big difference between taking something out of a purpose specific embedded OS and taking something out of a usable desktop OS. embedded devices may not need explorer but what goods a blank desktop with no shell? maybe we can launch applications by thought.
You at least need to proof the person actually possesses the data and in my case... good luck proofing that.
Actually in some countries direct linking alone is illegal, you do not need to actually posses the data but simply link to it anywhere else on the Internet can be illegal.
This reminds me of a site FAQ the other day on seedler.org which tries to justify it's existance by saying BitTorrent is not illegal Is BitTorrent Illegal?
No. BitTorrent is purely a protocol for file transfer, just like FTP and HTTP. Unlike Kazaa it has no central database of files, or search capabilities. The BitTorrent protocol can be used to transfer illegal files, but then so can FTP and HTTP. So if the bittorrent clients are illegal, so are Internet Explorer, Netscape etc.
But they are not a BitTorrent client, they are a site hosting.torrents which link in some way directly to copyright material. IE/firefox etc is not illegal but a web site which links directly to illegal material may very well be so that argument does not work.
Yes that applies here to Australia, as an example of Three prepaid voice can cost you 20cent flagfall and then 35cents per 30 seconds (rounded to 30 seconds) so it's like 55cents just to say hello.
A text message (which you get 150 free of) costs 25 cents.
I have prefered to circulate documents in PDF ever since a time when I used to get a daily email that usually came as a PDF but would occasionally come as a Word doc, the former looked much more polished.
I also prefer PDF for this reason, it looks smoother and I know it's going to look right pretty much every time for the person viewing it. With docs and Word/Wordpad/Ooo it seems they always render different results and overall does not look as nice.
Over the last 6 months I have applied to many jobs using PDF for resumes, around 10% replied saying they refused to even read it until a doc was given to them. In one instance I even gave them a simple xmlresume generated plain txt file and they still wanted doc before reading.
There was an article on this the other day how Channel 7 stopped playing new episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives and Channel 9 did the same for some show I forget over the easter season which is apparently a bad time for them viewers wise and the advertising spots aren't worth as much money so they have been running re-runs and the new episodes returned this week where holiday viewing returns to normal and they can get more money from advertisers.
it should also be mentioned that the advertiser who made the mistake was Telstra, who also happen to own BigPond so they were actually covering up their own mistake.
You'll note how silly this is. The firmware only works on products Intel sells. Intel doesn't sell the firmware seperately. There is no loss to Intel, at all, for it to provide OpenBSD users with the firmware, and it'd increase sales for Intel.
since they are willing to allow it via a click-through license it seems this is the main concern with Intel is the loss of user-agreement to whatever clauses the license contains. i haven't seen their license but the usual licenses have clauses regarding reverse engineering and agreeing not to hold the authors responsible for any damaging side effects etc etc. as end-users these licenses don't really mean jack to us, we usually scroll to the end and just click i agree but i bet the companies take them alot more seriously.
If we had the same group of scumbags in government back when the car was invented, I'd probably own a ridiculously overpriced horse and carriage today.
compared to our petrol prices at the moment the horse and carriage doesn't sound too bad.
In Australia we've had similair laws to this for years, the only visual display infront of a driver allowed is for information purposes (navigation etc), a DVD/movie player is allowed to be hooked up to the front display for when the car isn't running, but it's only allowed to function on rear displays while the car is started, actually thought most countries had laws like this.
We've actually been doing this for a couple of years with a couple of methods and used them in legitimate software products, one being eFX a Window GUI changer and another being Napigator v2.0+ but a different and what I believe is more powerful approach since you don't need to paste code into edit boxes and use debuggers was formed.
Step 1: Howto get into another processes memory space
The easiest way todo this is via a global system-hook, or via a DLL that you must put in a special regkey and Windows will automatically load your DLL into every process as it starts, another more complicated method is to use CreateRemoteThread() (NT only?) and run a small function which performs LoadLibrary() on the DLL of your choice. I'll refer to a hook method for now as it's simple and works on all flavours of 32-bit Windows. SetWindowsHookEx documentation Usually this function is only used to set a hook within the specified thread ID to keep the hook localized however by setting the thread ID to 0 and putting the HOOKPROC inside a DLL and using WH_CBT, WH_GETMESSAGE etc hooks, Windows will automatically load your hook DLL into each process which the hook applies to which is usually all of them. That's it.
Step 2: Doing something useful
If you chose to use WH_GETMESSAGE for your hook then you have a hook function which is being called each time a process calls GetMessage() as part of its message loop, during the time in GetMessage() you are in the processes memory space as if it was your own and you may execute any code you like, prevent the process from getting messages.. whatever you like.. since we're on the discussion of exploits though let's do something interesting and take over the process.
Step 3: API hooking
When a process calls a shared function from a DLL it looks up the address of the function in the import table of the process. This is the main executable PE usually but you can also do recursive API hooking and modify the IATs of each module/DLL loaded in the same way. If you want to learn more on that just study up on the PE module format. My method of API hooking works by modifying the import table to change the address of where the actual functions are. This lets you replace shared DLL functions including most of the Win32 API with your own, here's a small example.
int (PASCAL FAR *orig_connect)(SOCKET s, const struct sockaddr FAR *name, int namelen) = 0;
int PASCAL FAR new_connect(SOCKET s, const struct sockaddr FAR *name, int namelen) {
printf("[new_connect] socket(0x%08X) host(%s) port(%d) orig_connect(0x%08X)\n",
s, inet_ntoa(((struct sockaddr_in *)name)->sin_addr), ntohs(((struct sockaddr_in *)name)->sin_port), orig_connect);
return orig_connect(s, name, namelen); }
Now to actually install the hook i've written a universal function kind of like GetProcAddress() todo it for me, I can't divulge the code because its company property however it's pretty easy to figure out if anyone needs todo it. The place I choose to install the hook is in DllMain() which is called when your DLL is loaded into each process, so you could hook every process running on the system since the global system hook we set earlier will be loading us into all of them or you could for example use GetModuleFileName(GetModuleHandle(0)...) to see which process you are now working in and if you want to hook it.
The first parameter to the function is the process of whos import table you wish to modify, all you have todo is build up the PE headers and you'll get there. The second parameter is the module which contains the function you want to replace, in this case its WSOCK32.DLL. The third parameter is normally the function name however we are hooking by ordinal instead here because the string "connect" wasn't available to search for with this particular module, I can't remember the exact details but I think it was Windows 2000 copy only exported ordinals but not exactly sure off hand has been a while. The fourth parameter is the address of the new function and the last just says to look for ordinals instead of strings. The address of the old function is returned so you can call it if you wish or un-install your hook by calling HookModuleImport again with orig_connect as parater 4 (a good place todo this is in DLL_PROCESS_DETACH).
Whats happening now is in the process whos IAT we patched, each time it calls the Winsock connect() function, our new_connect is now called instead. We can do anything we like here, calling SetLastError(WSAECONNREFUSED); return SOCKET_ERROR; would make the particular process think the connection was refused (hmm, how bout a filter that prevents all spyware from connecting to its destination on every process on the system transparently by checking the destination address). I've only used Winsock::connect() as an example but this method can be applied to any function a process imports in any DLL (if you have VC++ just type dumpbin/imports blah.exe to see what's available for the taking).
I noticed this a few weeks ago and also had connections open 24/7 to wustat.windows.com:80 which 2 days ago turned into wutrack.windows.com:80 and I've just checked my netstat and it's back to wustat.windows.com:80 so I figure it has something todo with Windows Updates, I do have automatic updates on and find it a useful feature however with hostnames like wutrack.windows.com it makes me wonder it's doing more. Also it only seems to check for updates every few days so why is the connection open 24/7 (its my own netstat program which I've also coded in a Close Socket button to close the connection, which if I do it wont reconnect until I reboot either), so why does something that checks for updates periodocally need to be constantly connected the entire time your PC is up, and if this applies to every copy of Windows XP, surely there's millions, how does Microsoft handle millions of constant TCP connections (especially if they use IIS)
I also had the oppurtunity to work at IBM when i was 17 years old, due to lots of personal things my highschool education level is year 8 (school ended at 14). Luck played a VERY big part ofcourse though, the unemployment lady helping me had a son and husband that both worked there, the husband being very good friends with the manager, the only thing i had to even do was meet the manager to show i was capable of dressing presentable.. i still had/have 3 foot long looking hippy hair i just had to dress up slightly. This was by no means coding etc, it was on the hardware side in the warranty/repair shop fixing the hardware with 2 other guys who were 45-50, and then there was about 3 guys who took care of the maintenance contracts going out to the jobs for mainly the big companies. I had NO 'formal' hardware experience myself, everything was self taught by sitting at home pulling my Amiga2000 apart and putting it back together, then Amigas bored me so a change to x86 was almost immediate. I've never really been into games so after computer magazines and a little thing called the 'modem' grabbing my attention i just had to get one, so i did.. messed around on BBS's and learning Turbo Pascal by myself at home (i used DOS, never touched win3.1), i then discovered Linux and and FreeBSD and i knew i was at home, downloading the Slackware disksets over 2400 bps modem, getting it installed, i was in love (especially with the command line interface, multitasking, network environment.. all of it).. i messed around on it for ages, learning C from man pages and Opensource technologies, also learning about networking and administration by installing and learning about all the apps, and especially security side interested me, buffer overflows etc, trying to understand it all, because i believe you can't secure something if you don't understand it in the first place (did same thing learning howto crack software, now i can use that knowledge to employ as many anti-cracking routines as possible in my software). i then moved to Windows programming, first learning by writing a few modules for the Litestep opensource shell for Windows, after a very quick pickup and my LS modules becoming very popular i was asked onto the Litestep development team where i learnt more and more about Windows coding, and quickly (within first ~2 months of coding C on Windows) gained a reputation in the shell community and being referred to as a coding machine, with the ability to churn out code so quickly (partly due to having no life).. anyway now i'm co-owner of a small virtual company, we have very low overheads due to all working from home, the other application programmer with us also started on Linux.
anyway sorry for rambling and getting off track, can't help it sometimes.. my point is, my personal life is a complete mess, but the things i talked about above are the only things that ever made me truly happy, and i've never really thought about it until now but when you look back at the roots the one thing that helped create it was Linux. it truly is not only a great server OS but a fantastic learning tool too, and for that i thank you.
and to IBM, while it was a relatively short stay (bout 8 months) due to them closing up the work centres for cost cutting, i thank you too for the only 'proper' job in my life, i thank you for giving me a chance to proove myself and not judging me based solely on education level. i know i taught the guys there stuff (i was the 'Windows 95 expert' because it had just came out, and the 2 older guys i worked with were a bit set in their ways and slightly old fassioned).. but they also taught me alot too, i especially thank Quentin for taking the time to teach me one on one, this wasn't a class environment or anything but he still took the time to not only sit down explaining things to me and teaching me a bit about electronics on the side, with regards to the hardware that can't just simply be 'replaced', within the first few months, because things like failed monitors often had a common cause, and no troubleshooting was involved i was allowed to solder and repair them too, i also had the oppurunity to go out and install custom touchscreen thinkpads in the Telstra vehicles, setting up radio packet modems and everything, even people in other departments took the time to help me learn, the networking guys would go print up entire books for me free of chargem, pulling thinkpads apart that needed repair. the point is noone has given me so much trust in my entire life, sure i did break some things (i dropped a printer cover a bit of plastic broke off, and i installed an imported Compaq (we did their repairs too) power supply into the machine without checking the switch was on 240v first (it was still on 110v) so when i plugged the cord, while leaning over the desktop case to get to the back, and proceeded to get the biggest shock of my life when it blew up inches from my head, only a cap in the ps blew and Q repaired it.. i felt really bad but they were all laughing and joking around saying don't worry about it. but i wasn't alone when one of the older guys had just put a new flyback transformer into a monitor, without attaching the suction cup thing back into the tube, he proceeded to turn it on to check if it worked, the suction cup looking thing was just hanging loose onto the metal workbench.. so all the power from the flyback transformer went into the workbench, back into the power circuit, the whole room was buzzing with energy because it was like being in an electrified metal cage, the flourecent lights going nuts and managed to fry a terminal or 2 we used, and the old 286 work machine.. everything was easily repaired tho and everyone had a good laugh, and i learnt that everyone makes mistakes.
once again sorry for rambling, i have no idea how much i've written, and if you want to skip over it here's the summary: both Linux (and lets not forget OpenBSD, FreeBSD.. Opensource.. the whole community) and IBM do make a difference and once again i'm greatful to both for bringing some hapiness and meaning into my life.
when you think about it, it should be chances are it was white or 'modern' humans, i'm Australian but not huge on history so i'll use approximations, feel free to correct any dates.. anyway aborigines lived here for millions of years or something first without extincting tasmanian tigers or dingos or kangaroos, white man comes along in around 1788 and somehow manages to extinct a species in under 200 years, wonder how the kangaroos are doing too, i've seen one in like the last decade.. standing in the middle of the road at 1am while i was driving thru a bendy gorge road, if it wasn't for good brakes he woulda been extinct too:) & have never seen a dingo but there are lots on frasier island, some little boy(s) were actually mauled there a few years back & first thing anyone wanted todo was cull the dingos (i believe they may have culled some and ended up building fences).
Yes. If you accept a license that says that you can't reverse engineer what you're installing and you do, then legally you're screwed. Morally is a whole other issue, and I side with the "cleaners"
Yeah, morally i'm with you.. but what I don't get is how lightly everyone takes Windows licenses especially, and then if anyone breaks the GPL they have a million geeks with pitch forks chasing after them.. if anyone reverse engineers a Windows program, to release a Linux version of a client, against the wishes of the author noone cares because it's apparently for a cause or something, just seems like a bit of a double standard, don't get me wrong I don't think the authors wishes or actions (including spyware) are always right, but it's still their wishes and their software so they can release it however they want, and their wishes should be abided by, if you don't agree with them don't use it.
I write both Windows and Linux software and have used the GPL a few times and it just seems like any non free-GPL type license is considered not worthy and taken with a pinch of salt.
I remember one guy who reverse engineered my Windows software against the license to hack it up, release again on his own site etc modified said directly to me something like it's your fault for not including a license, so when i proceeded to show him the license which not only exists, not only has to be agree'd to before installing but says you may not reverse engineer he laughed and said i don't read those things anyway.. ofcourse this guy probably wouldn't abide by the GPL or any license.
We store the credit card information in MySQL encrypted using the PHP OpenSSL routines. Only the public key is stored on the server, the private key is offsite and can be pasted into a form when you need to retrieve the information and have the PHP script decrypt it for display purposes only (all over HTTPS ofcourse).
Is 2way satellite now, it's expensive though, they are a DirecPC reseller i think.. for more than the price of 512k DSL with 3gig/month you get 64k satellite with 300mb/month.. to get the same as the $89 DSL package you have to pay $450
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/satellite/2WayP ri cing.asp
not only in there no legal alternative but the RIAA doesn't want one either, they want a music monopoly. we licensed fasttracks technology and wrote our own client from scratch (not releasing now since they filed suit against musiccity, waiting to see how it turns out).. we've contacted RIAAs musicnet service about licensing content, recieved no reply, contacted ARIA about licensing (australia), no reply.. they don't wanna know about it, they're happy in their own little world ripping people off with CDs.. they bitch and moan about copyright infringement, and won't even let anyone try do it legally either, the competition consumer comission needs to step in at some point.
very true, one other thing is only one of the cease&desist letters they've sent lists copyright infringement (the one to MusicCity, because they have lawyers that will fight back).. every other cease&desist letter uses the 9th thingies Napster case as an excuse, the thing is they prooved Napster was copyright infringing, they are just ASSUMING all the opennap servers are, this means nothing in court without proof that the opennap servers contain infringing material, they are just too lazy to go through them all gathering evidence. Also if they want to use the Napster decision as an excuse, Napster was told to block copyrighted material.. how come the opennap servers aren't given this chance? the opennap software contains the ability to filter, it even has regular expression support. They are abusing their power with scare tactics and they know it by sending ONLY MusicCity a screenshot listing 20 infringing titles and told them to remove them and sending everyone else orders to shut down because they know they can't afford lawyers to check the legality of it all.
napigator works with beta 8 and 9 just fine, and we've just released a few alpha's of napigator v2.0 that integrates into napster itself like one of its normal pages.. v2.0 release will be out in a few days.
I also use OpenBSD for a NAT router and have to agree with you here.. the setup is so simple & very easy to get everything working as if there is no NAT with a few port redirects (such as ICQ, Napster etc).. the only thing i can't get going is NetMeeting to receive video.. thought about writing a H.323 packet parser that dynamically adds NAT rules for the ports but i don't really need NetMeeting that much.
Real intelligent statement there with lots of arguments to back it up I see. I use whatever suits the job in question (web server, SQL server etc), including Linux, FreeBSD & OpenBSD.
thanks for the info.. so now this brings up one other question, the main reason to use bind9 was for multiprocessor support (-n [number_of_cpus]).. multiprocessor app's are usually multithreaded so the OS can take care of handing out individual threads to different CPUs.. so with threading disabled will this inturn disable the multiprocessor features aswell.
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big difference between taking something out of a purpose specific embedded OS and taking something out of a usable desktop OS. embedded devices may not need explorer but what goods a blank desktop with no shell? maybe we can launch applications by thought.
You at least need to proof the person actually possesses the data and in my case... good luck proofing that.
.torrents which link in some way directly to copyright material. IE/firefox etc is not illegal but a web site which links directly to illegal material may very well be so that argument does not work.
Actually in some countries direct linking alone is illegal, you do not need to actually posses the data but simply link to it anywhere else on the Internet can be illegal.
This reminds me of a site FAQ the other day on seedler.org which tries to justify it's existance by saying BitTorrent is not illegal
Is BitTorrent Illegal?
No. BitTorrent is purely a protocol for file transfer, just like FTP and HTTP. Unlike Kazaa it has no central database of files, or search capabilities.
The BitTorrent protocol can be used to transfer illegal files, but then so can FTP and HTTP. So if the bittorrent clients are illegal, so are Internet Explorer, Netscape etc.
But they are not a BitTorrent client, they are a site hosting
Yes that applies here to Australia, as an example of Three prepaid voice can cost you 20cent flagfall and then 35cents per 30 seconds (rounded to 30 seconds) so it's like 55cents just to say hello.
A text message (which you get 150 free of) costs 25 cents.
I have prefered to circulate documents in PDF ever since a time when I used to get a daily email that usually came as a PDF but would occasionally come as a Word doc, the former looked much more polished.
I also prefer PDF for this reason, it looks smoother and I know it's going to look right pretty much every time for the person viewing it. With docs and Word/Wordpad/Ooo it seems they always render different results and overall does not look as nice.
Over the last 6 months I have applied to many jobs using PDF for resumes, around 10% replied saying they refused to even read it until a doc was given to them. In one instance I even gave them a simple xmlresume generated plain txt file and they still wanted doc before reading.
There was an article on this the other day how Channel 7 stopped playing new episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives and Channel 9 did the same for some show I forget over the easter season which is apparently a bad time for them viewers wise and the advertising spots aren't worth as much money so they have been running re-runs and the new episodes returned this week where holiday viewing returns to normal and they can get more money from advertisers.
it should also be mentioned that the advertiser who made the mistake was Telstra, who also happen to own BigPond so they were actually covering up their own mistake.
You'll note how silly this is. The firmware only works on products Intel sells. Intel doesn't sell the firmware seperately. There is no loss to Intel, at all, for it to provide OpenBSD users with the firmware, and it'd increase sales for Intel.
since they are willing to allow it via a click-through license it seems this is the main concern with Intel is the loss of user-agreement to whatever clauses the license contains. i haven't seen their license but the usual licenses have clauses regarding reverse engineering and agreeing not to hold the authors responsible for any damaging side effects etc etc. as end-users these licenses don't really mean jack to us, we usually scroll to the end and just click i agree but i bet the companies take them alot more seriously.
compared to our petrol prices at the moment the horse and carriage doesn't sound too bad.
In Australia we've had similair laws to this for years, the only visual display infront of a driver allowed is for information purposes (navigation etc), a DVD/movie player is allowed to be hooked up to the front display for when the car isn't running, but it's only allowed to function on rear displays while the car is started, actually thought most countries had laws like this.
We've actually been doing this for a couple of years with a couple of methods and used them in legitimate software products, one being eFX a Window GUI changer and another being Napigator v2.0+ but a different and what I believe is more powerful approach since you don't need to paste code into edit boxes and use debuggers was formed.
/imports blah.exe to see what's available for the taking).
Step 1: Howto get into another processes memory space
The easiest way todo this is via a global system-hook, or via a DLL that you must put in a special regkey and Windows will automatically load your DLL into every process as it starts, another more complicated method is to use CreateRemoteThread() (NT only?) and run a small function which performs LoadLibrary() on the DLL of your choice. I'll refer to a hook method for now as it's simple and works on all flavours of 32-bit Windows. SetWindowsHookEx documentation Usually this function is only used to set a hook within the specified thread ID to keep the hook localized however by setting the thread ID to 0 and putting the HOOKPROC inside a DLL and using WH_CBT, WH_GETMESSAGE etc hooks, Windows will automatically load your hook DLL into each process which the hook applies to which is usually all of them. That's it.
Step 2: Doing something useful
If you chose to use WH_GETMESSAGE for your hook then you have a hook function which is being called each time a process calls GetMessage() as part of its message loop, during the time in GetMessage() you are in the processes memory space as if it was your own and you may execute any code you like, prevent the process from getting messages.. whatever you like.. since we're on the discussion of exploits though let's do something interesting and take over the process.
Step 3: API hooking
When a process calls a shared function from a DLL it looks up the address of the function in the import table of the process. This is the main executable PE usually but you can also do recursive API hooking and modify the IATs of each module/DLL loaded in the same way. If you want to learn more on that just study up on the PE module format. My method of API hooking works by modifying the import table to change the address of where the actual functions are. This lets you replace shared DLL functions including most of the Win32 API with your own, here's a small example.
int (PASCAL FAR *orig_connect)(SOCKET s, const struct sockaddr FAR *name, int namelen) = 0;
int PASCAL FAR new_connect(SOCKET s, const struct sockaddr FAR *name, int namelen)
{
printf("[new_connect] socket(0x%08X) host(%s) port(%d) orig_connect(0x%08X)\n",
s, inet_ntoa(((struct sockaddr_in *)name)->sin_addr), ntohs(((struct sockaddr_in *)name)->sin_port), orig_connect);
return orig_connect(s, name, namelen);
}
Now to actually install the hook i've written a universal function kind of like GetProcAddress() todo it for me, I can't divulge the code because its company property however it's pretty easy to figure out if anyone needs todo it. The place I choose to install the hook is in DllMain() which is called when your DLL is loaded into each process, so you could hook every process running on the system since the global system hook we set earlier will be loading us into all of them or you could for example use GetModuleFileName(GetModuleHandle(0)...) to see which process you are now working in and if you want to hook it.
BOOL APIENTRY DllMain( HANDLE hModule,
DWORD ul_reason_for_call,
LPVOID lpReserved
)
{
switch(ul_reason_for_call)
{
case DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH:
{
(FARPROC&)orig_connect = HookModuleImport(GetModuleHandle(0), "WSOCK32.DLL", (LPCSTR)4, (PROC)new_connect, TRUE);
}
break;
}
return TRUE;
}
PROC HookModuleImport(HMODULE hModule, LPCSTR szModule, LPCSTR szImport, PROC pNewProc, BOOL bOrdinal);
The first parameter to the function is the process of whos import table you wish to modify, all you have todo is build up the PE headers and you'll get there. The second parameter is the module which contains the function you want to replace, in this case its WSOCK32.DLL. The third parameter is normally the function name however we are hooking by ordinal instead here because the string "connect" wasn't available to search for with this particular module, I can't remember the exact details but I think it was Windows 2000 copy only exported ordinals but not exactly sure off hand has been a while. The fourth parameter is the address of the new function and the last just says to look for ordinals instead of strings. The address of the old function is returned so you can call it if you wish or un-install your hook by calling HookModuleImport again with orig_connect as parater 4 (a good place todo this is in DLL_PROCESS_DETACH).
Whats happening now is in the process whos IAT we patched, each time it calls the Winsock connect() function, our new_connect is now called instead. We can do anything we like here, calling SetLastError(WSAECONNREFUSED); return SOCKET_ERROR; would make the particular process think the connection was refused (hmm, how bout a filter that prevents all spyware from connecting to its destination on every process on the system transparently by checking the destination address). I've only used Winsock::connect() as an example but this method can be applied to any function a process imports in any DLL (if you have VC++ just type dumpbin
I noticed this a few weeks ago and also had connections open 24/7 to wustat.windows.com:80 which 2 days ago turned into wutrack.windows.com:80 and I've just checked my netstat and it's back to wustat.windows.com:80 so I figure it has something todo with Windows Updates, I do have automatic updates on and find it a useful feature however with hostnames like wutrack.windows.com it makes me wonder it's doing more. Also it only seems to check for updates every few days so why is the connection open 24/7 (its my own netstat program which I've also coded in a Close Socket button to close the connection, which if I do it wont reconnect until I reboot either), so why does something that checks for updates periodocally need to be constantly connected the entire time your PC is up, and if this applies to every copy of Windows XP, surely there's millions, how does Microsoft handle millions of constant TCP connections (especially if they use IIS)
I also had the oppurtunity to work at IBM when i was 17 years old, due to lots of personal things my highschool education level is year 8 (school ended at 14). Luck played a VERY big part ofcourse though, the unemployment lady helping me had a son and husband that both worked there, the husband being very good friends with the manager, the only thing i had to even do was meet the manager to show i was capable of dressing presentable.. i still had/have 3 foot long looking hippy hair i just had to dress up slightly. This was by no means coding etc, it was on the hardware side in the warranty/repair shop fixing the hardware with 2 other guys who were 45-50, and then there was about 3 guys who took care of the maintenance contracts going out to the jobs for mainly the big companies. I had NO 'formal' hardware experience myself, everything was self taught by sitting at home pulling my Amiga2000 apart and putting it back together, then Amigas bored me so a change to x86 was almost immediate. I've never really been into games so after computer magazines and a little thing called the 'modem' grabbing my attention i just had to get one, so i did.. messed around on BBS's and learning Turbo Pascal by myself at home (i used DOS, never touched win3.1), i then discovered Linux and and FreeBSD and i knew i was at home, downloading the Slackware disksets over 2400 bps modem, getting it installed, i was in love (especially with the command line interface, multitasking, network environment.. all of it).. i messed around on it for ages, learning C from man pages and Opensource technologies, also learning about networking and administration by installing and learning about all the apps, and especially security side interested me, buffer overflows etc, trying to understand it all, because i believe you can't secure something if you don't understand it in the first place (did same thing learning howto crack software, now i can use that knowledge to employ as many anti-cracking routines as possible in my software). i then moved to Windows programming, first learning by writing a few modules for the Litestep opensource shell for Windows, after a very quick pickup and my LS modules becoming very popular i was asked onto the Litestep development team where i learnt more and more about Windows coding, and quickly (within first ~2 months of coding C on Windows) gained a reputation in the shell community and being referred to as a coding machine, with the ability to churn out code so quickly (partly due to having no life).. anyway now i'm co-owner of a small virtual company, we have very low overheads due to all working from home, the other application programmer with us also started on Linux.
anyway sorry for rambling and getting off track, can't help it sometimes.. my point is, my personal life is a complete mess, but the things i talked about above are the only things that ever made me truly happy, and i've never really thought about it until now but when you look back at the roots the one thing that helped create it was Linux. it truly is not only a great server OS but a fantastic learning tool too, and for that i thank you.
and to IBM, while it was a relatively short stay (bout 8 months) due to them closing up the work centres for cost cutting, i thank you too for the only 'proper' job in my life, i thank you for giving me a chance to proove myself and not judging me based solely on education level. i know i taught the guys there stuff (i was the 'Windows 95 expert' because it had just came out, and the 2 older guys i worked with were a bit set in their ways and slightly old fassioned).. but they also taught me alot too, i especially thank Quentin for taking the time to teach me one on one, this wasn't a class environment or anything but he still took the time to not only sit down explaining things to me and teaching me a bit about electronics on the side, with regards to the hardware that can't just simply be 'replaced', within the first few months, because things like failed monitors often had a common cause, and no troubleshooting was involved i was allowed to solder and repair them too, i also had the oppurunity to go out and install custom touchscreen thinkpads in the Telstra vehicles, setting up radio packet modems and everything, even people in other departments took the time to help me learn, the networking guys would go print up entire books for me free of chargem, pulling thinkpads apart that needed repair. the point is noone has given me so much trust in my entire life, sure i did break some things (i dropped a printer cover a bit of plastic broke off, and i installed an imported Compaq (we did their repairs too) power supply into the machine without checking the switch was on 240v first (it was still on 110v) so when i plugged the cord, while leaning over the desktop case to get to the back, and proceeded to get the biggest shock of my life when it blew up inches from my head, only a cap in the ps blew and Q repaired it.. i felt really bad but they were all laughing and joking around saying don't worry about it. but i wasn't alone when one of the older guys had just put a new flyback transformer into a monitor, without attaching the suction cup thing back into the tube, he proceeded to turn it on to check if it worked, the suction cup looking thing was just hanging loose onto the metal workbench.. so all the power from the flyback transformer went into the workbench, back into the power circuit, the whole room was buzzing with energy because it was like being in an electrified metal cage, the flourecent lights going nuts and managed to fry a terminal or 2 we used, and the old 286 work machine.. everything was easily repaired tho and everyone had a good laugh, and i learnt that everyone makes mistakes.
once again sorry for rambling, i have no idea how much i've written, and if you want to skip over it here's the summary: both Linux (and lets not forget OpenBSD, FreeBSD.. Opensource.. the whole community) and IBM do make a difference and once again i'm greatful to both for bringing some hapiness and meaning into my life.
when you think about it, it should be chances are it was white or 'modern' humans, i'm Australian but not huge on history so i'll use approximations, feel free to correct any dates.. anyway aborigines lived here for millions of years or something first without extincting tasmanian tigers or dingos or kangaroos, white man comes along in around 1788 and somehow manages to extinct a species in under 200 years, wonder how the kangaroos are doing too, i've seen one in like the last decade.. standing in the middle of the road at 1am while i was driving thru a bendy gorge road, if it wasn't for good brakes he woulda been extinct too :) & have never seen a dingo but there are lots on frasier island, some little boy(s) were actually mauled there a few years back & first thing anyone wanted todo was cull the dingos (i believe they may have culled some and ended up building fences).
Yeah, morally i'm with you.. but what I don't get is how lightly everyone takes Windows licenses especially, and then if anyone breaks the GPL they have a million geeks with pitch forks chasing after them.. if anyone reverse engineers a Windows program, to release a Linux version of a client, against the wishes of the author noone cares because it's apparently for a cause or something, just seems like a bit of a double standard, don't get me wrong I don't think the authors wishes or actions (including spyware) are always right, but it's still their wishes and their software so they can release it however they want, and their wishes should be abided by, if you don't agree with them don't use it.
I write both Windows and Linux software and have used the GPL a few times and it just seems like any non free-GPL type license is considered not worthy and taken with a pinch of salt.
I remember one guy who reverse engineered my Windows software against the license to hack it up, release again on his own site etc modified said directly to me something like it's your fault for not including a license, so when i proceeded to show him the license which not only exists, not only has to be agree'd to before installing but says you may not reverse engineer he laughed and said i don't read those things anyway.. ofcourse this guy probably wouldn't abide by the GPL or any license.
We store the credit card information in MySQL encrypted using the PHP OpenSSL routines. Only the public key is stored on the server, the private key is offsite and can be pasted into a form when you need to retrieve the information and have the PHP script decrypt it for display purposes only (all over HTTPS ofcourse).
Is 2way satellite now, it's expensive though, they are a DirecPC reseller i think.. for more than the price of 512k DSL with 3gig/month you get 64k satellite with 300mb/month.. to get the same as the $89 DSL package you have to pay $450
P ri cing.asp
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/satellite/2Way
not only in there no legal alternative but the RIAA doesn't want one either, they want a music monopoly. we licensed fasttracks technology and wrote our own client from scratch (not releasing now since they filed suit against musiccity, waiting to see how it turns out).. we've contacted RIAAs musicnet service about licensing content, recieved no reply, contacted ARIA about licensing (australia), no reply.. they don't wanna know about it, they're happy in their own little world ripping people off with CDs.. they bitch and moan about copyright infringement, and won't even let anyone try do it legally either, the competition consumer comission needs to step in at some point.
very true, one other thing is only one of the cease&desist letters they've sent lists copyright infringement (the one to MusicCity, because they have lawyers that will fight back).. every other cease&desist letter uses the 9th thingies Napster case as an excuse, the thing is they prooved Napster was copyright infringing, they are just ASSUMING all the opennap servers are, this means nothing in court without proof that the opennap servers contain infringing material, they are just too lazy to go through them all gathering evidence. Also if they want to use the Napster decision as an excuse, Napster was told to block copyrighted material.. how come the opennap servers aren't given this chance? the opennap software contains the ability to filter, it even has regular expression support. They are abusing their power with scare tactics and they know it by sending ONLY MusicCity a screenshot listing 20 infringing titles and told them to remove them and sending everyone else orders to shut down because they know they can't afford lawyers to check the legality of it all.
napigator works with beta 8 and 9 just fine, and we've just released a few alpha's of napigator v2.0 that integrates into napster itself like one of its normal pages.. v2.0 release will be out in a few days.
From FreeBSD security list
There are two flaws in the SSH1 protocol as implemented by OpenSSH and ssh.
I also use OpenBSD for a NAT router and have to agree with you here.. the setup is so simple & very easy to get everything working as if there is no NAT with a few port redirects (such as ICQ, Napster etc).. the only thing i can't get going is NetMeeting to receive video.. thought about writing a H.323 packet parser that dynamically adds NAT rules for the ports but i don't really need NetMeeting that much.
Not quite the same as the one in BTF but here you go anyway, airboard
Linux 2.2.18 (Dual p3-550, 1Gb ram, all SCSI compiling Apache 1.3.17)
make
real 0m37.244s
user 0m23.900s
sys 0m6.000s
make -j3
real 0m26.915s
user 0m24.360s
sys 0m6.020s
make -j4
real 0m23.724s
user 0m24.130s
sys 0m5.880s
make -j5
real 0m20.154s
user 0m22.940s
sys 0m5.000s
make -j6
real 0m21.326s
user 0m24.120s
sys 0m5.830s
FreeBSD (Dual p3-550, 512Mb ram, all SCSI compiling Apache 1.3.17)
make
39.458u 5.635s 0:48.99 92.0% 1686+1874k 0+1249io 0pf+0w
make -j3
40.007u 5.725s 0:32.53 140.5% 1696+1884k 0+1645io 1pf+0w
make -j4
40.027u 5.817s 0:32.73 140.0% 1691+1877k 0+1631io 0pf+0w
make -j5
40.154u 5.832s 0:31.74 144.8% 1701+1884k 1+1628io 0pf+0w
Real intelligent statement there with lots of arguments to back it up I see. I use whatever suits the job in question (web server, SQL server etc), including Linux, FreeBSD & OpenBSD.
thanks for the info.. so now this brings up one other question, the main reason to use bind9 was for multiprocessor support (-n [number_of_cpus]) .. multiprocessor app's are usually multithreaded so the OS can take care of handing out individual threads to different CPUs.. so with threading disabled will this inturn disable the multiprocessor features aswell.