Sega Channel tanked miserably. It was released a bit too late to do any good, the Genesis really went downhill shortly after (32x anyone?).
I managed to pick up a Sega Channel modem recently (50 cents, can't be beat!); anyone know of any groups trying to reverse engineer these things, so a person could somehow set up a local server for themselves?
After all, the personal firewall edition is very limited (I haven't found a way to block off individual ports, though it may be possible).
Zonealarm (personal) gives you as much or as little individual port control as you desire. If you want port 80 open, fire up your webserver - it'll try to open the port, zonealarm will ask if that's ok, and you click 'ok'. Bang, port 80 is open.
As for blocking off individual ports, Zonealarm blocks ALL ports by default, unless an application requests them. Blocking only certain ports would almost certainly cause problems with an application that thinks it can use them. And really, if you're using an application that wants certain ports open, that you can't control, maybe it's time to find a better app:)
Ok, so not the most trusted news source, but it was the first I could find quick, and it's been all over our local news for several days now. Why isn't anyone else reporting this? Bad news sells more eyeballs?
In my opinion, the only time security vulenrabilities should be released publicly is when they are fixed. Otherwise, teenage script kiddies worldwide will launch attacks on everything and everyone.
Keep in mind that pretty much by definition, "script kiddies" won't be doing much with a new vulnerability, as their sole skill lies in being able to run someone else's code. Most new vulnerabilities either aren't exploited for months (vendor patch or no), or if they are, the exploit certainly isn't public knowledge. Therefore, there's little chance of a script kiddie rampage from some leaked vulnerability.
Ok, so I'm nitpicking;)
I guess the only real threat with this sort of thing is that someone who actually *might* be able to do something with this, now has a known target to go after.
Remember the EULA on windows from two years back? It said "This product cannot be used in life-critical applications, because it contains Java from Sun Microsystems." Don't underestimate the damage a sinister sounding warning message can cause.
FYI, this warning comes from Sun themselves. Download the SDK from java.sun.com and it's right there in bold print.
If you honestly think an 8-bit system like the TG-16 (yes, that's right, 8-bit, read up on it if you don't believe me) performs as well as the 32-bit GBA...
And if you really think Legendary Axe/Bonk looks anything *close* to the new Metroid/Castlevania/Mega Man...
Then why'd you buy the original? This is like complaining about the Xbox's capabilities, when you already spent $300 on your Atari 2600. If you think something's worth your money, buy it. If no, don't.
Freedom of choice doesn't come any simpler than this.
I'm pretty sure the joke was about slashdotting the Matrix ITSELF, not AOL/Apple/whoever hosts these trailers. But thanks for coming out.
Early weird news reports
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just before 9pm est, CNN Headline News said something about a hijacked Cuban airliner being escorted by military jets into Miami. When they came back after commercial break, no mention of it.
Another news station reported that a CNN reporter had been shot live on camera. Again, nothing.
During Aaron Brown's chat with some Pentagon bigwig or another, you could distinctly hear laughing and clapping in the background of CNN's studios. Brown's face showed that he heard it too.
All in all, considering how little has actually happened, it's been one hell of a weird night.
I'd say it takes an even bigger man to say "Other people may disagree with me, in fact the vast majority of people may disagree with me, but I'm still going to do everything in my power to do what's right".
How about I was buying coke and half of it was cut with cyanide and a few friends died? Do we laugh them?
Until there's any sort of legality around cocaine, or any sort of regulation as to what goes in it, or any sort of quality checking by anyone whatsoever (beyond Jimmy the Mouth)... Yes. I laugh long, and i laugh hard.
It's pretty common knowledge that cocaine is illegal in 99% of the world, and that for the most part it comes cut with who knows what. If you're that stupid to die from taking that kind of risk, then yes, I do laugh. Same as I would at people who die from drinking methanol that was stored in some old liquor bottles (that were obtained by breaking into someone's house).
They played on this in Max Headroom. For those not in the know, the idea was insanely fast commercials, sort of a play on subliminal advertising (which was still a big concern back then). Watch enough of them however, and they kill your brain (or something equally 80s cheesy:)
I'm spooked every time I see those shorts on TLC, where the announcer says some tagline for some product, but they've electronically sped up so that the guy sounds like he's shilling Mirco Machines. Life imitating Art indeed...
Far from being a 'dot-bomb' era expression, killer app has been used for at least 2 decades now. Google 'macintosh' and 'lotus', and you'll see what I mean.
The amounts they're talking about are what they expect to be able to extract from the half-ton or so that Apollo returned. 3 grams of material from Earth, 0.03g from Mars (makes sense, it's a hell of a lot further away), and 0.003g from Venus (far away, and closer to the sun. material has one hell of a time getting AWAY from the sun's gravitational well).
I'd say yeesh, read the article before you spout off your ignorance, but hey, this is Slashdot.
I don't know about you, but an out-of-the-box RedHat 8 is pretty damn secure, assuming you don't install any services with it. Select 'high security' in the installer, and boom! Instant firewall.
Comes with more software than I've currently got loaded on my Windows machine, period. Office suite(s), games, usenet, web, mail, irc, packet sniffer, firewall, cd-burning,... I could go on, but at 4.6 gigs it's kinda scary:) Took me about 10 minutes worth of clicking on little boxes, nothing beyond the automatic partitioning that even remotely resembled thought. Bless rpms.
This worm has been on the radar for over a week now. The Internet Storm Center noticed a dramatic increase in port 445 traffic, and the fit really hit the shan on saturday/sunday (depending on where you live). Someone finally managed to get a specimin of this thing analyzed, and it's by far the biggest thing since Slammer.
Consider how little it's actually spread - we should be happy Windows is no longer vulnerable to the single-character-password flaw. Now, if only we could explain to Microsoft that it should be very, VERY difficult for the home user to share their filesystem over tcp/ip (read: world-readable), we might be able to stop these annoying little buggers. Well, at least for a few weeks:)
A few years back, when previews were showing for Armageddon and Deep Impact, I was anxiously anticipating both movies. Big disaster, and especially end-of-the-world stories have always been my faves. Having read Hammer 4 or 5 times at this point, I was really hoping someone was going to make a semi-adaptation of it (it being one of the greatest books written in the latter half of the 20th century imho).
So, I saw Armageddon first. Almost left the theatre until I realized it's a really funny movie if you imagine Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck as secret lovers.
Then came Deep Impact. Not bad, typical Hollywood overdoing of everything.. hmm, doesn't look like the end of the world's gonna happen... HOLY FUCK THERE'S MICHAEL. Orion (nuke powered ship from one of Niven/Pournelle's early classics) on the big screen (in a movie sorta loosely based on the other of Niven/Pournelle's earlyclassics).
The icing on the cake is when the comet hit the Earth. I'll most likely never see Hammer on the big screen, but considering how bad most SF books are mangled, I look at fondly Deep Impact as a sort of weird love-child from Niven and Pournelle.
This is a common myth that's repeated like Gospel amongst people, but for good reasons. Allow me to elaborate:
The very earliest types of rechargable batteries, used on things like satellites, suffered from what is known as a 'memory' effect. In silly terms, it basically means that if you charge a half-full battery, it'll 'remember' where the charge started from, and only go on to do a half charge. When it reaches the halfway point, the battery 'thinks' it's empty. So you've just halved your battery life. Wash, rinse, repeat until the battery is useless.
When consumer rechargables started becoming common, early chargers (and a lot still do this today on NiCads) would keep applying current to the battery, even if it was fully charged. This 'overcharging' can seriously decimate the life of a battery - it renders useless the chemicals needed to drive the electric current.
So basically, people were overcharging their batteries left, right, and centre. Manufacturers started telling people not to continuously charge their devices, ie: leave the cordless phone off the hook for a while, things like that. Between noone explaining the principle of overcharging, and companies not fully understanding it themselves, we've moved on to 'completely drain any device before you charge it again'. Ironically this can actually lessen the life of many types of rechargables, including the new funky rechargable alkalines you see everywhere.
Anyway, the memory effect was only ever seen with batteries that never made it into consumer hands. But the myth lives on. There never was a reason for the drain-and-charge cycle. Overcharging was the problem all along.
Anybody ever stop and think "Hey, evolution takes place over a very long period of time...perhaps we shouldn't fuck with it?" Nope.
I don't know what part of the world you live in, but just looking at the posts in this thread I'd say most people ask that very question. Watching/reading/hearing news echoes this: story after story using fear tactics to convince the public that science is somehow 'bad'. Talking to people, layman and scientist, there is a huge push *against* massive mucking with the genome. Whether it's from people who don't understand and are scared, or people that do and want us not to run off willy-nilly towards Uncle Adolph's superrace... I see almost nothing BUT objection to human genetic engineering.
Personally, I see GE as a way to INCREASE variety. Most of my family has pretty identical genomes. Most people with similar ancestry to me also do. Imagine being able to see people with black hair and blue eyes on a regular basis. Or yellow eyes. Or whatever you want. I'd love to have the deep, lustrous black hair that a lot of Greek men have, but just on my head, thanks. Unfortunately it doesn't always work this way, because humans are too similar most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Sega Channel tanked miserably. It was released a bit too late to do any good, the Genesis really went downhill shortly after (32x anyone?).
I managed to pick up a Sega Channel modem recently (50 cents, can't be beat!); anyone know of any groups trying to reverse engineer these things, so a person could somehow set up a local server for themselves?
After all, the personal firewall edition is very limited (I haven't found a way to block off individual ports, though it may be possible).
:)
Zonealarm (personal) gives you as much or as little individual port control as you desire. If you want port 80 open, fire up your webserver - it'll try to open the port, zonealarm will ask if that's ok, and you click 'ok'. Bang, port 80 is open.
As for blocking off individual ports, Zonealarm blocks ALL ports by default, unless an application requests them. Blocking only certain ports would almost certainly cause problems with an application that thinks it can use them. And really, if you're using an application that wants certain ports open, that you can't control, maybe it's time to find a better app
Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory has good reason to think this isn't coronavirus at all.
Ok, so not the most trusted news source, but it was the first I could find quick, and it's been all over our local news for several days now. Why isn't anyone else reporting this? Bad news sells more eyeballs?
Why would Shareaza want to bootstrap off the Gnutella name?
:)
Same reason it's bootstrapping off the Kazaa name?
In my opinion, the only time security vulenrabilities should be released publicly is when they are fixed. Otherwise, teenage script kiddies worldwide will launch attacks on everything and everyone.
;)
Keep in mind that pretty much by definition, "script kiddies" won't be doing much with a new vulnerability, as their sole skill lies in being able to run someone else's code. Most new vulnerabilities either aren't exploited for months (vendor patch or no), or if they are, the exploit certainly isn't public knowledge. Therefore, there's little chance of a script kiddie rampage from some leaked vulnerability.
Ok, so I'm nitpicking
I guess the only real threat with this sort of thing is that someone who actually *might* be able to do something with this, now has a known target to go after.
Remember the EULA on windows from two years back? It said "This product cannot be used in life-critical applications, because it contains Java from Sun Microsystems." Don't underestimate the damage a sinister sounding warning message can cause.
FYI, this warning comes from Sun themselves. Download the SDK from java.sun.com and it's right there in bold print.
If you honestly think an 8-bit system like the TG-16 (yes, that's right, 8-bit, read up on it if you don't believe me) performs as well as the 32-bit GBA...
And if you really think Legendary Axe/Bonk looks anything *close* to the new Metroid/Castlevania/Mega Man...
I have one hell of a cheap bridge to sell you.
I've never heard of a TV tuner for the GBA, sp or no. Anyone got any links on this?
Then why'd you buy the original? This is like complaining about the Xbox's capabilities, when you already spent $300 on your Atari 2600. If you think something's worth your money, buy it. If no, don't.
Freedom of choice doesn't come any simpler than this.
With my Nintendo subscription, I was playing mine 20 minutes before they hit stores! :)
I'm pretty sure the joke was about slashdotting the Matrix ITSELF, not AOL/Apple/whoever hosts these trailers. But thanks for coming out.
Just before 9pm est, CNN Headline News said something about a hijacked Cuban airliner being escorted by military jets into Miami. When they came back after commercial break, no mention of it.
Another news station reported that a CNN reporter had been shot live on camera. Again, nothing.
During Aaron Brown's chat with some Pentagon bigwig or another, you could distinctly hear laughing and clapping in the background of CNN's studios. Brown's face showed that he heard it too.
All in all, considering how little has actually happened, it's been one hell of a weird night.
I'd say it takes an even bigger man to say "Other people may disagree with me, in fact the vast majority of people may disagree with me, but I'm still going to do everything in my power to do what's right".
Sometimes, what's popular isn't what's best.
How about I was buying coke and half of it was cut with cyanide and a few friends died? Do we laugh them?
Until there's any sort of legality around cocaine, or any sort of regulation as to what goes in it, or any sort of quality checking by anyone whatsoever (beyond Jimmy the Mouth)... Yes. I laugh long, and i laugh hard.
It's pretty common knowledge that cocaine is illegal in 99% of the world, and that for the most part it comes cut with who knows what. If you're that stupid to die from taking that kind of risk, then yes, I do laugh. Same as I would at people who die from drinking methanol that was stored in some old liquor bottles (that were obtained by breaking into someone's house).
They played on this in Max Headroom. For those not in the know, the idea was insanely fast commercials, sort of a play on subliminal advertising (which was still a big concern back then). Watch enough of them however, and they kill your brain (or something equally 80s cheesy :)
I'm spooked every time I see those shorts on TLC, where the announcer says some tagline for some product, but they've electronically sped up so that the guy sounds like he's shilling Mirco Machines. Life imitating Art indeed...
Far from being a 'dot-bomb' era expression, killer app has been used for at least 2 decades now. Google 'macintosh' and 'lotus', and you'll see what I mean.
The amounts they're talking about are what they expect to be able to extract from the half-ton or so that Apollo returned. 3 grams of material from Earth, 0.03g from Mars (makes sense, it's a hell of a lot further away), and 0.003g from Venus (far away, and closer to the sun. material has one hell of a time getting AWAY from the sun's gravitational well).
I'd say yeesh, read the article before you spout off your ignorance, but hey, this is Slashdot.
I don't know about you, but an out-of-the-box RedHat 8 is pretty damn secure, assuming you don't install any services with it. Select 'high security' in the installer, and boom! Instant firewall.
:) Took me about 10 minutes worth of clicking on little boxes, nothing beyond the automatic partitioning that even remotely resembled thought. Bless rpms.
Comes with more software than I've currently got loaded on my Windows machine, period. Office suite(s), games, usenet, web, mail, irc, packet sniffer, firewall, cd-burning,... I could go on, but at 4.6 gigs it's kinda scary
Anyway, your point again was?
This worm has been on the radar for over a week now. The Internet Storm Center noticed a dramatic increase in port 445 traffic, and the fit really hit the shan on saturday/sunday (depending on where you live). Someone finally managed to get a specimin of this thing analyzed, and it's by far the biggest thing since Slammer.
:)
Consider how little it's actually spread - we should be happy Windows is no longer vulnerable to the single-character-password flaw. Now, if only we could explain to Microsoft that it should be very, VERY difficult for the home user to share their filesystem over tcp/ip (read: world-readable), we might be able to stop these annoying little buggers. Well, at least for a few weeks
A few years back, when previews were showing for Armageddon and Deep Impact, I was anxiously anticipating both movies. Big disaster, and especially end-of-the-world stories have always been my faves. Having read Hammer 4 or 5 times at this point, I was really hoping someone was going to make a semi-adaptation of it (it being one of the greatest books written in the latter half of the 20th century imho).
So, I saw Armageddon first. Almost left the theatre until I realized it's a really funny movie if you imagine Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck as secret lovers.
Then came Deep Impact. Not bad, typical Hollywood overdoing of everything.. hmm, doesn't look like the end of the world's gonna happen... HOLY FUCK THERE'S MICHAEL. Orion (nuke powered ship from one of Niven/Pournelle's early classics) on the big screen (in a movie sorta loosely based on the other of Niven/Pournelle's earlyclassics).
The icing on the cake is when the comet hit the Earth. I'll most likely never see Hammer on the big screen, but considering how bad most SF books are mangled, I look at fondly Deep Impact as a sort of weird love-child from Niven and Pournelle.
No offense, but I'm much happier killing some poor shmuck's website than I am teleporting with 500,000 unwashed geeks :)
freeweed talks like this too, sometimes. Are you trying to say something to freeweed?
Welcome to human society. In the West, the diamond ring makes people think it's no longer prostitution.
This is a common myth that's repeated like Gospel amongst people, but for good reasons. Allow me to elaborate:
The very earliest types of rechargable batteries, used on things like satellites, suffered from what is known as a 'memory' effect. In silly terms, it basically means that if you charge a half-full battery, it'll 'remember' where the charge started from, and only go on to do a half charge. When it reaches the halfway point, the battery 'thinks' it's empty. So you've just halved your battery life. Wash, rinse, repeat until the battery is useless.
When consumer rechargables started becoming common, early chargers (and a lot still do this today on NiCads) would keep applying current to the battery, even if it was fully charged. This 'overcharging' can seriously decimate the life of a battery - it renders useless the chemicals needed to drive the electric current.
So basically, people were overcharging their batteries left, right, and centre. Manufacturers started telling people not to continuously charge their devices, ie: leave the cordless phone off the hook for a while, things like that. Between noone explaining the principle of overcharging, and companies not fully understanding it themselves, we've moved on to 'completely drain any device before you charge it again'. Ironically this can actually lessen the life of many types of rechargables, including the new funky rechargable alkalines you see everywhere.
Anyway, the memory effect was only ever seen with batteries that never made it into consumer hands. But the myth lives on. There never was a reason for the drain-and-charge cycle. Overcharging was the problem all along.
Anybody ever stop and think "Hey, evolution takes place over a very long period of time...perhaps we shouldn't fuck with it?" Nope.
I don't know what part of the world you live in, but just looking at the posts in this thread I'd say most people ask that very question. Watching/reading/hearing news echoes this: story after story using fear tactics to convince the public that science is somehow 'bad'. Talking to people, layman and scientist, there is a huge push *against* massive mucking with the genome. Whether it's from people who don't understand and are scared, or people that do and want us not to run off willy-nilly towards Uncle Adolph's superrace... I see almost nothing BUT objection to human genetic engineering.
Personally, I see GE as a way to INCREASE variety. Most of my family has pretty identical genomes. Most people with similar ancestry to me also do. Imagine being able to see people with black hair and blue eyes on a regular basis. Or yellow eyes. Or whatever you want. I'd love to have the deep, lustrous black hair that a lot of Greek men have, but just on my head, thanks. Unfortunately it doesn't always work this way, because humans are too similar most of the time.