken, badly-supported technology that rarely works at all, much less works correctly, and switch to something simpler, cheaper, and a million times more versatile. Namely, anything.
Here's what the system ACTUALLY is, avoiding the hype:
The Sender sends a stereo audio+1 video signal to the receiver. That's it. It's just that simple folks, works on ANY os, since it's not actually doing a whole lot. It's the exact same sender/reciever pair used in the DVD anywhere set.
The remote control is the exact same as the Mouse Remote they offer. It is a universal IR remote, PLUS a RF remote that goes to a reciever you attach to either your PS/2 mouse or serial port. Linux drivers ARE available for this item.
The key difference between the various systems is the software. With the MP3 anywhere, (according to the website) you get software to control the RealJukebox (probably has a winamp plugin too that they don't mention) so that you don't have to setup the remote control functions yourself.
That's it. That's the gist of it. Note that all but the software can be bought entirely separately on their site. You can buy this thing, piece by piece. And the software is FREE to download. Well, most of it. There's some software they want you to pay for, like some stuff for that firecracker kit a lot of people bought (I got one, I like it, but they should give that software away...)
Yes, but there was other evidence in that case, i.e. he had the viral code on his hard drive.
And to answer someone else's statement, a watermark can be so designed so as to SURVIVE a Digital to Analog conversion, and back to Digital. Even several such conversions. At some point, depending on the quality of the watermark, You lose enough data to lose the watermark.
I once had a really amazing demonstration of watermarking, as applied to pictures. A watermark was inserted into a GIF. The GIF was printed on a color inkjet (NOT a color laser). The printout was photographed with a Polaroid instant camera, and the picture was scanned back in. The watermark survived all this, and was readable from the file from the scanner. And trust me, the final picture looked REALLY bad after all this stuff. It wouldn't survive that twice in a row, but hey..
>The cracking file intercepts the audio data stream as the file is being sent to an output device -- such as a speaker -- according to Kevin Unangst, lead product manager in the streaming media division at Microsoft.
HAH! I knew something like this would happen. If you can't defeat the system, just work around it.
Face it folks. There is NO way to defeat this type of crack. I've said this many times. ANY system to protect the music has the fatal flaw that, at some point, it has to come out the speakers.:-)
I'm waiting for a generic version of something like this. One that will defeat ANY audio protection scheme they care to create.
When I was still in school, many of the classes I was in (which were called "gifted" classes before it became wrong to call them that), had us take test of this sort, along with IQ tests, math puzzle tests, and pretty much every thing else you can name. I've, at one time or another, taken them all. I don't recall ALL of the results, but I remember that I consistantly came up INTP on Myer-Briggs.
However, many others whom I took the test with kept flip-flopping between 2-3 results on that test. In light of this fact, and after a bit of analysis, I've long since come to the conclusion that while the tests may indeed be accurate, they all suffer from pretty much the same flaw, and that is self-awareness. Most people don't analyse their day to day actions. So they, when presented with a situation on paper, have no idea how they'd react. They also can't visualize the situation enough to be able to draw results from it. Me, I always visualized the situation then went with my gut instinct on what I would do, without thinking about it at all, really. I think that this "rapid-fire" technique, which is what they actually told us to do, yields more consistant results. Although my percentages varied a bit, they didn't vary enough to affect the overall outcome.
The only reliable method of judging your own personality is to find out the opinions of those around you. If those people have psycho degrees, then they can probably better explain your personality to you, but it's still an opinion of others type of thing.
A man does not readily fit into a small, predefined box. Unless you dont mind crunching the bones up.
Saw this on TV two weeks ago on Discovery channel or TLC or something like that. It is a handheld unit with a blue/red screen, that turns red when something is moving in the direction you point the thing.
Usage was something like this: Point the thing. Lay it against the wall or whatever.. If anything in that direction moves, the system shows it as a red on blue kind of thing. It wasn't yet sensitive enough to show breathing, so if the subject was _really_ still, they were invisible to it.
Seems to me it's just sending radio waves thru the wall, and noting the reflection. When the reflection changes, it lights up that area. Range would be fairly limited, and you could probably not "scan" an area with it.. Plus, it's uncertain whether or not this would give a distance to target, if it's just a better motion sensor. One thing I did notice on the show, was that when they moved the unit itself, while it was on, the whole damn screen went red until they stopped moving it. Fairly annoying. You had to hold the thing really still to get any kind of image. Still, I could see uses for it. But forget someone "accidentally" seeing you. Even after you stopped moving the thing across the wall, it took a few seconds to see anything useful. If anyone saw something using this thing, they meant to see it.
Also, if you're invisible to radar, you're probably invisible to this. Anyone wanna invent the "stealth" bomber jacket?:-)
>The disadvantage of one time pads is that they require huge keys, and thus key distribution becomes a major pain.
No, the BIG disadvantage with one-time pads is that you need a secure channel on which to send the pad to the other person. Since you need that, and the pad is as large as the message, what's the point? Why not simply send the message over the secure channel?
In any case, you are right. No amount of resources can decrypt this system without first obtaining the pad, or enough of it to make it possible to apply other techniques.
Profits and Stock values are completely unrelated. Witness Amazon.com, with a giant stock value (may have gone down, I haven't checked recently), and who has, AFAIK, NEVER made a profit (again, I haven't checked recently). I do know that for a long long long time, amazon.com was regularly posting huge losses, and every time they did, their stock value went up. Hmmmmmm.. Could it be that investors haven't quite figured out internet or so called ".com" stocks? Or perhaps it's that they rely on the market to shoot the value of any of these IPO's thru the roof long enough to make a nice profit if they get in early..
> To continue my rant, the factoring is not "obscure". RSA would be "obscure" if it relied on some "magic" number - that is, in finding this single "magic" number, one could decode *all* messages encrypted with RSA. Since the public key is, well, public, the strength of the algorithm lies in the difficulty of factoring an arbitrary large composite number that has only 4 factors.
Actually, I think he was referring to the fact that the PRIVATE key must be kept obscure. Naturally. This likens to his issue of passwords being obscure. You can't tell someone your password, or it's useless. Same with RSA. You can't give out your private key, or it's useless.
In any case, yes, I would say that by this definition, ALL security relies on some amount of obscurity. But big deal. This is more or less axiomatic, and the article's point seems to be moot. If that's all he was trying to say, I think it's safe to say we knew that. But that doesn't say that simple obscurity (such as the web page on a different port) is a good bit of security. It's not. It's highly insecure. But it is cheap, isn't it? As in all things, you must evaluate the need along with the price.
If you go out and buy an actual sniffer device (expensive, but if you use it a lot, it's worth it), such as a network general sniffer or some such, then there's just no way to detect it. These don't send anything back down the TX line (unless you tell them to.. very handy to send out a custom packet or three for debugging), and put nothing at all on the network... This l0pht dealie is to detect computers with normal NIC's that have been put into promiscuous mode. It does this a bunch of ways, some are OS specific (older linux versions, most Windows versions due to poor network driver programming), and one is not.
The one that is not relies on the fact that if you beat the hell out of a system in promiscuous mode, it'll slow down, badly. Basically, it pings the shit out of the system while adding a bunch of network traffic destined to somewhere else. Then it measures latency on the pings. If that latency stays about the same, then the system you are pinging is probably ignoring all that other traffic at the hardware layer. If it goes up by a good amount, then that extra traffic may be getting through, passing to the software, thus slowing the system down enough to detect.
An actual sniffer device has none of these issues. Hell, a lot of them don't even HAVE an IP address. You stick it on the network, and hear pretty much what you want to hear. Transmit from any IP you want. It's just a matter of forming the packet correctly. If the system doesn't send out anything at all, there's no way to detect it, short of mucking about with resistances on the line or some EE stuff I know nothing of.:-)
>The mission is to LOOK FOR anti-helium (and why is H skipped?) - so far it's like building an alien landing pad in your corn field - it don't mean they actually exist.
H is skipped because it is conceivable for anti-hydrogen to be produced rather spontaneously. I mean, it's just an anti-electron orbiting an anti-proton.. or maybe it's the other way around.. no wait.. umm.. <sound type=explosion source=head> ARGH!! </sound>
If anti-helium is found, it's pretty good proof that somewhere, a natural system is operating with anti-particles. Like an anti-galaxy. But, it's not REQUIRED that such a system exists, it's just fairly good evidence of it. It is possible to form any damn thing spontaneously, but it's very unlikely for anything higher than anti-hydrogen.
The requirements for a perfect OS are simple. The OS must be able to do anything I think it should be able to do, when I want it to do it, without me having to tell it how to do it. Simple.
The human brain runs the perfect OS. It does everything you think it can do, without any programming whatsoever. Too bad the source isn't GPL'd, damnit. I'd try to port it.:-)
Hmm.. could make an interesting sci-fi, probably better than much of the crap out there..
Slashdot Mirror
But when a user asks me something about Linux, the LDP is the LAST place I'd tell him to go. It's hard to find anything in there. It gives next to no details on anything useful, is outdated in a LOT of places, and in general, needs to be redone from scratch.
:-)
The simple fact is that NO good docs for Linux exist. This is a serious problem that the LDP hasn't been very good at fixing. We need a better way. User contribution is a good idea, if it only worked right. (If any programmers really liked writing docs..
---
Make sure that if you get an MP3 player, it's flashable to support a different decoding standard. None are yet, as far as I know, but hey..
There's an idea. Build a generic audio playing device, with a flash ROM to hold the decoding software. Then you can release plugin's (well, not really, but okay) to download to the device to change the type of music it will decode. Downside here is that you would need an actual processor in the thing instead of just a hardware decoder. Probably running at a fairly good speed too. Hmm.. Must research this..
---
This type of protocol would have to handle huge lag.. Think about it.. it's 8 minutes for light to go from here to the Sun, a bit under an hour to Jupiter, right? Pluto is what, a week? The moon is 1 second each way..
Any protocol that can easily cope with even a 2 second ping time, can be used for all sorts of things.. They make mention to cars and such in the article, but basically you can toss them at any moving target and be okay with it. Nice.
---
Bah to you.
>The fact that so many ordinary folks are mystified by computers speaks not to their stupidity, but the crudity of the technology and the limitations of the designers.
No, it speaks to their unwillingness to learn. Using a computer is no more difficult than driving a car. Fixing a computer is a lot harder, but people can drive cars and not be able to fix them either.
It's like anything else. "Don't blame the people, blame the technology" is rubbish. The fact is that the people are at fault for their own ignorance. Computers have existed for 25 years now. Plenty of time to hop on the bandwagon.
No big deal though, the newest generation is growing up in an internet-enabled society. My 6-year old cousin knows more about computers than his parents do.
---
I would love to have a screen painted into my wall.. That would be great to be able to pop any image onto any wall.. computers in my clothes, well.. I can't really see much use in that. Big deal, so my clothes can change colors, or I can surf the web on my pants leg.. hmmm.. that could be cool.. just dont ask what the pointing device would be. :-)
But a lot of this is just crap. Speculation of the possiblities. Technology is one thing, the consumer market is another. If people don't want computers in their clothes, they won't buy them. And if no one buys them, they stop making them. The world is market-driven. Dont ever think otherwise.
The potential exists to do a lot of things that aren't done because no-one thinks they're very useful. The "computers in clothes" concept is a by-product of researchers making computing devices smaller and smaller, and they need a way to describe possibilities from this. It may or may not actually occur that way.
---
I see nothing wrong with this kid. He's an 18 year old guy, who has a bit more common sense than those around him. He may be a script kiddie, but who's to say that one day he may not be something more?
Look, he did one of the better hacks there is. It didn't involve any "mad skillz" or anything, but mainly a bit of social engineering. He got onto MTV, didn't he? And yes, while MTV may be lame, everyone deserves their 15 minutes of fame. I applaud the guy for doing something he considers interesting. He got to get out of the rut that so many people in this world are in, and see the world a bit. Good for him!
Hell, if I was given the opportunity to do something like that, I'd be there in a second. Even though I do consider both "Real World" and "Road Rules" to be the two stupidest things on TV these days.
---
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. With a 24 hour/day connection, it's just there, all the time. It's not a matter of "going online".. You're always online. It becomes another thing in the house, like television. You can't imagine being without it.
I was like that until I moved and lost my permanent connection. I need another connection.. ARGH! Losing it is like losing an arm. You never notice how important it really is until you don't have it anymore.
---
This depends more on the CD-ROM drive than the software used. If you have a good drive that can read Audio CD's in a good way, it'll work under any software. Conversely, if you have a bad drive, that really has problems doing digital copies off an audio cd, then a lot of the software out there will suck. One of the best drives I had (it died a painful death), on old NEC 4x IDE, could read at full 4x speed, every time, using any program, no problems. No skips, ever. This new 40x drive I have can barely read audio cd's at 2x speed, and needs jitter correction. bah.
---
Hmm.. That would make me...
:-)
Sam-od Halit Doostorm of Generic Excedrin
Doesn't quite have that.. well.. anything.. I think the Doostorm is probably what really hurts it..
Problem is, everytime you take some new drugs, suddenly your from another planet. That's only okay if they're really good drugs, you know?
---
Apache is a very important piece of software for the Open Source community. Apache is one of the main pieces of software on nearly every Linux box out there. Apache runs over half the world's web servers. I'd say a new release is news. Plus, freshmeat is mostly loaded full of minor version releases of software no one cares about, nor notices. The signal to noise ratio on FM is very low, IMHO.
If that many people hate this type of thing, I suggest making a new section heading called "Software Releases" so that people who don't want to see them can block them out in their preferences..
Pass the suggestion on to CmdrTaco yourself. I'm tired today for some reason...
---
They'll realize that ASP is a bloated, worthless, broken, badly-supported technology that rarely works at all, much less works correctly, and switch to something simpler, cheaper, and a million times more versatile. Namely, anything.
---
Here's what the system ACTUALLY is, avoiding the hype:
The Sender sends a stereo audio+1 video signal to the receiver. That's it. It's just that simple folks, works on ANY os, since it's not actually doing a whole lot. It's the exact same sender/reciever pair used in the DVD anywhere set.
The remote control is the exact same as the Mouse Remote they offer. It is a universal IR remote, PLUS a RF remote that goes to a reciever you attach to either your PS/2 mouse or serial port. Linux drivers ARE available for this item.
The key difference between the various systems is the software. With the MP3 anywhere, (according to the website) you get software to control the RealJukebox (probably has a winamp plugin too that they don't mention) so that you don't have to setup the remote control functions yourself.
That's it. That's the gist of it. Note that all but the software can be bought entirely separately on their site. You can buy this thing, piece by piece. And the software is FREE to download. Well, most of it. There's some software they want you to pay for, like some stuff for that firecracker kit a lot of people bought (I got one, I like it, but they should give that software away...)
---
Except currently AudioJacker only works on NT 4.0 ...
---
Yes, but there was other evidence in that case, i.e. he had the viral code on his hard drive.
And to answer someone else's statement, a watermark can be so designed so as to SURVIVE a Digital to Analog conversion, and back to Digital. Even several such conversions. At some point, depending on the quality of the watermark, You lose enough data to lose the watermark.
I once had a really amazing demonstration of watermarking, as applied to pictures. A watermark was inserted into a GIF. The GIF was printed on a color inkjet (NOT a color laser). The printout was photographed with a Polaroid instant camera, and the picture was scanned back in. The watermark survived all this, and was readable from the file from the scanner. And trust me, the final picture looked REALLY bad after all this stuff. It wouldn't survive that twice in a row, but hey..
---
>The cracking file intercepts the audio data stream as the file is being sent to an output device -- such as a speaker -- according to Kevin Unangst, lead product manager in the streaming media division at Microsoft.
:-)
HAH! I knew something like this would happen. If you can't defeat the system, just work around it.
Face it folks. There is NO way to defeat this type of crack. I've said this many times. ANY system to protect the music has the fatal flaw that, at some point, it has to come out the speakers.
I'm waiting for a generic version of something like this. One that will defeat ANY audio protection scheme they care to create.
---
When I was still in school, many of the classes I was in (which were called "gifted" classes before it became wrong to call them that), had us take test of this sort, along with IQ tests, math puzzle tests, and pretty much every thing else you can name. I've, at one time or another, taken them all. I don't recall ALL of the results, but I remember that I consistantly came up INTP on Myer-Briggs.
However, many others whom I took the test with kept flip-flopping between 2-3 results on that test. In light of this fact, and after a bit of analysis, I've long since come to the conclusion that while the tests may indeed be accurate, they all suffer from pretty much the same flaw, and that is self-awareness. Most people don't analyse their day to day actions. So they, when presented with a situation on paper, have no idea how they'd react. They also can't visualize the situation enough to be able to draw results from it. Me, I always visualized the situation then went with my gut instinct on what I would do, without thinking about it at all, really. I think that this "rapid-fire" technique, which is what they actually told us to do, yields more consistant results. Although my percentages varied a bit, they didn't vary enough to affect the overall outcome.
The only reliable method of judging your own personality is to find out the opinions of those around you. If those people have psycho degrees, then they can probably better explain your personality to you, but it's still an opinion of others type of thing.
A man does not readily fit into a small, predefined box. Unless you dont mind crunching the bones up.
---
Although I strongly disagree with parts of what it says for me, here we go:
:-)
Openness: Yoda (93%)
Conscientious: Admiral Ozzel (25%)
Extraversion: Wampas (4%)
Agreeableness: Emperor Palpantine (6%)
Neuroticism: C-3P0 (71%)
I highly disagree with the last three. I am not disagreeable damnit!
---
Saw this on TV two weeks ago on Discovery channel or TLC or something like that. It is a handheld unit with a blue/red screen, that turns red when something is moving in the direction you point the thing.
:-)
Usage was something like this:
Point the thing. Lay it against the wall or whatever..
If anything in that direction moves, the system shows it as a red on blue kind of thing.
It wasn't yet sensitive enough to show breathing, so if the subject was _really_ still, they were invisible to it.
Seems to me it's just sending radio waves thru the wall, and noting the reflection. When the reflection changes, it lights up that area. Range would be fairly limited, and you could probably not "scan" an area with it.. Plus, it's uncertain whether or not this would give a distance to target, if it's just a better motion sensor. One thing I did notice on the show, was that when they moved the unit itself, while it was on, the whole damn screen went red until they stopped moving it. Fairly annoying. You had to hold the thing really still to get any kind of image. Still, I could see uses for it. But forget someone "accidentally" seeing you. Even after you stopped moving the thing across the wall, it took a few seconds to see anything useful. If anyone saw something using this thing, they meant to see it.
Also, if you're invisible to radar, you're probably invisible to this. Anyone wanna invent the "stealth" bomber jacket?
---
>The disadvantage of one time pads is that they require huge keys, and thus key distribution becomes a major pain.
No, the BIG disadvantage with one-time pads is that you need a secure channel on which to send the pad to the other person. Since you need that, and the pad is as large as the message, what's the point? Why not simply send the message over the secure channel?
In any case, you are right. No amount of resources can decrypt this system without first obtaining the pad, or enough of it to make it possible to apply other techniques.
---
Profits and Stock values are completely unrelated. Witness Amazon.com, with a giant stock value (may have gone down, I haven't checked recently), and who has, AFAIK, NEVER made a profit (again, I haven't checked recently). I do know that for a long long long time, amazon.com was regularly posting huge losses, and every time they did, their stock value went up. Hmmmmmm.. Could it be that investors haven't quite figured out internet or so called ".com" stocks? Or perhaps it's that they rely on the market to shoot the value of any of these IPO's thru the roof long enough to make a nice profit if they get in early..
Ahh well..
---
> To continue my rant, the factoring is not "obscure". RSA would be "obscure" if it relied on some "magic" number - that is, in finding this single "magic" number, one could decode *all* messages encrypted with RSA. Since the public key is, well, public, the strength of the algorithm lies in the difficulty of factoring an arbitrary large composite number that has only 4 factors.
Actually, I think he was referring to the fact that the PRIVATE key must be kept obscure. Naturally. This likens to his issue of passwords being obscure. You can't tell someone your password, or it's useless. Same with RSA. You can't give out your private key, or it's useless.
In any case, yes, I would say that by this definition, ALL security relies on some amount of obscurity. But big deal. This is more or less axiomatic, and the article's point seems to be moot. If that's all he was trying to say, I think it's safe to say we knew that. But that doesn't say that simple obscurity (such as the web page on a different port) is a good bit of security. It's not. It's highly insecure. But it is cheap, isn't it? As in all things, you must evaluate the need along with the price.
---
If you go out and buy an actual sniffer device (expensive, but if you use it a lot, it's worth it), such as a network general sniffer or some such, then there's just no way to detect it. These don't send anything back down the TX line (unless you tell them to.. very handy to send out a custom packet or three for debugging), and put nothing at all on the network... This l0pht dealie is to detect computers with normal NIC's that have been put into promiscuous mode. It does this a bunch of ways, some are OS specific (older linux versions, most Windows versions due to poor network driver programming), and one is not.
:-)
The one that is not relies on the fact that if you beat the hell out of a system in promiscuous mode, it'll slow down, badly. Basically, it pings the shit out of the system while adding a bunch of network traffic destined to somewhere else. Then it measures latency on the pings. If that latency stays about the same, then the system you are pinging is probably ignoring all that other traffic at the hardware layer. If it goes up by a good amount, then that extra traffic may be getting through, passing to the software, thus slowing the system down enough to detect.
An actual sniffer device has none of these issues. Hell, a lot of them don't even HAVE an IP address. You stick it on the network, and hear pretty much what you want to hear. Transmit from any IP you want. It's just a matter of forming the packet correctly. If the system doesn't send out anything at all, there's no way to detect it, short of mucking about with resistances on the line or some EE stuff I know nothing of.
---
>The mission is to LOOK FOR anti-helium (and why is H skipped?) - so far it's like building an alien landing pad in your corn field - it don't mean they actually exist.
H is skipped because it is conceivable for anti-hydrogen to be produced rather spontaneously. I mean, it's just an anti-electron orbiting an anti-proton.. or maybe it's the other way around.. no wait.. umm..
<sound type=explosion source=head> ARGH!! </sound>
If anti-helium is found, it's pretty good proof that somewhere, a natural system is operating with anti-particles. Like an anti-galaxy. But, it's not REQUIRED that such a system exists, it's just fairly good evidence of it. It is possible to form any damn thing spontaneously, but it's very unlikely for anything higher than anti-hydrogen.
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For those interested...
http://www.wolfstonelaw.com/saganslande r.html
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The requirements for a perfect OS are simple. The OS must be able to do anything I think it should be able to do, when I want it to do it, without me having to tell it how to do it. Simple.
:-)
The human brain runs the perfect OS. It does everything you think it can do, without any programming whatsoever. Too bad the source isn't GPL'd, damnit. I'd try to port it.
Hmm.. could make an interesting sci-fi, probably better than much of the crap out there..
ahh well.. ramblings from the cubicle..