Damn right you should fear Google. With its extensive web and Usenet caching, resourceful employers (or anyone else for that matter) who decide to profile you with a quick search represent a very big threat to everything that you hold dear. Best thing you could do is be careful when dealing with things like messageboards and Usenet. If the content you post is questionable, settle with nothing less than at least a half dozen aliases, several e-mail addresses and an anonymizer.
My all time faves on the NES? The Megaman and Castlevania series, Legacy of the Wizard (a game which you could literally and irrecovacably become stuck in), and Blaster Master. Can't forget Mike Tyson's Punchout and Contra.
Some of my best gaming memories were on that system, man. I'll never forget it.
Damn you, first poster. I was sitting here just waiting for Slashdot to release the thread for replies. Seems they set a timer on the reply action so as to not open the discussion up right away.
You know, I used to think Mitnick was a myth in man form; not necessarily a man that didn't exist, but one that oozed some intangible breed of talent, but then I began seeing him on television and hearing him speak. Weirdly enough, he appears to have zero depth of character and he keeps recycling the same dead "social engineering" story everytime a camera is pointed at him. Kevin Mitnick is a terribly simple man with outdated arguments who, perhaps by virtue of brain atrophy as a result of his extended incarceration, has lost his ability to formulate complex arguments.
Perhaps it was John Markoff's ability to lay on the superlatives. Perhaps like Keven claims, all that stuff in Cyberpunk was, um, bunk.
And check it out, the man plans to open a security firm so he could consult people on how to avoid social engineers, no doubt! He has nothing in the way of skills anymore, if he ever had skills!
I read the first chapter of Mitnick's new book, The Art of Deception. Helluva lot of first person pronouns in that mother, I'm telling ya. Lots more than Tsutomu Shimomura's "Takedown." And there are a lot of silly social engineering "scenarios" in that book that gives the book a HOWTO feel for adolescents! Kinda like 2600 magazine or some subversive text from Loompanics Unlimited. I am thoroughly bored hearing about Kevin Mitnick.
The Terminator franchise was unduly fucked when they introduced the comedy called Judgement Day. The first one, although archaic compared to the sequel, had a serious film noir thing happening. In that one, Arnold was FRIGHTENING and very synthetic looking.
But alas, that's the problem with films these days. They're too pre-chewed for mass consumption, and because of that, good films end up as children's material.
You want the ultimate SCI-FI universe? How about the same high art, highly geometric, high contrast, high breed of cyberspace brought to life in the movie TRON and the first System Shock game? Or how about the cyberspace as imagined in Johnny Mnemonic where in order to connect to a remote computer, you had to strap on the 'trodes, tweak a few shapes in a 3D virtual space, blast past a big octagon that represents Citybank or American Express in a sort of similated sensory projection, that is, only if the intrusion countermeasures (ICE) don't fry your synapses to fuck first.
Now BOOM -- that kinda of shit strikes me as the real deal SCI-FI universe!
To : Nancy.Carter@*********, nancar@********* Cc: Attchmnt: Subject : Your E-mail Case? You WILL Lose! ----- Message Text ----- Nancy,
If the courts haven't seen your case yet, I assure you, your case is a very weak one. The court of public opinion in ISP practice weighs heavily against you. Just about every Canadian service provider carries the e-mail handling policy you consider unjust.
Your argument asserts that despite being delinquent with the fees responsible for your account's upkeep, that you are still entitled to what most Internet providers would consider chargeable services, whether that service is access to your messages or to have them forwarded to another e-mail hosted at another service provider.
Understand that the e-mail an Internet provider accumulates for you while your account remains suspended and you are sorting your billing issues is a good faith practice an ISP is not obligated to do. In other words, they are extending a favour to you. This favour is the lesser of two evils.
The other evil is undelivered mail due to a/purged/ account rather than a suspended one. In other words, your mail does not accumulate whatsoever and the sender is returned a mailer notification explaining your account no longer exists. Which evil is the more appealing to you?
I am qualified to be offering you my opinion you ask? Well, I am not a praciting attorney but I am a Internet service professional that has seen and dealt with variations of your problem. In a case like yours, the facts are so overwhelmingly against you that I imagine a judge would dismiss your claim entirely citing negligence on your part for not paying your bills.
I only suggest you tread carefully. You're dealing with professionals who's practices are often reviewed with lawyers before they are put into play. Nonetheless, I wish you the best of luck in your fight.
I used to work for Netcom Canada where we had our own in-house software for business related hosting services, and no word of a lie, while I was once testing the software it unexpectedly crashed with the error:
Granted we're all busy, we all could do the more well-meaning Internet a duty by checking the headers of even five or ten a day of those SPAM messages and submitting any open SMTP relays you find to at least one realtime blackhole list. This is what I've been doing for over a year. This is precisely what the article meant about e-mail vigilante-ism. You'd be surprised to find out how much of the SPAM you receive are sent through ill-configured mail relays.
It also quite likely means YOU have received one less SPAM message because of ME!
And how does one confirm a mail host is an open relay? I shall not explain, but if you know of telnet and a bit of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, you could manually check this.
Quite honestly, if even half the Slashdot population did this sort of thing consistently for two weeks, the entire Internet could conceivably see a tremendous decrease in SPAM flow. Not impossible.
And when are YOU going to thank our Canadian snipers for taking your American soldiers TO SCHOOL? Remember that world record for longest snipe we just set in Afghanistan? Goes to show, brotherman.
Been online ten years and never had to pay for access once. That thar's the benefit of working for ISPs. Free is good, so because of that, I siphon off others' broadband connections and use my 56K connection for IRC and a bit of web browsing.
This isn't so much about the anniversary of an aggressive virus so much as it is a reminder that people remain impressionable, gullible and downright cluelness about the technology they use on a daily basis.
The same people with computers that end up ravaged by silly viruses attached to e-mail messages with subjects resembling "Virus Removal Tool" are the same people that wonder why they can't address e-mail to "www.yahoo.com" and so ask me to explain the difference between a web and e-mail address to them. Oh yeah, did I mention I do tech support for an ISP?
Worse yet, it's remarkable how people end up being repeatedly suckered by half-baked, ill-worded schemes to get you to open their 'refund.txt.bat' files.
The real weakest link here are the people -- after all, it's people that are responsible for creating and propagating viruses, but a close second for that ultimate prize goes to the method to all this madness: Microsoft Windows and its rotten offspring, Outlook Express. With ease of use comes ease of being deceived, which is all attributed to the same people who believe computers are toys -- the ignorant ones. That isn't to say everybody that uses Windows and Outlook Express are ignorant; I use Windows on a daily basis, never Outlook Express though. I set that aside in favour of no-frills e-mail through a sell account. There are an overrepresentation of stupid folks using Windows.
So with that reasoning, I suppose it would be more appropriate to wish the stupid folks a happy birthday.
They're one of the few laptop companies that not only have their shit together, but keep their shit together. I recently made the jump from Toshiba; a jump urged all the faster because of their indifference to some concerns I had with their adoption of the Legacy Free BIOS design. Bad.
Anyhow, I'm about a month into owning my spanking new Dell Inspiron 8200, which runs Quake III like a dream by the way. Even at 1600x1200 res with everything enabled. Presently working my way through various System Shock 2 levels. This notebook does not disappoint. So very highly recommended.
If you're looking to break into listening to electronic music, start from the source and sample the masters (creators). Their stuff is pure, unfiltered genius.
Anything else would be uncivilized.
Jeff Mills
Juan Atkinson
Derrick May
Claude Young
Robert Armani
Felix The Housecat
(and so on..)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn right you should fear Google. With its extensive web and Usenet caching, resourceful employers (or anyone else for that matter) who decide to profile you with a quick search represent a very big threat to everything that you hold dear. Best thing you could do is be careful when dealing with things like messageboards and Usenet. If the content you post is questionable, settle with nothing less than at least a half dozen aliases, several e-mail addresses and an anonymizer.
- IP
My all time faves on the NES? The Megaman and Castlevania series, Legacy of the Wizard (a game which you could literally and irrecovacably become stuck in), and Blaster Master. Can't forget Mike Tyson's Punchout and Contra.
Some of my best gaming memories were on that system, man. I'll never forget it.
- IP
Damn you, first poster. I was sitting here just waiting for Slashdot to release the thread for replies. Seems they set a timer on the reply action so as to not open the discussion up right away.
Ah well, no biggie. Second post!
- IP
Damn. Failed to get first post, but slap mah 'fro anyway.
- IP
I'm an ISTP. We're far cooler.
- IP
You know, I used to think Mitnick was a myth in man form; not necessarily a man that didn't exist, but one that oozed some intangible breed of talent, but then I began seeing him on television and hearing him speak. Weirdly enough, he appears to have zero depth of character and he keeps recycling the same dead "social engineering" story everytime a camera is pointed at him. Kevin Mitnick is a terribly simple man with outdated arguments who, perhaps by virtue of brain atrophy as a result of his extended incarceration, has lost his ability to formulate complex arguments.
Perhaps it was John Markoff's ability to lay on the superlatives. Perhaps like Keven claims, all that stuff in Cyberpunk was, um, bunk.
And check it out, the man plans to open a security firm so he could consult people on how to avoid social engineers, no doubt! He has nothing in the way of skills anymore, if he ever had skills!
I read the first chapter of Mitnick's new book, The Art of Deception. Helluva lot of first person pronouns in that mother, I'm telling ya. Lots more than Tsutomu Shimomura's "Takedown." And there are a lot of silly social engineering "scenarios" in that book that gives the book a HOWTO feel for adolescents! Kinda like 2600 magazine or some subversive text from Loompanics Unlimited. I am thoroughly bored hearing about Kevin Mitnick.
- IP
The Terminator franchise was unduly fucked when they introduced the comedy called Judgement Day. The first one, although archaic compared to the sequel, had a serious film noir thing happening. In that one, Arnold was FRIGHTENING and very synthetic looking.
But alas, that's the problem with films these days. They're too pre-chewed for mass consumption, and because of that, good films end up as children's material.
- IP
Always possible, my friend.
- IP
Toronto, Canada
You want the ultimate SCI-FI universe? How about the same high art, highly geometric, high contrast, high breed of cyberspace brought to life in the movie TRON and the first System Shock game? Or how about the cyberspace as imagined in Johnny Mnemonic where in order to connect to a remote computer, you had to strap on the 'trodes, tweak a few shapes in a 3D virtual space, blast past a big octagon that represents Citybank or American Express in a sort of similated sensory projection, that is, only if the intrusion countermeasures (ICE) don't fry your synapses to fuck first.
Now BOOM -- that kinda of shit strikes me as the real deal SCI-FI universe!
Icephreak
Artiste Extraordinaire!
I've got you beat. 89,984.
By the way, this case is old news and Slashdot has posted this thread before.
To : Nancy.Carter@*********, nancar@********* :
/purged/ account rather than a
Cc
Attchmnt:
Subject : Your E-mail Case? You WILL Lose!
----- Message Text -----
Nancy,
If the courts haven't seen your case yet, I assure you, your case is a
very weak one. The court of public opinion in ISP practice weighs heavily
against you. Just about every Canadian service provider carries the
e-mail handling policy you consider unjust.
Your argument asserts that despite being delinquent with the fees
responsible for your account's upkeep, that you are still entitled to what
most Internet providers would consider chargeable services, whether that
service is access to your messages or to have them forwarded to another
e-mail hosted at another service provider.
Understand that the e-mail an Internet provider accumulates for you while
your account remains suspended and you are sorting your billing issues is
a good faith practice an ISP is not obligated to do. In other words, they
are extending a favour to you. This favour is the lesser of two evils.
The other evil is undelivered mail due to a
suspended one. In other words, your mail does not accumulate whatsoever
and the sender is returned a mailer notification explaining your account
no longer exists. Which evil is the more appealing to you?
I am qualified to be offering you my opinion you ask? Well, I am not a
praciting attorney but I am a Internet service professional that has seen
and dealt with variations of your problem. In a case like yours, the
facts are so overwhelmingly against you that I imagine a judge would
dismiss your claim entirely citing negligence on your part for not paying
your bills.
I only suggest you tread carefully. You're dealing with professionals
who's practices are often reviewed with lawyers before they are put into
play. Nonetheless, I wish you the best of luck in your fight.
(Name Witheld)
An Anonymous Spectator
Naturally I laughed.
- IP
From the article:
"As for features, well I guess it all depends on what your looking for."
"Your" expected to use grammar checking when you write articles and expect to sound credible, Mr. Author.
- IP
Don't fret, but countersue. Make his dumbass self realize stupidity too can be expensive.
- IP
Granted we're all busy, we all could do the more well-meaning Internet a duty by checking the headers of even five or ten a day of those SPAM messages and submitting any open SMTP relays you find to at least one realtime blackhole list. This is what I've been doing for over a year. This is precisely what the article meant about e-mail vigilante-ism. You'd be surprised to find out how much of the SPAM you receive are sent through ill-configured mail relays.
It also quite likely means YOU have received one less SPAM message because of ME!
And how does one confirm a mail host is an open relay? I shall not explain, but if you know of telnet and a bit of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, you could manually check this.
Quite honestly, if even half the Slashdot population did this sort of thing consistently for two weeks, the entire Internet could conceivably see a tremendous decrease in SPAM flow. Not impossible.
- IP
And when are YOU going to thank our Canadian snipers for taking your American soldiers TO SCHOOL? Remember that world record for longest snipe we just set in Afghanistan? Goes to show, brotherman.
- IP
Been online ten years and never had to pay for access once. That thar's the benefit of working for ISPs. Free is good, so because of that, I siphon off others' broadband connections and use my 56K connection for IRC and a bit of web browsing.
- IP
This isn't so much about the anniversary of an aggressive virus so much as it is a reminder that people remain impressionable, gullible and downright cluelness about the technology they use on a daily basis.
The same people with computers that end up ravaged by silly viruses attached to e-mail messages with subjects resembling "Virus Removal Tool" are the same people that wonder why they can't address e-mail to "www.yahoo.com" and so ask me to explain the difference between a web and e-mail address to them. Oh yeah, did I mention I do tech support for an ISP?
Worse yet, it's remarkable how people end up being repeatedly suckered by half-baked, ill-worded schemes to get you to open their 'refund.txt.bat' files.
The real weakest link here are the people -- after all, it's people that are responsible for creating and propagating viruses, but a close second for that ultimate prize goes to the method to all this madness: Microsoft Windows and its rotten offspring, Outlook Express. With ease of use comes ease of being deceived, which is all attributed to the same people who believe computers are toys -- the ignorant ones. That isn't to say everybody that uses Windows and Outlook Express are ignorant; I use Windows on a daily basis, never Outlook Express though. I set that aside in favour of no-frills e-mail through a sell account. There are an overrepresentation of stupid folks using Windows.
So with that reasoning, I suppose it would be more appropriate to wish the stupid folks a happy birthday.
- IP
They're one of the few laptop companies that not only have their shit together, but keep their shit together. I recently made the jump from Toshiba; a jump urged all the faster because of their indifference to some concerns I had with their adoption of the Legacy Free BIOS design. Bad.
Anyhow, I'm about a month into owning my spanking new Dell Inspiron 8200, which runs Quake III like a dream by the way. Even at 1600x1200 res with everything enabled. Presently working my way through various System Shock 2 levels. This notebook does not disappoint. So very highly recommended.
- IP
Well, I'd zip up a combination of the latest BitchX client, a picture of our mutual Goatse friend and a text file with the message:
These backdoors had belonged to us.
If you're looking to break into listening to electronic music, start from the source and sample the masters (creators). Their stuff is pure, unfiltered genius.
Anything else would be uncivilized.
Jeff Mills
Juan Atkinson
Derrick May
Claude Young
Robert Armani
Felix The Housecat
(and so on..)
ICEPHREAK
Already forgetting are you, Mr. Taco?
I have but one thing to say:
BSD IS DYING.
- IP
Lynx sucks anyway. Links is miles better.