How do you figure out what messages are specifying the pads? For all we know Slashdot's sole purpose is to provide one-time pads to the Linux Terrorists.
It's not like I'd be writing a message saying "Hey, guys, my pad is generated by grabbing the Sting CD and...". Those clues were all set up in the coffee shop last year.
Can you honestly say that if you saw a message saying "I love Sting's new CD" you would look at that and say "Ahh, this guy's obviously an international terrorist telling people how to read his messages?".
Aside from the obvious clue that nobody in their right mind would listen to Sting's new album, that is.
The possibilities on how to transfer these are endless. Say I send somebody a message saying "I love Sting". That tells him to take the latest sting CD, rip whatever track is [Current Day] % [Number of Tracks], and gzip -9 it. There's your pad.
That's an obvious one, I'm sure there are any number of ways that are even harder to detect.
I think his point was that the cell phone conversations were already being recorded. After all, you can't record a conversation after the fact. Therefore, it's regular procedure and probably has been for a long time.
I am in no way surprised. Here in Vancouver a few years ago we had a big political scandal that started because a Member of Parliament was using a scanner to record cell phone conversations between our Premier and a real-estate agent. It ended up bringing down the government.
If private citizens are doing it, you can bet the gov't is. I've just been assuming for years that all my communications are monitored. The only surprising thing here is that it's been admitted.
Right now, no, it would not worry me. Let's pull out all the stops and get the bastards. In a time of disaster some rules get bent, and this is one of those times. I Canada we have something called the "War Measures Act" which essentially suspends all civil rights if put into effect, and it was once in the 60's in response to internal terrorism.
The problem is if this is used to justify turning this into regular procedure for the forseeable future. This is where the concern is. Will the FBI use this to ban all encryption and install Carnivore permamently in all ISPs? Honestly, then the terrorists have won. Now is the time to start thinking about that.
I just had a thought -- what effect is this going to have on the dissemination of civilian encryption technology?
Right now everybody's trying to figure out how this could possibly have been planned in secret. Eventually the finger pointing is going to get around to encryption technology, and maybe even the recent lifting of restrictions.
I fear we're about to be set back decades in the battle to effectively communicate in a private manner.
She managed to lock herself into a bathroom and call 911 on her cell phone. This has been confirmed (and I remember the name, that's who called 911)
So this is possible. I haven't heard anything about what they were armed with, just that she called 911 and reported they'd all been herded into the back of the plane and were being hijacked.
There's explosions in afghanistan now. Kabul has multiple explosions, CNN is suggesting that they see lights that look like they were at the speed of cruise missles. Anyone heard more about this?
At one time (this morning) they were talking about a 5th plane crashed somewhere in Colorado, but that's dropped out of all the American and Canadian news sources, so it appears it was a rumour.
I live in Vancouver, so I can fill in some details here:
The Canadian border is open, it was closed briefly. Don't bother trying to get through, you need a specific reason and every car is being searched. A CBC reporter was let through, but they put spikes down in front of the car before searching it just so he couldn't get through.
Planes are being diverted to whatever Canadian airport can handle them, not just northern ones. I can see the Vancouver airport from where I am, and it's just a sea of planes. I don't see how anymore could possibly get in, but I still hear more circling overhead. They've obviously opened a runway they don't normally use, because the planes are coming down on a line they don't normally take.
Finally, I don't know what they're going to do about accomodations! I don't see how we can possibly have enough hotels by the airport for this, so they're going to have to send people far afield. That's going to be a real problem.
The redhat part was just to get people's attention and start a good flame war:-)
The problem with _just_ having added support for Suse 7.x is that it's about 6 months too late -- I was forced to migrate away from it long ago, and now Ximian really needs some sort of killer app to get me to consider going back.
Note that this isn't because I see gnome or KDE as being better than the other, but because I've now got a large investment in configuring KDE and installing KDE apps, and since I've been burnt once already by Ximian I'm leery of trying it again. Again, this seems to be a prevalent attitude through the Suse community.
In all honesty, there are three things that Ximian needs to do quite quickly in order to get a wider distribution:
1. Support more than Red Hat
2. Support more then Red Hat
3. Well, you get the idea
I was hooked as a user of Ximian Gnome for some time, and even went through the effort of downloading and compiling Evolution. Then they stopped making builds that would work on Suse 7.x. After getting frustrated waiting ("any time now") I gave up and installed KDE to see how it had come along. Now Ximian is really going to have to do something special to get me to go back.
Watching the Suse mailing lists, I'm not the only on in this situation. Outside of North America (and even inside if I'm any indication) Suse is quite heavily used -- it is definitely not a good idea to alienate a potentially large user base
This is a me too -- my firewall logs are filing up with DENY's on port 80,
ever since last night.
Out of curiosity I've tried loading web pages from a number of the ip addresses in my logs
and it seems that a lot of people on @home really hate us US government!
Actually I think the problem is a bit more subtle than that -- the GPL ensures that another company can't incoporate your code into a proprietary product, thus making it non-free in that specific instance.
Example, in this case the developers of GnuCash don't want to be funding the next version of Microsoft Money, or Quicken.
I run an md5 checksum of most of the files on my
computer every night to see if they've been
modified. Some of those are html files.
Better yet, for my firewall that checksum is being
passed across the network, and I am automatically
notified any time the files are potentially modified.
Am I in danger of violating this patent for running something akin to tripwire?
Seems to me that the idea of using checksums for file modification is quite commonly in use, I'm not sure that applying it to a filename that ends in ".html" qualifies as a new twist.
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 1
Seems to me that we're too late anyway. With the number of items we've sent to Mars, it could already be polluted with earthly bacteria. We might as well take the chance on this one, and think about this in places like europa which definitely haven't been touched by us.
Normally I wouldn't bother to respond to this, but there are just too many misconceptions here...
I'd like to be free to keep more than 50% of my income, without having it all go to taxes to support dubious socialist programs that I'll never make use of, because I *work* for a living.
Did you know that our average capital gains rate is less than the US? Also when you include all the extras that aren't considered "tax" in the us it really depends on where you live -- I have a number of friends that tried life in New York or California that see a lot less of their paycheck than they did in Canada.
I'd like to be free not to have my government try to reduce my standard of living to that of the lowest common denominator.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, the UN consistenly rates Canada as having one of the best standards of living in the world.
I'd like to be free to say what I want - even though I probably wouldn't exercise that freedom - without the Canadian government telling me that what I say is obscene, unfair or unjust, and therefore proving that I have freedom of speech to a point, similar to the way that China has freedom of speech to a point.
I gather you prefer to hace the US gov't telling you what is obscene, unfair... I really have no idea where you get the idea that Canada doesn't have free speech. Heck, as pointed out above the courts are right now discussing whether child porn is protected by free speech laws!
I'd like to be free to drive on roads without jackasses talking on cellphones reversing on freeways because they've missed their exits.
I have never seen anyone on a freeway here reverse because they missed an exit (or for any other reason). Do you want to know about the nightmare of roads, bad signage, short merging lanes, and crazy drivers that I had to navigate on my recent trip to Seattle?
I'd like to be free to know that upon returning to Canada, the Canadian Customs agents will treat me as well as the friendly, chipper,
informative, helpful and welcoming American Customs staff always do.
On the aforementioned trip to Seattle, the US guard was quite surly and adversarial, and the Canadian guard on the return was very friendly, which is the common case for me. Maybe border guards or friendlier to people of the same nationality? Nahh, can't be.
I'd like to be free to live in a country where national unity is not a central issue to every political decision.
Only if you live in Quebec. And I prefer to live in a country where national unity is decided in the courts instead of by picking up guns, as some wackos did in Texas a couple of years ago (and dare we mention the American civil war?)
I'd like to be free to live in a country where I can pay for health care that doesn't leave me sitting in an emergency room for three
hours waiting for a Keflex prescription for strepped throat, while homeless heroin-addicts with needles broken off in their arms
come in after me, sit beside me, play show-and-tell with their pus, and then get served before I do, despite the fact that I'm a tax
payer and they're not.
Last time I booked an appointment with my GP, I got a slot later the same afternoon. He was running ahead of schedule, so I ended up getting out before my appointment was supposed to have started. Hasn't slashdot taught you that some things you read in the media can be slightly exaggerated?
I'd like to be free to live in a land where what is played on TV and radio stations is based on market demands, not on CRTC 40%
Canadian Content regulations, forcing broadcasters to play the same really lame Tragically Hip songs and poorly lit Canadian TV
shows over and over again.
You have a point here, although I will point out that I actually hear more Canadian content on The End out of Seattle than I go on a lot of the radio stations up here. Hopefully the CRTC will die a much needed death soon, though.
Most of all, I'd like to be free to go outside without fearing for my life for 5 months of the year. I don't define quality of living by
habitating in a place where you can die simply from going outside without a jacket on.
As I type this it is 50 degrees F outside. The last (of 3 total I think) snow fall my city had this year was about three weeks ago. Oh, and I'm going downhill skiing tomorrow after work. Cypress has about 60" of snow mid-mountain.
I'd like to be free to live in a land where the politicians don't waste millions of dollars trying to figure out why all of Canada's best,
brightest and most talented are moving to the United States, while the problems are so obvious and mostly rectifiable.
You're right, the problems are easily rectifiable. Most of my friends who went to the US to work have decided it was a mistake. What we need is better publicity. Oh, and the gov't isn't spending millions trying to figure this out, in fact our PM recently said he didn't think there was even a problem.
And finally, I'd like to be free to post this comment without being moderated down by someone who simply disagrees with me;
rather, I'd like to be moderated down if I've said anything untrue about Canada.
By my count, your about 50% untrue, and 45% misconceptions. But it would seem preferable to educate rather than censor, at least that's the Canadian way.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, they'd recognize the pad alright. They'd have to be stupid not to because it will be sitting in my home directory and called "pad.bin".
Of course that pad will decrypt it into an email discussing how nice my last vacation was...
How do you figure out what messages are specifying the pads? For all we know Slashdot's sole purpose is to provide one-time pads to the Linux Terrorists.
It's not like I'd be writing a message saying "Hey, guys, my pad is generated by grabbing the Sting CD and...". Those clues were all set up in the coffee shop last year.
Can you honestly say that if you saw a message saying "I love Sting's new CD" you would look at that and say "Ahh, this guy's obviously an international terrorist telling people how to read his messages?".
Aside from the obvious clue that nobody in their right mind would listen to Sting's new album, that is.
The possibilities on how to transfer these are endless. Say I send somebody a message saying "I love Sting". That tells him to take the latest sting CD, rip whatever track is [Current Day] % [Number of Tracks], and gzip -9 it. There's your pad.
That's an obvious one, I'm sure there are any number of ways that are even harder to detect.
I think his point was that the cell phone conversations were already being recorded. After all, you can't record a conversation after the fact. Therefore, it's regular procedure and probably has been for a long time. I am in no way surprised. Here in Vancouver a few years ago we had a big political scandal that started because a Member of Parliament was using a scanner to record cell phone conversations between our Premier and a real-estate agent. It ended up bringing down the government. If private citizens are doing it, you can bet the gov't is. I've just been assuming for years that all my communications are monitored. The only surprising thing here is that it's been admitted.
Here's the crux...
Right now, no, it would not worry me. Let's pull out all the stops and get the bastards. In a time of disaster some rules get bent, and this is one of those times. I Canada we have something called the "War Measures Act" which essentially suspends all civil rights if put into effect, and it was once in the 60's in response to internal terrorism.
The problem is if this is used to justify turning this into regular procedure for the forseeable future. This is where the concern is. Will the FBI use this to ban all encryption and install Carnivore permamently in all ISPs? Honestly, then the terrorists have won. Now is the time to start thinking about that.
I just had a thought -- what effect is this going to have on the dissemination of civilian encryption technology?
Right now everybody's trying to figure out how this could possibly have been planned in secret. Eventually the finger pointing is going to get around to encryption technology, and maybe even the recent lifting of restrictions.
I fear we're about to be set back decades in the battle to effectively communicate in a private manner.
She managed to lock herself into a bathroom and call 911 on her cell phone. This has been confirmed (and I remember the name, that's who called 911)
So this is possible. I haven't heard anything about what they were armed with, just that she called 911 and reported they'd all been herded into the back of the plane and were being hijacked.
They're now saying that the gov't has confirmed it's not US, that it has to be from the ongoing civil war.
Interesting timing.
There's explosions in afghanistan now. Kabul has multiple explosions, CNN is suggesting that they see lights that look like they were at the speed of cruise missles. Anyone heard more about this?
At one time (this morning) they were talking about a 5th plane crashed somewhere in Colorado, but that's dropped out of all the American and Canadian news sources, so it appears it was a rumour.
I live in Vancouver, so I can fill in some details here:
The Canadian border is open, it was closed briefly. Don't bother trying to get through, you need a specific reason and every car is being searched. A CBC reporter was let through, but they put spikes down in front of the car before searching it just so he couldn't get through.
Planes are being diverted to whatever Canadian airport can handle them, not just northern ones. I can see the Vancouver airport from where I am, and it's just a sea of planes. I don't see how anymore could possibly get in, but I still hear more circling overhead. They've obviously opened a runway they don't normally use, because the planes are coming down on a line they don't normally take.
Finally, I don't know what they're going to do about accomodations! I don't see how we can possibly have enough hotels by the airport for this, so they're going to have to send people far afield. That's going to be a real problem.
The redhat part was just to get people's attention and start a good flame war :-)
The problem with _just_ having added support for Suse 7.x is that it's about 6 months too late -- I was forced to migrate away from it long ago, and now Ximian really needs some sort of killer app to get me to consider going back.
Note that this isn't because I see gnome or KDE as being better than the other, but because I've now got a large investment in configuring KDE and installing KDE apps, and since I've been burnt once already by Ximian I'm leery of trying it again. Again, this seems to be a prevalent attitude through the Suse community.
In all honesty, there are three things that Ximian needs to do quite quickly in order to get a wider distribution:
1. Support more than Red Hat
2. Support more then Red Hat
3. Well, you get the idea
I was hooked as a user of Ximian Gnome for some time, and even went through the effort of downloading and compiling Evolution. Then they stopped making builds that would work on Suse 7.x. After getting frustrated waiting ("any time now") I gave up and installed KDE to see how it had come along. Now Ximian is really going to have to do something special to get me to go back.
Watching the Suse mailing lists, I'm not the only on in this situation. Outside of North America (and even inside if I'm any indication) Suse is quite heavily used -- it is definitely not a good idea to alienate a potentially large user base
Well, generally the US way is to level economic sanctions against the company. Just ask anyone that's done trade with Cuba in the last few years.
This is a me too -- my firewall logs are filing up with DENY's on port 80, ever since last night.
Out of curiosity I've tried loading web pages from a number of the ip addresses in my logs and it seems that a lot of people on @home really hate us US government!
Actually I think the problem is a bit more subtle than that -- the GPL ensures that another company can't incoporate your code into a proprietary product, thus making it non-free in that specific instance.
Example, in this case the developers of GnuCash don't want to be funding the next version of Microsoft Money, or Quicken.
I run an md5 checksum of most of the files on my computer every night to see if they've been modified. Some of those are html files.
Better yet, for my firewall that checksum is being passed across the network, and I am automatically notified any time the files are potentially modified.
Am I in danger of violating this patent for running something akin to tripwire?
Seems to me that the idea of using checksums for file modification is quite commonly in use, I'm not sure that applying it to a filename that ends in ".html" qualifies as a new twist.
Seems to me that we're too late anyway. With the number of items we've sent to Mars, it could already be polluted with earthly bacteria. We might as well take the chance on this one, and think about this in places like europa which definitely haven't been touched by us.
Odds are you won't see this response this late in the thread, but just in case, you're right, I'm living in Vancouver ¥although I'm from the Toronto area© If you're in Chicago then you really have nothing to fear from Canadian winters, certainly in most of the big cities©
Vancouver weather is very similar to Seattle if you're familiar with that© In the summer it's in the 60's to 70's in the winter the 40's to 50's, with rare drops down to single digits© If there is snow on the road the city shuts down ¥if people see snow in the fields they're scared to drive©
The catch is the rain / grey skies in the winter, some people can't get used to that© The big plus is the proximity of Whistler / Blackomb here, and Mount Baker in Washington, so you can always get that snow fix if you really want it© And in the summer it provides some incredible mountain biking©
Personally, I'd have trouble thinking of another place in the world I'd trade with, but the political slant is quite different than the US, and that can bother some people© As with everything ymmv©
I'd like to be free to keep more than 50% of my income, without having it all go to taxes to support dubious socialist programs that I'll never make use of, because I *work* for a living.
Did you know that our average capital gains rate is less than the US? Also when you include all the extras that aren't considered "tax" in the us it really depends on where you live -- I have a number of friends that tried life in New York or California that see a lot less of their paycheck than they did in Canada.
I'd like to be free not to have my government try to reduce my standard of living to that of the lowest common denominator.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, the UN consistenly rates Canada as having one of the best standards of living in the world.
I'd like to be free to say what I want - even though I probably wouldn't exercise that freedom - without the Canadian government telling me that what I say is obscene, unfair or unjust, and therefore proving that I have freedom of speech to a point, similar to the way that China has freedom of speech to a point.
I gather you prefer to hace the US gov't telling you what is obscene, unfair... I really have no idea where you get the idea that Canada doesn't have free speech. Heck, as pointed out above the courts are right now discussing whether child porn is protected by free speech laws!
I'd like to be free to drive on roads without jackasses talking on cellphones reversing on freeways because they've missed their exits.
I have never seen anyone on a freeway here reverse because they missed an exit (or for any other reason). Do you want to know about the nightmare of roads, bad signage, short merging lanes, and crazy drivers that I had to navigate on my recent trip to Seattle?
I'd like to be free to know that upon returning to Canada, the Canadian Customs agents will treat me as well as the friendly, chipper, informative, helpful and welcoming American Customs staff always do.
On the aforementioned trip to Seattle, the US guard was quite surly and adversarial, and the Canadian guard on the return was very friendly, which is the common case for me. Maybe border guards or friendlier to people of the same nationality? Nahh, can't be.
I'd like to be free to live in a country where national unity is not a central issue to every political decision.
Only if you live in Quebec. And I prefer to live in a country where national unity is decided in the courts instead of by picking up guns, as some wackos did in Texas a couple of years ago (and dare we mention the American civil war?)
I'd like to be free to live in a country where I can pay for health care that doesn't leave me sitting in an emergency room for three hours waiting for a Keflex prescription for strepped throat, while homeless heroin-addicts with needles broken off in their arms come in after me, sit beside me, play show-and-tell with their pus, and then get served before I do, despite the fact that I'm a tax payer and they're not.
Last time I booked an appointment with my GP, I got a slot later the same afternoon. He was running ahead of schedule, so I ended up getting out before my appointment was supposed to have started. Hasn't slashdot taught you that some things you read in the media can be slightly exaggerated?
I'd like to be free to live in a land where what is played on TV and radio stations is based on market demands, not on CRTC 40% Canadian Content regulations, forcing broadcasters to play the same really lame Tragically Hip songs and poorly lit Canadian TV shows over and over again.
You have a point here, although I will point out that I actually hear more Canadian content on The End out of Seattle than I go on a lot of the radio stations up here. Hopefully the CRTC will die a much needed death soon, though.
Most of all, I'd like to be free to go outside without fearing for my life for 5 months of the year. I don't define quality of living by habitating in a place where you can die simply from going outside without a jacket on.
As I type this it is 50 degrees F outside. The last (of 3 total I think) snow fall my city had this year was about three weeks ago. Oh, and I'm going downhill skiing tomorrow after work. Cypress has about 60" of snow mid-mountain.
I'd like to be free to live in a land where the politicians don't waste millions of dollars trying to figure out why all of Canada's best, brightest and most talented are moving to the United States, while the problems are so obvious and mostly rectifiable.
You're right, the problems are easily rectifiable. Most of my friends who went to the US to work have decided it was a mistake. What we need is better publicity. Oh, and the gov't isn't spending millions trying to figure this out, in fact our PM recently said he didn't think there was even a problem.
And finally, I'd like to be free to post this comment without being moderated down by someone who simply disagrees with me; rather, I'd like to be moderated down if I've said anything untrue about Canada.
By my count, your about 50% untrue, and 45% misconceptions. But it would seem preferable to educate rather than censor, at least that's the Canadian way.