This story reminds me of the Crowds Project (used to be described at http://www.research.att.com/projects/crowds, but the page is down). It was an early scheme to allow anonymous internet browsing.
Basically, a group of cooperating internet users would exchange anonymous proxy services at random. A hit apparently from user X would be guaranteed not to be from user X, but instead from some other user in the crowd. Actual hits from user X would appear to be from random other members of the crowd. Users would promise not to keep logs or otherwise track each other's usage.
Does anyone know if anything ever came of the project?
" I think that I'd wipe the harddrive and install a new OS (read: Linux) before I even thought about connecting it to the net."
The only problem with that is that this guy was trying to pull off sensitive information from the box.
A smart thief would have popped a disk imaging disk or a Knoppix or Lindows CD into the laptop and booted from that, not the fucking hard drive. Then, after copying the hard drive's contents to another machine on his LAN, he would have put the laptop back where he found it! That way, the theft would only slowly dawn on Wells Fargo as he began to make use of his information haul. Indeed, they might never figure out how the info leaked.
Wouldn't the hack then consist of either (1) finding Ritz's public key and replacing it with your own, or (2) finding the place in the firmware where the encryption happens and patching the code to jump around it?
If you click on the above links, you will find that all of the search engines except AllTheWeb give you the correct answer (10) in the first few hits. Actually, the answer appears in the hit abstracts, so you don't even have to fetch the hits, unless you want the fascinating background info.
Northern Light is actually a better search engine than Google for specific info
Bull.
How's this for an obscure query: How many nanoseconds long is a shake?
Try it in Northern Light and be fuddled for a while. Now try Google and WiseNut. You won't even have to follow the hits. The answer is in the summary of the second or third hit. Not bad, IHMO.
Several times I've found stuff in Google's cache that I know were password-protected on the website. I was grateful, but wondered how they retrieved them. Did they purchase a subscription?
No need. I too have found stuff in Google's cache that was secured on the actual site. It's almost certainly a question of timing. I.e., the webmaster published the page to the world accidently, and then only later realized his mistake and fixed hit. Meanwhile, the googlebot stopped by and scarfed up the unsecured content.
Did the owners give them access for the benefit of having the site catalogued?
This is also possible. Some webmasters are highly devious in dealing with search engines (especially the porn meisters). But I would bet 99% of the cases are a matter of publish first and secure later.
If you post your credit card on a sign in your front window, it's perfectly legal for any window browsing passerby to copy it down or photograph it or write a letter to the editor about it. However, it's still illegal for them to buy stuff with it.
I like the idea, I just hope the phone will display the GPS information, and there is a way to opt-out for all of the location based advertisements you will get with your GPS enabled phone.
There should also be a way for the user to disable transmission of the GPS information or limit it to 911 calls only.
...charging them with murder and, if they are convicted, imprisoning or executing them to prevent further atrocities...
One positive development in US policy is to treat terrorism as an act of war, and not as crime, and to resolve to deal with it militarily, not judicially. States which harbor terrorists will have to yield their sovereignty one way or another so that the terrorist organizations can be liquidated. If they do not, then they too must be annihilated.
To the extent possible, "collateral damage" should be avoided. However, the safety of US troops must be maximized. As General Patton said, the goal in war is not to die for your country. It's to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his!
He is said to pass messages encrypted onto floppy disks via couriers.
Cryptography wouldn't really help terrorists much anyway, because electronic surveillance can still pick up who is talking to whom.
That's called traffic analysis. It can help a lot if you know where the different bad guys are (as with military units arrayed on a potential battle field). If the normal traffic patterns change, you know something's up.
But it's not much help with this situation. "Abu and Mohammed need tuition checks for flight school in Florida" is useful. "decj32y dae434t2k+03/ac e*jk8i3-p,Yt3" isn't so helpful, even if you know it's from some internet cafe in Pakistan to a Hotmail account that got accessed from a public library in Poughkeepsie. You can stake out the library and maybe get lucky but that won't work if the bad guys are careful.
Re:The consumer will never see an IA64 processor.
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 1
It is designed for servers, and possibly extremely high-end workstations
Sklyarov isn't charged with breaking the encryption while in Russia, but standing on US soil telling people what he had discovered.
Technically not true. In their complaint the feds cite a "sale" of the circumventing software in the United States by reason of the fact that the Intel person in Santa Clara who bought it from ElcomSoft paid for it through an agency in Seattle (a common third party arrangement). From this they conclude the sale took place on US soil. They then attempt to pin the blame on Dmitri for the sale on the ground that his name is on the software copyright and he works for the company that published it. They do not base their complaint on his talk in Reno. They only mention his attendance at the conference in passing in their account of how he came within their grasp.
IANAL, but it escapes me how their complaint could stick. Even if the Intel person had ordered plutonium from ElcomSoft, it would still be ElcomSoft doing the deed, not Dmitri.
I can think of no reason a priori why Marlboro cigarettes should be the first hit returned by your single word query, especially since Philip Morris, unlike a lot of our filty capitalist enterprises, has apparently not taken the trouble to create a special web site for the Marlboro brand.
Try adding "cigarettes" or "tobacco" or "tax free" to your query and you'll get a load of hits for cheap cigarettes. If, as you seem to imply, the American government were trying to censor the search engines, why wouldn't they purge the discounters?
Nevertheless, I agree in principle that it would be nice to have a powerful search engine on the web that is beyond the reach of the US government. Perhaps, you might nominate a venue? Remember, got to have lots of bandwidth and be out of reach of Uncle Sam. So where? Frogland? Krautland? Nope -- they're recovering Nazis there, and they don't want the net pushing them off the wagon. UK? RIP. Australia? Noses too blue down under. China? Afghanistan? Right. Russia? Perhaps, provided they can preserve anarchy while improving bandwidth.
The pill won't replace colonoscopies, the exams that check for colon cancer, because the battery doesn't last long enough to get to the large intestine.
Maybe you could get rid of the battery altogether if you had the patient wear a transformer primary as a belt that would transmit energy to a secondary in the pill.
Getting rid of the battery and its toxic ingredients would also reduce the potential consequences of the pill getting stuck.
The larger concern is that XP will be shipped with full raw sockets.
And if MS were to ship XP with crippled sockets instead, then you'd be ragging on them for shipping a defective, inferior product, right?
Just as, if MS had failed to provide a scripting language for Windows and its apps, you would be drawing negative comparisons vs *nix in the area of scriptability. But, as we well know, MS has endowed Windows with fairly robust scripting capabilities and thereby created a whole new substrate for hacking -- e.g., Melissa, Sircam, etc. etc.
So, if Linux or some other flavor of *nix came with a decent desktop suite and an easy installer and finally caught on with the clueless masses, would you and Gibson then be whining about the dangers of placing its sockets in the hands of the ubiquitous laity?
The solution to the DDoS problem is to smarten up the routers, not to dumb down the desktops!
ALl they really need is an algorithm.... whish shouldn't be a problem from the guys that revolutionized searching in the first place.
Huh? An algorithm (and an attitude) is what Google started with. Their present success follows from the singular appropriateness of both the algorithm and the attitude.
At present, Teoma is definitely inferior to Google. But they bear watching. Their results look promising. They could be competitors when their spidered DB gets large enough.
This reminds me... In a related vein, Windows lusers may find Mark Russinovich's BlueScreen Screen Saver highly amusing. Anyone know of an equivalent for *nix?
Slashdot Mirror
This story reminds me of the Crowds Project (used to be described at http://www.research.att.com/projects/crowds, but the page is down). It was an early scheme to allow anonymous internet browsing.
Basically, a group of cooperating internet users would exchange anonymous proxy services at random. A hit apparently from user X would be guaranteed not to be from user X, but instead from some other user in the crowd. Actual hits from user X would appear to be from random other members of the crowd. Users would promise not to keep logs or otherwise track each other's usage.
Does anyone know if anything ever came of the project?
Remember that old cartoon of the cat with two wooden front legs gazing into the piranha tank?
" I think that I'd wipe the harddrive and install a new OS (read: Linux) before I even thought about connecting it to the net."
The only problem with that is that this guy was trying to pull off sensitive information from the box.
A smart thief would have popped a disk imaging disk or a Knoppix or Lindows CD into the laptop and booted from that, not the fucking hard drive. Then, after copying the hard drive's contents to another machine on his LAN, he would have put the laptop back where he found it! That way, the theft would only slowly dawn on Wells Fargo as he began to make use of his information haul. Indeed, they might never figure out how the info leaked.
Wouldn't the hack then consist of either (1) finding Ritz's public key and replacing it with your own, or (2) finding the place in the firmware where the encryption happens and patching the code to jump around it?
If you can't tell Windows apart from innovation, you've got a problem.
Did you ever think of feeding your scanner's output through a linear amplifier? That way, doors could be going up and down all over town!
Gee, someone should build a sales prospect search engine that returns the hits ranked by suggestibility. You would definitely come out on top.
You wouldn't be looking for a heavily traveled bridge in an urban area likely to be the target of a weapon of mass destruction, would you?
- AllTheWeb
- Google
- Teoma
- WiseNut
- AltaVista
If you click on the above links, you will find that all of the search engines except AllTheWeb give you the correct answer (10) in the first few hits. Actually, the answer appears in the hit abstracts, so you don't even have to fetch the hits, unless you want the fascinating background info.Not to worry. Grad students are largely judgement proof.
One solution is to increase the number with the bomb diagrams. Click here.
The US Treasury has been cleaning up by selling the Chinese "lucky" dollar bills with four eights in their serial numbers at a price of $5.95.
Bull.
How's this for an obscure query: How many nanoseconds long is a shake?
Try it in Northern Light and be fuddled for a while. Now try Google and WiseNut. You won't even have to follow the hits. The answer is in the summary of the second or third hit. Not bad, IHMO.
No need. I too have found stuff in Google's cache that was secured on the actual site. It's almost certainly a question of timing. I.e., the webmaster published the page to the world accidently, and then only later realized his mistake and fixed hit. Meanwhile, the googlebot stopped by and scarfed up the unsecured content.
Did the owners give them access for the benefit of having the site catalogued?
This is also possible. Some webmasters are highly devious in dealing with search engines (especially the porn meisters). But I would bet 99% of the cases are a matter of publish first and secure later.
If you post your credit card on a sign in your front window, it's perfectly legal for any window browsing passerby to copy it down or photograph it or write a letter to the editor about it. However, it's still illegal for them to buy stuff with it.
There should also be a way for the user to disable transmission of the GPS information or limit it to 911 calls only.
One positive development in US policy is to treat terrorism as an act of war, and not as crime, and to resolve to deal with it militarily, not judicially. States which harbor terrorists will have to yield their sovereignty one way or another so that the terrorist organizations can be liquidated. If they do not, then they too must be annihilated.
To the extent possible, "collateral damage" should be avoided. However, the safety of US troops must be maximized. As General Patton said, the goal in war is not to die for your country. It's to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his!
Cryptography wouldn't really help terrorists much anyway, because electronic surveillance can still pick up who is talking to whom.
That's called traffic analysis. It can help a lot if you know where the different bad guys are (as with military units arrayed on a potential battle field). If the normal traffic patterns change, you know something's up.
But it's not much help with this situation. "Abu and Mohammed need tuition checks for flight school in Florida" is useful. "decj32y dae434t2k+03/ac e*jk8i3-p,Yt3" isn't so helpful, even if you know it's from some internet cafe in Pakistan to a Hotmail account that got accessed from a public library in Poughkeepsie. You can stake out the library and maybe get lucky but that won't work if the bad guys are careful.
Until next year.
Technically not true. In their complaint the feds cite a "sale" of the circumventing software in the United States by reason of the fact that the Intel person in Santa Clara who bought it from ElcomSoft paid for it through an agency in Seattle (a common third party arrangement). From this they conclude the sale took place on US soil. They then attempt to pin the blame on Dmitri for the sale on the ground that his name is on the software copyright and he works for the company that published it. They do not base their complaint on his talk in Reno. They only mention his attendance at the conference in passing in their account of how he came within their grasp.
IANAL, but it escapes me how their complaint could stick. Even if the Intel person had ordered plutonium from ElcomSoft, it would still be ElcomSoft doing the deed, not Dmitri.
Try adding "cigarettes" or "tobacco" or "tax free" to your query and you'll get a load of hits for cheap cigarettes. If, as you seem to imply, the American government were trying to censor the search engines, why wouldn't they purge the discounters?
Nevertheless, I agree in principle that it would be nice to have a powerful search engine on the web that is beyond the reach of the US government. Perhaps, you might nominate a venue? Remember, got to have lots of bandwidth and be out of reach of Uncle Sam. So where? Frogland? Krautland? Nope -- they're recovering Nazis there, and they don't want the net pushing them off the wagon. UK? RIP. Australia? Noses too blue down under. China? Afghanistan? Right. Russia? Perhaps, provided they can preserve anarchy while improving bandwidth.
Sounds like you need to add <a href="/robots.txt">Robot Food</a> to your homepage. Then I would expect you would see some hits.
What else interesting do you have on yer site?
Maybe you could get rid of the battery altogether if you had the patient wear a transformer primary as a belt that would transmit energy to a secondary in the pill.
Getting rid of the battery and its toxic ingredients would also reduce the potential consequences of the pill getting stuck.
And if MS were to ship XP with crippled sockets instead, then you'd be ragging on them for shipping a defective, inferior product, right?
Just as, if MS had failed to provide a scripting language for Windows and its apps, you would be drawing negative comparisons vs *nix in the area of scriptability. But, as we well know, MS has endowed Windows with fairly robust scripting capabilities and thereby created a whole new substrate for hacking -- e.g., Melissa, Sircam, etc. etc.
So, if Linux or some other flavor of *nix came with a decent desktop suite and an easy installer and finally caught on with the clueless masses, would you and Gibson then be whining about the dangers of placing its sockets in the hands of the ubiquitous laity?
The solution to the DDoS problem is to smarten up the routers, not to dumb down the desktops!
Huh? An algorithm (and an attitude) is what Google started with. Their present success follows from the singular appropriateness of both the algorithm and the attitude.
At present, Teoma is definitely inferior to Google. But they bear watching. Their results look promising. They could be competitors when their spidered DB gets large enough.
This reminds me ... In a related vein, Windows lusers may find Mark Russinovich's BlueScreen Screen Saver highly amusing. Anyone know of an equivalent for *nix?