The rest of us are tired of tolerating people like YOU who think the world revolves around your CHILDREN. Your world might. We have better things to do than supervise your spawn.
Respond this these requests as if you were being asked to let them search your car or person.
Remember: if you are ASKED to allow the search, you have no recourse what-so-ever should you GIVE PERMISSON OR CONSENT. Just as you should never consent to a search of your automobile or home, DO NOT CONSENT to any search or confiscation of property.
In most jobs, you probably also signed a non-discolsure agreement when you started your employment. Presenting ANY information related to your work could be seen as a violation of this legally binding agreement. I'm sure that something such as a password, or worse the confidential client/company documents protected by that password, would most certianly violate that agreement.
Just as with any other Law Enforcement Officer (LEO), which the TSA or Customs Agent may or may not qualify as, you have the RIGHT to refuse to answer ANY questions at ANY TIME. Your other option may not be particularly attractive (missing the flight, brief confinement), but it only takes 1 little bit of 'evidence' taken out of context to incriminate and possibly incarcerate you for a very long time.
The instant that you are threatened with loss of life, liberty ("You can't take this, or any other flight. You're coming with us.") or property ("Give us your computer/password/secrets.") without due process you should refuse, clearly state that you are being coerced and request a lawyer.
In many portions of this country, a person would be killed and often legally for simply providing a convincing threat of such actions (removal of life/liberty/property).
I remember a previous slashdot article (my search skills seem to be lacking) where ANOTHER study was done for adoption of ALL consumer technologies (electricity, telephone, automobile, television, computer, etc..) that showed that REGARDLESS of the specific technology, it took about 20 years to be adopted by the majority of the US public.
That's about one generation worth of consumers.
The cellular phone may have been slighty anomolous, as in my mind that's simply an extension of a POTS line that can now go where you go. No vastly different functionality.
I don't know how long the statute of limitations is on this sort of thing, and I don't think that we actually broke any laws doing it. If we had continued to pound their servers after becoming suspicious of the results of our program, then we probably would have been guilty of some act (morally if not legally).
As for publishing it, if someone (MTV Legal?) wants to spend their money to track me down, with a subpeona to slashdot to identify my email, then another to my ISP to locate my residence, then take me to court to sue me for the no assets that I have, then let them. The online community and the MTV viewer community would have a field day with the bullying of a college student that used creativity and ingenuity to make the system work for him.
What percentage of MTV's viewers are college students? I would wager a guess at better than 50%. You wouldn't watch a TV program if you knew that the company broadcasting it was willing to sue you for watching/participating would you?
Actually, the show (and the service) went on for about 2 months after we didi this. Notice that the show didn't die, nor did their service, based on any "interference" that we may have caused. The viewership simply wasn't there to keep the thing running.
You complain that you couldn't watch the videos you wanted? Well then call some friends and start submitting votes for your video of choice. Or get off your lazy whining ass and write a better program to submit more votes than we could.
Not once did we think that we were abusing the system. We simply put our resources to use and submitted as many votes as we could.
As soon as we noticed a problem (_possibly_ caused by our actions) we terminated the project and allowed the normal course of events to take over. We didn't want to break their servers, we enjoyed watching the videos we voted for.
This isn't the first time that MTV's Web stuff has been poorly implemented. Around January of 2001 my friends and I began to watch MTV2 pretty regularly.
Lo and behold we found the wonders of MTV's Control Freak show. While a video was playing on the show, you could visit their web site and vote for the next video to air. All this was implement ed with a simple "click on this video to vote for it" page that was simply replaced/edited then refreshed each time the new video began to air.
Well we had already implemeted a web interfaced, Linux based, MP3 jukebox hooked directly to our stereo and also to an FM-stereo transmitter for longer range listening. Now we had the opportunity to have our very own Video Jukebox (granted with a somewhat limited selection).
So we wrote a program to parse the page for the voting URL's, display them for selection, and then create http connections submitting the appropriate vote. On the normal interface this would send you to a new page asking you to "Click here to vote again" and the whole process would repeat itself.
Now normally you would wait for a response that the vote submission went through. We didn't really care if it did or not since we were submitting votes as fast as we could open the connections successfully.
This seemed to work fine, however we were still unable to watch anything we wanted since the rest of the world was voting as well. On the videos that were evenly split, we would supply the (many) deciding votes, but for the runaway hits we didn't have a fast enough connection with our piddly 768 u/d DSL modem (~1000 votes/min)
That prompted a redesign of the program. Version 2 allowed for distributed vote submission. With the resources that we had (root on a few high performance computers connected to a burstable T3) the distributed program soon allowed us to submit ~15000 votes/min.
This solution worked like a charm. Start the threads and the percentage on our video would start to climb like a mountain goat. Switch the video we were voting for and that one would climb. Nothing like seeing a piece of crap (Busta Rhyme's YoYoYo) go from 1% to 97% in less than 2 minutes.
Well that next week or the week after that, Control Freak was not being aired. "No worries, we'll hit 'em next week." The next week, the show came on. We started voting for our favorite video. The percentages went up. And up. And, wait a minute the percentages just dropped 25%!
Seems that MTV had caught on to our scheme and was culling our votes from the pool. Bastards!
Well, we kept at it to see if we could find the cutoff limit for votes from a single IP address (that was the only way we could think of for them to remove just our votes). That way we could run the client for x amount of time/votes and then shut it off for maximum effectiveness.
That worked for a week. The next week we had upgraded the client to "spoof" random IP's with each vote it sent out to bypass the culling machine.
It bypassed the culling machine alright. That week the percentages would climb, then something broke. The percentages went to 20K+% on each video. Then our video went to 0%. So we chose a new video. It went to 0%.
Right then we shut down the operation. Up till that point, we had been doing nothing wrong (well cept maybe the IP spoofing of votes) since they had encouraged users to vote multiple times. We had simply removed the human factor of the voting process. But finally we had broken THEIR program.
We surmised that the program held the vote tallys in an int and when we started submitting votes, the ints overflowed and caused a serious problem with negative numbers being used to calculate the percentages. If we had continued to vote in that manner MTV could have sued us for breaking their computers. Very bad scene for 3 college students with no money. Not to mention the fact that the computers connected to that T3 were not ours, and we probably would have lost those jobs and been sued for misuse of company resources.
But, I'll tell you that was probably the most fun I have ever had hacking any type of program/protocol/interface/hardware. This produced immediate results that you could not only see, but your friends on the other side of town could see as well.
That might work, however I would never pay for such a thing.
Reason: Most ISP's buy Leased lines (T1/E1) at $XXXX/Month. This is a bandwidth limited line. They pay the $XXXX/Month whether they use the bandwidth or not. There is no reason to sell me a service (768Kb/sec Up and Down) and then limit the amount of data I can receive/transmit at that speed. Companies that implement policies like that are doing so because they have over-sold their bandwidth. They need to find a way to limit the usage of the users so that they can sell to more people and not have insanely slow connection speeds.
Just because I like to drink all the beer out of the bottle before I throw it away, doesn't mean that I should have to pay more for it. If you sell me a connection for a certian speed, you better make sure that I can ALWAYS get that speed from another computer that can send it to me that fast. And don't ever think that I won't use the service that I am paying for to its fullest capabilities.
One of the major components of a QUALITY UPS is the surge protection provided in them. APC even has a warranty that will cover the cost of your fried equipment if your box gets fried while connected to their UPS.
If that contraption was struck by lightning (I've seen comps get hit) the surge would go stright through the DC supply and the BIG lead-acid battery would then become a GIANT burning ball of hydrogen and concentrated sulfuric acid.
I don't know about you but I have a few things in my "lab" that I don't want eaten by acid (not the least of which, ME!).
Slashdot Mirror
The rest of us are tired of tolerating people like YOU who think the world revolves around your CHILDREN.
Your world might. We have better things to do than supervise your spawn.
Respond this these requests as if you were being asked to let them search your car or person.
Remember: if you are ASKED to allow the search, you have no recourse what-so-ever should you GIVE PERMISSON OR CONSENT. Just as you should never consent to a search of your automobile or home, DO NOT CONSENT to any search or confiscation of property.
In most jobs, you probably also signed a non-discolsure agreement when you started your employment. Presenting ANY information related to your work could be seen as a violation of this legally binding agreement. I'm sure that something such as a password, or worse the confidential client/company documents protected by that password, would most certianly violate that agreement.
Just as with any other Law Enforcement Officer (LEO), which the TSA or Customs Agent may or may not qualify as, you have the RIGHT to refuse to answer ANY questions at ANY TIME. Your other option may not be particularly attractive (missing the flight, brief confinement), but it only takes 1 little bit of 'evidence' taken out of context to incriminate and possibly incarcerate you for a very long time.
The instant that you are threatened with loss of life, liberty ("You can't take this, or any other flight. You're coming with us.") or property ("Give us your computer/password/secrets.") without due process you should refuse, clearly state that you are being coerced and request a lawyer.
In many portions of this country, a person would be killed and often legally for simply providing a convincing threat of such actions (removal of life/liberty/property).
Yep. And they weren't to be used for National Security purposes when installed.
This is why you don't give a mouse a cookie...
This is the ticket.
I remember a previous slashdot article (my search skills seem to be lacking) where ANOTHER study was done for adoption of ALL consumer technologies (electricity, telephone, automobile, television, computer, etc..) that showed that REGARDLESS of the specific technology, it took about 20 years to be adopted by the majority of the US public.
That's about one generation worth of consumers.
The cellular phone may have been slighty anomolous, as in my mind that's simply an extension of a POTS line that can now go where you go. No vastly different functionality.
What I found MOST interesting was the fact that during testing the device successfully identified the "owner" 9 out of 10 times.
Now I'm not a Law Enforcement Officer (LEO), but if I ever draw my weapon I want to be 100% sure that it will fire when the trigger is pulled.
Sure, but then it wouldn't be High-Performance now would it?
Processor speed is only part of the equation in HP Computing, remember that those nodes have to WAIT for the data to go between each other.
Ethernet's latency is simply too high for a system such as this...
I don't know how long the statute of limitations is on this sort of thing, and I don't think that we actually broke any laws doing it. If we had continued to pound their servers after becoming suspicious of the results of our program, then we probably would have been guilty of some act (morally if not legally).
As for publishing it, if someone (MTV Legal?) wants to spend their money to track me down, with a subpeona to slashdot to identify my email, then another to my ISP to locate my residence, then take me to court to sue me for the no assets that I have, then let them. The online community and the MTV viewer community would have a field day with the bullying of a college student that used creativity and ingenuity to make the system work for him.
What percentage of MTV's viewers are college students? I would wager a guess at better than 50%. You wouldn't watch a TV program if you knew that the company broadcasting it was willing to sue you for watching/participating would you?
Actually, the show (and the service) went on for about 2 months after we didi this. Notice that the show didn't die, nor did their service, based on any "interference" that we may have caused. The viewership simply wasn't there to keep the thing running.
You complain that you couldn't watch the videos you wanted? Well then call some friends and start submitting votes for your video of choice. Or get off your lazy whining ass and write a better program to submit more votes than we could.
Not once did we think that we were abusing the system. We simply put our resources to use and submitted as many votes as we could.
As soon as we noticed a problem (_possibly_ caused by our actions) we terminated the project and allowed the normal course of events to take over. We didn't want to break their servers, we enjoyed watching the videos we voted for.
This isn't the first time that MTV's Web stuff has been poorly implemented. Around January of 2001 my friends and I began to watch MTV2 pretty regularly.
Lo and behold we found the wonders of MTV's Control Freak show. While a video was playing on the show, you could visit their web site and vote for the next video to air. All this was implement ed with a simple "click on this video to vote for it" page that was simply replaced/edited then refreshed each time the new video began to air.
Well we had already implemeted a web interfaced, Linux based, MP3 jukebox hooked directly to our stereo and also to an FM-stereo transmitter for longer range listening. Now we had the opportunity to have our very own Video Jukebox (granted with a somewhat limited selection).
So we wrote a program to parse the page for the voting URL's, display them for selection, and then create http connections submitting the appropriate vote. On the normal interface this would send you to a new page asking you to "Click here to vote again" and the whole process would repeat itself.
Now normally you would wait for a response that the vote submission went through. We didn't really care if it did or not since we were submitting votes as fast as we could open the connections successfully.
This seemed to work fine, however we were still unable to watch anything we wanted since the rest of the world was voting as well. On the videos that were evenly split, we would supply the (many) deciding votes, but for the runaway hits we didn't have a fast enough connection with our piddly 768 u/d DSL modem (~1000 votes/min)
That prompted a redesign of the program. Version 2 allowed for distributed vote submission. With the resources that we had (root on a few high performance computers connected to a burstable T3) the distributed program soon allowed us to submit ~15000 votes/min.
This solution worked like a charm. Start the threads and the percentage on our video would start to climb like a mountain goat. Switch the video we were voting for and that one would climb. Nothing like seeing a piece of crap (Busta Rhyme's YoYoYo) go from 1% to 97% in less than 2 minutes.
Well that next week or the week after that, Control Freak was not being aired. "No worries, we'll hit 'em next week."
The next week, the show came on. We started voting for our favorite video. The percentages went up. And up. And, wait a minute the percentages just dropped 25%!
Seems that MTV had caught on to our scheme and was culling our votes from the pool. Bastards!
Well, we kept at it to see if we could find the cutoff limit for votes from a single IP address (that was the only way we could think of for them to remove just our votes). That way we could run the client for x amount of time/votes and then shut it off for maximum effectiveness.
That worked for a week. The next week we had upgraded the client to "spoof" random IP's with each vote it sent out to bypass the culling machine.
It bypassed the culling machine alright. That week the percentages would climb, then something broke. The percentages went to 20K+% on each video. Then our video went to 0%. So we chose a new video. It went to 0%.
Right then we shut down the operation. Up till that point, we had been doing nothing wrong (well cept maybe the IP spoofing of votes) since they had encouraged users to vote multiple times. We had simply removed the human factor of the voting process. But finally we had broken THEIR program.
We surmised that the program held the vote tallys in an int and when we started submitting votes, the ints overflowed and caused a serious problem with negative numbers being used to calculate the percentages. If we had continued to vote in that manner MTV could have sued us for breaking their computers. Very bad scene for 3 college students with no money. Not to mention the fact that the computers connected to that T3 were not ours, and we probably would have lost those jobs and been sued for misuse of company resources.
But, I'll tell you that was probably the most fun I have ever had hacking any type of program/protocol/interface/hardware. This produced immediate results that you could not only see, but your friends on the other side of town could see as well.
That might work, however I would never pay for such a thing.
Reason: Most ISP's buy Leased lines (T1/E1) at $XXXX/Month. This is a bandwidth limited line. They pay the $XXXX/Month whether they use the bandwidth or not. There is no reason to sell me a service (768Kb/sec Up and Down) and then limit the amount of data I can receive/transmit at that speed. Companies that implement policies like that are doing so because they have over-sold their bandwidth. They need to find a way to limit the usage of the users so that they can sell to more people and not have insanely slow connection speeds.
Just because I like to drink all the beer out of the bottle before I throw it away, doesn't mean that I should have to pay more for it. If you sell me a connection for a certian speed, you better make sure that I can ALWAYS get that speed from another computer that can send it to me that fast. And don't ever think that I won't use the service that I am paying for to its fullest capabilities.
One of the major components of a QUALITY UPS is the surge protection provided in them. APC even has a warranty that will cover the cost of your fried equipment if your box gets fried while connected to their UPS.
If that contraption was struck by lightning (I've seen comps get hit) the surge would go stright through the DC supply and the BIG lead-acid battery would then become a GIANT burning ball of hydrogen and concentrated sulfuric acid.
I don't know about you but I have a few things in my "lab" that I don't want eaten by acid (not the least of which, ME!).