Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
actually, by my calculations, "Polish immigrants" + "vegan lesbian holistic bomb-making camps" + "HD Television cameras" == Best episode of Mythbusters EVER
"There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset...."
Let me make this abundantly clear: The above statement is 100% bullshit. My local paper, the Ann Arbor News, also went tits up. Over the last two years, the paper had opened comments sections on the majority of its stories to enable the aforementioned pipe dream. End result? The trolls moved in and feasted like rats in a corn silo, the nut jobs flooded the forums with "facts" on every story from free republic and the knock offs, and the signal to noise ratio plummeted. Now the paper has relaunched as annarbor.com, and the solution to the above has become: censor comments, and allow the newspaper staff to wade right into the thick of the mud. Fantastic.
When I see what has happened to old media sites that get into "Web 2.0" I feel like a WW1 vet being told by a fresh out of west point grad that "trench warfare 2.0 will revolutionize war as we know it!"
I don't really *want* to engage with the community when I go hunting for local "news", I don't *want* to hear from the friend of the victims brother-in-law who got arrested for B&E two blocks from my house. And most of all I don't want the most most useless section of the newspaper (Op-ed) to become the foundation of our "new media." Report, and leave me to use my gray matter to formulate my own opinions. If I'm at the site, the I'm there because I want local news. Period. Well researched, well reported, well digested, local news. It doesn't exist on TV anymore, i don't think it will ever exist on the web.
"Left unchecked, Pecot says 'it could spread all the way to Michigan.'"...where its heretofore unchecked growth will be stymied by crushing unemployment, deteriorating highways, crippling corruption in and around Detroit, and the disheartening realization that July is the only month out of the year that has never had a recorded snowfall.
Failing that, we can always deploy Vernors against the weed. Nothing outside of Michigan can handle the pure sweet taste of eleven pounds of ginger crammed into a 20oz bottle. If things get bad we could also turn to Faygo.
I remember years ago debating the value of a login banner. Granted, having a message that says "for authorized use only" won't *deter* anyone, it does make this sort of legal weaseling more of a moot point. Instead of proving that he was intentionally out to cause damage, or that he wasn't just mindlessly poking around, they just would have had to prove he wasn't an authorized user.
By his lawyers defense, having any open port exposed to the internet on any machine absolves the perp of responsibility.
"Your honor, my client was fully within his rights to use a 0-day exploit to gain access to a machine, ignore the login banner, place trojans on all machines within the subnet, order the backup catalog to long erase all backup tapes, drop all tables on all of the database servers, and change the company webserver to goatse. The ssh server was sitting wide open on an unregistered port! Why, the root account had simply been renamed to "dont-ever-use-me-ever-what-ever-no-never", and access required nothing more than a 4096-bit PSK and the knowledge of a 36 character password!"
Remote access to desktops directly connected to the interweb: probably not a good idea. Browsing said desktops when you're not an authorized user: illegal. Even if the plain text password is 12345.
The fact that the device is a linux box at heart was a big reason for my purchase of a DX. It's a reasonably open device that has great hacking potential.
(and yes, I know, "ZOMFG Teh 1984zzzz!!!! Amazon will burn your books!" Please, quit dangling from Stallman's wrinkled sack and get a life.)
Any idiot knows that fixes involving the main deflector array are seldom effective. Truly groundbreaking work *only* occurs when power is rerouted from the primary weapons and, in dire circumstances, life support.
Recently in historical terms, encryption has became essentially unbreakable [wikipedia.org], and this is the backdoor to it all.
Score -1: Wrong.
*Brute force* decryption has reached a point in *some cases* where it has become pointless. In other cases (say, a four digit pin) where it's still a perfectly acceptable solution.
My half-assed crack pot theory is that genuine decryption has long since followed the same path that password cracking has moved towards. Rainbow tables. Rather than trying to break open one particular key, or dedicating the resources towards generating all possible keys, just do a hybrid dictionary / rainbow tables / brute force attack. Use those terra-exo-giga-uber-flop beasties to generate all possible keys, but work your way down from most probable to least probable. What's the point of quintuple DES 8192-bit Blowfish double ROT-13 with a cherry on top encryption if you're going to use 12345 as your decryption passphrase?
Anything that involves a passphrase is inherently weak. The end user will always be the weak link. Unless you're into burying USB sticks with PSK's in the backyard, thinking that your data is secure just because 'it's encrypted, and xyz encryption is unbreakable!' is a fallacy.
The "You won't make yer money back" argument is dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. To me, a hybrid version of a car is an option, just like any other available option. Only that particular option allows me to trade spending a bit more at time of purchase for spending less money at the gas pump. Does it even out? Probably not. Am I paying a premium for superior technology? Damn right I am.
When was the last time you heard anyone say "you'll never make your money back on that sun roof", or on leather seats?
If you really want to play numbers games, factor in the lessened depreciation in hybrid vehicles when figuring the return on investment. Used hybrids have held their value far better than traditional vehicles have over the past few years.
WTG Slashdot! At first I thought a story that was posted without a link or attribution of source was a mistake. But then I realized it's really just a super-subtle acknowledgment of John Hughes' passing....
"My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Rupert Murdoch pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious."
One of the more fascinating things coming out of intelligence circles today is how much we are learning from those minute details, and how much of that data we are releasing to the press. Things like being able to tell how old video of Kim Jong Il is by looking at foliage in the background, or what time of day a Bin Laden tape was filmed (notice that those videos are all against a white sheet, or in windowless rooms now). I bet you could even identify a particular camcorder model (or even unit) by the noise it introduces into a tape.
So, what's the difference between me modding my own hardware and then saying "well, done with that fun hack... I'm putting this on eBay so I can get my next toy to see if I can hack it" and this guy hacking the hardware and then selling it? Really, what, specifically is different? Intent?
Ask a homebrewer and a moonshiner what the difference between selling and personal use is. The DMCA is as legit as any alcohol tax laws (and it exists for essentially the same purposes, ensuring profits.)
TFA doesn't give specifics, but he was specifically indicted for modding for the purposes of "financial gain" so I sorta doubt he was just selling what he had lying around the house. TFA also says he was modding 360's, PS3's, and wii's, which sounds much more like cottage industry than knocking around. Granted, that could just as easily be six as it could be six hundred.
At the end of the day, this is just about the money. If he's been making real money at this, the DMCA violations will just be used as precursors to go after his ill-gotten gains.
"Playing pirated games on any device is and should be illegal. Modifying the device in a way that makes it possible to play pirated games should NOT be illegal."
And therein lies the rub. From TFA:
"The Cal State Fullerton student was arrested Monday on federal charges that he illegally modified Xbox, Playstation, Wii and other video game consoles to enable the machines to play pirated video games."
"Specifically, the college student is accused of modifying for personal financial gain technology affecting control or access to a copyrighted work"
'They' aren't trampling your rights to mod the hardware you own. They're trampling this guys (non-existent) right to mod consoles for profit. This isn't some basement hacker getting his door kicked in by the jack booted thugs. He's no different (legally anyway) from guys selling pirated movies.
Hackers & discipline... probably not the best combination ever.
Score -1: So wrong it hurts to read.
The best hackers i know of are the ones who *are* disciplined. Go to sourceforge and look at the overwhelming number of half assed, dead projects the clutter up the works. The best open source projects are the ones that have taken years of hard work to reach maturity. That's real discipline.
The linux kernel wasn't written in a nights hacking in Linus' moms basement. It takes years of dedication and hard work to get to the level of "holy freaking crap, that guy is amazing" hacking. Simply knocking around around in perl does not a hacker make. For ever 10 hackers out there that won't put up with the bullshit that military service brings, there are probably one or two who will go that extra mile. Kudos to the air force for figuring that out.
You're right, It's not P2P itself. It's the perception of what P2P is. I say P2P here, and we think of torrents for ISO sharing (at least, for legitimate use). Say P2P anywhere else and people think "Oh yeah, that's that program that lets you get free music and shit."
As far as the latter use is concerned, there's no way that stuff belongs on any work related network, government or otherwise. Ban away. Anything legitimately work related can be obtained by other means. What you do at home is not my concerned, what you do on the PC's I have to manage is. I mean, really, who uses Limewire to D/L ISO's?
Grim Fandango. Just for the thought of being able to roam around in a full 3d environment with Manny would be awesome. Not that was a game that had style.
I make a habit out of checking out the awstats for our domain, and noticed something kinda odd. Bing very quickly became our top referring site. This might just be awstats not treating bing as a search engine (and categorizing hits from them accordingly) or it could be Bing doing something fishy.
Anyone who suggests zipties should be shot, kicked, beaten, stabbed, sodomoized, then forced to install vista over ME on an Acer PC with a cyrix processor.
You can't tell what you're going to do with those cables in a year, or what cable will mysteriously go bad. Velcro straps > pretty much anything else.
No additional planes *beyond those already on order*. Total production will be capped at 187 units, and I doubt there are anywhere near that number already off the line and in service. Seven more were on the table, and that's what got axed.
A bit sad if you ask me. We're generations away from having drones fulfill the air superiority role. On one hand, air superiority today seems to be an idea that's as antiquated as trench strafing or artillery spotting. But on the other hand, the F-22 is so *good* at it (or should be anyway) that I hate to see us limit that skill set in case it does become relevant again.
I can see why something like the F-117 went away. Drones make more sense in that role, now. But I'm not sure limiting the F-22 is the right choice.
Slashdot Mirror
vegan lesbian holistic bomb-making camps
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
actually, by my calculations, "Polish immigrants" + "vegan lesbian holistic bomb-making camps" + "HD Television cameras" == Best episode of Mythbusters EVER
"There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset...."
Let me make this abundantly clear: The above statement is 100% bullshit. My local paper, the Ann Arbor News, also went tits up. Over the last two years, the paper had opened comments sections on the majority of its stories to enable the aforementioned pipe dream. End result? The trolls moved in and feasted like rats in a corn silo, the nut jobs flooded the forums with "facts" on every story from free republic and the knock offs, and the signal to noise ratio plummeted. Now the paper has relaunched as annarbor.com, and the solution to the above has become: censor comments, and allow the newspaper staff to wade right into the thick of the mud. Fantastic.
When I see what has happened to old media sites that get into "Web 2.0" I feel like a WW1 vet being told by a fresh out of west point grad that "trench warfare 2.0 will revolutionize war as we know it!"
I don't really *want* to engage with the community when I go hunting for local "news", I don't *want* to hear from the friend of the victims brother-in-law who got arrested for B&E two blocks from my house. And most of all I don't want the most most useless section of the newspaper (Op-ed) to become the foundation of our "new media." Report, and leave me to use my gray matter to formulate my own opinions. If I'm at the site, the I'm there because I want local news. Period. Well researched, well reported, well digested, local news. It doesn't exist on TV anymore, i don't think it will ever exist on the web.
More whining about the pariah who selflessly velcro'd himself to the cross because his tip calculator got rejected.
"Left unchecked, Pecot says 'it could spread all the way to Michigan.'" ...where its heretofore unchecked growth will be stymied by crushing unemployment, deteriorating highways, crippling corruption in and around Detroit, and the disheartening realization that July is the only month out of the year that has never had a recorded snowfall.
Failing that, we can always deploy Vernors against the weed. Nothing outside of Michigan can handle the pure sweet taste of eleven pounds of ginger crammed into a 20oz bottle. If things get bad we could also turn to Faygo.
I remember years ago debating the value of a login banner. Granted, having a message that says "for authorized use only" won't *deter* anyone, it does make this sort of legal weaseling more of a moot point. Instead of proving that he was intentionally out to cause damage, or that he wasn't just mindlessly poking around, they just would have had to prove he wasn't an authorized user.
By his lawyers defense, having any open port exposed to the internet on any machine absolves the perp of responsibility.
"Your honor, my client was fully within his rights to use a 0-day exploit to gain access to a machine, ignore the login banner, place trojans on all machines within the subnet, order the backup catalog to long erase all backup tapes, drop all tables on all of the database servers, and change the company webserver to goatse. The ssh server was sitting wide open on an unregistered port! Why, the root account had simply been renamed to "dont-ever-use-me-ever-what-ever-no-never", and access required nothing more than a 4096-bit PSK and the knowledge of a 36 character password!"
Remote access to desktops directly connected to the interweb: probably not a good idea. Browsing said desktops when you're not an authorized user: illegal. Even if the plain text password is 12345.
Another Op. ed. from Doctor Who Fucking Cares. I'm amazed he didn't work in a few dozen plugs for his book.
The fact that the device is a linux box at heart was a big reason for my purchase of a DX. It's a reasonably open device that has great hacking potential.
(and yes, I know, "ZOMFG Teh 1984zzzz!!!! Amazon will burn your books!" Please, quit dangling from Stallman's wrinkled sack and get a life.)
81 and partly cloudy just outside my office. That's close enough, right?
Any idiot knows that fixes involving the main deflector array are seldom effective. Truly groundbreaking work *only* occurs when power is rerouted from the primary weapons and, in dire circumstances, life support.
NASA has a contract with Cingularity, not Cingular. Perhaps you've heard their marketing slogan? "All Bars in All Places..."
Recently in historical terms, encryption has became essentially unbreakable [wikipedia.org], and this is the backdoor to it all.
Score -1: Wrong.
*Brute force* decryption has reached a point in *some cases* where it has become pointless. In other cases (say, a four digit pin) where it's still a perfectly acceptable solution.
My half-assed crack pot theory is that genuine decryption has long since followed the same path that password cracking has moved towards. Rainbow tables. Rather than trying to break open one particular key, or dedicating the resources towards generating all possible keys, just do a hybrid dictionary / rainbow tables / brute force attack. Use those terra-exo-giga-uber-flop beasties to generate all possible keys, but work your way down from most probable to least probable. What's the point of quintuple DES 8192-bit Blowfish double ROT-13 with a cherry on top encryption if you're going to use 12345 as your decryption passphrase?
Anything that involves a passphrase is inherently weak. The end user will always be the weak link. Unless you're into burying USB sticks with PSK's in the backyard, thinking that your data is secure just because 'it's encrypted, and xyz encryption is unbreakable!' is a fallacy.
The "You won't make yer money back" argument is dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. To me, a hybrid version of a car is an option, just like any other available option. Only that particular option allows me to trade spending a bit more at time of purchase for spending less money at the gas pump. Does it even out? Probably not. Am I paying a premium for superior technology? Damn right I am.
When was the last time you heard anyone say "you'll never make your money back on that sun roof", or on leather seats?
If you really want to play numbers games, factor in the lessened depreciation in hybrid vehicles when figuring the return on investment. Used hybrids have held their value far better than traditional vehicles have over the past few years.
WTG Slashdot! At first I thought a story that was posted without a link or attribution of source was a mistake. But then I realized it's really just a super-subtle acknowledgment of John Hughes' passing....
"My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Rupert Murdoch pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious."
...Twitter does have a nearly unique architecture that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to block without blocking the entire Internet...
so then.....it's not really down right now, and this "outage" nonsense is all just a fabrication of the liberal media?
One of the more fascinating things coming out of intelligence circles today is how much we are learning from those minute details, and how much of that data we are releasing to the press. Things like being able to tell how old video of Kim Jong Il is by looking at foliage in the background, or what time of day a Bin Laden tape was filmed (notice that those videos are all against a white sheet, or in windowless rooms now). I bet you could even identify a particular camcorder model (or even unit) by the noise it introduces into a tape.
So, what's the difference between me modding my own hardware and then saying "well, done with that fun hack... I'm putting this on eBay so I can get my next toy to see if I can hack it" and this guy hacking the hardware and then selling it? Really, what, specifically is different? Intent?
Ask a homebrewer and a moonshiner what the difference between selling and personal use is. The DMCA is as legit as any alcohol tax laws (and it exists for essentially the same purposes, ensuring profits.)
TFA doesn't give specifics, but he was specifically indicted for modding for the purposes of "financial gain" so I sorta doubt he was just selling what he had lying around the house. TFA also says he was modding 360's, PS3's, and wii's, which sounds much more like cottage industry than knocking around. Granted, that could just as easily be six as it could be six hundred.
At the end of the day, this is just about the money. If he's been making real money at this, the DMCA violations will just be used as precursors to go after his ill-gotten gains.
"Playing pirated games on any device is and should be illegal. Modifying the device in a way that makes it possible to play pirated games should NOT be illegal."
And therein lies the rub. From TFA:
"The Cal State Fullerton student was arrested Monday on federal charges that he illegally modified Xbox, Playstation, Wii and other video game consoles to enable the machines to play pirated video games."
"Specifically, the college student is accused of modifying for personal financial gain technology affecting control or access to a copyrighted work"
'They' aren't trampling your rights to mod the hardware you own. They're trampling this guys (non-existent) right to mod consoles for profit. This isn't some basement hacker getting his door kicked in by the jack booted thugs. He's no different (legally anyway) from guys selling pirated movies.
If this was a legit scam instead of a prank, then there's a saying that applies:
"Only the most foolish mouse hides behind the cat's ear, but only the cleverest cat thinks to look there."
Hackers & discipline... probably not the best combination ever.
Score -1: So wrong it hurts to read.
The best hackers i know of are the ones who *are* disciplined. Go to sourceforge and look at the overwhelming number of half assed, dead projects the clutter up the works. The best open source projects are the ones that have taken years of hard work to reach maturity. That's real discipline.
The linux kernel wasn't written in a nights hacking in Linus' moms basement. It takes years of dedication and hard work to get to the level of "holy freaking crap, that guy is amazing" hacking. Simply knocking around around in perl does not a hacker make. For ever 10 hackers out there that won't put up with the bullshit that military service brings, there are probably one or two who will go that extra mile. Kudos to the air force for figuring that out.
You're right, It's not P2P itself. It's the perception of what P2P is. I say P2P here, and we think of torrents for ISO sharing (at least, for legitimate use). Say P2P anywhere else and people think "Oh yeah, that's that program that lets you get free music and shit."
As far as the latter use is concerned, there's no way that stuff belongs on any work related network, government or otherwise. Ban away. Anything legitimately work related can be obtained by other means. What you do at home is not my concerned, what you do on the PC's I have to manage is. I mean, really, who uses Limewire to D/L ISO's?
Grim Fandango. Just for the thought of being able to roam around in a full 3d environment with Manny would be awesome. Not that was a game that had style.
That makes more sense than anything else.
I make a habit out of checking out the awstats for our domain, and noticed something kinda odd. Bing very quickly became our top referring site. This might just be awstats not treating bing as a search engine (and categorizing hits from them accordingly) or it could be Bing doing something fishy.
Anyone else see something like this?
Anyone who suggests zipties should be shot, kicked, beaten, stabbed, sodomoized, then forced to install vista over ME on an Acer PC with a cyrix processor.
You can't tell what you're going to do with those cables in a year, or what cable will mysteriously go bad. Velcro straps > pretty much anything else.
No additional planes *beyond those already on order*. Total production will be capped at 187 units, and I doubt there are anywhere near that number already off the line and in service. Seven more were on the table, and that's what got axed.
A bit sad if you ask me. We're generations away from having drones fulfill the air superiority role. On one hand, air superiority today seems to be an idea that's as antiquated as trench strafing or artillery spotting. But on the other hand, the F-22 is so *good* at it (or should be anyway) that I hate to see us limit that skill set in case it does become relevant again.
I can see why something like the F-117 went away. Drones make more sense in that role, now. But I'm not sure limiting the F-22 is the right choice.