C'mon, be rational here. The guy annoys a few people and you want to throw him in the slammer next to rapists and murders for 7 years? I say slap him with a big fine and some community service at the very most. Anything else is barbaric and absurd.
Hey, c'mon yourself. I don't think you read the whole story. His actions caused monetary damages to one network, and he spewed porn to many more than a few people. A heinous act, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Let people go and find the porn via legit advertising; who knows how many addressees were kids?
Anyway, spammers need a lesson in humility--they are laughing in our face at our feeble attempts to curb the onslaught of spam. Spam costs me time and money, every day. Without there being any consequences in forging others' domain names (and possibly tarnishing the owner's reputation), hijacking the network resources of others, and spreading rip-offs to millions the world-over, nothing is ever going to change, and our mailboxes will still be deluged.
No, he deserves jail time. I'll admit that seven years is probably too much, but 6 months or a year ought to do nicely.
try a whois on microsoft.com. they've been cracked in more ways than one.
That doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft.
What you are seeing is the result of flawed pattern matching by the WHOIS server, which terrorists.net has taken advantage of (to prove a point or for joke benefit I guess).
Note, although 1 meter = 3' 4", you can't see people because people aren't (well, usually aren't) over 3 feet wide.
Indeed, that's a good point that I missed mentioning in my post. Probably should have said that most people are less than 2 meters tall, though;-) But I'm not much more than 5 feet myself, and so might as well be 1 meter tall!
Sorry to sound like a fool. But what exactly does
1 meter resolution mean?
Hi, no problem. What that means is that objects smaller than 1 meter cannot be seen by the satellite. For example, since most people are around 1 meter tall, they can't be imaged very well at all by this commercial satellite.
The spy satellites in use are much more costly. While in the service I had occassion to see many photos and know their resolutions, I can neither confirm nor deny they are better or worse than this commercial satellite:-) (by their very high price tag you can infer their quality, though). If you read the likes of Clancy, however, he spits out some numbers--I think. Can't recall exactly what the numbers he spit out were.
At the same time, I don't see this as that big of an issue. If somebody can come up with a worst-case scenario of an exploit for this 'feature' that will format my hard-drive, then I'll be concerned.
Well, it's your hide, I guess. We already know that companies are using such private information to track you right now. We know that if you get into enough marketing databases, for example, they can correlate your web browsing and tailor it to specific advertising. All those cookies lying around on various web servers are worth their weight in gold to marketers.
Once we were looking for a new tape drive, and I searched the web for good deals. A couple or three weeks later I started getting snail mail ads for a tape backup company! Coincidence? Perhaps. But it got me thinking very hard.
When you enter information into a web form, your information can be used against you. Your IP address can be logged and correlated with other cookie logs from other web sites. Your home address, even if you don't give them your e-mail address, can be correlated with the database maintained by our friendly Internet neighbour: Netsol. Think about it, all they need is an IP
address that resolves back to somewhere in your domain, your real name, and that's it! Smart marketing weasels are just that: they are smart.
For this reason and many others, we have available for our customers a filtering proxy server running JunkBuster. It's not paranoia, just prudence. If you don't care whether you get spammed or have to pay to dispose of the junk mail (I sure do), that's OK with me, really. Personally, I can't stand the thought of being tracked on my browsing. It would be like having a clerk walking with you in the store and marking down everything you looked at. Ack, annoying!
Until then, I must accept the fact that I use Windows, and must therefore deal with this kind of crap.
Man, I almost cried when I read that! Don't give in and accept it, use something else!:-)
One of the reasons this thing is located in West Virginia is because of the location. It is surrounded by some very large mountains on all sides that shield it from radio interference.
Dude, when was the last time you saw a "very large mountain" anywhere east of the Mississippi?;-)
My only drive through WV took me over some very large hills! (and I do recall one trip through a pretty large tunnel, I think that was in WV). I suppose they are big enough, from what I've read here, to do a good job of shielding radio interference. Just how big are they, I wonder? Guess I can check out a map.
Anyway, I have views of 10,000+ foot mountains outside my window here, and could not resist jabbing at easterners' definition of "mountains.":-) Now, if only we had a Robert Byrd here in Oregon... we could use a little pork here.
But 2600 is itself (as much as Time-Warner, et al., might not like it) a journalistic source. If CNN can write about (and link to) the source, what's fundamentally different about 2600?
Yep, Ixnert, you are right. My post was a knee-jerk without considering all the facts, especially the fact that even linking to it was ruled by a "judge" (heh) to be illegal. How on earth did I forget that?
The link the in question seems to have dissappeared. The fourth link is now to Harvard University, not to a DeCSS mirror.
Man, I compose my own post whilst there are none yet I can see, and after I do, I see this!
In my post I said "people would complain loudly,"
so perhaps we ought to, for all the good it would do.
A bit off the topic of this thread, but something about CNN I noticed recently that is interesting and which I forgot about until just this second, is a broken link to an article about the break-in
that ended up leaking the "Survivor" winner.
I can't even remember finding a broken link at CNN's web site before, so I wonder if Time-Warner/CNN felt some pressure to remove it.
hmmm... but I don't know anything really about that break-in, so I'm not sure if it was real or not (if it was, it seems to me to have been repressed pretty well).
Although I know many will want to debate the point, CNN is the press, after all. I would think that people would complain loudly if CNN lacked the integrity to tell the whole story, and even place a link to the offending site.
I can't recall an instance of CNN lacking journalistic integrity with regard to its parent company, personally. If others have references, please point them out.
I don't know if what I said made any real difference -- certainly, he'd already started to walk away from script-kiddie stuff -- but I think that the search for recognition and respect was a significant factor in his life...
I tried very hard once to convince some script kiddies to put their talent where it would do some good. At the time I was an IRC Operator and had occassion to chat with the kids often. Unfortunately they could think of nothing else except making our lives on IRC as miserable as possible; biting the hand that feeds them, essentially, by performing never-ending DoS attacks on the IRC network. No amount of complaining to ISPs would do much good--they had so many rooted boxes it was impossible to provide any compelling evidence.
One day I heard chat of some of the kids bragging about hacking into NASA. NASA, as many of us know, might as well be considered a honeypot network built solely to test script kiddies' abilities. They compromised a web server at the Goddard Space Flight Center and replaced its web content with yet another Mitnick release demand. (note: no offense intended to administrators at NASA. I suppose they have a huge burden maintaining such a large network of UNIX machines. Dunno).
On the web page they put up were IRC nicknames I recognized. I thought for some time and concluded some of the kids needed a tough lesson, and now was the time for them to learn it while they were still minors. So, I contacted NASA. To make a long story short, I assisted them in gathering enough evidence for them to investigate. Keep in mind that I did all this while connected to IRC as a plain ol' user, never using oper commands. It wasn't tough; the idiots bragged and lambasted NASA in their public IRC channel!
Since the main suspect was a minor, I wasn't told what punishment was eventually handed down, nor his real name, of course. I do know his computer was confiscated for a period of time. He knew it was me that ratted him out, and he asked me why. I really don't think I was successful in convincing him that I didn't have any anymosity toward him personally, but that I merely believed his actions, both personally witnessed by me and many others, and what I knew of his exploits, I found appaling.
So, would he have eventually grown out of it like the script-kiddie mentioned in the post I quoted? Or, would he have continued to hack and hack until finally someone caught him after he turned 18? All I knew was that he was a menace to NASA and to our IRC network, but I truly hope he has squared himself away. I felt a tiny bit sorry for the kid at the time, having never had any desire to rat anybody out, but I don't feel that way any longer.
Oh, God no! Heh, I can't imagine who would play the part of Aaron Meehan (my insignificant role I mentioned in another post in this thread). Or worse, what if I'm not even included in the movie at all! Ack!
The only way it could get better is if somehow parlays it into some nookey (unfortunately, in my experience real women aren't impressed by this kind of thing, at least not from a passing on the genes standpoint).
They'll have to be women from somewhere other than Bend, Oregon, I tell you. I don't think too many have been that impressed so far (except maybe by his BMW Roadster, ow!) Oh, that's all I should say in a forum such as this:-) Now, if he succeeds... we'll just have to see if I should start following him around the bars.;-)
There is no doubt that this guy has far too much time and money on his hands.
As someone who knows the man I can say this is somewhat true. Brian is a very smart, very decent man who has made a good deal of money. Yes, toys! The first time I met him was at a local bar and he was showing off a completely useless laser gadget that he had invented that probably made him mucho dollars. Ahh, useless to me, anyway.
Much later, while enjoying a good local beer after work one day, Brian told me about his rocket plan, and that he wanted a domain name -- rocketguy.com. I honestly thought he was crazy, but knew if anyone could do it, it would be Brian. I do remember thinking that he probably needed a girlfriend...
For reasons unknown to me he transferred his web site elsewhere. Too bad -- I would have liked to see if our web server could survive a slashdotting.:-)
Quite a few people are gaining karma making smartass comments about Brian and his plan. I understand why people are tempted to do that, but I would ask a favor: think at least one good thought about the man, whether you feel him brave or stupid (or both:-), because he is a good man who deserves our best wishes. (I almost shudder to think what other peoples' good thoughts might be..;-)
As a system administrator for a local ISP, spam is a big time waster for us.
I don't care if it's illegal right now. What I do care about is that it's my job to make sure our customers can get their email in a timely fashion, that they can get their email without being worried about their children getting junk from the latest kiddie porn spammer. When our customers call and wonder why they are getting this junk in their mailbox, they want to know what we're going to do about it.
Well, we maintain mail filtering for those who want to use it, but I have to spend a significant amount of man-hours maintaining the filters and other tasks associated with keeping the mail system in shape.
In short, spam is a money-waster for ISPs. I could be spending more time doing the myriad of other tasks that need to be done to keep our customers happy. Spammers are cost-shifting their advertising onto us; every byte they are using on our internet connection and our mail server is costing us money. Our SMTP banner says "NO UCE." If we say we don't want it, it should be illegal.
I don't think we'll start mining during our lifetimes. As soon as our government (and others) stop wasting money on killing ourselves (war, nukes, maintaining nukes, etc), THEN I think we'll start to see some real progress in space exploration. Unfortunately, I am pessimistic about this happening anytime soon. One thing is for sure: we don't get there with the NASA's meager share of our national budget.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, c'mon yourself. I don't think you read the whole story. His actions caused monetary damages to one network, and he spewed porn to many more than a few people. A heinous act, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Let people go and find the porn via legit advertising; who knows how many addressees were kids?
Anyway, spammers need a lesson in humility--they are laughing in our face at our feeble attempts to curb the onslaught of spam. Spam costs me time and money, every day. Without there being any consequences in forging others' domain names (and possibly tarnishing the owner's reputation), hijacking the network resources of others, and spreading rip-offs to millions the world-over, nothing is ever going to change, and our mailboxes will still be deluged.
No, he deserves jail time. I'll admit that seven years is probably too much, but 6 months or a year ought to do nicely.
That doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft. What you are seeing is the result of flawed pattern matching by the WHOIS server, which terrorists.net has taken advantage of (to prove a point or for joke benefit I guess).
Indeed, that's a good point that I missed mentioning in my post. Probably should have said that most people are less than 2 meters tall, though ;-) But I'm not much more than 5 feet myself, and so might as well be 1 meter tall!
regards,
Hi, no problem. What that means is that objects smaller than 1 meter cannot be seen by the satellite. For example, since most people are around 1 meter tall, they can't be imaged very well at all by this commercial satellite.
The spy satellites in use are much more costly. While in the service I had occassion to see many photos and know their resolutions, I can neither confirm nor deny they are better or worse than this commercial satellite :-) (by their very high price tag you can infer their quality, though). If you read the likes of Clancy, however, he spits out some numbers--I think. Can't recall exactly what the numbers he spit out were.
Well, it's your hide, I guess. We already know that companies are using such private information to track you right now. We know that if you get into enough marketing databases, for example, they can correlate your web browsing and tailor it to specific advertising. All those cookies lying around on various web servers are worth their weight in gold to marketers.
Once we were looking for a new tape drive, and I searched the web for good deals. A couple or three weeks later I started getting snail mail ads for a tape backup company! Coincidence? Perhaps. But it got me thinking very hard.
When you enter information into a web form, your information can be used against you. Your IP address can be logged and correlated with other cookie logs from other web sites. Your home address, even if you don't give them your e-mail address, can be correlated with the database maintained by our friendly Internet neighbour: Netsol. Think about it, all they need is an IP address that resolves back to somewhere in your domain, your real name, and that's it! Smart marketing weasels are just that: they are smart.
For this reason and many others, we have available for our customers a filtering proxy server running JunkBuster. It's not paranoia, just prudence. If you don't care whether you get spammed or have to pay to dispose of the junk mail (I sure do), that's OK with me, really. Personally, I can't stand the thought of being tracked on my browsing. It would be like having a clerk walking with you in the store and marking down everything you looked at. Ack, annoying!
Until then, I must accept the fact that I use Windows, and must therefore deal with this kind of crap.
Man, I almost cried when I read that! Don't give in and accept it, use something else! :-)
Good luck,
Dude, when was the last time you saw a "very large mountain" anywhere east of the Mississippi? ;-)
My only drive through WV took me over some very large hills! (and I do recall one trip through a pretty large tunnel, I think that was in WV). I suppose they are big enough, from what I've read here, to do a good job of shielding radio interference. Just how big are they, I wonder? Guess I can check out a map.
Anyway, I have views of 10,000+ foot mountains outside my window here, and could not resist jabbing at easterners' definition of "mountains." :-) Now, if only we had a Robert Byrd here in Oregon... we could use a little pork here.
Yep, Ixnert, you are right. My post was a knee-jerk without considering all the facts, especially the fact that even linking to it was ruled by a "judge" (heh) to be illegal. How on earth did I forget that?
Anyway, thanks.
Man, I compose my own post whilst there are none yet I can see, and after I do, I see this!
In my post I said "people would complain loudly," so perhaps we ought to, for all the good it would do.
A bit off the topic of this thread, but something about CNN I noticed recently that is interesting and which I forgot about until just this second, is a broken link to an article about the break-in that ended up leaking the "Survivor" winner.
From here you can follow a link named Web site flub said to leak 'Survivor' winner that is broken.
I can't even remember finding a broken link at CNN's web site before, so I wonder if Time-Warner/CNN felt some pressure to remove it. hmmm... but I don't know anything really about that break-in, so I'm not sure if it was real or not (if it was, it seems to me to have been repressed pretty well).
I can't recall an instance of CNN lacking journalistic integrity with regard to its parent company, personally. If others have references, please point them out.
I tried very hard once to convince some script kiddies to put their talent where it would do some good. At the time I was an IRC Operator and had occassion to chat with the kids often. Unfortunately they could think of nothing else except making our lives on IRC as miserable as possible; biting the hand that feeds them, essentially, by performing never-ending DoS attacks on the IRC network. No amount of complaining to ISPs would do much good--they had so many rooted boxes it was impossible to provide any compelling evidence.
One day I heard chat of some of the kids bragging about hacking into NASA. NASA, as many of us know, might as well be considered a honeypot network built solely to test script kiddies' abilities. They compromised a web server at the Goddard Space Flight Center and replaced its web content with yet another Mitnick release demand. (note: no offense intended to administrators at NASA. I suppose they have a huge burden maintaining such a large network of UNIX machines. Dunno).
On the web page they put up were IRC nicknames I recognized. I thought for some time and concluded some of the kids needed a tough lesson, and now was the time for them to learn it while they were still minors. So, I contacted NASA. To make a long story short, I assisted them in gathering enough evidence for them to investigate. Keep in mind that I did all this while connected to IRC as a plain ol' user, never using oper commands. It wasn't tough; the idiots bragged and lambasted NASA in their public IRC channel!
Since the main suspect was a minor, I wasn't told what punishment was eventually handed down, nor his real name, of course. I do know his computer was confiscated for a period of time. He knew it was me that ratted him out, and he asked me why. I really don't think I was successful in convincing him that I didn't have any anymosity toward him personally, but that I merely believed his actions, both personally witnessed by me and many others, and what I knew of his exploits, I found appaling.
So, would he have eventually grown out of it like the script-kiddie mentioned in the post I quoted? Or, would he have continued to hack and hack until finally someone caught him after he turned 18? All I knew was that he was a menace to NASA and to our IRC network, but I truly hope he has squared himself away. I felt a tiny bit sorry for the kid at the time, having never had any desire to rat anybody out, but I don't feel that way any longer.
I wonder if that kid reads /. Heh.. probably!
Oh, God no! Heh, I can't imagine who would play the part of Aaron Meehan (my insignificant role I mentioned in another post in this thread). Or worse, what if I'm not even included in the movie at all! Ack!
The only way it could get better is if somehow parlays it into some nookey (unfortunately, in my experience real women aren't impressed by this kind of thing, at least not from a passing on the genes standpoint).
They'll have to be women from somewhere other than Bend, Oregon, I tell you. I don't think too many have been that impressed so far (except maybe by his BMW Roadster, ow!) Oh, that's all I should say in a forum such as this :-) Now, if he succeeds... we'll just have to see if I should start following him around the bars. ;-)
As someone who knows the man I can say this is somewhat true. Brian is a very smart, very decent man who has made a good deal of money. Yes, toys! The first time I met him was at a local bar and he was showing off a completely useless laser gadget that he had invented that probably made him mucho dollars. Ahh, useless to me, anyway.
Much later, while enjoying a good local beer after work one day, Brian told me about his rocket plan, and that he wanted a domain name -- rocketguy.com. I honestly thought he was crazy, but knew if anyone could do it, it would be Brian. I do remember thinking that he probably needed a girlfriend...
For reasons unknown to me he transferred his web site elsewhere. Too bad -- I would have liked to see if our web server could survive a slashdotting. :-)
Quite a few people are gaining karma making smartass comments about Brian and his plan. I understand why people are tempted to do that, but I would ask a favor: think at least one good thought about the man, whether you feel him brave or stupid (or both :-), because he is a good man who deserves our best wishes. (I almost shudder to think what other peoples' good thoughts might be.. ;-)
As a system administrator for a local ISP, spam is a big time waster for us.
I don't care if it's illegal right now. What I do care about is that it's my job to make sure our customers can get their email in a timely fashion, that they can get their email without being worried about their children getting junk from the latest kiddie porn spammer. When our customers call and wonder why they are getting this junk in their mailbox, they want to know what we're going to do about it.
Well, we maintain mail filtering for those who want to use it, but I have to spend a significant amount of man-hours maintaining the filters and other tasks associated with keeping the mail system in shape.
In short, spam is a money-waster for ISPs. I could be spending more time doing the myriad of other tasks that need to be done to keep our customers happy. Spammers are cost-shifting their advertising onto us; every byte they are using on our internet connection and our mail server is costing us money. Our SMTP banner says "NO UCE." If we say we don't want it, it should be illegal.
I don't think we'll start mining during our lifetimes. As soon as our government (and others) stop wasting money on killing ourselves (war, nukes, maintaining nukes, etc), THEN I think we'll start to see some real progress in space exploration. Unfortunately, I am pessimistic about this happening anytime soon. One thing is for sure: we don't get there with the NASA's meager share of our national budget.