"A story in Bloomberg Businessweek gives the first in-depth look at a wave of new start-ups selling cyber weaponry"
And yet in the opening para we have some guy in a ski mask breaking into some offices. This, another article from the school of bad fiction and total cyberbullshit
> The sketches featuring boxes labeled PDP-11 and pointers to "The Ether" would eventually be translated into a big-time business for 3Com, Digital Equipment Corp, and now, just about anybody in the computer, telecom and networking businesses..
How did this happen without patent protection for "The Ether"?
"British consumers will have to pay far more than their U.S. counterparts for Apple's latest must-have gadget, the iPad. Apple has announced that the starting price in the UK will be £429 for the 16GB model with a wi-fi link to the internet - around 25 per cent more than in America. The equivalent price for the same device there is around £340.. In an effort to explain the price difference between America and Britain, Apple pointed to the fact that there are different, and higher, taxes in Europe, as well as higher transport and other costs".. link
"perceived sleights turned into byzantine obsession is a sign of a person who will do nothing but bring grief to anyone who ever touches his or her life"
Have you never see the Cable Guy or One Hour Photo. I guess the lesson to be learned here is don't piss off technical support..:)
"Up until his termination in June of 2010, Ardolf worked at Medtronic as a neuromodulation device repair technician" link
How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in Historylink
"Months earlier, in June 2009, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran with just one aim"
Is there some kind of directive in place that doesn't allow for the mention of MIcrosoft Windows and who in their right mind would be using Windows to control hardware? And that entire report coming from the style of bad journalism, ie. a very bad imitation of Tom Wolf.
"In this case, the exploit allowed the virus to cleverly spread from one computer to another via infected USB sticks. The vulnerability was in the LNK file of Windows Explorer"
Finally, we get to a mention of Windows and what's a browser even doing on a 'computer' controlling a centrefuge? So to recapp, Insert USB device->Windows attempts to to open an icon from a LNK shortcut, the loads a malicious DLL into memory, the DLL is in actuality a rootkit disguised as a digitally signed device driver that gets loaded and run with 'root' privileges, the perps now have full control of your 'computer'.
"When an infected USB stick was inserted into a computer, as Explorer automatically scanned the contents of the stick, the exploit code awakened and surreptitiously dropped a large, partially encrypted file onto the computer, like a military transport plane dropping camouflaged soldiers into target territory"
"On the night before Thanksgiving last year, T.J. Whelan.. phone started buzzing with texts.. The messages said there was no connectivity to the Microsoft Exchange cluster.. That meant that attorneys in the firm's two U.S. offices and two overseas offices were completely cut off from email.. The network manager contacted Dell support, which confirmed that the disks had failed but also reported that it might be a while before replacement parts could be located"..
This beggers belief, the IT department of a major law firm don't keep a single harddrive as backup and don't have a standby system in place for just such an eventuality as a failed harddrive..
> the company appears to be establishing its case by suing Fujitsu and Lenovo over the use of its invention in the Lifebook and Thinkpad series of products..
What 'invention`, a temperature controlled variable CPU clock frequency...
Paul Ceglia: The Man Who Owns 84% of Facebook? link
"Ceglia sifting through old files in his western New York home to find assets to pay back his clientele. He says he came across a document signed in 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg, then a freshman at Harvard and now chief executive of Facebook. He says the document is a valid contract that entitles him to an 84 percent stake in Facebook"
"Mr. Ceglia's high-profile representation.. recently withdrew from the case at a critical juncture.. Mr. Ceglia is carrying on with a small, boutique-y firm of four San Diego-based attorneys who, according to CNET, represent 200 medical marijuana collectives. link
> My FF upgraded itself today to FF5 and I have plugins that don't work, tom17
Why did you change the "Ask me what to I want to do" setting in Update. The option third down from "Automatically check for updates to:". And just under that is an option "Warn me if this will disable any of my add-ons"
"Gawker used this broken implementation, which replaced all non-ascii characters with question marks prior to hashing". link
"Versions of jBCrypt before 0.3 suffered from a bug related to character encoding that substantially reduced the entropy of hashed passwords containing non US-ASCII characters.
"An incorrect encoding step transparently replaced such characters by '?' prior to hashing. In the worst case of a password consisting solely of non-US-ASCII characters, this would cause its hash to be equivalent to all other such passwords of the same length".link
Didn't anyone ever test the algorithm to see if if functioned as designed, as in producing unique hashs for very similar passwords. Would be most important as part of an encryption suite..
"Ironically, by preventing others from enacting the rights granted by the GNU GPL, AVM itself is in violation of the license terms. Therefore they have no right to distribute the software" says Till Jaeger.
> The problem is that with Microsoft if there is a problem you call them up and they fix it but they don't tell you how to prevent the problem in the future..
The average Microsoft Certified sandwichmaker only know how to click on a 'service pack' or reinstall, reinstall, reinstall the OS.
> However this does allow you to hire more, cheaper, engineers and programmers to run your wares. Unix systems required a higher caliber of programmer and engineer team because you didn't have the support, other than a company like IBM..
That's a false analogy, more doesn't equate to cheaper, and Unix support staff aren't necessarily more expensive. And unless you are in the software development process, then you would have no need of onsite programmers. And there are numerous companies offering support contracts.
"The big decision is in: United Airlines plans to wean itself off its decades-long reservations-system provider, Travelport’s Apollo, and to migrate its reservations to HP’s SHARES system in 2012". link
"The Apollo reservation system used by United Airlines was down worldwide for at least four hours Tuesday", Jan 2006 link
"Today, our businesses move too fast for the traditional IT model; instead, business technology (BT) leaders must partner with their business colleagues to create business and technology strategy simultaneously."
I thought that's how it was always done, identify a market for a particular technology. I hadn't realized the `traditional IT model' was a hindrance to doing business. Doing large scale IT projects is a bit like building bridges, each one is unique and you never want to be involved in one again. Given the anount of buzz words in that article I figure its aimed at the clueless PHB who don't know or don't want to know about real world IT processes.
Key words: building bridges, business architecture strategies, business change, business objectives., business partners, business strategy, business technology, co-created innovation, co-creating business, collective action, consultation, continual refinement, Counter-intuitively, customer-driven, empowered BT organization, empowered employees, flexibility, flexible processes , foundation, fresh technology implementations, interrelated disciplines:, IT capabilities , key potential driver, legacy burdens, new-generation technology visioning, operationalizing innovation, process flexibility, provision their own technology, push innovation, ruthless standardization of technology, scaling innovative solutions, service delivery infrastructure, smart business process management, technology alignment, technology strategy, the enterprise, tools, traditional IT , Unleash technology-based innovation, waterfall process...
"So, where's Brazil getting all of this ethanol from? The United States. According to Platts, almost all of Brazil's imports were U.S. corn-based ethanol, as prices were deemed to be the world's most competitive".
`Linus Torvalds has done well with Linux and now Git, but I don't really seeing him deserving the title of pioneer of "open innovation". At least not in the way the author is using the word "pioneer"'
That might be true but first one would have to redefine the meaning of 'pioneer', 'creating', 'taking advantage of', "open innovation" and "open source methodologies"
"I'm doing a (free) operating system.. and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them:-)link
"Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is a satirical book on American politics by comedian, political commentator and now Senator Al Franken, published in 2003 link - Amazon.com Review
"Am I the only person who would actually prefer the Windows 3.1.. a nice "desktop" that you can organise how you like.. without things popping up at random places on the screen"
"I guess you heard that Florian Mueller is at it again. He made strong claims of a smoking gun regarding alleged copyright infringement of Oracle files by Google. Well, in the cold light of day, some of the media who printed it without fact checking are now awakening to the news that the news wasn't as reliable or unchallengeable as they assumed". link
"The actual damages Oracle is demanding are unclear, since many portions of the latest five-page document are blacked out of view in the publicly available version filed Monday in federal court".
"After years of pretending to be a friend of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), IBM now shows its true colors. IBM breaks the number one taboo of the FOSS community and shamelessly uses its patents against a well-respected FOSS project, the Hercules mainframe emulator", Florian Mueller
"IBM has no intention of asserting its patent portfolio against the Linux kernel, unless of course we are forced to defend ourselves", IBM
"The '078 is the modern day version of a submarine patent, the claims morphing over more than a decade through a CIP and multiple continuations, most of which were abandoned along the way" link
"This Customer-Based Product Design Module (CB-PD Module) invention is designed to embed a new type of product feature within a range of products and services, helping them evolve into Customer Directed Products (CDP) by means of Development Interactions (DI). The result is a continuous source of Aggregate Customer Desires (ACD) and Defined Customer Desires (DCD) from customers and users while they are using these products and services. This serves vendors as a continuous way to listen to Customers and understand their performance, their needs and their expectations." link
"In nature, we know that ants defend against threats very successfully," Fulp said. "They can ramp up their defense rapidly, and then resume routine behavior quickly after an intruder has been stopped. We're trying to achieve that same framework in a computer system." link
Except computer viruses are no way near analogous to the biological kind. In nature the virus first has to latch onto the outside of the cell before injecting its genetic payload. It does this by hijacking biological processes necessary the cell to survive and propagate in the host fluid. There is no such analogous process in computer systems. A computer system can still function without ever having to download external code. The root cause of the current virus/spam/phishing infestation being the inability of the local system to differentiate between code and data and not allowing remote code to be run.
"this summer researchers are working to train the "digital ants" well enough that they can turn them loose into the power grid to seek out computer viruses trying to wreak havoc on the system".
The only way 'computer viruses` could get into the power grid is if you run your SCADA units on Microsoft Windows and connect them directly to the Internet. Designing a system that allows 'digital ants` to scurry about and be secure at the same time is a contradiction in terms. What happens if the 'digital ants` are hijacked by the.cyber->terrorists:)
“The power grid is probably more vulnerable to cyber attacks than security experts would like to admit,” said Fulp.,
What part of don't connect your SCADA units to the Internet don't these 'security experts' understand?
“As the grid becomes more and more interconnected, it offers hackers more points to enter the system; for instance, inserting a virus or computer worm into a low security site, such as in your home's smart grid, to gain access to more secure systems up the line,”
Anyone who designs such a system should be arrested immediately and shifted off to Guantanamo Bay as a threat to national security.
Slashdot Mirror
"A story in Bloomberg Businessweek gives the first in-depth look at a wave of new start-ups selling cyber weaponry"
And yet in the opening para we have some guy in a ski mask breaking into some offices. This, another article from the school of bad fiction and total cyberbullshit
'Customers have shown that, so far, they have been willing to suffer through a poor user experience in order to enjoy the benefits Facebook provides'
What customers, it's a free service, paid for through advertising !!!!
> The sketches featuring boxes labeled PDP-11 and pointers to "The Ether" would eventually be translated into a big-time business for 3Com, Digital Equipment Corp, and now, just about anybody in the computer, telecom and networking businesses ..
How did this happen without patent protection for "The Ether"?
And the solution is .. go directly to the Download site ...
"British consumers will have to pay far more than their U.S. counterparts for Apple's latest must-have gadget, the iPad. .. In an effort to explain the price difference between America and Britain, Apple pointed to the fact that there are different, and higher, taxes in Europe, as well as higher transport and other costs" .. link
Apple has announced that the starting price in the UK will be £429 for the 16GB model with a wi-fi link to the internet - around 25 per cent more than in America. The equivalent price for the same device there is around £340
"perceived sleights turned into byzantine obsession is a sign of a person who will do nothing but bring grief to anyone who ever touches his or her life"
Have you never see the Cable Guy or One Hour Photo. I guess the lesson to be learned here is don't piss off technical support .. :)
"Up until his termination in June of 2010, Ardolf worked at Medtronic as a neuromodulation device repair technician" link
How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History link
"Months earlier, in June 2009, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran with just one aim"
Is there some kind of directive in place that doesn't allow for the mention of MIcrosoft Windows and who in their right mind would be using Windows to control hardware? And that entire report coming from the style of bad journalism, ie. a very bad imitation of Tom Wolf.
"In this case, the exploit allowed the virus to cleverly spread from one computer to another via infected USB sticks. The vulnerability was in the LNK file of Windows Explorer"
Finally, we get to a mention of Windows and what's a browser even doing on a 'computer' controlling a centrefuge? So to recapp, Insert USB device->Windows attempts to to open an icon from a LNK shortcut, the loads a malicious DLL into memory, the DLL is in actuality a rootkit disguised as a digitally signed device driver that gets loaded and run with 'root' privileges, the perps now have full control of your 'computer'.
"When an infected USB stick was inserted into a computer, as Explorer automatically scanned the contents of the stick, the exploit code awakened and surreptitiously dropped a large, partially encrypted file onto the computer, like a military transport plane dropping camouflaged soldiers into target territory"
Ohh for fucks sake !!!
"On the night before Thanksgiving last year, T.J. Whelan .. phone started buzzing with texts .. The messages said there was no connectivity to the Microsoft Exchange cluster .. That meant that attorneys in the firm's two U.S. offices and two overseas offices were completely cut off from email .. The network manager contacted Dell support, which confirmed that the disks had failed but also reported that it might be a while before replacement parts could be located" ..
This beggers belief, the IT department of a major law firm don't keep a single harddrive as backup and don't have a standby system in place for just such an eventuality as a failed harddrive ..
> the company appears to be establishing its case by suing Fujitsu and Lenovo over the use of its invention in the Lifebook and Thinkpad series of products ..
What 'invention`, a temperature controlled variable CPU clock frequency ...
Paul Ceglia: The Man Who Owns 84% of Facebook? link
"Ceglia sifting through old files in his western New York home to find assets to pay back his clientele. He says he came across a document signed in 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg, then a freshman at Harvard and now chief executive of Facebook. He says the document is a valid contract that entitles him to an 84 percent stake in Facebook"
"Mr. Ceglia's high-profile representation .. recently withdrew from the case at a critical juncture .. Mr. Ceglia is carrying on with a small, boutique-y firm of four San Diego-based attorneys who, according to CNET, represent 200 medical marijuana collectives. link
Better watch out then as if you win then these two will come suing your ass off Winklevoss Twins Resume Facebook Attack..
> My FF upgraded itself today to FF5 and I have plugins that don't work, tom17
Why did you change the "Ask me what to I want to do" setting in Update. The option third down from "Automatically check for updates to:". And just under that is an option "Warn me if this will disable any of my add-ons"
Tools->Options->Advanced->Update ..
"Gawker used this broken implementation, which replaced all non-ascii characters with question marks prior to hashing". link
"Versions of jBCrypt before 0.3 suffered from a bug related to character encoding that substantially reduced the entropy of hashed passwords containing non US-ASCII characters.
"An incorrect encoding step transparently replaced such characters by '?' prior to hashing. In the worst case of a password consisting solely of non-US-ASCII characters, this would cause its hash to be equivalent to all other such passwords of the same length". link
Didn't anyone ever test the algorithm to see if if functioned as designed, as in producing unique hashs for very similar passwords. Would be most important as part of an encryption suite ..
"Ironically, by preventing others from enacting the rights granted by the GNU GPL, AVM itself is in violation of the license terms. Therefore they have no right to distribute the software" says Till Jaeger.
> The problem is that with Microsoft if there is a problem you call them up and they fix it but they don't tell you how to prevent the problem in the future ..
The average Microsoft Certified sandwichmaker only know how to click on a 'service pack' or reinstall, reinstall, reinstall the OS.
> However this does allow you to hire more, cheaper, engineers and programmers to run your wares. Unix systems required a higher caliber of programmer and engineer team because you didn't have the support, other than a company like IBM ..
That's a false analogy, more doesn't equate to cheaper, and Unix support staff aren't necessarily more expensive. And unless you are in the software development process, then you would have no need of onsite programmers. And there are numerous companies offering support contracts.
"The big decision is in: United Airlines plans to wean itself off its decades-long reservations-system provider, Travelport’s Apollo, and to migrate its reservations to HP’s SHARES system in 2012". link
"The Apollo reservation system used by United Airlines was down worldwide for at least four hours Tuesday", Jan 2006 link
"Today, our businesses move too fast for the traditional IT model; instead, business technology (BT) leaders must partner with their business colleagues to create business and technology strategy simultaneously."
I thought that's how it was always done, identify a market for a particular technology. I hadn't realized the `traditional IT model' was a hindrance to doing business. Doing large scale IT projects is a bit like building bridges, each one is unique and you never want to be involved in one again. Given the anount of buzz words in that article I figure its aimed at the clueless PHB who don't know or don't want to know about real world IT processes.
Key words: building bridges, business architecture strategies, business change, business objectives., business partners, business strategy, business technology, co-created innovation, co-creating business, collective action, consultation, continual refinement, Counter-intuitively, customer-driven, empowered BT organization, empowered employees, flexibility, flexible processes , foundation, fresh technology implementations, interrelated disciplines:, IT capabilities , key potential driver, legacy burdens, new-generation technology visioning, operationalizing innovation, process flexibility, provision their own technology, push innovation, ruthless standardization of technology, scaling innovative solutions, service delivery infrastructure, smart business process management, technology alignment, technology strategy, the enterprise, tools, traditional IT , Unleash technology-based innovation, waterfall process ...
Brazil's ethanol industry
Brazil imports record amount of ethanol
"So, where's Brazil getting all of this ethanol from? The United States. According to Platts, almost all of Brazil's imports were U.S. corn-based ethanol, as prices were deemed to be the world's most competitive".
`Linus Torvalds has done well with Linux and now Git, but I don't really seeing him deserving the title of pioneer of "open innovation". At least not in the way the author is using the word "pioneer"'
That might be true but first one would have to redefine the meaning of 'pioneer', 'creating', 'taking advantage of', "open innovation" and "open source methodologies"
"I'm doing a (free) operating system .. and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) link
" Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is a satirical book on American politics by comedian, political commentator and now Senator Al Franken, published in 2003 link - Amazon.com Review
"This type of data mining holds great potential for investigative revelation — and great potential for journalistic abuse"
I don't think so ...
"Am I the only person who would actually prefer the Windows 3.1 .. a nice "desktop" that you can organise how you like .. without things popping up at random places on the screen"
A combination of Novell Netware and Xtree done for me or even Midnight Commander
"I guess you heard that Florian Mueller is at it again. He made strong claims of a smoking gun regarding alleged copyright infringement of Oracle files by Google. Well, in the cold light of day, some of the media who printed it without fact checking are now awakening to the news that the news wasn't as reliable or unchallengeable as they assumed". link
"The actual damages Oracle is demanding are unclear, since many portions of the latest five-page document are blacked out of view in the publicly available version filed Monday in federal court".
"After years of pretending to be a friend of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), IBM now shows its true colors. IBM breaks the number one taboo of the FOSS community and shamelessly uses its patents against a well-respected FOSS project, the Hercules mainframe emulator", Florian Mueller
"IBM has no intention of asserting its patent portfolio against the Linux kernel, unless of course we are forced to defend ourselves", IBM
"The '078 is the modern day version of a submarine patent, the claims morphing over more than a decade through a CIP and multiple continuations, most of which were abandoned along the way" link
"This Customer-Based Product Design Module (CB-PD Module) invention is designed to embed a new type of product feature within a range of products and services, helping them evolve into Customer Directed Products (CDP) by means of Development Interactions (DI). The result is a continuous source of Aggregate Customer Desires (ACD) and Defined Customer Desires (DCD) from customers and users while they are using these products and services. This serves vendors as a continuous way to listen to Customers and understand their performance, their needs and their expectations." link
"In nature, we know that ants defend against threats very successfully," Fulp said. "They can ramp up their defense rapidly, and then resume routine behavior quickly after an intruder has been stopped. We're trying to achieve that same framework in a computer system." link
Except computer viruses are no way near analogous to the biological kind. In nature the virus first has to latch onto the outside of the cell before injecting its genetic payload. It does this by hijacking biological processes necessary the cell to survive and propagate in the host fluid. There is no such analogous process in computer systems. A computer system can still function without ever having to download external code. The root cause of the current virus/spam/phishing infestation being the inability of the local system to differentiate between code and data and not allowing remote code to be run.
"this summer researchers are working to train the "digital ants" well enough that they can turn them loose into the power grid to seek out computer viruses trying to wreak havoc on the system".
The only way 'computer viruses` could get into the power grid is if you run your SCADA units on Microsoft Windows and connect them directly to the Internet. Designing a system that allows 'digital ants` to scurry about and be secure at the same time is a contradiction in terms. What happens if the 'digital ants` are hijacked by the .cyber->terrorists :)
“The power grid is probably more vulnerable to cyber attacks than security experts would like to admit,” said Fulp.,
What part of don't connect your SCADA units to the Internet don't these 'security experts' understand?
“As the grid becomes more and more interconnected, it offers hackers more points to enter the system; for instance, inserting a virus or computer worm into a low security site, such as in your home's smart grid, to gain access to more secure systems up the line,”
Anyone who designs such a system should be arrested immediately and shifted off to Guantanamo Bay as a threat to national security.