Re:I want Code Red IV myself...
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2
I'd be happy if it used an HCF instruction, or at least programmed the video chip for an extremely high resolution at 100 Hz refresh, resulting in the monitor going HCF. Another option (on soft-power ATX machines) is to shut down (but not reboot) the system. Maybe zero out the boot blocks, too. Actually just the boot blocks alone would be enough fun. Basically, something annoying that has at least a 1% chance of getting the attention of your average MCSE.
Why is it my favorite hit so far? Because I really was "hacked by Chinese"!
inetnum: 61.131.51.72 - 61.131.51.79
netname: NANAN-SHISHAN-SCHOOL
descr: Shishan middle school of Nan'an
descr: town of Quanzhou city of Fujian
descr: province
country: CN
admin-c: MD47-AP
tech-c: MD47-AP
mnt-by: MAINT-CHINANET-FJ
changed: milizi@sina.com 20010526
source: APNIC
It would be interesting to look at the sales of Code Red Mountain Dew (so when are they going to make Code Blue?) and how they have been affected by all the publicity generated by the worm. This is the kind of publicity that money just can't buy, other than by passing out free cases of soda to cube farms full of programmers.
I know that virtually everyone who reads this site will agree that this is a load of crap, so let me just summarize my reaction: "To save the Internet, it was necessary to destroy the Internet."
When in actuality all we need to do to save the internet is to destroy Microsoft.
For the record, Code Red doesn't actually infect the routers, but does trigger a known crashing bug in the IOS web server that was discovered a few months ago. So it will stop an un-upgraded router dead in its tracks.
I've been hit seven times so far according to my Apache access logs, and a possible three other times on another machine with no web server, but a logging firewall block on port 80.
At least two of the hits are from an @home and a DSL customer. Perhaps by crashing the un-upgraded Cisco DSL routers they're actually doing a service by preventing DS-Lusers' home machines from being able to spread the worm. Not to mention blocking all the skript-k1dd13 IRC DD0S w4r3z that are already running on said lusers' machines.
An interesting anecdote is two weeks ago when I called my ISP, their phone answered with a message about Code Red, and then I overheard a tech support guy in another cubicle at the ISP telling someone to power-cycle their router.
Anyone in or near Austin who wants to see some vintage computers should check out the Goodwill Computer Store on US 183 at Ohlen. Lots of old micros there in the back room museum, plus a disk array frame (I think that's what it is) out of a Cray.
TI pulled out of the computer business about six months after we got it, though, so it never got beyond 16K and the hideously slow (double-interpreted?) built-in BASIC.
The reason it was so slow was that the 16K it used was the video chip RAM. This is esentially the same chip used in the ColecoVision (except Coleco for some bizarre reason used the RGB version and an RGB video to RF modulator!) In order to use this RAM, you have to tell the video chip the address, then you can read sequential data bytes from it. This is an I/O operation, rather than a normal memory operation. Everything must have been stored out there, including the program and variables.
I learned how slow it was one day when I saw one powered up in a store. I hit the RETURN key and the thing took a whole second of thinking before it did the nothing that I asked it to! That's right, it took a whole second just to do nothing!
When you had a PEB or sidecar RAM, that was in the 64K address space of the CPU, and I've heard that BASIC would know to use that instead. Of course TI discouraged any non-PEB expansion, so sidecar options were only used by the tech savvy. (And not many tech savvy folk went with the TI in the first place.)
Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it.
The main units (and about two dozen different cartridges) were very common back in the mid 90's when I was collecting classic video game stuff. Except for the old non-A version with the chiclet keyboard, that is. It's the goodies that will set you back.
I only wish. I drank a can of "Old Coke" about six months after New Coke came out. (At an automotive garage that would buy months worth of soda ahead of time just because they could.) It was only after I drank it and noticed the familiar flavor that I looked at the can and saw the promotional offer from just before New Coke came out.
New Coke was really just a scam so they could stop using 100% sucrose sugar because U.S. sugar prices were so inflated (like 10 times the world market price) and start using High Fructose Corn Syrup instead. They would mess so much with the sweetner mix for Coke Classic that about three or four years ago I gave up and switched to Diet Coke because of batches of Coke Classic that would taste worse. At least Diet Coke has a consistent flavor.
Re:The Difference Engine
on
Zeitgeist
·
· Score: 2
I didn't think The Difference Engine had much in the way of a coherent plot, but I loved it because the setting was such wonderful eye candy for my imagination. It was like reading chocolate. Or something like that. It also helped that I was listening to Jean Michel Jarre's Revolutions, the first four parts of which make for great steampunk background music.
Nope, that was Kansas. And once they were quietly taken aside and had it explained to them by a math professor, they withdrew the bill.
Re:Screwed by Laserdisc? No way.
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 2
I had a Laserdisc player for about six years before I switched to DVD, and it was *great*.
The big question is: why did you get rid of it? Those $1500 in costs were already paid out, and now you'd be able to find stuff in pawn shops and used book stores that still isn't on DVD. I got into LD during its last two or three years, and ended up with half a dozen players, and over 600 LDs, many of which were purchased at $10 each, and many more at $3 each. (My cheapest was four for 50 cents each at a thrift store that charged me LP prices.) In the past few months, used LDs have become much easier to find, and my collection is still growing.
Re:Screwed by Laserdisc? No way.
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 2
Actually, laserdiscs are (originally, at least) 100% analog. They may have pits and non-pits, but the spacing of the pits is analog. They represent a broadband FM modulated RF signal, at maximum modulation such that the signal only has two levels. The time between pit edges represents the amplitude of the RF signal. VHS uses esentially the same idea, except with lower bandwidth, especially for the chroma channel. (SuperVHS has near LD quality luma resolution, but the exact same resolution as VHS.) The point of this is to raise the signal frequency, which reduces the octave range to fit within that of the recording media.
Now it is true that most LDs since 1990 have 44.1K/16-bit digital audio in a new RF sub-band, and a few LDs from the late '90s have a Dolby Digital bitstream modulated into an analog signal on one of the analog tracks (LD analog tracks have 100KHz bandwidth, much better than CD), but the main signal is still composite NTSC analog video.
There is only one aspect of LD that has been digital since day one. The frame number/time code and chapter number are recorded as a BCD digits in the vertical retrace interval of the video. This was later deprecated in favor of a standard CD audio TOC in many (but not all) digital audio LDs. There was even a system from Pioneer which did LD-ROM by recording a Sega CD game in the digital audio channel, to give you Sewer Shark style video overlay games. (They didn't do Dragons Lair, but they should have.)
I don't have digital cable, but my mom does. First of all, the box is S L O W. It changes channels slowly, even analog ones. The guide has S L O W choppy screen redrwaws that make an Apple II or Mac Plus look good. I would suspect that screen draws are done in what cycles are left after MPEG decoding, except this happens on analog channels, too. And that's not even counting the second or two of painting before the digital channels pick up a key frame.
It's a scam, based on the public assuming "digital == better", due to the improvement from cassette->CD and VHS->DVD (and never having seen LD, thanks to CED giving it a bad rep). The only good thing about digital cable (aside from a couple of movie channels with higher resolution, and sometimes 5.1 DD if you pay extra for the cable box with DD output) is that it lets them squeeze more channels into the coax cable. And they get to charge $3/mo. per box, too. I know they love that.
You know what's funny? I have a friend in Dallas who had digital satellite a couple of years ago, about the time I got DVD. The picture quality is comparable to digital cable. The artifacts are much more obvious than with DVD, yet he couldn't even see the "screen door" effect on a picture with a soft diagonal gradient. But a few months after I pointed it out, he could see the difference!
Stephen Granade [S.G.]: If you had the chance to redo any of your Infocom games, which one would you change? What would you do differently, or would you avoid the game entirely?
D.L.: I'd redo the infamous Baseball Diamond puzzle in Zork II, which has been an object of universal hatred ever since its implementation.
I actually had to disassemble the Z-machine code to the game to figure out that puzzle. I had no clue that it was even a baseball reference until I read the object code.
So, I win my $10. I may or may not have to pay my attorney's fees. And my attorney gets fees + bazillion*$5 (he's getting a contingency on all members of the class).
You're assuming you get the $10 as a check you can deposit at your bank. If the Iomega click-o-death class action suit is any indication, you'd probably end up with a $10 coupon that you could spend on any one of a list of a dozen or so $COMPANY (Sony in your example) products.
10 PRINT "What is your name? ";
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "What is your problem? ";
40 INPUT B$
50 FOR I = 1 TO 10000: NEXT I
60 PRINT A$;", please reboot Windows and try again."
70 GOTO 10
Sounds like a good idea to me. I run my three domains on my DSL and have MAPS in my Sendmail config, although I do have a few obvious spam domains blocked in/etc/mail/access. And my/29 block DOES have proper PTR records resolving to one of my domains, thanks to my clueful ISP. I would gladly switch to this method, especially with your experience that it does work.
So does anyone have an M4 macro command for Sendmail configuration to do the in-addr.arpa verification? All I really care about is that there is a reverse DNS entry that can go into headers and logs, and not that it exactly matches the alleged hostname. (After all, some hosts have multiple names, and "mail." probably has another real hostname.) At least if the IP was from a dialup block, it would still mean the ISP was clueful enough that there would be a chance of them applying a LART when given the IP and an NTP-locked UTC timestamp.
(Sorry, I don't happen to have The Bat handy right now, or I'd try looking it up in there.)
The Model M is the most holy of PC keyboards. It's even available (if you're lucky to find one; I've got two) in a "Spacesaver" version without the number pad. Most of them have swappable cords for AT and PS/2. And many of them (but not the Spacesaver) have fully swappable keycaps, perfect for April Fools pranks, like making a "QUERTY" keyboard.:-)
The second most holy is the Northgate Omni series. They even have models with the control key to the left of the A key. I think that's their "Jerry Pournelle" model. (JP is well known as a keyboard bigot^Wconniseur from his Byte magazine columns.)
The problem is that the spammers claimed to be offering Motorola pagers when they weren't. The main problem in this case seems to be misuse of trademarks and (not surprisingly for spammers) fradulent misrepresentation of what they were offering. But I do hope Moto puts the hammer down nice and hard on these cockroaches of the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be happy if it used an HCF instruction, or at least programmed the video chip for an extremely high resolution at 100 Hz refresh, resulting in the monitor going HCF. Another option (on soft-power ATX machines) is to shut down (but not reboot) the system. Maybe zero out the boot blocks, too. Actually just the boot blocks alone would be enough fun. Basically, something annoying that has at least a 1% chance of getting the attention of your average MCSE.
What this web needs is a good INTERCAL to CGI interface.
That isn't saying much. It is my experience that nitroglycerin is more stable than any version of Netscape 4.xx.
61.131.51.74 - - [01/Aug/2001:15:59:39 +0000] "GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN%u9090%u6858% ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%uc bd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00%u531 b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0" 400 316 "-"
Why is it my favorite hit so far? Because I really was "hacked by Chinese"!
inetnum: 61.131.51.72 - 61.131.51.79
netname: NANAN-SHISHAN-SCHOOL
descr: Shishan middle school of Nan'an
descr: town of Quanzhou city of Fujian
descr: province
country: CN
admin-c: MD47-AP
tech-c: MD47-AP
mnt-by: MAINT-CHINANET-FJ
changed: milizi@sina.com 20010526
source: APNIC
It would be interesting to look at the sales of Code Red Mountain Dew (so when are they going to make Code Blue?) and how they have been affected by all the publicity generated by the worm. This is the kind of publicity that money just can't buy, other than by passing out free cases of soda to cube farms full of programmers.
When in actuality all we need to do to save the internet is to destroy Microsoft.
I've been hit seven times so far according to my Apache access logs, and a possible three other times on another machine with no web server, but a logging firewall block on port 80.
At least two of the hits are from an @home and a DSL customer. Perhaps by crashing the un-upgraded Cisco DSL routers they're actually doing a service by preventing DS-Lusers' home machines from being able to spread the worm. Not to mention blocking all the skript-k1dd13 IRC DD0S w4r3z that are already running on said lusers' machines.
An interesting anecdote is two weeks ago when I called my ISP, their phone answered with a message about Code Red, and then I overheard a tech support guy in another cubicle at the ISP telling someone to power-cycle their router.
Anyone in or near Austin who wants to see some vintage computers should check out the Goodwill Computer Store on US 183 at Ohlen. Lots of old micros there in the back room museum, plus a disk array frame (I think that's what it is) out of a Cray.
So when is there going to be a "VCF Central" for Texas? :-)
The reason it was so slow was that the 16K it used was the video chip RAM. This is esentially the same chip used in the ColecoVision (except Coleco for some bizarre reason used the RGB version and an RGB video to RF modulator!) In order to use this RAM, you have to tell the video chip the address, then you can read sequential data bytes from it. This is an I/O operation, rather than a normal memory operation. Everything must have been stored out there, including the program and variables.
I learned how slow it was one day when I saw one powered up in a store. I hit the RETURN key and the thing took a whole second of thinking before it did the nothing that I asked it to! That's right, it took a whole second just to do nothing!
When you had a PEB or sidecar RAM, that was in the 64K address space of the CPU, and I've heard that BASIC would know to use that instead. Of course TI discouraged any non-PEB expansion, so sidecar options were only used by the tech savvy. (And not many tech savvy folk went with the TI in the first place.)
The main units (and about two dozen different cartridges) were very common back in the mid 90's when I was collecting classic video game stuff. Except for the old non-A version with the chiclet keyboard, that is. It's the goodies that will set you back.
I only wish. I drank a can of "Old Coke" about six months after New Coke came out. (At an automotive garage that would buy months worth of soda ahead of time just because they could.) It was only after I drank it and noticed the familiar flavor that I looked at the can and saw the promotional offer from just before New Coke came out.
New Coke was really just a scam so they could stop using 100% sucrose sugar because U.S. sugar prices were so inflated (like 10 times the world market price) and start using High Fructose Corn Syrup instead. They would mess so much with the sweetner mix for Coke Classic that about three or four years ago I gave up and switched to Diet Coke because of batches of Coke Classic that would taste worse. At least Diet Coke has a consistent flavor.
All you have to do is:
Until we discover a means of FTL communication, interplanetary networks will have to use something other than TCP/IP.
I didn't think The Difference Engine had much in the way of a coherent plot, but I loved it because the setting was such wonderful eye candy for my imagination. It was like reading chocolate. Or something like that. It also helped that I was listening to Jean Michel Jarre's Revolutions, the first four parts of which make for great steampunk background music.
Nope, that was Kansas. And once they were quietly taken aside and had it explained to them by a math professor, they withdrew the bill.
The big question is: why did you get rid of it? Those $1500 in costs were already paid out, and now you'd be able to find stuff in pawn shops and used book stores that still isn't on DVD. I got into LD during its last two or three years, and ended up with half a dozen players, and over 600 LDs, many of which were purchased at $10 each, and many more at $3 each. (My cheapest was four for 50 cents each at a thrift store that charged me LP prices.) In the past few months, used LDs have become much easier to find, and my collection is still growing.
Now it is true that most LDs since 1990 have 44.1K/16-bit digital audio in a new RF sub-band, and a few LDs from the late '90s have a Dolby Digital bitstream modulated into an analog signal on one of the analog tracks (LD analog tracks have 100KHz bandwidth, much better than CD), but the main signal is still composite NTSC analog video.
There is only one aspect of LD that has been digital since day one. The frame number/time code and chapter number are recorded as a BCD digits in the vertical retrace interval of the video. This was later deprecated in favor of a standard CD audio TOC in many (but not all) digital audio LDs. There was even a system from Pioneer which did LD-ROM by recording a Sega CD game in the digital audio channel, to give you Sewer Shark style video overlay games. (They didn't do Dragons Lair, but they should have.)
It's a scam, based on the public assuming "digital == better", due to the improvement from cassette->CD and VHS->DVD (and never having seen LD, thanks to CED giving it a bad rep). The only good thing about digital cable (aside from a couple of movie channels with higher resolution, and sometimes 5.1 DD if you pay extra for the cable box with DD output) is that it lets them squeeze more channels into the coax cable. And they get to charge $3/mo. per box, too. I know they love that.
You know what's funny? I have a friend in Dallas who had digital satellite a couple of years ago, about the time I got DVD. The picture quality is comparable to digital cable. The artifacts are much more obvious than with DVD, yet he couldn't even see the "screen door" effect on a picture with a soft diagonal gradient. But a few months after I pointed it out, he could see the difference!
You mean a product like "apostrophe's"? By the way, how long has Miss Used been used?
I actually had to disassemble the Z-machine code to the game to figure out that puzzle. I had no clue that it was even a baseball reference until I read the object code.
You're assuming you get the $10 as a check you can deposit at your bank. If the Iomega click-o-death class action suit is any indication, you'd probably end up with a $10 coupon that you could spend on any one of a list of a dozen or so $COMPANY (Sony in your example) products.
10 PRINT "What is your name? ";
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "What is your problem? ";
40 INPUT B$
50 FOR I = 1 TO 10000: NEXT I
60 PRINT A$;", please reboot Windows and try again."
70 GOTO 10
So does anyone have an M4 macro command for Sendmail configuration to do the in-addr.arpa verification? All I really care about is that there is a reverse DNS entry that can go into headers and logs, and not that it exactly matches the alleged hostname. (After all, some hosts have multiple names, and "mail." probably has another real hostname.) At least if the IP was from a dialup block, it would still mean the ISP was clueful enough that there would be a chance of them applying a LART when given the IP and an NTP-locked UTC timestamp.
(Sorry, I don't happen to have The Bat handy right now, or I'd try looking it up in there.)
The second most holy is the Northgate Omni series. They even have models with the control key to the left of the A key. I think that's their "Jerry Pournelle" model. (JP is well known as a keyboard bigot^Wconniseur from his Byte magazine columns.)
And thanks for the Model M site link.
The problem is that the spammers claimed to be offering Motorola pagers when they weren't. The main problem in this case seems to be misuse of trademarks and (not surprisingly for spammers) fradulent misrepresentation of what they were offering. But I do hope Moto puts the hammer down nice and hard on these cockroaches of the internet.