Re:Department of Defense getting in on the fun?
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
You've have to excuse me, but as a non-merkan' I'm not very knowledgable on what the different Departments of Whatever are supposed to be doing in the first place. I can only guess that the DoD is a large organization, doing all kinds of things in areas one might not think they'd have any interest in (like DARPA).
Anyway, It could be everything from a technology test, a bug, misconfiguration or any of a number of "benign" reasons. I mean, my own personal site is crawled several times a month by a certain spider. Why? Who knows. I don't update it very often, and I'm sure there's a whole lot of "other internet" to crawl instead of spending time with my small corner.
Granted, once a day is often enough that one might want to coordinate to find out more, like you've done.
Prediction: This won't happen. The net is full of very bad PR at the moment because of this "rumor". AMD, which might well be in an advanced stage of planning this out, will realize that this sucks, retreat and try the only sensible thing instead; plain information.
Gawd I hope I'm right.
And what's up with the Palomino problems? That sucks even more by the sound of it.
Re:Department of Defense getting in on the fun?
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
RSA and Eliptic Curve Cryptography is used for "copy protection" in a number of products. HIEW uses RSA for it's keyfile IIRC, and ECC is used by CloneCD, just to name two examples.
(Yeah I remember, now that you mention it. It might be interesting to see how Windows would behave with two task monitoring each other in the same way. I'm not sure how it works behind the scenes with killing processes.)
The point of the interlock is to form a dependence. Purpose: to ensure the survival of the worm in a hostile environment. Survival is of paramount imporance. Any kind of payload must come second.
The artificial society would take advantage of the fact that to cleanly kill it off the real-world enemy, us humans, would have to enter into correspondingly interconnected communication and trust
Payload is a whole other topic, where destruction of data is the least interesting one, though I agree that data-corruption is amongst the most evil payloads.
What I've come to realize is that a worm could become real scary if its author, like me, were to be a fan of multi-agent systems. There's a plenthora of research on agent-to-agent communication, just waiting for that big experiment to take place.
Ponder this: interlock. The worms work together to reach a situation in which a host cannot be cleaned without data from another host, and vice-versa, thus making disinfection extremely hard
I've been sketching on scenario where relationships are created via the infection plus one level. if A infects B (first level of interconnect), then B would tell A about every other host it infects in turn (second level). These hosts would form a cluster, where each member is free to initiate contact with another and request services.One of these could be the encryption or decryption of data. Hosts would say "Please encrypt this data (hands it over) and return the encrypted result". Say host A tells host B this. Suddenly we're in a situation where we cannot simply disinfect host B, because if we do we'll lose the key that decrypts data on host A! Of course, the worms would negotiate the complement, and host A would contain the key to unlock data in host B. We then expand this scenario to a great interconnection between members of the cluster. We can strengthen the connections by allowing unrelated hosts to negotiate interlocks.
In the same vein worms can negotiate and divide the search-space between them. Each worm could contain a compressed/simplified representation of the IP-search-space (just a couple of masks maybe? Haven't thought too hard about it). Relatives would communicate which parts have been scanned as to not duplicate (too much) work. This then becomes a parallell binary search!
I think I'm gonna have to write a short doomsday article too, there's just so much cool things that someone wicked could do.
You really believe delta-compression was invented with Q3, don't you?:-\
Sorry, but this is getting boring. Technically the engines are great, but... Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3/Quake 3:TA, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", Doom 3, Quake 4... it's getting a little bit repetitive.
The Looking Glass people did it right with Thief. Red Storm built Rainbow Six around good gameplay, but a crap engine and the worst netcode I've experienced (well, that's a lie -- I'm not counting Operation Flashpoint since I consider it Beta). Couldn't ID take their tech to the tactical level?
I've been waiting for ID to whip up a real good CRPG using a state-of-the-art 3d-engine for some time now... I hope those people over at ID can enjoy games from some other genre than just straight action-FPS, or they'll fade away... I'm not seeing myself buying any of their FPS anyhow. <shrug>.
Ah well, guess we have Bioware and Gas Powered Games to refine and put out some great gameplay for us.
Chris Taylor and John Carmack teaming up, now that could be interesting. Or maybe Jane Jensen doing another Gabriel Knight using Carmack-o-tech. Anything BUT ANOTHER FPS!
try burning a SafeDisc2 protected image on a new Plextor drive.
No problem. The PlexWriter PX-W2410A does perfect Safedisc 2 copies, at least with the firmware shipped to reviewers.
Of course, SD2 is pretty much broken if you take into consideration BetaBlocker, a program you can use to 'fix' a SD2-protected image prior to burning. Works with any burner.
Re:Magnifying glasses say it all...
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: 1
Oh, I agree that being able to scale the whole page is a very useful function. Being an avid Opera user I've been enjoying this feature since.. well 1998 or something like that:-)
Can you navigate forward/back by holding the left/right mousebutton while clicking the right/left? That's one feature I cannot live without nowadays.
So I submitted it. <decloak> Now I almost hope they nuke it, or at least rewrite the submission, because I failed to make clear why it is potentially stuff that matters;
Either it's true for the most part, which would be just incredible. How can the judges get away with stuff like that? Where's the media? What happened?!
or..
It's a big lie, in which it's interesting because all the effort that's gone into it. Loads of documents, interviews, people, etc, and lot's of 'facts' that shouldn't be to hard to check up on, for an american. Does the case even exist? If not, why haven't anyone debunked the page already?How many people like me are there, spreading the big lie on and on...?
Apart from the reports on Dmitry, this is the most interesting thing I've read in a good while.
I'd still like to see the hoards of slashdot have at it, but it must be made clear that this is highly suspicious stuff.
A long time ago a friend of mine ran a BBS on his Amiga. He had the startup rigged with a boot-meny containing a fake "Start BBS"-entry as a default, which - if chosen - would encrypt the RDB (Rigid Disk-Block) and reset. Or something to that effect.
Hey, don't look at me, it wasn't my computer, nor my idea.
Tell me about it. I registered a domain a couple of months ago, after having waited for it for years (some South African dude nicked it right before my eyes..).
Record expires on 02-Feb-2001.
Record created on 02-Feb-1999.
That's from a whois of the domain I did the 5:th of May!
A few days after that record semi-expired, listing only NS, not the original owner.
Not until the 18:th of May was the domain finally released and I could register it,
so they held on to it for about three months after the record expired. Sucked.
I know, I was "there" when superstor and stacker were all the rage.
Back then the problem was a) Software solutions slowed things way down and ate precious memory b) They were relatively unsafe because they added another layer of filsystem indirection (lose a cluster of the 'container' file and you had days of fun ahead) and c) Hardware was expensive and 'external'
With todays processing power you could offload it onto the controller on-board the drive. Cheap, fast and efficient.
That's exactly it. I see consumer protection/rights as the reason why reverse-engineering should not only be allowed, it should be actively encouraged!
Spreading rev-eng techniques to the masses is The Right Thing to do.
eBook, meet IDA and SoftIce. Adobe, meet whack-a-mole.
I'm working with PDFs (programmatic generation of) at my place of employment, and if security issues ever come up you can bet I'm gonna tell the truth.
"Security? What security?"
As a programmer I have no sway in what the copywriters and graphicians use though, but I'm sure as hell is gonna bring this up. Maybe I could show them GIMP, or at least talk about it as a possible substitute.
Waste time telling Adobe what they already know?! Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Of course Adobe know their product isn't secure, it's just that they don't want ANYONE ELSE to know or tell the public about it. That is bad publicity, and that in turn is bad for the stock.
What these companies want is a nice little world where they can say whatever they want, even out right lie about their products, all the while having laws making sure no-one can come forward and expose them for the liars they are, and spread the truth about the product.
I've always hoped that we'd get compression in hardware on these cheap ATA drives, like for free. Sure, it complicates adressing sectors, but it'd be cool.
Maybe the Big Ones could get together and work out a standard for a small DSP/processor thingy with a small area for code and data which could be flashed with code for doing compression / encryption / added redundancy / whatever.
Just for the record, I write these things so that in ten years, we won't have to have that "Oh, that wasn't obvious at all!"-disussion. (just kidding)
In the future actors will live on for ever, as they can be digitally recreated. That isn't a new thought of course. At first this may require special 'recording' sessions to capture their motion and such things, but I forsee a future where for instance the voice of anyone can be modelled with such accuracy that 80% or more of the population cannot discern original from copy. So instead of "You copied my movie!" it will be "You copied my voice!".
Next thing we know, there'll be copyrights on voice and speech-patterns, trademarked ways to utter certain syllables, etc. There'll be courtbattles over who owns $famous_actor's voice-patterns after he/she's long dead. Corporations will rush in to try and grab exclusive rights to classic actors. There'll be "voice rape"-laws, and a whole lot of retro-things there in the beginning of the revolution.
...Then maybe we'll all go up in a big bang. That'd be neat.
Slashdot Mirror
You've have to excuse me, but as a non-merkan' I'm not very knowledgable on what the different Departments of Whatever are supposed to be doing in the first place. I can only guess that the DoD is a large organization, doing all kinds of things in areas one might not think they'd have any interest in (like DARPA).
Anyway, It could be everything from a technology test, a bug, misconfiguration or any of a number of "benign" reasons. I mean, my own personal site is crawled several times a month by a certain spider. Why? Who knows. I don't update it very often, and I'm sure there's a whole lot of "other internet" to crawl instead of spending time with my small corner.
Granted, once a day is often enough that one might want to coordinate to find out more, like you've done.
Prediction: This won't happen. The net is full of very bad PR at the moment because of this "rumor". AMD, which might well be in an advanced stage of planning this out, will realize that this sucks, retreat and try the only sensible thing instead; plain information.
Gawd I hope I'm right.
And what's up with the Palomino problems? That sucks even more by the sound of it.
Inktomi of course is a search-engine.
I really don't see what the big deal is.
RSA and Eliptic Curve Cryptography is used for "copy protection" in a number of products. HIEW uses RSA for it's keyfile IIRC, and ECC is used by CloneCD, just to name two examples.
Or were you thinking of something else?
Download here.
Shit, you mean there's prior art?! :-)
(Yeah I remember, now that you mention it. It might be interesting to see how Windows would behave with two task monitoring each other in the same way. I'm not sure how it works behind the scenes with killing processes.)
The point of the interlock is to form a dependence. Purpose: to ensure the survival of the worm in a hostile environment. Survival is of paramount imporance. Any kind of payload must come second.
The artificial society would take advantage of the fact that to cleanly kill it off the real-world enemy, us humans, would have to enter into correspondingly interconnected communication and trust
Payload is a whole other topic, where destruction of data is the least interesting one, though I agree that data-corruption is amongst the most evil payloads.
I've had similar thoughts. I've been reading Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence and with the Code Red outbreak, I've taken to reading it with malware in mind.
What I've come to realize is that a worm could become real scary if its author, like me, were to be a fan of multi-agent systems. There's a plenthora of research on agent-to-agent communication, just waiting for that big experiment to take place.
Ponder this: interlock. The worms work together to reach a situation in which a host cannot be cleaned without data from another host, and vice-versa, thus making disinfection extremely hard
I've been sketching on scenario where relationships are created via the infection plus one level. if A infects B (first level of interconnect), then B would tell A about every other host it infects in turn (second level). These hosts would form a cluster, where each member is free to initiate contact with another and request services.One of these could be the encryption or decryption of data. Hosts would say "Please encrypt this data (hands it over) and return the encrypted result". Say host A tells host B this. Suddenly we're in a situation where we cannot simply disinfect host B, because if we do we'll lose the key that decrypts data on host A! Of course, the worms would negotiate the complement, and host A would contain the key to unlock data in host B. We then expand this scenario to a great interconnection between members of the cluster. We can strengthen the connections by allowing unrelated hosts to negotiate interlocks.
In the same vein worms can negotiate and divide the search-space between them. Each worm could contain a compressed/simplified representation of the IP-search-space (just a couple of masks maybe? Haven't thought too hard about it). Relatives would communicate which parts have been scanned as to not duplicate (too much) work. This then becomes a parallell binary search!
I think I'm gonna have to write a short doomsday article too, there's just so much cool things that someone wicked could do.
You really believe delta-compression was invented with Q3, don't you? :-\
Sorry, but this is getting boring. Technically the engines are great, but... Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3/Quake 3:TA, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", Doom 3, Quake 4... it's getting a little bit repetitive.
The Looking Glass people did it right with Thief. Red Storm built Rainbow Six around good gameplay, but a crap engine and the worst netcode I've experienced (well, that's a lie -- I'm not counting Operation Flashpoint since I consider it Beta). Couldn't ID take their tech to the tactical level?
I've been waiting for ID to whip up a real good CRPG using a state-of-the-art 3d-engine for some time now... I hope those people over at ID can enjoy games from some other genre than just straight action-FPS, or they'll fade away... I'm not seeing myself buying any of their FPS anyhow. <shrug>.
Ah well, guess we have Bioware and Gas Powered Games to refine and put out some great gameplay for us.
Chris Taylor and John Carmack teaming up, now that could be interesting. Or maybe Jane Jensen doing another Gabriel Knight using Carmack-o-tech. Anything BUT ANOTHER FPS!
try burning a SafeDisc2 protected image on a new Plextor drive.
No problem. The PlexWriter PX-W2410A does perfect Safedisc 2 copies, at least with the firmware shipped to reviewers.
Of course, SD2 is pretty much broken if you take into consideration BetaBlocker, a program you can use to 'fix' a SD2-protected image prior to burning. Works with any burner.
Oh, I agree that being able to scale the whole page is a very useful function. Being an avid Opera user I've been enjoying this feature since.. well 1998 or something like that :-)
Can you navigate forward/back by holding the left/right mousebutton while clicking the right/left? That's one feature I cannot live without nowadays.
I'm sure it'll will be popular with game developers. Ogg is already being used by Bohemia Interactive for Operation Flashpoint, for instance.
So I submitted it. <decloak> Now I almost hope they nuke it, or at least rewrite the submission, because I failed to make clear why it is potentially stuff that matters;
Either it's true for the most part, which would be just incredible. How can the judges get away with stuff like that? Where's the media? What happened?!
or..
It's a big lie, in which it's interesting because all the effort that's gone into it. Loads of documents, interviews, people, etc, and lot's of 'facts' that shouldn't be to hard to check up on, for an american. Does the case even exist? If not, why haven't anyone debunked the page already?How many people like me are there, spreading the big lie on and on...?
Apart from the reports on Dmitry, this is the most interesting thing I've read in a good while.
I'd still like to see the hoards of slashdot have at it, but it must be made clear that this is highly suspicious stuff.
Somewhat related...
A long time ago a friend of mine ran a BBS on his Amiga. He had the startup rigged with a boot-meny containing a fake "Start BBS"-entry as a default, which - if chosen - would encrypt the RDB (Rigid Disk-Block) and reset. Or something to that effect.
Hey, don't look at me, it wasn't my computer, nor my idea.
If it was a decent system the hashes of the passwords would be stored, not the passwords themselves (encrypted or not)
Tell me about it. I registered a domain a couple of months ago, after having waited for it for years (some South African dude nicked it right before my eyes..).
Record expires on 02-Feb-2001.
Record created on 02-Feb-1999.
That's from a whois of the domain I did the 5:th of May!
A few days after that record semi-expired, listing only NS, not the original owner.
Not until the 18:th of May was the domain finally released and I could register it, so they held on to it for about three months after the record expired. Sucked.
I know, I was "there" when superstor and stacker were all the rage.
Back then the problem was a) Software solutions slowed things way down and ate precious memory b) They were relatively unsafe because they added another layer of filsystem indirection (lose a cluster of the 'container' file and you had days of fun ahead) and c) Hardware was expensive and 'external'
With todays processing power you could offload it onto the controller on-board the drive. Cheap, fast and efficient.
I said 'cool', not 'very important'.
That's exactly it. I see consumer protection/rights as the reason why reverse-engineering should not only be allowed, it should be actively encouraged!
Spreading rev-eng techniques to the masses is The Right Thing to do.
eBook, meet IDA and SoftIce. Adobe, meet whack-a-mole.
I'm working with PDFs (programmatic generation of) at my place of employment, and if security issues ever come up you can bet I'm gonna tell the truth.
"Security? What security?"
As a programmer I have no sway in what the copywriters and graphicians use though, but I'm sure as hell is gonna bring this up. Maybe I could show them GIMP, or at least talk about it as a possible substitute.
Waste time telling Adobe what they already know?! Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Of course Adobe know their product isn't secure, it's just that they don't want ANYONE ELSE to know or tell the public about it. That is bad publicity, and that in turn is bad for the stock.
What these companies want is a nice little world where they can say whatever they want, even out right lie about their products, all the while having laws making sure no-one can come forward and expose them for the liars they are, and spread the truth about the product.
They're halfway there. Fuck!
This really makes me mad! Argh... Adobe, you've just made a whole lot of new enemies.
Burn.
And when you shut your eyes, does the world sieze to exist?
My spambox gets everything from 0 to 20 spammails a day
I've always hoped that we'd get compression in hardware on these cheap ATA drives, like for free. Sure, it complicates adressing sectors, but it'd be cool.
Maybe the Big Ones could get together and work out a standard for a small DSP/processor thingy with a small area for code and data which could be flashed with code for doing compression / encryption / added redundancy / whatever.
Just for the record, I write these things so that in ten years, we won't have to have that "Oh, that wasn't obvious at all!"-disussion. (just kidding)
In the future actors will live on for ever, as they can be digitally recreated. That isn't a new thought of course. At first this may require special 'recording' sessions to capture their motion and such things, but I forsee a future where for instance the voice of anyone can be modelled with such accuracy that 80% or more of the population cannot discern original from copy. So instead of "You copied my movie!" it will be "You copied my voice!".
Next thing we know, there'll be copyrights on voice and speech-patterns, trademarked ways to utter certain syllables, etc. There'll be courtbattles over who owns $famous_actor's voice-patterns after he/she's long dead. Corporations will rush in to try and grab exclusive rights to classic actors. There'll be "voice rape"-laws, and a whole lot of retro-things there in the beginning of the revolution.
...Then maybe we'll all go up in a big bang. That'd be neat.
Then we all agree then, there ain't no Nobel prize given out in Economic Sciences or whatever you want to call it.
I am of course well aware of the honorary prizes, but they are just that, and calling them "Nobel prizes" is wrong.
That was my point.