A friend of mine who got his CS degree this past spring mentioned to me that while he was taking one of his finals for his last semester in college, the computer running the projector in front of the whole class got a net send spam which advertised college diplomas. It was probably looking mighty tempting to those who weren't doing so hot on the exam and it was probably pretty funny to the rest.
Does this count the number of Windows machines that were 'compromised' by BLASTER and its children?... More direct hacks on Linux machines might just mean that there was much more human effort expended.
If this is indeed the case, and I believe it is, the numbers show the opposite of what they would otherwise imply. I think everyone around here would agree attacks by real hackers reading the source code of every daemon you're running are much more difficult to defend against as oppose to the latest worm where your firewall just blocks port X that you don't really need anyhow and apply a patch for good measure. So if we're not counting automated attacks essentially what we're saying is it requires a hacker, not just another machine, to hack into a Linux server. To me, that says Linux in general is more difficult to hack.
From the article: The Sobig and MSBlast malware that afflict Microsoft platforms contributed significantly to the record estimate.
I find this a bit hard to swallow. Have they forgotten about Slammer? That one brought most of the net to a crawl. Is it possible that it compromised less than 4000 servers? And suppose a server is compromised twice, does that count as two or one in this count? I'm not even going to touch SoBig and MSBlaster.
You'll notice Ebay doesn't ever seem to stop sale of Diablo2 and other online virtual items that can only be "delivered electronically through the Internet". It's just there so when seller X doesn't deliver to buyer Y, Ebay can say "You're not suppose to be bidding on that type of thing and he wasn't suppose to be listing that type of thing so tough luck."
That, plus the fact that most folks go see a movie just once, whereas some games... well... you're the counting freak...
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. In the analogy movie tickets are copies of a game sold. Are you meaning to say that some people buy multiple copies of a single game? If thats the case this is a new phenomenon to me, what are the motives of these people? Also, movies are released in stages; they go from theatres to rental to DVD to premium channels to TV; all the while at least a few people involved are making money. When a game is released, it hits stores and people can take it home immediately and after a while it stops making money.
Windows XP and even Windows Server 2003 ship with 4 open ports.
My mothers WinXP (IIRC: Home, Dell installed) computer was also using uPnP to open a ~65000 port wide hole in my router firewall by default. Fortunately uPnP wasn't really necessary and could be disabled.
Yes, but AFAIK the only technique for doing so is brute force (might be wrong here, if I am someone call me on it). So you'd have to just happen to randomly generate the mp3 file, or some other file that hashes to the same thing. There was a flaw in Blackboard around 6-10 months ago that allowed to retrieval of arbitrary MD5 hashed passwords, the only problem with that was you could brute force a password that hashed to the same thing and authenticate as the user of that password.
I believe that technique is called "packet sniffing".
Grabbing the packets themselves I wouldn't go for, it'd create a sort of race condition/replay attack combination that could cause the same numbers to be generated if you hit it just right. What about the variation on a ground wire or the imperfections on the bit signals? All sorts of unpredictable crap influencing that. Also, when was the last time someone exploited a weakness in a random number generator to crack encryption? I've never heard of this being done.
Scenario 1: You work for company X, who has a wireless network, a large building, and large number of access points and very few geeks employed to make the thing run. You don't know the person who set up the wireless so you don't know how good of a job [s]he did. Enter this robot, it goes through the building scanning the place for insecure areas. Scenario 2: You work for a tech firm who employs a large number of hackers/geeks that have the access and the know how to create insecurities in your wireless network for whatever purpose. Enter this robot, it continuously transverses the network watching for vulnerabilities.
Also of note is this, a dual wheel mouse. A friend of mine has one and loves it. (FYI, contrary to what you might think only one of the wheels also functions as a button.)
6) Play Beethoven on the keypad. 7) Try to order a pizza. 8) Lower the volume of your voice over a few sentences so they have to listen very closely. Open up a modem with manual dial on and have it screech at them for a bit. 9) If its one of those machines that plays a message then records, play music into the phone. Hours of it. Also try the modem trick. 10) Hold one of the phone keys down the entire time. 11) Act like you're having sex. If the order taker sees that you're busy and will call back insist you're not busy. 12) 'Forget' everything they said more than 10 seconds ago. Ask questions to refresh your memory. 13) Ask when they last time masturbated. If they don't hang up, sheepishly ask them if they would mind helping you.
I'm sure lots of people around here already know this, but Sean Fanning's service wasn't even P2P, it used a client-server model, which turned out to be its achilles heel. Killing a service based on that model is a simple matter of removing the servers, the vast majority of which were owned by Napster. Thats why P2P has become the prefered method for trading, it suffers from no such weakness; all nodes have to be individually removed.
I believe those rants pertain more to why learn QBASIC now, in 2003 with the widespread availability of free compilers for other more widely used and useful languages. In terms of the help file I agree with you; I too started in QBASIC with only that file to guide me and it gave me a head start for a BASIC programming class in high school that helped me make up my mind as to what field I was going to go into.
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says. "The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?" His emotional attachment to letters is dependent on their physical medium AND the style in which they were written?
Michael Sull, a 54-year-old artist in Overland Park, Kan., says today's third graders have not developed proper forearm and hand musculature, seated posture or mental discipline. Sit down any good joystick jockey and this guy in a First Person Shooter and we'll see who doesn't have muscular control and mental discipline. Its comparing apples and oranges either way.
"If you need to relay information immediately and have just a half-second to grab anything, maybe just a napkin, penmanship is so valuable," Sull says. "It doesn't rely on batteries or power. It's like breathing - it's always with you." He must have a pencil built into his finger if he's never in a position where he can't write anything down. I'd also like to see him carry the amount of paper it would take to store the equivalent amount of data as a Palm Pilot carries or even better a laptop. Fax machines are also not as widespread as email so its not likely he could quickly send his handwritten document to anyone he wanted in a very small period of time, his whole argument here is void.
There seem to be a lot of people in this story saying "shame on you for reverse engineering". It has its uses, how else would viruses, worms, and trojans be analyzed to figure out what they do and how they do it.
For those of you who like Whitespace, you might also take a look at Brainfuck. How can you go wrong with a 171 byte compiler? K.I.S.S. at its finest.:)
sometime in early March last year. I had the same concern and I didn't install any of the stuff I got until some time later I read on MS's site that the software was licensed. They also gave out Visual Studio.NET Academic t-shirts, a free full copy of WinXP Pro (using it on my gaming machine), some mints in a strange tin that you have to press on the top to open and squeeze the sides to lock (mmmm... mints), a Visual Studio.NET pen and I can't remember what else. In short, this story is a false alarm, MS does a lot of evil stuff, but this isn't a case of it.
Wow, I never thought I'd be defending MS, especially on/.
Some software makers are working on more aggressive solutions. Tony Ray, the president of the Houston-based company Even Balance, distributes a free product called Punkbusters that acts as a virus detector by looking for modifications on every player's machine. Game companies are paying for its development in the hope of keeping the games fair. Software installed on every player's machine watches for cheating while periodically filing reports to other players.
This has always bugged me. PunkBuster is just another piece of software. What stops it from being hacked just like the game? It seems to me that theres a sort of circular reasoning going on here: "This software is hacked, add software to prevent hacking." Whats worse is some servers require and kick those who don't have it and it many players assume that when someone uses it they absolutely cannot be cheating.
I recommend reading this. It is illegal for telemarketters to call any number for which the callee is charged. I've put my cell phone on lots of forms and so forth and never gotten a spam call to it so I suspect the telemarketroids are sufficiently spooked by legality issues to not call it.
Every single story about some dude porting Linux to his remote control, or jamming an atx motherboard into a PSOne case, or creating a working rocket out of a LEGO Mindstorm set
And how many of those do those people turn around and sell their creations? You misunderstand me. My question was not why this was done, doing for the sake of doing it is reason enough. I want to know why someone thinks this is such a drastic shift out of the norm that it will draw revenue. I can get photorealistic images by posing an actor in a set and having him/her say lines. Why is this better? I don't think there are that many people with a geek complex out there that will watch it just because it's CG. Even for most geeks the novelty will diminish after two or three episodes. Perhaps they have a really awesome plot and very well developed characters and all the makings of a great show. Why are they trying to sell it as photorealistic CG?
Slashdot Mirror
On the re-election poster for Governor Marley on the dock house on Melee Island: "When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice."
(Is it scary I remember that and haven't played the game in 6+ years?)
A friend of mine who got his CS degree this past spring mentioned to me that while he was taking one of his finals for his last semester in college, the computer running the projector in front of the whole class got a net send spam which advertised college diplomas. It was probably looking mighty tempting to those who weren't doing so hot on the exam and it was probably pretty funny to the rest.
that I can store roughly one first person shooter per gib of drive space.
Does this count the number of Windows machines that were 'compromised' by BLASTER and its children?... More direct hacks on Linux machines might just mean that there was much more human effort expended.
If this is indeed the case, and I believe it is, the numbers show the opposite of what they would otherwise imply. I think everyone around here would agree attacks by real hackers reading the source code of every daemon you're running are much more difficult to defend against as oppose to the latest worm where your firewall just blocks port X that you don't really need anyhow and apply a patch for good measure. So if we're not counting automated attacks essentially what we're saying is it requires a hacker, not just another machine, to hack into a Linux server. To me, that says Linux in general is more difficult to hack.
From the article: The Sobig and MSBlast malware that afflict Microsoft platforms contributed significantly to the record estimate.
I find this a bit hard to swallow. Have they forgotten about Slammer? That one brought most of the net to a crawl. Is it possible that it compromised less than 4000 servers? And suppose a server is compromised twice, does that count as two or one in this count? I'm not even going to touch SoBig and MSBlaster.
Yes (warning: adult material). :)
Try not to pound my webspace too hard.
Observe the status bar of the window on the left for the exit URL, and the pr0n window on the right for what was there.
You'll notice Ebay doesn't ever seem to stop sale of Diablo2 and other online virtual items that can only be "delivered electronically through the Internet". It's just there so when seller X doesn't deliver to buyer Y, Ebay can say "You're not suppose to be bidding on that type of thing and he wasn't suppose to be listing that type of thing so tough luck."
That, plus the fact that most folks go see a movie just once, whereas some games... well... you're the counting freak...
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. In the analogy movie tickets are copies of a game sold. Are you meaning to say that some people buy multiple copies of a single game? If thats the case this is a new phenomenon to me, what are the motives of these people? Also, movies are released in stages; they go from theatres to rental to DVD to premium channels to TV; all the while at least a few people involved are making money. When a game is released, it hits stores and people can take it home immediately and after a while it stops making money.
Windows XP and even Windows Server 2003 ship with 4 open ports.
My mothers WinXP (IIRC: Home, Dell installed) computer was also using uPnP to open a ~65000 port wide hole in my router firewall by default. Fortunately uPnP wasn't really necessary and could be disabled.
Yes, but AFAIK the only technique for doing so is brute force (might be wrong here, if I am someone call me on it). So you'd have to just happen to randomly generate the mp3 file, or some other file that hashes to the same thing.
There was a flaw in Blackboard around 6-10 months ago that allowed to retrieval of arbitrary MD5 hashed passwords, the only problem with that was you could brute force a password that hashed to the same thing and authenticate as the user of that password.
Yes, I must admit I'm excited by the possibility shown to me by these commercials of becoming (and I quote) a "techie whiz".
I believe that technique is called "packet sniffing".
Grabbing the packets themselves I wouldn't go for, it'd create a sort of race condition/replay attack combination that could cause the same numbers to be generated if you hit it just right. What about the variation on a ground wire or the imperfections on the bit signals? All sorts of unpredictable crap influencing that.
Also, when was the last time someone exploited a weakness in a random number generator to crack encryption? I've never heard of this being done.
Scenario 1:
You work for company X, who has a wireless network, a large building, and large number of access points and very few geeks employed to make the thing run. You don't know the person who set up the wireless so you don't know how good of a job [s]he did. Enter this robot, it goes through the building scanning the place for insecure areas.
Scenario 2:
You work for a tech firm who employs a large number of hackers/geeks that have the access and the know how to create insecurities in your wireless network for whatever purpose. Enter this robot, it continuously transverses the network watching for vulnerabilities.
Also of note is this, a dual wheel mouse. A friend of mine has one and loves it. (FYI, contrary to what you might think only one of the wheels also functions as a button.)
6) Play Beethoven on the keypad.
7) Try to order a pizza.
8) Lower the volume of your voice over a few sentences so they have to listen very closely. Open up a modem with manual dial on and have it screech at them for a bit.
9) If its one of those machines that plays a message then records, play music into the phone. Hours of it. Also try the modem trick.
10) Hold one of the phone keys down the entire time.
11) Act like you're having sex. If the order taker sees that you're busy and will call back insist you're not busy.
12) 'Forget' everything they said more than 10 seconds ago. Ask questions to refresh your memory.
13) Ask when they last time masturbated. If they don't hang up, sheepishly ask them if they would mind helping you.
Sean Fanning did not invent P2P.
I'm sure lots of people around here already know this, but Sean Fanning's service wasn't even P2P, it used a client-server model, which turned out to be its achilles heel. Killing a service based on that model is a simple matter of removing the servers, the vast majority of which were owned by Napster. Thats why P2P has become the prefered method for trading, it suffers from no such weakness; all nodes have to be individually removed.
I have to wonder what happened to our old friend Bernie. He's got to be a prime example of online reputations.
I believe those rants pertain more to why learn QBASIC now, in 2003 with the widespread availability of free compilers for other more widely used and useful languages. In terms of the help file I agree with you; I too started in QBASIC with only that file to guide me and it gave me a head start for a BASIC programming class in high school that helped me make up my mind as to what field I was going to go into.
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says. "The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"
His emotional attachment to letters is dependent on their physical medium AND the style in which they were written?
Michael Sull, a 54-year-old artist in Overland Park, Kan., says today's third graders have not developed proper forearm and hand musculature, seated posture or mental discipline.
Sit down any good joystick jockey and this guy in a First Person Shooter and we'll see who doesn't have muscular control and mental discipline. Its comparing apples and oranges either way.
"If you need to relay information immediately and have just a half-second to grab anything, maybe just a napkin, penmanship is so valuable," Sull says. "It doesn't rely on batteries or power. It's like breathing - it's always with you."
He must have a pencil built into his finger if he's never in a position where he can't write anything down. I'd also like to see him carry the amount of paper it would take to store the equivalent amount of data as a Palm Pilot carries or even better a laptop. Fax machines are also not as widespread as email so its not likely he could quickly send his handwritten document to anyone he wanted in a very small period of time, his whole argument here is void.
There seem to be a lot of people in this story saying "shame on you for reverse engineering". It has its uses, how else would viruses, worms, and trojans be analyzed to figure out what they do and how they do it.
For those of you who like Whitespace, you might also take a look at Brainfuck. How can you go wrong with a 171 byte compiler? K.I.S.S. at its finest. :)
sometime in early March last year. I had the same concern and I didn't install any of the stuff I got until some time later I read on MS's site that the software was licensed. They also gave out Visual Studio .NET Academic t-shirts, a free full copy of WinXP Pro (using it on my gaming machine), some mints in a strange tin that you have to press on the top to open and squeeze the sides to lock (mmmm... mints), a Visual Studio .NET pen and I can't remember what else. In short, this story is a false alarm, MS does a lot of evil stuff, but this isn't a case of it.
/.
Wow, I never thought I'd be defending MS, especially on
I'd like to say that's a record, but you know how things are around here. :)
Some software makers are working on more aggressive solutions. Tony Ray, the president of the Houston-based company Even Balance, distributes a free product called Punkbusters that acts as a virus detector by looking for modifications on every player's machine. Game companies are paying for its development in the hope of keeping the games fair. Software installed on every player's machine watches for cheating while periodically filing reports to other players.
This has always bugged me. PunkBuster is just another piece of software. What stops it from being hacked just like the game? It seems to me that theres a sort of circular reasoning going on here: "This software is hacked, add software to prevent hacking." Whats worse is some servers require and kick those who don't have it and it many players assume that when someone uses it they absolutely cannot be cheating.
I recommend reading this. It is illegal for telemarketters to call any number for which the callee is charged. I've put my cell phone on lots of forms and so forth and never gotten a spam call to it so I suspect the telemarketroids are sufficiently spooked by legality issues to not call it.
Every single story about some dude porting Linux to his remote control, or jamming an atx motherboard into a PSOne case, or creating a working rocket out of a LEGO Mindstorm set
And how many of those do those people turn around and sell their creations? You misunderstand me. My question was not why this was done, doing for the sake of doing it is reason enough. I want to know why someone thinks this is such a drastic shift out of the norm that it will draw revenue. I can get photorealistic images by posing an actor in a set and having him/her say lines. Why is this better? I don't think there are that many people with a geek complex out there that will watch it just because it's CG. Even for most geeks the novelty will diminish after two or three episodes.
Perhaps they have a really awesome plot and very well developed characters and all the makings of a great show. Why are they trying to sell it as photorealistic CG?