No kidding! I just went there after visiting Broken Saints, to remind myself of a really good flash story, and was surprised at the hits they're showing on the front page. 57 million hits and counting?!? And all without ad support!
Broken Saints looks like it goes in a bit for the cheap scare in the opening flash, and the "classic" trailer doesn't inspire much more confidence, either. At least Ninjai is funny sometimes, as well as sad. I thought the "little bird" was a bit too Disney, but still worth a few (at $13? sure) t-shirts. And Ninjai never tried to create artificial interest in itself by calling itself a 'publishing event' - like labelling comics as collector's editions, you know - or by announcing itself to Slashdot.
Not everybody purchases Microsoft operating systems at the beginning of their life cycle, and for them, the per-annum cost of a license is pretty high indeed.
If that's the case, then they won't be buying the next operating system that comes out, for a while anyway, will they? So you point is moot.
OK, i haven't read the linked article and I don't really understand all of what's talked about on/., but the actual/. posting said the vuln. was also to be found in the 2k and XP versions of windows.
Bad sysadmin! Making unsupported assumptions without checking!:)
Yes, the vulnerability affects those OSes, but they have patches for that. Now, one thing that hasn't been said yet is whether Linux and BSD are protected from the malformed-packet issue by default, either. A better sysadmin than I would check his operating system for the same vulnerability that is reported in others' OSes. I'm going to settle for asking on/. and waiting for more press releases, because I keep my firewall strict.
They're not saying (publicly, anyway), "hah, we're not supporting this ancient operating system any more, go away."
The article quotes them saying they can't fix it, there's too much stuff to do.
Using your firewall to block port 135 is fine, unless you actually need RPC for something useful. In that case, I'd say that a firewall that discards all malformed packets (more complicated) is in order. Or an upgrade to Win2K. After all, it's been out for, what, 4 years now?
I've got a replacement P280 from T-Mobile, that is showing some of the same firmware issues as the first one. It hasn't started garbling screens or dialed numbers, yet, like the first one, but it already screws up appointments set in its calendar more than a month in advance. For example, I set some July birthdays into the calendar a couple of weeks ago, and last weekend they went off.
(I know it's not the SIM card, because I got a replacement from a local store before the phone got replaced)
Again, this is the second P280 I've had that has had this problem. Oh, and the first P280 had extremely slow menus, but I just put up with it. This one is much faster (possibly because the new SIM card was a different model, because I was assured by Voicestream and T-Mobile people that they never upgrade the firmware on the phones they sell), but without the calendar being useful, it can't compete with the Samsung I could have bought at the time for less. Now, of course, they're even more of a non-player.
Not to mention that I only "upgraded" to my P280 because my Motorola P7389's speaker died just after Voicestream's (before it turned into T-Mobile) replacement ran out, while I was on a trip. After buying the new phone (I needed the phone for work), I bought a full set of Torx and took the phone apart, re-bent the flat speaker spring-type leads, and it started working again. How those leads could have bent away remains a mystery, but I chalk it down to poor case design since it must have flexed repeatedly.
So, anyway, since I can't get T-Mobile to credit me with the price of the phone so I can get a different brand and model, I've decided that I'll keep calling them for a replacement every time my current phone barfs up another appointment.
(And don't get me started on how crappy T-Mobile is. They can't even keep their billing up-to-the-month on their website. Last month, my November bill was still the latest it showed.
And when I first called support about the phone, they made me drive across town to a store to get the SIM card, instead of sending me one. The guy there said the call center should have sent me one, gave me one, and then told me to go home and call the service number again to get the phone replaced. When I got home, support told me that the store should have processed the replacement, but at least they voluntarily offered to credit me for the $15 UPS fee if I wanted UPS instead of the free postal delivery. On the call I made earlier this week to replace this replacement phone, they refused to do that again, so I opted for the free postal delivery this time. Not a big deal - they will probably be sending me a lot of boxes anyway until my contract (and phone warranty) run out in July.
Well, it's a month later, two months after I sent my broken ReplayTV 5040 unit into Sonicblue, and I still haven't received a new or repaired unit. At this point, I doubt I ever will. Oh well, that was $320 wasted.:(
Hopefully you used a full-service credit card. You should be able to get the charges reversed on at least the two months you were fraudulently charged, and possibly get something back on purchase protection, since the company sold you a defective product and went defunct before replacing it.
It would be a shame not allow the Open Source developer community complete access to Replay.
Even if they don't, as long as their schedule subscription service stays around, it's still a good box for hackers to play with - the 4xxxx and 5xxxx series talk to each other with a kind of XML to send programs back and forth, and they have NICs on board, so as you can imagine, it's not impossible to write software for your computer that emulates the request functions of another ReplayTV and sends the program direct to your hard drive in a nice MPEG format.
I was looking into getting one, and if there's confirmation that the service will continue for at least 3 years, I'll probably buy one with a lifetime subscription (which apparently allows manual recording) based on this... just think - a PVR that you don't have to upgrade the drive for internally, because you can download everything from it (and back to it), and no hacking shell necessary.
Isn't it a common geek mantra that the maker of a device isn't bad, the device isn't bad, it's just the way it is used that is bad?
They're trading DivX:-)s and MP3s of media for which they have no intention of paying the makers, and thinking it's a good thing. Yah, I know some people buy some CDs or movies after watching them, but if you want a trial run for a movie you should rent it or go see it in the theater, etc. And what about those MP3s people keep around for months and years, pass to other people, burn to CD and listen to in the car? Are they still deciding if they like them?
Did you work at Rogue Wave Software, or in the Corvallis area by any chance? I had a friend working in the Rogue Wave offices there, and he told me about a coworker (or was it a friend of a coworker?) that owned bazookas and such, and would spend his free time blowing stuff up on his farm. Maybe it's not so suprising that there was an Al-Qaida cell found to be running a training camp in that state... :/
Nope, I didn't. But it doesn't surprise me that there's lots of weird goings-on out there. If you look at a map of Oregon, a lot of it isn't just rural, there's just plain no roads, etc. And the tiny ex-logging towns you see may have just 50-1000 people in them. So a lot can be hidden away.
I loved the place. It's very beautiful, and the people in major population clusters are friendly. But remember those news stories about parents who killed their kids and went to beaches and parks and dumped their bodies? There's tons of places where nobody is around.
Don't forget the fact that the suicide rate is among the highest in the country, there. So other psychiatric/sociopathic/psychotic disorders are probably relatively high, also. Don't forget the large proportion of homeless people that live on the west coast, either, when considering mental illness.
Remember those two suburban girls that a neighbor killed, etc.? Even with people around, somehow they didn't hear anything. Twice. Don't forget that great police work after the fact, or the work of Child Protective Services in responding to one victim's accusations against the killer beforehand.
Okay, I was using that page as an example listing of gun-suppliers. If the example I chose was inaccurate, apologies. However, I remain convinced that it's possible to purchase military-grade firearms in the US, which puts into perspective the poster's concerns over offering encryption capabilities to the public.
Yes, I agree with you that military-grade weaponry is a bad thing in the hands of the average consumer. In fact, when I was in Oregon, a guy at work told the rest of us about some guy he knew who was buying up tanks and stuff from army surplus sales, fixing them (apparently a lot of that stuff is not nearly as irreversibly decommissioned as they claim) and driving them around/firing them or whatever out on his huge ranch somewhere in the vast ruralness of the state. People like that scare me a lot.
On the other hand, the bad guys have that grade of equipment (generally not tanks, but the rest of it), and so do the police (and if they don't, they're outclassed by the bad guys). Having a population out-armed by the police and bad guys means they're unable to defend themselves against either.
If the bad guys have machine guns, I want the same. Yes, with all the machine guns around, some crazy guy will eventually go off on the populace, but since I don't think I'm the crazy one, that makes the other guys more likely to be crazy, and that's all the more reason. Yee-haw.
Yah. Crucial was my main memory supplier for a while, and now that I've learned my lesson with Fry's, I'll go back to them.
I just won't take their word for how many sticks can fit in my motherboards, because they've been wrong twice for not counting the banks on the sticks they suggested.
I've tried Mushkin, but only because they were the best named sticks Fry's had when I was there, and the only 2-3-3 PC266s in stock. Mushkin's cool, but historically way overpriced. I wouldn't even have recognized the name except for the advertising on Anandtech.
There is a very simple way to avoid dealing the morons who work at Fry's - buy retail pack items. Then, if something goes wrong, you deal with a company that has a reputation and would like to keep it. And price the disparity between OEM and retail is a lot less than what it once was.
Well, when I got the replacement memory, I paid the upsell price for overly-marked-up Mushkin, which seems to have worked out fine. But as far as the memory goes, the original faulty sticks were no-name but had a lifetime or one-year or whatever guarantee, not the 90-day. They were just being jerks wanting to test it.
My first mistake in all this was thinking that their "package deal" was really all that much better than what I could have done through the Internet, and for wanting my new system parts right away instead of in a couple days.
Really, when I lived in Oregon, if I'd have had a good selection of vendors locally, I wouldn't have been at Fry's, anyway. Also, Oregon has no consumer sales tax for regular goods, so Internet price + shipping was often close enough that I stopped bothering with Pricewatch and IBuyer for most things. But Fry's, unfortunately, had the widest selection that I knew of.
Seriously, I've had some of their OEM memory as part of a package deal, and it was very nasty stuff.
What's worse, before they would take it back, they wanted to "test" it, testing being limited to a couple runs of PC-Doctor, which is totally lightweight.
To make a long story short, they refused to take it back the first time, later it blew up my motherboard. They replaced the motherboard (it was part of the package) and sent me home, where I discovered my Athlon XP was also damaged. I took it up there, and they wanted to run PC-Doctor on it, but the "technician" (hah!) cracked the CPU while putting it in a "test board," so "oops, I guess we're replacing that."
P.S. One of the guys at the return desk who I got to know quite well told me, when I asked him why the "test boards" they were using always changed, that he thought they were boards that belonged to customers. Whether that meant boards in for repairs, or returned boards, I don't know or care - either is bad news.
P.P.S. This was at the Fry's in Wilsonville, Oregon. There is also an idiotic troll in the service department there who, after ignoring me waiting at an empty counter for 10 minutes while he chatted on the phone, wanted to charge me for a "missing" monitor stand on a monitor I was returning, refusing for 15 minutes to look in the bottom of the box under the styrofoam because monitor stands always come attached to the monitors, didn't you know? He finally looked when I demanded to talk to the manager, and of course it was there. I had a long discussion with the manager anyway over his, and their, incompetence (I reminded him of the memory fiasco) but the troll was still lurking there the last time I dropped by for consumables, which is all I will ever buy from Fry's, now. You can't miss him - he looks like he'd feel more at home in a raincoat, instead of his cheesy lab coat, roaming a playground on a sunny day.
Come on people, this argument makes no sense at all. By that logic, we should ban all technology, since even a big wheel can be used to kill somebody! Heck, I could use the cup of tea I have here and use it as a weapon by breaking it against somebody's head.
Did you know that you can kill someone with a newspaper? (And no, I don't mean whacking them over the head with it, or death by papercuts!)
Yup. In fact, it's one of the many personal defense tactics you can and probably should learn: If you see someone threatening coming toward you as you're sitting in the park reading your newspaper (or magazine, or something similar) you can quietly roll your reading implement along the short axis so that it makes a long cone. Then, when you are attacked, you can surprise them by shoving the cone up into a vulnerable spot, like an eye, or even better, into the throat, (which may kill the attacker if it destroys the windpipe, etc., but certainly puts him or her into a world of pain, regardless) and then while the attacker is flailing about, you can run away. Yes, run. Because you don't know for sure that the attacker is disabled enough not to hurt you if you stick around, or may be working with others.
Oh, the nice part is: if you're in a country that may not take kindly to your self-defense, or if you think the police might be after you already, you can let the newspaper unroll as you run away, and then drop it in a nearby trashcan or body of water, and there's no evidence trail. Unless you broke the skin of the attacker, the implement of defense will now just be slightly crumpled on one side, possibly with skin flakes from the attacker, but it's highly unlikely that anyone would recognize it as the implement unless the attack and defense were witnessed, anyway.
I'm not saying carry a newspaper if you think you will be attacked; obviously, if you ave time to prepare, arm yourself properly if at all possible. However, this is an excellent example at how articles (pun intended) commonly at hand can be easily used in your defense.
Moral: The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it takes a thoughtful reader to really get his point across.
has it been abandoned/is it no longer actively being worked on? If I'm looking in the right place, the last alpha release has a 2001 file date, and the README says explicitly not to trust the code.
Has it undergone any sort of peer review? I can't read code well enough to tell if any source distribution is concealing a trojan, and even if I could, I don't know anything about encryption, and couldn't guess whether an encryption program actually works.
For the purposes of argument, you have to assume that the world's best hardware is enslaved to the people who want to kill human rights activists; it really needs rigorous testing if the source code has been available to the bad guys for about 2 years.
Then again, maybe the activist groups have their own great coders and have secretly forked the source for continuing development, and are relying on obscurity as well as advancement to protect them against the bad guys.
You may want to lecture them then. DV (which uses the same codecs and technology as MiniDV, just a different physical form factor) is the standard for news footage, documentary work, and indie work.
MiniDV is a lot different, and it's got to do with the quality of the tape used, which is exactly the part of the system we'd be using for data storage.
Try looking here for a precis by a company that maintains/repairs hardware for both types of systems, or here if you want a manufacturer's perspective.
They're not the same. One has much better performance and stability. It's not the consumer grade.
Professionals in the video industry expect this stuff to remain perfect for the next 10 years at a minimum
Professionals in the industry generally know better than to use MiniDV for broadcast-quality recording. Also, the people who made CD-Rs in the beginning claimed a 20+ year shelf life, and nobody should believe them. Nobody seriously claims a data life for a consumer quality videotape, because they're not sold or tested for data-grade applications, but for videotaping, and consumer videotape has a really high "acceptable" loss rate.
All of that is true, and is why the sky won't fall anytime soon. However, it does strike me as 'fixing' the lack of a deadbolt for your door by hiring a guard rather than installing the deadbolt. In the IBM example, if the broadcasts from the small ISP had IBM's signature on them, you wouldn't need to do anything special at all to handle the change as long as you could obtain IBM's public key from an authoritative source.
Properly implemented, routing object servers already provide this level of security. The downstream user has to modify the routing object, using his password/pgpkey/whatever, and he/she has to use his/her AS number when making the announcement. The AS is only accepted through his/her interface(s) (and those of other transit providers if he/she is multi-homed). The routing filters are built automatically incorporating the routing object server information, on a regular basis.
Everything stays smooth and secure, at least for the ISP side, because a compromise in the system almost certainly involves a broken password/pgpkey/whatever on the downstream side. The only real problem with this method, of course, is when customers get "consultants" who know nothing about routing objects, or BGP itself, or the customer's admin runs off with the password. The ISP can rewrite the password code for the object, or simply wipe the object and letthe customer start from scratch, but it can't do much about clueless consultants, because it's not selling a BGP training program:)
Why don't you have some kind of terminal server hooked up to provide the necessary out-of-band access so the lack of truster personnel on site isn't an issue? A modem? Secondary IP connectivity?
This is already covered in answers to other responses. Essentially, though, that's one good answer, and so is having the telco loop the circuit or otherwise disable it so it stops flapping and you can get to it through another line.
The example in reality that I'm thinking of involved an ISP that was bought out, and some of their backbone had yet to be suborned into the buyer's structure fully. Nobody left knew their term server dialin info, or if they even had one.:) You can imagine the excitement when it was discovered that nobody had a valid CID, either.
You dial in to the modem attached to the AUX port.
I didn't say the line stayed up long enough (remember, there are multiple lines, it's an aggregate), I said the router doesn't stay up enough. As in, would you even finish handshaking? Doubtful. But you could dial into a term server connected to it, then try to interrupt the loading process, reconfigure that flapping interface to be admin down, and so forth. Another good answer (as another reader mentioned) is to call the telco and have them shove the line down, like forcing a loop or something.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding! I just went there after visiting Broken Saints, to remind myself of a really good flash story, and was surprised at the hits they're showing on the front page. 57 million hits and counting?!? And all without ad support!
Broken Saints looks like it goes in a bit for the cheap scare in the opening flash, and the "classic" trailer doesn't inspire much more confidence, either. At least Ninjai is funny sometimes, as well as sad. I thought the "little bird" was a bit too Disney, but still worth a few (at $13? sure) t-shirts. And Ninjai never tried to create artificial interest in itself by calling itself a 'publishing event' - like labelling comics as collector's editions, you know - or by announcing itself to Slashdot.
I'm unemployed, you insensitive clod!
No, really. I'd install it all day on lots computers. Later, if they paid me enough, I might even support the IDE for it.
If that's the case, then they won't be buying the next operating system that comes out, for a while anyway, will they? So you point is moot.
Bad sysadmin! Making unsupported assumptions without checking!
Yes, the vulnerability affects those OSes, but they have patches for that. Now, one thing that hasn't been said yet is whether Linux and BSD are protected from the malformed-packet issue by default, either. A better sysadmin than I would check his operating system for the same vulnerability that is reported in others' OSes. I'm going to settle for asking on
The page you were reading only mentions that NT 4.0 Workstation will go non-supported this summer (and EOL next year).
Check here for NT 4.0 Server, support for which ends later.
They're not saying (publicly, anyway), "hah, we're not supporting this ancient operating system any more, go away."
The article quotes them saying they can't fix it, there's too much stuff to do.
Using your firewall to block port 135 is fine, unless you actually need RPC for something useful. In that case, I'd say that a firewall that discards all malformed packets (more complicated) is in order. Or an upgrade to Win2K. After all, it's been out for, what, 4 years now?
This song!
(just kidding)
I've got a replacement P280 from T-Mobile, that is showing some of the same firmware issues as the first one. It hasn't started garbling screens or dialed numbers, yet, like the first one, but it already screws up appointments set in its calendar more than a month in advance. For example, I set some July birthdays into the calendar a couple of weeks ago, and last weekend they went off.
(I know it's not the SIM card, because I got a replacement from a local store before the phone got replaced)
Again, this is the second P280 I've had that has had this problem. Oh, and the first P280 had extremely slow menus, but I just put up with it. This one is much faster (possibly because the new SIM card was a different model, because I was assured by Voicestream and T-Mobile people that they never upgrade the firmware on the phones they sell), but without the calendar being useful, it can't compete with the Samsung I could have bought at the time for less. Now, of course, they're even more of a non-player.
Not to mention that I only "upgraded" to my P280 because my Motorola P7389's speaker died just after Voicestream's (before it turned into T-Mobile) replacement ran out, while I was on a trip. After buying the new phone (I needed the phone for work), I bought a full set of Torx and took the phone apart, re-bent the flat speaker spring-type leads, and it started working again. How those leads could have bent away remains a mystery, but I chalk it down to poor case design since it must have flexed repeatedly.
So, anyway, since I can't get T-Mobile to credit me with the price of the phone so I can get a different brand and model, I've decided that I'll keep calling them for a replacement every time my current phone barfs up another appointment.
(And don't get me started on how crappy T-Mobile is. They can't even keep their billing up-to-the-month on their website. Last month, my November bill was still the latest it showed.
And when I first called support about the phone, they made me drive across town to a store to get the SIM card, instead of sending me one. The guy there said the call center should have sent me one, gave me one, and then told me to go home and call the service number again to get the phone replaced. When I got home, support told me that the store should have processed the replacement, but at least they voluntarily offered to credit me for the $15 UPS fee if I wanted UPS instead of the free postal delivery. On the call I made earlier this week to replace this replacement phone, they refused to do that again, so I opted for the free postal delivery this time. Not a big deal - they will probably be sending me a lot of boxes anyway until my contract (and phone warranty) run out in July.
Hopefully you used a full-service credit card. You should be able to get the charges reversed on at least the two months you were fraudulently charged, and possibly get something back on purchase protection, since the company sold you a defective product and went defunct before replacing it.
Even if they don't, as long as their schedule subscription service stays around, it's still a good box for hackers to play with - the 4xxxx and 5xxxx series talk to each other with a kind of XML to send programs back and forth, and they have NICs on board, so as you can imagine, it's not impossible to write software for your computer that emulates the request functions of another ReplayTV and sends the program direct to your hard drive in a nice MPEG format.
I was looking into getting one, and if there's confirmation that the service will continue for at least 3 years, I'll probably buy one with a lifetime subscription (which apparently allows manual recording) based on this... just think - a PVR that you don't have to upgrade the drive for internally, because you can download everything from it (and back to it), and no hacking shell necessary.
They're trading DivX:-)s and MP3s of media for which they have no intention of paying the makers, and thinking it's a good thing. Yah, I know some people buy some CDs or movies after watching them, but if you want a trial run for a movie you should rent it or go see it in the theater, etc. And what about those MP3s people keep around for months and years, pass to other people, burn to CD and listen to in the car? Are they still deciding if they like them?
Nope, I didn't. But it doesn't surprise me that there's lots of weird goings-on out there. If you look at a map of Oregon, a lot of it isn't just rural, there's just plain no roads, etc. And the tiny ex-logging towns you see may have just 50-1000 people in them. So a lot can be hidden away.
I loved the place. It's very beautiful, and the people in major population clusters are friendly. But remember those news stories about parents who killed their kids and went to beaches and parks and dumped their bodies? There's tons of places where nobody is around.
Don't forget the fact that the suicide rate is among the highest in the country, there. So other psychiatric/sociopathic/psychotic disorders are probably relatively high, also. Don't forget the large proportion of homeless people that live on the west coast, either, when considering mental illness.
Remember those two suburban girls that a neighbor killed, etc.? Even with people around, somehow they didn't hear anything. Twice. Don't forget that great police work after the fact, or the work of Child Protective Services in responding to one victim's accusations against the killer beforehand.
Yes, I agree with you that military-grade weaponry is a bad thing in the hands of the average consumer. In fact, when I was in Oregon, a guy at work told the rest of us about some guy he knew who was buying up tanks and stuff from army surplus sales, fixing them (apparently a lot of that stuff is not nearly as irreversibly decommissioned as they claim) and driving them around/firing them or whatever out on his huge ranch somewhere in the vast ruralness of the state. People like that scare me a lot.
On the other hand, the bad guys have that grade of equipment (generally not tanks, but the rest of it), and so do the police (and if they don't, they're outclassed by the bad guys). Having a population out-armed by the police and bad guys means they're unable to defend themselves against either.
If the bad guys have machine guns, I want the same. Yes, with all the machine guns around, some crazy guy will eventually go off on the populace, but since I don't think I'm the crazy one, that makes the other guys more likely to be crazy, and that's all the more reason. Yee-haw.
Yah. Crucial was my main memory supplier for a while, and now that I've learned my lesson with Fry's, I'll go back to them.
I just won't take their word for how many sticks can fit in my motherboards, because they've been wrong twice for not counting the banks on the sticks they suggested.
I've tried Mushkin, but only because they were the best named sticks Fry's had when I was there, and the only 2-3-3 PC266s in stock. Mushkin's cool, but historically way overpriced. I wouldn't even have recognized the name except for the advertising on Anandtech.
Ooh, look at the Anonymous Coward trying to lecture me over this.
What are you, an object lesson?
Well, when I got the replacement memory, I paid the upsell price for overly-marked-up Mushkin, which seems to have worked out fine. But as far as the memory goes, the original faulty sticks were no-name but had a lifetime or one-year or whatever guarantee, not the 90-day. They were just being jerks wanting to test it.
My first mistake in all this was thinking that their "package deal" was really all that much better than what I could have done through the Internet, and for wanting my new system parts right away instead of in a couple days.
Really, when I lived in Oregon, if I'd have had a good selection of vendors locally, I wouldn't have been at Fry's, anyway. Also, Oregon has no consumer sales tax for regular goods, so Internet price + shipping was often close enough that I stopped bothering with Pricewatch and IBuyer for most things. But Fry's, unfortunately, had the widest selection that I knew of.
Seriously, I've had some of their OEM memory as part of a package deal, and it was very nasty stuff.
What's worse, before they would take it back, they wanted to "test" it, testing being limited to a couple runs of PC-Doctor, which is totally lightweight.
To make a long story short, they refused to take it back the first time, later it blew up my motherboard. They replaced the motherboard (it was part of the package) and sent me home, where I discovered my Athlon XP was also damaged. I took it up there, and they wanted to run PC-Doctor on it, but the "technician" (hah!) cracked the CPU while putting it in a "test board," so "oops, I guess we're replacing that."
P.S. One of the guys at the return desk who I got to know quite well told me, when I asked him why the "test boards" they were using always changed, that he thought they were boards that belonged to customers. Whether that meant boards in for repairs, or returned boards, I don't know or care - either is bad news.
P.P.S. This was at the Fry's in Wilsonville, Oregon. There is also an idiotic troll in the service department there who, after ignoring me waiting at an empty counter for 10 minutes while he chatted on the phone, wanted to charge me for a "missing" monitor stand on a monitor I was returning, refusing for 15 minutes to look in the bottom of the box under the styrofoam because monitor stands always come attached to the monitors, didn't you know? He finally looked when I demanded to talk to the manager, and of course it was there. I had a long discussion with the manager anyway over his, and their, incompetence (I reminded him of the memory fiasco) but the troll was still lurking there the last time I dropped by for consumables, which is all I will ever buy from Fry's, now. You can't miss him - he looks like he'd feel more at home in a raincoat, instead of his cheesy lab coat, roaming a playground on a sunny day.
Did you know that you can kill someone with a newspaper? (And no, I don't mean whacking them over the head with it, or death by papercuts!)
Yup. In fact, it's one of the many personal defense tactics you can and probably should learn: If you see someone threatening coming toward you as you're sitting in the park reading your newspaper (or magazine, or something similar) you can quietly roll your reading implement along the short axis so that it makes a long cone. Then, when you are attacked, you can surprise them by shoving the cone up into a vulnerable spot, like an eye, or even better, into the throat, (which may kill the attacker if it destroys the windpipe, etc., but certainly puts him or her into a world of pain, regardless) and then while the attacker is flailing about, you can run away. Yes, run. Because you don't know for sure that the attacker is disabled enough not to hurt you if you stick around, or may be working with others.
Oh, the nice part is: if you're in a country that may not take kindly to your self-defense, or if you think the police might be after you already, you can let the newspaper unroll as you run away, and then drop it in a nearby trashcan or body of water, and there's no evidence trail. Unless you broke the skin of the attacker, the implement of defense will now just be slightly crumpled on one side, possibly with skin flakes from the attacker, but it's highly unlikely that anyone would recognize it as the implement unless the attack and defense were witnessed, anyway.
I'm not saying carry a newspaper if you think you will be attacked; obviously, if you ave time to prepare, arm yourself properly if at all possible. However, this is an excellent example at how articles (pun intended) commonly at hand can be easily used in your defense.
Moral: The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it takes a thoughtful reader to really get his point across.
I only saw powder on that website, and they sell it through retailers/dealers. I don't think that's a fair comparison.
For the purposes of argument, you have to assume that the world's best hardware is enslaved to the people who want to kill human rights activists; it really needs rigorous testing if the source code has been available to the bad guys for about 2 years.
Then again, maybe the activist groups have their own great coders and have secretly forked the source for continuing development, and are relying on obscurity as well as advancement to protect them against the bad guys.
MiniDV is a lot different, and it's got to do with the quality of the tape used, which is exactly the part of the system we'd be using for data storage.
Try looking here for a precis by a company that maintains/repairs hardware for both types of systems, or here if you want a manufacturer's perspective.
They're not the same. One has much better performance and stability. It's not the consumer grade.
Professionals in the industry generally know better than to use MiniDV for broadcast-quality recording. Also, the people who made CD-Rs in the beginning claimed a 20+ year shelf life, and nobody should believe them. Nobody seriously claims a data life for a consumer quality videotape, because they're not sold or tested for data-grade applications, but for videotaping, and consumer videotape has a really high "acceptable" loss rate.
Properly implemented, routing object servers already provide this level of security. The downstream user has to modify the routing object, using his password/pgpkey/whatever, and he/she has to use his/her AS number when making the announcement. The AS is only accepted through his/her interface(s) (and those of other transit providers if he/she is multi-homed). The routing filters are built automatically incorporating the routing object server information, on a regular basis.
Everything stays smooth and secure, at least for the ISP side, because a compromise in the system almost certainly involves a broken password/pgpkey/whatever on the downstream side. The only real problem with this method, of course, is when customers get "consultants" who know nothing about routing objects, or BGP itself, or the customer's admin runs off with the password. The ISP can rewrite the password code for the object, or simply wipe the object and letthe customer start from scratch, but it can't do much about clueless consultants, because it's not selling a BGP training program
This is already covered in answers to other responses. Essentially, though, that's one good answer, and so is having the telco loop the circuit or otherwise disable it so it stops flapping and you can get to it through another line.
The example in reality that I'm thinking of involved an ISP that was bought out, and some of their backbone had yet to be suborned into the buyer's structure fully. Nobody left knew their term server dialin info, or if they even had one.
I didn't say the line stayed up long enough (remember, there are multiple lines, it's an aggregate), I said the router doesn't stay up enough. As in, would you even finish handshaking? Doubtful. But you could dial into a term server connected to it, then try to interrupt the loading process, reconfigure that flapping interface to be admin down, and so forth. Another good answer (as another reader mentioned) is to call the telco and have them shove the line down, like forcing a loop or something.