Mike has run xlr8yourmac for years with the same plain format. More websites should take their cue from him and keep it simple. Hyperlinks and simple graphics make for quick pageloads. His is an excellent example of a site with huge amounts of content and a simple format. You don't need massive loads of graphics to make a excellent site.
from http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/ww2online/ww2 main.htm
1.2.0 Patch Update
Date: 07/12/01 06:00:00
First the bad news: Satchels are debugged and code-frozen, but we've run out of unmapped keys and key combinations on a standard keyboard to assign them to. We are looking into possible keyless solutions such as signalling your intent to place a satchel charge by using a USB connected optical pen reader to scan a barcode. We wanted to keep the system flexible, so the barcode will be printed on a collectible foil sticker that you can put on the side of your case or maybe your monitor or really anywhere within the length of the optical pen's cord - tentatively three feet.
Now the good news: Grenades are in! Our commitment to bringing you the actual battlefield experience has resulted in the most realistic depiction of maintaining and throwing a grenade ever attempted. Here's how it works:
-Press shift-7 to inspect the grenade for obvious defects.
-Press shift-8 to inspect the grenade for less obvious defects.
-If a defect is found, you will be alerted. Press shift-E to "Enter" the grenade alert screen so that grenade alerts may be read. Alternate between pressing shift-7 and ctrl-8 relatively quickly to correct the obvious defects, faster for less obvious defects.
-If fixing the defect is not possible, you will be alerted to return to the nearest Resource Center where you must turn in the grenade at the flag station by pressing alt-M.
-Press ctrl-L to ensure that the fuze is not unscrewed from the body of the grenade.
-Press ctrl-L again to visually inspect the safety pin
-If the pin appears partially removed, press cltr-l a third time to carefully push it back in place. Note: Any time you monkey with the pin, make sure you're also pressing shift-A to hold the lever securely down.
-Press shift-L to visually inspect the grenade for dirt.
-If the grenade appears dirty or grimy, press M to engage your damp cloth (this replaces the 'map' key), Press shift-M several times to wipe the grenade.
-In order to simulate a structural peculiarity that surfaced when grenades of this era were wiped too vigorously, you probably want to once again visually inspect the pin by pressing ctrl-L.
-In order to further simulate battlefield conditions, pressing alt-R will erroneously connect the grenade to your clothing by the pull ring. We do not expect this option to be utilized much; it's simply there for historical accuracy.
-Soldiers of the era on both sides had a recognized fascination with attempting to modify their grenades using tape or wire - always against the strong reccommendations of the manufacturer. The alt-P/shift-P sequence simulates this preoccupation. After using the 'equpiment modification temptation' option, there is a good possibility that the grenade will explode in your hand. Though there is a chance that it will not.
-Okay, soldier, you're ready to throw the grenade! Right after you press shift-V to open your ammunition pouch and then, using a combination of the shift key and the hat control on your joystick, rotate the grenade so that the pull ring is pointing down.
-Press J once for each of the following actions: a) Remove safety clip b) Pull pin c) Throw
-Find cover immediately! Do not wait for the grenade to land!
-The Grenade is a two-man crewed armament. While you look for cover, the 'spotter' should be positioned at a distance where he can safely watch the grenade land so that between the two of you, someone can probably see what happens.
-Though he cannot carry any grenades himself, the 'spotter' has his own damp cloth which he can use to help wipe off your grenade.
The night the 4.0 version of CSHP came out I happened
upon an an aimbot tweaked that same night to defeat
CSHP 4. For purposes of self-edification I tried it
out that evening. It was sad and funny at once. Sad
because no on the CSHP4 servers was willing to accept
the obvious, that an aimbot was in use; not one person
accused me of anything. Funny because my connection
was so sad only one out of 5 shots hit even with the
aimbot. Come to think of it, maybe that's why no one
was accusing me of cheating;)
Cheaters suck for gaming reasons, but I have to hand
it to em for technical reasons. They've kept ahead of
all the cheat protections, and now the cheat
protections are more annoying than the cheaters. Or
nearly so.
And remember if you suspect a cheater, just duck. The
aimbots I'm familiar with can't track crouching
targets. Case in point, a low-grav Face server I
played that same night (before I researched the
aimbot). One guy is shooting my head off without
pause, even when we're on opposite sides of the map,
floating at high altitude. So on my next flag run I
crouch in the air and for the last 30 yards to the
base. The guy is standing right in front of me and
can't hit me once.
I'll have to stop into my bot source tonight and see
what new strains of C-coded terrorism they've
developed, see if they've done anything about that
limitation.
Rg
PS Who is mad he couldn't cash in on the Mir Special
at Taco Bell or the Crouching Tiger Free Fried Rice at
the local Chinese place. How is my body going to make
enough blood for me to go to the plasma center with so
I can get cash for groceries if I can't get some free
food?
PPS
Pint of plasma: $30
Plasma TV: $10,000
Figuring out a punchline that connects the first item
with the second: Priceless
I first dled whitecap the beta version back in 98 and I was so impressed. I had never seen anything so cool before on a mac. The quality of it even as a beta put my bro's winamp plugins to shame. I told everyone I could about it. Whitecap is an amazing 2D visualization, then and now even more.
Privacy is dead. We are watched by 1.5m closed-circuit television cameras, more per head of population than any country on Earth. Our government, police and intelligence services have more legal powers to poke around in our private lives than those of communist China. And thanks to new
technologies from mobile phones to the internet, they can use those powers to find out where we are, whom we talk or send e-mails to, and what websites we click on. According to most experts in the field, a police state with powers of control and surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of Hitler or Stalin could now be established in Britain within 24 hours. And guess what: MI5 probably read this article before you did. It was delivered by e-mail, a hopelessly insecure system. It is full of the sort of security-sensitive words the spooks look out for, and, as I shall explain, I seem to be an MI5 target.
But the weirdest thing of all is that we really don't care. To take an example that may sound trivial but isn't, the Television Licensing Authority is currently running an advertising campaign boasting of its ability to invade our privacy. Hoardings show a local street sign with the caption that declares, four people in this street don't have a TV licence and the TLA knows who they are.
Duncan Bennett, a systems administrator with the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, knows exactly what this means. He hasn't had a TV in 10 years and yet, annually, he gets threatening letters from the TLA. He has now discovered that, with no evidence against him whatsoever, they can get a warrant - always automatically granted - to break into and search his house. He is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, a terrible inversion of ancient common-law tradition. He has struggled to find anybody willing to take up his campaign on the issue. Bennett is not suspected of drug-trafficking, terrorism or subversion. He is suspected of having a TV without a licence. Only in Britain would such an abuse of power - or even such advertisements - be tolerated.
We seem to have such fear of crime, and such a mute acceptance of the seizure of power by the authorities, that we are actually comforted by the thought that we are being watched all the time. This, in the current climate of paranoia and high technology, is dangerous. Our right to live a law-abiding life without interference is now utterly compromised. The Englishman's home is no longer his castle, it is his virtual interrogation cell.
How did we get here? The story begins in a bedroom in Cheltenham in 1969. James Ellis, an employee of the Government Communications Headquarters, Britain's global listening post, had been working on the problem of coding, more accurately known as encryption. Thanks to our cracking of the German Enigma code during the second world war, the British were regarded as world masters of this art. Since then, GCHQ had been working closely with the American National Security Agency (NSA) to ensure that the good guys - us - would always be able to crack or write codes more successfully than the bad guys - primarily the Soviets.
In his bedroom, Ellis had an idea for a system of encryption that would be utterly unbreakable. But his system was so completely at odds with prevailing wisdom that it was at once rejected by almost everybody in the code business. Ellis died in 1997, professionally anonymous to the last, and just a month before his brilliance was generally recognised when GCHQ finally published his papers on their website.
Until then, everybody thought the first man to have this idea was an American named Whitfield Diffie. In 1975, Diffie had independently experienced the same eureka moment as Ellis, but his insight was made public. At that moment, both GCHQ and NSA, not to mention every other security and intelligence service on the planet, suffered a crisis from which they have yet to recover, and the issue of individual privacy leapt to the top of the political agenda, where, almost everywhere except in Britain, it remains.
The Ellis/Diffie invention was what is now called public key cryptography (PKC). It is the most powerful coding system that has ever been devised. It's what you use if you bank or buy on the internet. You don't know you're using it: your computer does it for you. It offers everybody
the power to communicate in unbreakable codes. As a result, it's easily the worst thing that has ever happened to the spooks and the police. Beside this, Kim Philby was a minor hiccough.
This is how it works. Normally, if one spook wants to send a coded message to another, he does so in a code that can be unlocked by a key - a string of numbers - known to both of them. The problem is, they have somehow to give each other the key. Diplomats going through customs handcuffed to briefcases are one way of passing on keys. But you can mug a diplomat and, as the British showed when they seized a German Enigma machine, you can intercept keys transmitted by any other means. Either way, the spooks lose their secrecy.
In PKC, one party makes his key completely public; anybody can have it.
This public code allows anybody to encode their message and send it. But the public key can only encrypt the message, it cannot decrypt it. Only the secret key possessed by the recipient can unscramble the message. As long as he keeps his key secret - an easy task, because he need never share it with anyone else - then his code is unbreakable.
The one flaw in this might be the use of supercomputers simply to run through all possible key combinations - a so-called "brute force" attack. Keys are just sequences of numbers, after all. But now that more powerful personal computers and software accept much longer keys, it would take billions of years for a brute-force attack to succeed. Rumour has it - there are only ever rumours in this area - that the NSA has spent $5 billion trying to crack the strongest contemporary codes and failed.
Since both the NSA and GCHQ are founded on the principle that they should be able to read any communication anywhere in the world, this is their worst nightmare. Since 1975 they have been battling to find ways of ensuring they can still eavesdrop on anything. And, because Diffie's trick was already out there among the nerds and hackers of the world, this battle had to take place in public. Essentially, both the British and American security services wanted copies of all keys to be lodged with government agencies - so-called "key escrow" - or, as in the system we now have in Britain, they wanted to be able to demand the surrender of keys.
But the libertarian nerds, known in this field as "cypherpunks", fought back in the name of freedom from the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother government. In the United States they have had some success, thanks to the native distrust of government; in Britain they have had almost none.
After the collapse of communism in 1989, this issue became even more urgent. The primary targets of the security services were no longer the Soviets. Now they were organised criminals, drug traffickers and terrorists. This meant they wanted to watch their own citizens rather than just foreign spooks.
The possibility of the high-tech, constant-surveillance Big Brother state was threatening to become a reality.
PKC had become much more than a brilliant mathematical trick: it was now the centre of a bitter philosophical and political debate about the privacy of the individual. This has now spilt over into just about every area of public policy. Before PKC, the spooks could watch and never explain anything. After PKC, they had to come out and argue their case.
The big questions are obvious. How much should the government be able to find out about me and the things I do? Should it be able to read all my private messages, my bank accounts, my health records? Do I have any right to privacy at all, or does the public interest in the possibility that I might be a terrorist, paedophile, criminal or spy overrule all other considerations?
Cryptography was only the beginning of this debate. Technology - whether in the form of computers, mobile phones, credit cards, store cards or closed-circuit television cameras with sophisticated face recognition systems - means that people can now, if they like, know almost everything about anybody.
We all leave an electronic trail wherever we go, whatever we do. This trail is impossible for the individual to eradicate or control.
Much of this trail may seem innocent - what you buy at Tesco using your loyalty card is hardly likely to be a sensitive matter. But the point about computer memory and processing power is that it is expanding at a rate few of us can begin to understand. As a result, thanks to those loyalty cards, it is perfectly possible to trawl through everything you have ever bought at Tesco, and that can produce a startlingly detailed picture of your life.
"I'm not embarrassed about my shopping," says Ian Brown, a researcher into mobile multimedia security at University College, London, "but the insidious nature of this is that it's not the day-by-day information, it's knowing about all your grocery for the last five years. It's amazing how much you can tell about someone from the pattern of their buying." Furthermore, information breeds information. Once I know one thing about you, I can generally find out another. Using a technique known as 'social engineering' - essentially a simple con trick - armed with a few details like your date of birth and post code, I can easily convince some lowly clerk on the phone that I am you and seduce him into parting with more sensitive material.
When you add into that mix internet usage and e-mails - neither of which are remotely secure unless you go out of your way to make sure they are - it becomes easy to build up staggeringly detailed pictures of the lives and habits of almost anybody. Indeed, there is an automated global system code-named Echelon, operated by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which is believed to intercept up to 3 billion communications a day, trawling through them for sensitive words that might indicate a security threat - it may well pick up this article in transit. Some claim that 90% of internet traffic is scanned by Echelon. The exact figures are unknown, because the system is
top secret. Indeed, Britain, alone among these countries, does not even admit it exists. Simon Davies, head of the pressure group Privacy International and a self-confessed cypherpunk, describes Echelon as "black-helicopter, Mulder-and-Scully stuff". As in The X Files, the truth is out there, but so is somebody who doesn't want you to know.
Even by just collating all the addresses of your e-mail correspondents, the security services can construct "friendship trees", patterns of association that, whether you are guilty or not, may connect you to terrorists or criminals.
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are the final turn of the screw. There are now 1.5m of these operating in Britain, and some, as in the London borough of Newham, use facial recognition software that automatically identifies target individuals. Some of these cameras are visible, but many,
in pubs and clubs, are not. In time, it is thought these cameras will be linked in a nationwide web. They will become, as Dr Stephen Graham of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne has suggested, the "fifth utility", after telephones, water, gas and electricity. "These networks," he writes, "have long since merged and extended to become technologically standardised, multipurpose, nationally regulated utilities, with virtually universal coverage. I would argue that CCTV looks set to follow a similar pattern of development over the next 20 years, to become a kind of fifth utility."
"We have far more of these cameras that any other country," Graham tells me, "though Germany and the US are now catching up. Why? Well, I suppose we have fewer constitutional and political fears about invasions of privacy.
We have a huge fear of crime and we have no totalitarian past like almost all the other countries in Europe."
Graham believes the key to the future, networked power of CCTV is automation. "The key to the limitations of their use was the human operator, who just got bored. Soon, software will be able to do all that, and then the power will be in the hands of the software writers to decide what is abnormal behaviour. It will all be hidden - there will be no accountability."
And, in their book The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, the academics Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong write: "The architecture of the maximum surveillance society is now in place." Their point is that the hardware of CCTV is so firmly in position that enabling it to watch everybody all the time is now merely a software problem.
Meanwhile, other surveillance technologies are springing up all the time. Police in the US, and some private agencies here, now have machines - called IMSI catchers - in their cars that fool your mobile phone into thinking they are base stations on your network. They can even tell your phone not to use any form of encryption. So they can listen to every mobile call you make. In addition, all big companies in the City of London routinely have to attach devices to their windows to prevent sensitive meetings being overheard through remote sensors that pick up voices from vibrations of the glass. Or there are Van Eck devices, which can read everything on your computer screen from a street away from your house. It is rumoured that one of these machines has been refined to the point where it can pick out one computer screen at the top of Canary Wharf from street level. Or tiny airborne devices the size of butterflies are being developed that can watch every move you make. And so on and so on. "It is plausible," writes Bruce Schneier, an American security consultant, in his book Secrets & Lies, "that we could soon be living in a world without expectation of privacy, anywhere or at any time."
Soon, some have suggested, we shall have to record our entire lives on audio and video just to establish an alibi, in case we are implicated in a crime. Indeed, not to make such a recording may one day be treated as a cause for suspicion.
Do we care? In Britain, apparently not. We accept CCTV cameras out of fear of crime, and as a result we have more than any other nation in the world. Meanwhile, a study by the Economic and Social Research Council's Virtual Society programme has found that employees do not regard surveillance systems in the workplace as invasions of privacy. And finally, in the form of last year's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP), we now have, according to many observers, the most invasive legal apparatus anywhere in the world. China, it has been pointed out, has nothing as draconian as this on its statute book. It has been described by the constitutionalist Anthony Barnett as "the most pernicious invasion of privacy ever imposed by a democratic state". Among other things, the act ensures that all internet and mobile-phone communications will potentially be interceptible by the police and security services. Furthermore, even if you are not suspected of any crime, you can be imprisoned for two years if you fail to disclose a computer password. The communications of UK citizens can now be trawled by GCHQ to investigate any "large number of persons in pursuit of a common purpose".
Mod this guy up!;)
cool links for macfans
http://freehosting2.at.webjump.com/23065c49f/gi/gi rliemac-webjump/index.html
http://www.fuckapple.org/
its not what you think!
now you decide to chime in? huh! Your review was good but i thought you wrote it for macusers. I mean i don't think pc users knew what you were talking about when u spoke of the finders intricacies and abilities. "Spacial" finder? Why don't you just say it remembers your window layout. Surely you should have explained yourself more, even i a macuser for 13 yrs was confused.
Also your focus on the GUI was painfully nitpicking. Like a true macuser!;) I was impressed.
The test of a OS is if ppl use it. Are u using os 9 or x today? I personally am torn between the two. My schizophrenic mac can't decide ifs its 9 or x. On one hand is os 9's beautyful familiar gui but rotten execution. On the other is os x's rotten gui, but excellent execution. It's like a pretty girl w/ no mind or a ugly genius girl. Perhaps apple should have just copied os 9's interface onto x's guts.
Omniweb OWNS all other browsers! Get the new version they released yesterday. The motherfukcer is uncrashable. I'm so impressed w/ that browser. It's great and the page loads are so freaking fast.!!!
I'm using OS X and Omniweb to post this. And god damn OS X hasn't crashed on me once. BSD truly does rock. It's freaking amazing. OS 9 is so slow browsing compared to OS X. My 56k feels like DSL. I am so freaking happy. YEAH!!!
Why only scientology stories?
Only posting stories about scientology smacks of persecuting a minority.
Clearly all religions are full of lies and silly stories. Scientology may be the most evil, but I still I think/. should spread the wealth when it comes to debunking religions.
Does anyone else agree?
I'm involved w/ the PKI roll out here in Minot AFB. A dozen CSC and subcontractors descended here yesterday and I was just issued my floppy w/ PKI certification key this morning. Interestingly they used netscape on their portables to connect to the PKI website, and make the keys and save them to floppy. No smart card yet though.
Why is it that hotline never gets mentioned??? Surely more bytes have been transfered over Hotline servers than ANY other file (not just mp3) sharing peer to peer system!!!
I know nobody will notice this post, cause it's at 1. Oh well. It just had to be said. At least I feel better now.
I have some questions for attendess to WWDC. Has anyone tried the new builds of OSX? If so, what do you think?
Will the dock be able to be viewed vertically with out a hack? I heard PPPoE is natively supported now. Also will apple use Telnet over SSH now? I heard that was because of overseas export restrictions. Any news on that front?
Also does anybody have any informal reviews of the titanium powerbook? I heard it's shipping.
I heard the games really sucked.
How long til someone dies from no fair catch?
What's with all the X names now? Even M$ is using X for whistler! Is everyone copying apple or what?
Specifically I was refering to the idea of having classified and unclassified material on the the same computer.
The DOD has the idea that once a device comes into ANY contact with classified information that device has been infected and must be "sanitized". They call this "remanance security" (sp?). Hell in the regs even a freaking monitor??!! has to be sanitized after it has had classifed displayed on it.
You aren't dealing with normal people here. This is the military. They are psychotic about classified shit, because lives (in theory) are at stake.
I used to work computer security for the Air Force. I think this sort of thing would never be allowed.
The amount of regulations that would have to be rewritten would be astounding. That (esp. versus the small cost {for the DOD loves to spend your tax money} of buying a seperate computer) would keep that from ever happening.
Plus you are talking about a new idea. The military thrives on the status quo. New ideas are implemented over many many years of missed deadlines (example {for mil guys} DMS).
You wouldn't believe the paranoia that sorrounds security around here. I can't stress enough, that would never ever happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah Time, it's called a fucking electric motor.
Mike has run xlr8yourmac for years with the same plain format. More websites should take their cue from him and keep it simple. Hyperlinks and simple graphics make for quick pageloads. His is an excellent example of a site with huge amounts of content and a simple format. You don't need massive loads of graphics to make a excellent site.
ww2 online is a buugy pos.
2 main.htm
from http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/ww2online/ww
1.2.0 Patch Update
Date: 07/12/01 06:00:00
First the bad news: Satchels are debugged and code-frozen, but we've run out of unmapped keys and key combinations on a standard keyboard to assign them to. We are looking into possible keyless solutions such as signalling your intent to place a satchel charge by using a USB connected optical pen reader to scan a barcode. We wanted to keep the system flexible, so the barcode will be printed on a collectible foil sticker that you can put on the side of your case or maybe your monitor or really anywhere within the length of the optical pen's cord - tentatively three feet.
Now the good news: Grenades are in! Our commitment to bringing you the actual battlefield experience has resulted in the most realistic depiction of maintaining and throwing a grenade ever attempted. Here's how it works:
-Press shift-7 to inspect the grenade for obvious defects.
-Press shift-8 to inspect the grenade for less obvious defects.
-If a defect is found, you will be alerted. Press shift-E to "Enter" the grenade alert screen so that grenade alerts may be read. Alternate between pressing shift-7 and ctrl-8 relatively quickly to correct the obvious defects, faster for less obvious defects.
-If fixing the defect is not possible, you will be alerted to return to the nearest Resource Center where you must turn in the grenade at the flag station by pressing alt-M.
-Press ctrl-L to ensure that the fuze is not unscrewed from the body of the grenade.
-Press ctrl-L again to visually inspect the safety pin
-If the pin appears partially removed, press cltr-l a third time to carefully push it back in place. Note: Any time you monkey with the pin, make sure you're also pressing shift-A to hold the lever securely down.
-Press shift-L to visually inspect the grenade for dirt.
-If the grenade appears dirty or grimy, press M to engage your damp cloth (this replaces the 'map' key), Press shift-M several times to wipe the grenade.
-In order to simulate a structural peculiarity that surfaced when grenades of this era were wiped too vigorously, you probably want to once again visually inspect the pin by pressing ctrl-L.
-In order to further simulate battlefield conditions, pressing alt-R will erroneously connect the grenade to your clothing by the pull ring. We do not expect this option to be utilized much; it's simply there for historical accuracy.
-Soldiers of the era on both sides had a recognized fascination with attempting to modify their grenades using tape or wire - always against the strong reccommendations of the manufacturer. The alt-P/shift-P sequence simulates this preoccupation. After using the 'equpiment modification temptation' option, there is a good possibility that the grenade will explode in your hand. Though there is a chance that it will not.
-Okay, soldier, you're ready to throw the grenade! Right after you press shift-V to open your ammunition pouch and then, using a combination of the shift key and the hat control on your joystick, rotate the grenade so that the pull ring is pointing down.
-Press J once for each of the following actions: a) Remove safety clip b) Pull pin c) Throw
-Find cover immediately! Do not wait for the grenade to land!
-The Grenade is a two-man crewed armament. While you look for cover, the 'spotter' should be positioned at a distance where he can safely watch the grenade land so that between the two of you, someone can probably see what happens.
-Though he cannot carry any grenades himself, the 'spotter' has his own damp cloth which he can use to help wipe off your grenade.
Have Fun!
Chris "Mo" Sherland
WWIIOL's Producer
Could you give any prices on those solectek antennas and bridges/routers?
A substantial portion of MS's bottom line comes from government purchases. Which every American taxpayer contributes too.
So while you stop buying MS products. Ask your representative to stop buying them too.
But, don't bother anyway. I think he'll listen to Bill Gates instead of you.
After all what's good for MS is good for Amerika. HAHAHHAHAH!
Yeah, I figured you did extreme sports like mountain climbing and parachuting.
You play video games???!! That's so strange! Really boggles the mind!
Well, I see how you maintain your perfect physique.
-vm
The night the 4.0 version of CSHP came out I happened upon an an aimbot tweaked that same night to defeat CSHP 4. For purposes of self-edification I tried it out that evening. It was sad and funny at once. Sad because no on the CSHP4 servers was willing to accept the obvious, that an aimbot was in use; not one person accused me of anything. Funny because my connection was so sad only one out of 5 shots hit even with the aimbot. Come to think of it, maybe that's why no one was accusing me of cheating ;)
Cheaters suck for gaming reasons, but I have to hand
it to em for technical reasons. They've kept ahead of
all the cheat protections, and now the cheat
protections are more annoying than the cheaters. Or
nearly so.
And remember if you suspect a cheater, just duck. The
aimbots I'm familiar with can't track crouching
targets. Case in point, a low-grav Face server I
played that same night (before I researched the
aimbot). One guy is shooting my head off without
pause, even when we're on opposite sides of the map,
floating at high altitude. So on my next flag run I
crouch in the air and for the last 30 yards to the
base. The guy is standing right in front of me and
can't hit me once.
I'll have to stop into my bot source tonight and see
what new strains of C-coded terrorism they've
developed, see if they've done anything about that
limitation.
Rg
PS Who is mad he couldn't cash in on the Mir Special
at Taco Bell or the Crouching Tiger Free Fried Rice at
the local Chinese place. How is my body going to make
enough blood for me to go to the plasma center with so
I can get cash for groceries if I can't get some free
food?
PPS
Pint of plasma: $30
Plasma TV: $10,000
Figuring out a punchline that connects the first item
with the second: Priceless
Valdrax-
3 27 &Item=SG4D500
you can get a dual g4 500 upgrade for your system here
http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=3
Here's a link to andy's home page check it out. Keep up the good work Andy!
-vm
But the weirdest thing of all is that we really don't care. To take an example that may sound trivial but isn't, the Television Licensing Authority is currently running an advertising campaign boasting of its ability to invade our privacy. Hoardings show a local street sign with the caption that declares, four people in this street don't have a TV licence and the TLA knows who they are.
Duncan Bennett, a systems administrator with the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, knows exactly what this means. He hasn't had a TV in 10 years and yet, annually, he gets threatening letters from the TLA. He has now discovered that, with no evidence against him whatsoever, they can get a warrant - always automatically granted - to break into and search his house. He is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, a terrible inversion of ancient common-law tradition. He has struggled to find anybody willing to take up his campaign on the issue. Bennett is not suspected of drug-trafficking, terrorism or subversion. He is suspected of having a TV without a licence. Only in Britain would such an abuse of power - or even such advertisements - be tolerated.
We seem to have such fear of crime, and such a mute acceptance of the seizure of power by the authorities, that we are actually comforted by the thought that we are being watched all the time. This, in the current climate of paranoia and high technology, is dangerous. Our right to live a law-abiding life without interference is now utterly compromised. The Englishman's home is no longer his castle, it is his virtual interrogation cell.
How did we get here? The story begins in a bedroom in Cheltenham in 1969. James Ellis, an employee of the Government Communications Headquarters, Britain's global listening post, had been working on the problem of coding, more accurately known as encryption. Thanks to our cracking of the German Enigma code during the second world war, the British were regarded as world masters of this art. Since then, GCHQ had been working closely with the American National Security Agency (NSA) to ensure that the good guys - us - would always be able to crack or write codes more successfully than the bad guys - primarily the Soviets.
In his bedroom, Ellis had an idea for a system of encryption that would be utterly unbreakable. But his system was so completely at odds with prevailing wisdom that it was at once rejected by almost everybody in the code business. Ellis died in 1997, professionally anonymous to the last, and just a month before his brilliance was generally recognised when GCHQ finally published his papers on their website.
Until then, everybody thought the first man to have this idea was an American named Whitfield Diffie. In 1975, Diffie had independently experienced the same eureka moment as Ellis, but his insight was made public. At that moment, both GCHQ and NSA, not to mention every other security and intelligence service on the planet, suffered a crisis from which they have yet to recover, and the issue of individual privacy leapt to the top of the political agenda, where, almost everywhere except in Britain, it remains.
The Ellis/Diffie invention was what is now called public key cryptography (PKC). It is the most powerful coding system that has ever been devised. It's what you use if you bank or buy on the internet. You don't know you're using it: your computer does it for you. It offers everybody the power to communicate in unbreakable codes. As a result, it's easily the worst thing that has ever happened to the spooks and the police. Beside this, Kim Philby was a minor hiccough.
This is how it works. Normally, if one spook wants to send a coded message to another, he does so in a code that can be unlocked by a key - a string of numbers - known to both of them. The problem is, they have somehow to give each other the key. Diplomats going through customs handcuffed to briefcases are one way of passing on keys. But you can mug a diplomat and, as the British showed when they seized a German Enigma machine, you can intercept keys transmitted by any other means. Either way, the spooks lose their secrecy.
In PKC, one party makes his key completely public; anybody can have it.
This public code allows anybody to encode their message and send it. But the public key can only encrypt the message, it cannot decrypt it. Only the secret key possessed by the recipient can unscramble the message. As long as he keeps his key secret - an easy task, because he need never share it with anyone else - then his code is unbreakable.
The one flaw in this might be the use of supercomputers simply to run through all possible key combinations - a so-called "brute force" attack. Keys are just sequences of numbers, after all. But now that more powerful personal computers and software accept much longer keys, it would take billions of years for a brute-force attack to succeed. Rumour has it - there are only ever rumours in this area - that the NSA has spent $5 billion trying to crack the strongest contemporary codes and failed.
Since both the NSA and GCHQ are founded on the principle that they should be able to read any communication anywhere in the world, this is their worst nightmare. Since 1975 they have been battling to find ways of ensuring they can still eavesdrop on anything. And, because Diffie's trick was already out there among the nerds and hackers of the world, this battle had to take place in public. Essentially, both the British and American security services wanted copies of all keys to be lodged with government agencies - so-called "key escrow" - or, as in the system we now have in Britain, they wanted to be able to demand the surrender of keys.
But the libertarian nerds, known in this field as "cypherpunks", fought back in the name of freedom from the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother government. In the United States they have had some success, thanks to the native distrust of government; in Britain they have had almost none.
After the collapse of communism in 1989, this issue became even more urgent. The primary targets of the security services were no longer the Soviets. Now they were organised criminals, drug traffickers and terrorists. This meant they wanted to watch their own citizens rather than just foreign spooks. The possibility of the high-tech, constant-surveillance Big Brother state was threatening to become a reality.
PKC had become much more than a brilliant mathematical trick: it was now the centre of a bitter philosophical and political debate about the privacy of the individual. This has now spilt over into just about every area of public policy. Before PKC, the spooks could watch and never explain anything. After PKC, they had to come out and argue their case.
The big questions are obvious. How much should the government be able to find out about me and the things I do? Should it be able to read all my private messages, my bank accounts, my health records? Do I have any right to privacy at all, or does the public interest in the possibility that I might be a terrorist, paedophile, criminal or spy overrule all other considerations?
Cryptography was only the beginning of this debate. Technology - whether in the form of computers, mobile phones, credit cards, store cards or closed-circuit television cameras with sophisticated face recognition systems - means that people can now, if they like, know almost everything about anybody.
We all leave an electronic trail wherever we go, whatever we do. This trail is impossible for the individual to eradicate or control.
Much of this trail may seem innocent - what you buy at Tesco using your loyalty card is hardly likely to be a sensitive matter. But the point about computer memory and processing power is that it is expanding at a rate few of us can begin to understand. As a result, thanks to those loyalty cards, it is perfectly possible to trawl through everything you have ever bought at Tesco, and that can produce a startlingly detailed picture of your life.
"I'm not embarrassed about my shopping," says Ian Brown, a researcher into mobile multimedia security at University College, London, "but the insidious nature of this is that it's not the day-by-day information, it's knowing about all your grocery for the last five years. It's amazing how much you can tell about someone from the pattern of their buying." Furthermore, information breeds information. Once I know one thing about you, I can generally find out another. Using a technique known as 'social engineering' - essentially a simple con trick - armed with a few details like your date of birth and post code, I can easily convince some lowly clerk on the phone that I am you and seduce him into parting with more sensitive material.
When you add into that mix internet usage and e-mails - neither of which are remotely secure unless you go out of your way to make sure they are - it becomes easy to build up staggeringly detailed pictures of the lives and habits of almost anybody. Indeed, there is an automated global system code-named Echelon, operated by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which is believed to intercept up to 3 billion communications a day, trawling through them for sensitive words that might indicate a security threat - it may well pick up this article in transit. Some claim that 90% of internet traffic is scanned by Echelon. The exact figures are unknown, because the system is top secret. Indeed, Britain, alone among these countries, does not even admit it exists. Simon Davies, head of the pressure group Privacy International and a self-confessed cypherpunk, describes Echelon as "black-helicopter, Mulder-and-Scully stuff". As in The X Files, the truth is out there, but so is somebody who doesn't want you to know.
Even by just collating all the addresses of your e-mail correspondents, the security services can construct "friendship trees", patterns of association that, whether you are guilty or not, may connect you to terrorists or criminals.
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are the final turn of the screw. There are now 1.5m of these operating in Britain, and some, as in the London borough of Newham, use facial recognition software that automatically identifies target individuals. Some of these cameras are visible, but many, in pubs and clubs, are not. In time, it is thought these cameras will be linked in a nationwide web. They will become, as Dr Stephen Graham of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne has suggested, the "fifth utility", after telephones, water, gas and electricity. "These networks," he writes, "have long since merged and extended to become technologically standardised, multipurpose, nationally regulated utilities, with virtually universal coverage. I would argue that CCTV looks set to follow a similar pattern of development over the next 20 years, to become a kind of fifth utility."
"We have far more of these cameras that any other country," Graham tells me, "though Germany and the US are now catching up. Why? Well, I suppose we have fewer constitutional and political fears about invasions of privacy.
We have a huge fear of crime and we have no totalitarian past like almost all the other countries in Europe."
Graham believes the key to the future, networked power of CCTV is automation. "The key to the limitations of their use was the human operator, who just got bored. Soon, software will be able to do all that, and then the power will be in the hands of the software writers to decide what is abnormal behaviour. It will all be hidden - there will be no accountability."
And, in their book The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, the academics Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong write: "The architecture of the maximum surveillance society is now in place." Their point is that the hardware of CCTV is so firmly in position that enabling it to watch everybody all the time is now merely a software problem.
Meanwhile, other surveillance technologies are springing up all the time. Police in the US, and some private agencies here, now have machines - called IMSI catchers - in their cars that fool your mobile phone into thinking they are base stations on your network. They can even tell your phone not to use any form of encryption. So they can listen to every mobile call you make. In addition, all big companies in the City of London routinely have to attach devices to their windows to prevent sensitive meetings being overheard through remote sensors that pick up voices from vibrations of the glass. Or there are Van Eck devices, which can read everything on your computer screen from a street away from your house. It is rumoured that one of these machines has been refined to the point where it can pick out one computer screen at the top of Canary Wharf from street level. Or tiny airborne devices the size of butterflies are being developed that can watch every move you make. And so on and so on. "It is plausible," writes Bruce Schneier, an American security consultant, in his book Secrets & Lies, "that we could soon be living in a world without expectation of privacy, anywhere or at any time."
Soon, some have suggested, we shall have to record our entire lives on audio and video just to establish an alibi, in case we are implicated in a crime. Indeed, not to make such a recording may one day be treated as a cause for suspicion.
Do we care? In Britain, apparently not. We accept CCTV cameras out of fear of crime, and as a result we have more than any other nation in the world. Meanwhile, a study by the Economic and Social Research Council's Virtual Society programme has found that employees do not regard surveillance systems in the workplace as invasions of privacy. And finally, in the form of last year's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP), we now have, according to many observers, the most invasive legal apparatus anywhere in the world. China, it has been pointed out, has nothing as draconian as this on its statute book. It has been described by the constitutionalist Anthony Barnett as "the most pernicious invasion of privacy ever imposed by a democratic state". Among other things, the act ensures that all internet and mobile-phone communications will potentially be interceptible by the police and security services. Furthermore, even if you are not suspected of any crime, you can be imprisoned for two years if you fail to disclose a computer password. The communications of UK citizens can now be trawled by GCHQ to investigate any "large number of persons in pursuit of a common purpose".
THE SURVEILLANCE TRAP | YOUR WHOLE LIFE LAID BARE
Mod this guy up! ;)
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http://www.fuckapple.org/
its not what you think!
Linuxtoday has Linus dispelling the flamewar zdnet tried to brew between our two camps. http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2384/LWD010410maccomme nts/
Shame on slashback for not noticeing. I get my newz from www.macsurfer.com
:)
What's up with that dedacted shit?
now you decide to chime in? huh! Your review was good but i thought you wrote it for macusers. I mean i don't think pc users knew what you were talking about when u spoke of the finders intricacies and abilities. "Spacial" finder? Why don't you just say it remembers your window layout. Surely you should have explained yourself more, even i a macuser for 13 yrs was confused.
;) I was impressed.
Also your focus on the GUI was painfully nitpicking. Like a true macuser!
The test of a OS is if ppl use it. Are u using os 9 or x today? I personally am torn between the two. My schizophrenic mac can't decide ifs its 9 or x. On one hand is os 9's beautyful familiar gui but rotten execution. On the other is os x's rotten gui, but excellent execution. It's like a pretty girl w/ no mind or a ugly genius girl. Perhaps apple should have just copied os 9's interface onto x's guts.
Omniweb OWNS all other browsers! Get the new version they released yesterday. The motherfukcer is uncrashable. I'm so impressed w/ that browser. It's great and the page loads are so freaking fast.!!!
I'm using OS X and Omniweb to post this. And god damn OS X hasn't crashed on me once. BSD truly does rock. It's freaking amazing. OS 9 is so slow browsing compared to OS X. My 56k feels like DSL. I am so freaking happy. YEAH!!!
Have checksums been done to verify this? I heard that the 'old' build 78 had the same sum as the 'new' gold master 78,
Why only scientology stories? Only posting stories about scientology smacks of persecuting a minority. Clearly all religions are full of lies and silly stories. Scientology may be the most evil, but I still I think /. should spread the wealth when it comes to debunking religions.
Does anyone else agree?
I'm involved w/ the PKI roll out here in Minot AFB. A dozen CSC and subcontractors descended here yesterday and I was just issued my floppy w/ PKI certification key this morning. Interestingly they used netscape on their portables to connect to the PKI website, and make the keys and save them to floppy. No smart card yet though.
Why is it that hotline never gets mentioned??? Surely more bytes have been transfered over Hotline servers than ANY other file (not just mp3) sharing peer to peer system!!!
I know nobody will notice this post, cause it's at 1. Oh well. It just had to be said. At least I feel better now.
I dare you defy me.
-gb
I have some questions for attendess to WWDC. Has anyone tried the new builds of OSX? If so, what do you think?
Will the dock be able to be viewed vertically with out a hack? I heard PPPoE is natively supported now. Also will apple use Telnet over SSH now? I heard that was because of overseas export restrictions. Any news on that front?
Also does anybody have any informal reviews of the titanium powerbook? I heard it's shipping.
-gb
I heard the games really sucked. How long til someone dies from no fair catch? What's with all the X names now? Even M$ is using X for whistler! Is everyone copying apple or what?
Specifically I was refering to the idea of having classified and unclassified material on the the same computer.
The DOD has the idea that once a device comes into ANY contact with classified information that device has been infected and must be "sanitized". They call this "remanance security" (sp?). Hell in the regs even a freaking monitor??!! has to be sanitized after it has had classifed displayed on it.
You aren't dealing with normal people here. This is the military. They are psychotic about classified shit, because lives (in theory) are at stake.
I used to work computer security for the Air Force. I think this sort of thing would never be allowed.
The amount of regulations that would have to be rewritten would be astounding. That (esp. versus the small cost {for the DOD loves to spend your tax money} of buying a seperate computer) would keep that from ever happening.
Plus you are talking about a new idea. The military thrives on the status quo. New ideas are implemented over many many years of missed deadlines (example {for mil guys} DMS).
You wouldn't believe the paranoia that sorrounds security around here. I can't stress enough, that would never ever happen.
boy someone can't take a joke