no, no, no.. install a 'pamphlet-holder' (or some other hardware that doesn't look out of place) containing a minature camera, to record the victim entering their security code.
For a long time I have avoided buying CD's, DVD's, DVD players, or even DVD computer drives in protest to the RIAA, MPAA and related 'pigopolist' organisations and companies.
However I recently made the following resolve. In the event of Jack Valenti's death, I will celebrate by buying a decent quality DVD writer at the first available opportunity.
"A few minutes" - it really doesn't matter. If they miss it this time and the problem wasn't a one-off, they can catch it the next time it reboots.
In the case of an earth-based server, however long it takes a normal sysadmin to log in and halt a process or two (a minute would be more than enough for me, allow 5 minutes for slower typists)
In the case of the Spirit Rover there are other systems in orbit they can program to detect when spirit reboots, log in, and halt further booting leaving the rover in a known stable state while they diagnose and deal with the problem. Which is just what they did.
Maybe I'm fooling myself by not buying DVDs and not going to movies. Should I just give in? Is anyone here actually still voting with their dollars by withholding it?
Yay. Glad I'm not the only one. I was starting to wonder this myself!
I refuse to buy DVD's or a player. I don't buy CD's (although I've had a few given to me). And I hardly ever watch movies (they all come out on TV, if you just wait a few months)
If you're really worried about your remote server being unreachable, here's what I would suggest doing:
Have a hardware watchdog. If the machine is lost or confused, it reboots itself.
Have it come up in a known state, fire off a few broadcast packets to the sysadmins, and run sshd but basically nothing else. Stay there for a minute or so.
If nobody's tried to log in and halt the boot process, carry on booting. With luck the problem was transient. Worst case the problem still exists, you reboot, and the admins get another chance to log in.
From the description of how they got Spirit back, it looks like this is exactly how it was set up.
Kidnappers usually get one chance.. swap cash for kin, and it's much safer and easier to grab someone else the next time around.
I'd be thinking Nigerian Scammers. You pay them a little to begin with, and once they have you hooked the 'requirements' keep getting bigger and bigger. And you're always just one payment away from having the deal closed.
Rather too easily - it's almost a logical progression!
netscape; MS released MSIE
winamp; MS put most of the same functionality into WMP
winzip; XP has compressed folders.
elcomsoft's tools; the next version of clippy?
first step;
pull an all-nighter and see how many lines you can trace back to code written under a GPL or BSD licence, code released by AT&T, Caldera and other incarnations of thescogroup, or code which the original authors can reasonably prove they wrote.
The first few pages of 'stolen code' SCO revealed were proven to be completely legit within days.
You hum it, we'll find the mp3 or midi..
on
Google's Bigger Index
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Waikato University has a music recognition system that would be awesome on google - if you can hum a few notes, it'll match it with the original tune. Remember all those emusic tunes that ended up as 'elevator' music? A lot of them are free downloads and still available on the artist's websites, but if you hear a tune you like while you're waiting on hold how do you find it?
Also, it would be cool if I could upload a text-overlayed, renamed thumbnail from usenet and google could find the matching full-size image for me.
I've turned off "plugins" and "Remote Image Loading" in my mail client, and while I only ever send plain text I do have other people send me HTML mail with performance graphs, etc, which I need to see.
And of course turn off all the nessus tests which crash things.
I'd say clone your production server if you can't afford for it to be down, but DO run the tests that crash things. You do want to know if some bored script-kiddie can take your site down with a trivial syn-flood or ping-of-death.
In a SCADA system near and dear to my career, we set alarm thresholds so low that the operators expect a certain amount of alarm traffic even for routine events. This helps to discover any misbehavior in the alarm system.
It also trains your operators to treat alarms as expected events which can be ignored, rather than something unusual which must be attended to immediately.
Personally, I'd assume they have some form of windows, so I'd instruct them through the process of identifying their windows version (right-click the "my computer" icon, select "properties" from the menu that comes up, etc..)
Mac users usually know they have a Mac. Linux users usually already know that the problem is at your end, and what YOU need to do to fix it.
What resolution do you design for? a flash site designed for 800x600 or even 1024x768 is going to be a squinty, unreadable postage stamp in the middle of the browser window at 1600x1200.
well, perhaps not that bad.. but a well-designed site using XHTML and CSS should look about the same at 1600x1200 as it does at 600x800, except with nicer edges on the text.
I doubt many people would want a 'write-once' memory card unless it could be made very cheap. And I don't believe it's the best solution anyhow, since you can still take the image from a arite-once card, tamper with it and any metadata, sign the new image, and write it to a fresh write-once card.
OTOH you could have a camera that included a PGP private key installed during manufacture and not accessable outside of the camera. If the CCD and image processing was all on a single chip, it would be impossible to recover or 'misuse' the PGP private key without completely destroying the camera.
The camera can PGP sign each photo, including metadata (time, focus, exposure, etc) before writing it to media.
Anyone can edit the media, but you can't sign the image again without passing it through the camera IE setting the clock back, fooling focus/light sensors, and projecting the high-resolution image directly onto the CCD chip. If the camera case itself is reasonably tamper-proof, you're really only left with the possiblity of photographing a tampered image from a multi-megapixel, daylight-intensity, wall-sized display screen across a room, which is a pretty expensive option.
And how do you propose travelling back in time to 3PM Friday afternoon, so that the signed timestamp will match the alarm call and/or police report of the incident?
There's always the option of photographing a high-resolution screen, or perhaps feeding in a different video signal. These things require knowing in advance that you're going to need the tampered evidence, photoshopping images on the spot to match object placement and lighting conditions of adjacent images, etc. The point is that you can't just change the clock, and you can't photoshop images after they've come out of the box because you don't have the keys to sign them again.
It's never going to be foolproof, all I'm aiming for is "at least as tamperproof as an equivalent film or video camera system" which is apparently good enough in most cases.
.. but is constantly NAGS you to UPGRADE. And there's no way of switching it off either, you can only get it to shut the hell up for a week at most before it starts again.
I was recently asked if we could make a reasonably untamperable 'security' camera; My solution was to make the machine itself 'physically secure' (sealed so that any attempt to open it would be obvious) and then have it PGP-sign each image. The client has easy access to all the images and public key from the box, but isn't told the root password or anything else that would give them access to the private key, so they cannot resign altered images.
I believe this would be 'at least' as untamperable as an equivalent film or video camera system.
If it's easily fixed, they'll just keep 'fixing' it, without ever securing the box. 90% of insecure boxes are there because the sysadmins are lazy and expend the minimum effort to get the thing working.
If you want them to learn, you need to make sure that "getting the box back up" is significantly more effort than "learning how to secure the box".
Don't bother trying to rate limit downloads; you'll get exactly the same number of people downloading everything, except that instead of doing it quickly they'll leave wget running all week and tying up your server's resources.
Have a page "download.php?filename=foo.txt" that all your links point to, and have that page return <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1;URL=files/$filename">
(pseudocode; my php scripting is not great, but you get the idea..)
This totally breaks wget, although it's not too hard to script around. You'll cut spider traffic back by probably 95%, all the casual 'grab everything we can' downloaders, but people who really want to get all your files will still figure out how to.
Or if you totally want to stop automated downloads, put each file behind a 'captcha'.
Slashdot Mirror
The word down here is that New Zealand has been unofficially nominated "Best Supporting Country in a Motion Picture"
Anyway, one thing I promise, you will NEVER see Peter Jackson produce anything even close to a 'crappy' movie. The guy is a true genius.
Unobtainium; A general term for any material that is, for all practical purposes, impossible to obtain!
no, no, no.. install a 'pamphlet-holder' (or some other hardware that doesn't look out of place) containing a minature camera, to record the victim entering their security code.
And for swipe-cards, install a 'skimmer'
For a long time I have avoided buying CD's, DVD's, DVD players, or even DVD computer drives in protest to the RIAA, MPAA and related 'pigopolist' organisations and companies.
However I recently made the following resolve. In the event of Jack Valenti's death, I will celebrate by buying a decent quality DVD writer at the first available opportunity.
"A few minutes" - it really doesn't matter. If they miss it this time and the problem wasn't a one-off, they can catch it the next time it reboots.
In the case of an earth-based server, however long it takes a normal sysadmin to log in and halt a process or two (a minute would be more than enough for me, allow 5 minutes for slower typists)
In the case of the Spirit Rover there are other systems in orbit they can program to detect when spirit reboots, log in, and halt further booting leaving the rover in a known stable state while they diagnose and deal with the problem. Which is just what they did.
Maybe I'm fooling myself by not buying DVDs and not going to movies. Should I just give in? Is anyone here actually still voting with their dollars by withholding it?
Yay. Glad I'm not the only one. I was starting to wonder this myself!
I refuse to buy DVD's or a player. I don't buy CD's (although I've had a few given to me). And I hardly ever watch movies (they all come out on TV, if you just wait a few months)
If you're really worried about your remote server being unreachable, here's what I would suggest doing:
Have a hardware watchdog. If the machine is lost or confused, it reboots itself.
Have it come up in a known state, fire off a few broadcast packets to the sysadmins, and run sshd but basically nothing else. Stay there for a minute or so.
If nobody's tried to log in and halt the boot process, carry on booting. With luck the problem was transient. Worst case the problem still exists, you reboot, and the admins get another chance to log in.
From the description of how they got Spirit back, it looks like this is exactly how it was set up.
Who'da thunk it!!
Kidnappers usually get one chance.. swap cash for kin, and it's much safer and easier to grab someone else the next time around.
I'd be thinking Nigerian Scammers. You pay them a little to begin with, and once they have you hooked the 'requirements' keep getting bigger and bigger.
And you're always just one payment away from having the deal closed.
Rather too easily - it's almost a logical progression!
netscape; MS released MSIE
winamp; MS put most of the same functionality into WMP
winzip; XP has compressed folders.
elcomsoft's tools; the next version of clippy?
first step;
pull an all-nighter and see how many lines you can trace back to code written under a GPL or BSD licence, code released by AT&T, Caldera and other incarnations of thescogroup, or code which the original authors can reasonably prove they wrote.
The first few pages of 'stolen code' SCO revealed were proven to be completely legit within days.
Hint; Google is an excellent way to track down alledged "stolen SCO code in linux"
Waikato University has a music recognition system that would be awesome on google - if you can hum a few notes, it'll match it with the original tune. Remember all those emusic tunes that ended up as 'elevator' music? A lot of them are free downloads and still available on the artist's websites, but if you hear a tune you like while you're waiting on hold how do you find it?
Also, it would be cool if I could upload a text-overlayed, renamed thumbnail from usenet and google could find the matching full-size image for me.
Why?
I've turned off "plugins" and "Remote Image Loading" in my mail client, and while I only ever send plain text I do have other people send me HTML mail with performance graphs, etc, which I need to see.
And of course turn off all the nessus tests which crash things.
I'd say clone your production server if you can't afford for it to be down, but DO run the tests that crash things. You do want to know if some bored script-kiddie can take your site down with a trivial syn-flood or ping-of-death.
In a SCADA system near and dear to my career, we set alarm thresholds so low that the operators expect a certain amount of alarm traffic even for routine events. This helps to discover any misbehavior in the alarm system.
It also trains your operators to treat alarms as expected events which can be ignored, rather than something unusual which must be attended to immediately.
Personally, I'd assume they have some form of windows, so I'd instruct them through the process of identifying their windows version (right-click the "my computer" icon, select "properties" from the menu that comes up, etc..)
Mac users usually know they have a Mac. Linux users usually already know that the problem is at your end, and what YOU need to do to fix it.
"pixel perfect" sure;
What resolution do you design for? a flash site designed for 800x600 or even 1024x768 is going to be a squinty, unreadable postage stamp in the middle of the browser window at 1600x1200.
well, perhaps not that bad.. but a well-designed site using XHTML and CSS should look about the same at 1600x1200 as it does at 600x800, except with nicer edges on the text.
I doubt many people would want a 'write-once' memory card unless it could be made very cheap. And I don't believe it's the best solution anyhow, since you can still take the image from a arite-once card, tamper with it and any metadata, sign the new image, and write it to a fresh write-once card.
OTOH you could have a camera that included a PGP private key installed during manufacture and not accessable outside of the camera. If the CCD and image processing was all on a single chip, it would be impossible to recover or 'misuse' the PGP private key without completely destroying the camera.
The camera can PGP sign each photo, including metadata (time, focus, exposure, etc) before writing it to media.
Anyone can edit the media, but you can't sign the image again without passing it through the camera IE setting the clock back, fooling focus/light sensors, and projecting the high-resolution image directly onto the CCD chip. If the camera case itself is reasonably tamper-proof, you're really only left with the possiblity of photographing a tampered image from a multi-megapixel, daylight-intensity, wall-sized display screen across a room, which is a pretty expensive option.
"Almost Certainly" == "Beyond all reasonable doubt"
You can never be 100% certain. If that was the required standard, nobody would ever be convicted of anything.
And how do you propose travelling back in time to 3PM Friday afternoon, so that the signed timestamp will match the alarm call and/or police report of the incident?
There's always the option of photographing a high-resolution screen, or perhaps feeding in a different video signal. These things require knowing in advance that you're going to need the tampered evidence, photoshopping images on the spot to match object placement and lighting conditions of adjacent images, etc. The point is that you can't just change the clock, and you can't photoshop images after they've come out of the box because you don't have the keys to sign them again.
It's never going to be foolproof, all I'm aiming for is "at least as tamperproof as an equivalent film or video camera system" which is apparently good enough in most cases.
.. but is constantly NAGS you to UPGRADE. And there's no way of switching it off either, you can only get it to shut the hell up for a week at most before it starts again.
Hell, even my wife isn't that annoying!
I was recently asked if we could make a reasonably untamperable 'security' camera; My solution was to make the machine itself 'physically secure' (sealed so that any attempt to open it would be obvious) and then have it PGP-sign each image. The client has easy access to all the images and public key from the box, but isn't told the root password or anything else that would give them access to the private key, so they cannot resign altered images.
I believe this would be 'at least' as untamperable as an equivalent film or video camera system.
If it's easily fixed, they'll just keep 'fixing' it, without ever securing the box. 90% of insecure boxes are there because the sysadmins are lazy and expend the minimum effort to get the thing working.
If you want them to learn, you need to make sure that "getting the box back up" is significantly more effort than "learning how to secure the box".
Don't bother trying to rate limit downloads; you'll get exactly the same number of people downloading everything, except that instead of doing it quickly they'll leave wget running all week and tying up your server's resources.
Have a page "download.php?filename=foo.txt" that all your links point to, and have that page return <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1;URL=files/$filename">
(pseudocode; my php scripting is not great, but you get the idea..)
This totally breaks wget, although it's not too hard to script around. You'll cut spider traffic back by probably 95%, all the casual 'grab everything we can' downloaders, but people who really want to get all your files will still figure out how to.
Or if you totally want to stop automated downloads, put each file behind a 'captcha'.
Set up javascript links, which wget can't follow.
Or set up a 'captcha' for each download, so that a human has to confirm each file one at a time.
No, last time it was carrier-pidgeons with memory sticks.