there are rootkit detectors, like http://www.chkrootkit.org/ which is in the synaptic's database, but not the adept one, because the adept installer is still beta quality. at least syanptic is in the adept db because it would be a pain to get software in linux if i had to use adept from kde4... *cough* i was forced to go kubuntu 6.10 beta by the 8.04.1 patch that hosed my x.org config.
as far as credit card theft goes, there are some major issues now, because for 2 some years, 'debian' and thus ubuntu, had a nasty flaw in the 'secure' connection software, so bad they made a wireshark plug in that lets you decrypt secure transmission to any affected debian/ubuntu system. the flaw is patched in debian an ubuntu, but there are still could be compromised servers running on the net. especially if a server wasn't hardened but was feature frozen based on the effected versions. if the company that had the servers set up as a one time deal, they might not even know they're affected.
weird, i've only had one application crash on kubuntu 8.10 beta, then again i only installed it on wednesday.
and there are tons of updates every day, something like 30 or so a day minimum. if you've got systems that are crashing, you should at least find a scratch drive, and report all the bugs you can find. they can't make it better if people aren't reporting bugs.
kubuntu 8.10 is coming along too, i've got the beta running, because the 8.04.1 update hosed my system. broke the x.org server, sigh.
8.10 kubuntu although still in beta has been pretty stable, there was one program that crashed on me, but didn't affect me, and there is an annoying bug with trying to configure the ethernet manually using the 'tray icon' (it won't ask for a password, and the ethernet can't be configured without a password) although, it seems like that icon is mysteriously gone today (there were some 27 updates today) plasmoids are really cool, they let you put useful widgets anywhere on the desktop, on the system bar, etc. but there aren't very many plasmoids right now.
well, all the perks at google hasn't stopped people from jumping ship and 'starting up' cuil. "pronounced cool"
in fact, from what i've heard, 'cuil' has many of the same perks as google, despite being an unproven startup, and despite google and yahoo already dominating the search space.
i really, really miss the 'fucked company' website, because it seems like the typical tech startup is hell bound to become one.
comodo as an anti virus is really not for the inexperienced. i've set it up for a couple people as an antivirus, but i've told them to pay for the support service, and if there was anything i questioned about the system i've had a paid comodo rep check the system out. the main reason i've told people to pay for it is because i don't like setting up remote administration, and then i can tell them 'if anything goes wrong just go to this website and have them open a support ticket.'
yeah it saves me a lot of trouble, and the price for the service isn't very high. the nice thing is then i only have to deal with real hardware issues. anything software related i can leave to comodo's reps.
yeah i got the wrong article, the article i was looking for was the one that linked to a test of newer firewalls and gave them a score of 0-7000
it sucks that the issue comes up again and again, i think the point though was that the newer article was about out bound protection, which let firewall vendors give sp2 firewall a 0 score while having a 7000 score for the high end products.
grc.com hasn't covered the issue since 2000, so he probably thinks the windows firewall is safe enough. that being said, this problem DOES crop up with firewalls that supposedly block inbound ports ALL THE TIME. especially hardware based firewalls based on skimming their code base from linux distros and not testing them vs leak tests or Denial of service attacks.
i think the most recent one was sending a packet on certain ports with certain datagrams that caused firewalls/routers/computers to be unable to send data as long as the packets were still coming inbound. (and in some cases caused crashes or forced reboots)
as a guy who plays online video games i can testify i have an affected wireless dlink router(their cheap one though), because the latest disc hack is based on the Denial of service attack, and just by playing online games for 45 minutes i am almost 100% for sure going to encounter a disc hacker. (this is only half the reason i don't play online games with the wireless router in between my pc and the net)
it's a cheat that doesn't go to the provider of the game, but rather to the people in the game, by getting their ip address through packet sniffing, which in an older game with no anti-cheat monitoring process, it's impossible to detect the putting the interface in promiscuous mode and correlating it with people disconnecting.
ahh finally an insightful comment instead of just noise saying it would never work (especially when they produced a picture albeit of a finger, a small bone, that uses less power than thicker bones.)
I take pride in my randomly generated sentence structure, and i'm a daily abuser of the firefox spell checker.
in fact i know about 11 misspellings that the corrector doesn't add the right corrections for. but i am too lazy to submit them for inclusion in the correction dictionary.
yeah Sometimes i capitalize, but i consider that, and proper punctuation and even real grammar to be a royal pain for an organic computer that believes it is sentient. in im i rarely correct misspellings because most people don't need help understanding the words. and i'm like someone needs to test this feature of firefox.
so i use spell checking, grammar checking is always in those damn dialogues and is a real pain. i won't use spell checkers that aren't right click menus. off topic i know, but it's been more than 11 minutes since i last posted slow down cowboy
you know, dads who wanted to disappear and make a paternity suit vanish might be willing to pay more than the lawyers giving the drug to dads, but if recalling the events are key to forgetting them, then it's easier to target the lower profit marks of dads willing to go to court over a paternity suit. since guys love to brag about the one they bagged last night.
man especially if you're the paternity lawyer for all these 'buddies' in bars who sleep with women, and they forget who the lawyer was who represented them last time too. as long as their money holds out you can rinse repeat.
well you're lucky you caught me on an all nighter. usually my paranoid thoughts aren't on topic, so i go anonymous with them. and when i don't take my meds to stay up all night the paranoia flows easier and i'm more likely to post with this account. this morning i happened to be on topic and on an all nighter.
my blog explains why i was up all night. debugging kubuntu which is my primary net use OS.
windows is only for a games, and only when i don't have money to rent console games and have a decent console system.
although i'm +5 funny i seriously at times believe what i've posted and worse, it really depends how much weird shit has happened. you know, like the stock market plunging 5% but only on days i'm mad, and in a place where i've set up the computers on their security, while my home systems are turned off...
or like me making a mistake on my food stamps, despite the fact i keep every single receipt. i mean who expects their food stamps to suddenly arrive on the 27th of the previous month? when they normally go on the 14th? that's a big enough gap for a human to make the mistake, and think they have too much money. and waste their money on say coke products.
this actually happened to me, and the day i realized it had happened to me the stock market fell 500 points. i mean i know stuff about computers, a lot, but i don't do anything with that knowledge. working on computers gets really hard for me, especially debugging, but the ideas, some days they flow a mile a minute of what the capabilities of computers are.
if the world was just a model and there were lots of people like myself and you could say get them to post their ideas in a blog posted on the internet, and spot a gem from a mile a way... i mean administration would prevent you from reading memory just like on unix you cant' read someone else's memory... but what about dreams? would the system prevent you from dreaming someone elses dream? would the system stop you from posting information through a computer to a blog? would the system reward you with golden ideas and punish you with bad ones? these are questions i worry about when i'm not reading up on tech, news, politics(as long as it's not ads) the environment, or playing video games etc...
just so you know, i don't dream either. not usually i mean my mind does stuff when i sleep, but whatever it does, for all i know some famous writer or painter is getting the read and store dream my mind is working on.... because i've always had a problem writing stories and being creative on my own. but i still try once in a while, but i crave variety. i get bored thinking of the same things, except for a crack like addictions to real time strategy. i don't like to brag, but i'm level 25 on battle.net and know ever unit and every race, and i'm starting to know which units are really imbalanced and which are super weak... i still suck at figuring out what the other team is doing, but i'm pretty spot on on detecting bsers and i'm fairly good at telling when my team are rush/tech alternators with no communication skills (thus reducing the chances of winning my over 50%) btw i was a rush tech alternator for like 6 months before i learned real skill, but real skill gets weaker when you take a break from it, and i took a less stressful approach to gaming on battle.net the playing the odds, game, trying to figure out the odds of winning and which loser strat or which winning strat to play. if you do it right, the matching code makes your wins easier to predict, and thus less stress is there in games where careful strategy is required. close games drive a lot of gamers, i know it, but i have to calm down after a tight game where i had to adapt my units to theirs all game.
i'll give you hint windows firewall in a leak test scored a 0 out of 6-7000 points. don't recall the exact total score, but windows SP2 firewall is not 'enough firewall for the average user' even the vista sp1 firewall has questionable merit being turned on.
consider also how japan makes the best TVs and such, america was the gold standard of radio and TVs for what was it, 60 years? i lost count. to date our hollywood and network television are still producing the most consistent quality live action shows, who else makes world class content? japan in animation? korea in kung-fu movies? the British in network TV supported by a household tax.
if you are behind and want to catch up, it's very hard, unless you have very smart people who figure out the moves you need to make to be #1. if you let your company be run by bean counters who are by nature envious of smart and creative people, you will loose the race. you need a guru on staff. with a 7 figure salary, his job is not to create products, it is to craft a vision of the future of your company, and all he does is learn about markets and the future, the best guy for this job is a CEO, since CEOs generally make or break a company, but if you can't have the 'vision' guy at the CEO you can hire one, but he almost has to have as much power to implement his 'great' plan as a ceo, at least if he has a gem of insight that nobody else has had yet.
because the arts attract creative types, who work for beans creative industries have thrived, because the TCO of creating a working creative company involves exploiting creative yet not very smart people. sadly in real business the idea man isn't nearly as cheap, they probably have a really good idea of how much money their idea is worth.
if you have idea man, but don't run with it, you wind up creating a competitor like the ipod. the ipod was like the 157th MP3 player on the market, i kid you not, most were based off the same waferboards, and most had hugely buggy interfaces programmed by amature hacks who thought a cd-r display would be plenty for a device that could hold 150 albums. but you know what, apple who was looking for good ideas that hadn't matured stumbled upon the mp3 market, and they started it to make people look at macs, they did what they were good at, making chic fashionable hardware. and it steamrolled, there are now 200 million ipods, and everyone has heard of itunes. it wasn't that other people didn't have the idea, it was that nobody got it right, and got the college kids to use it.
in electronics it's all about the college student, in computers some people focus on business because a business needs these typewriters on everyone's desk with e-mail to even function nowadays. but business isn't where the profit margin is. college kids are inexperienced, and want trendy hip stuff. they will overspend, and drive a trend, but not everyone can be a trend setter, that's why sony took so long to be overcome in portable music, that's why nintendo is still in the business of games.
if you worship bean counters like foldgers and maxwell house you sit here in the aughties watching starbucks make the same mistake you did when you went to blends of less pure 'good' quality beans that require mountains with some but not too much humidity.
fodgers and maxwell house were coffee house coffee in the 30's and they're what bargain coffee in the 5lbs jug that tastes stale by your last lb, instead of the 1lbs vacuum sealed pure good beans, $7 dollar a pound fresh gourmet coffees. you know it wasn't until the 80's that they really screwed with their formulas because of bean counters.
I don't drink coffee but bean counters went by smell, not taste. i can't smell the difference between a gourmet 1 lbs coffee and a 5 lbs coffee, but even i can taste the difference, and i dislike coffee.
btw i know coffee drinkers who are and aren't picky about coffee and some of them have way worse sense of taste than me, some of it is marketing, telling people the more expensive bean is superior. but that wouldn't work if there wasn't a slight taste difference, even the roasting process affects the flavor, arguably more than the bean selection, and the best roasting fuel is more expensive, and in modern times takes careful planning of where you do your r
ah but there is a good analogy. this is like Ford chugging along making model Ts suddenly realizing that this upstart, General motors is making a move on your core business making cars and you design the model A. but after 20 years you realize that the model A just isn't cutting it, and you hire a real design team and start offering cars in colors other than black, because 'design' of 'models' of cars is 'popular' just as network file transfer interoperability is becoming 'popular' for people who say use a more secure linux computer along with say a less secure gaming rig windows PC.
only in this case, the worry of losing business to companies that start considering linux + xp as a solution instead of windows server 2009 + vista. instead of worrying that linux will take your place, you decide to play nice, in making cross platform solutions easier, so that you can FUD people into believing that 'linux desktops will be too hard for your people to learn, vista can be set up by network support to look just like nt if needed, while still having all the security featerus and if you have a few linux servers they'll play nice with new vista, so you should upgrade to vista.
your own post suggests that past history suggests that GE has been very good at Correctly Valuing 'goodwill' on balance sheets in a real world stock market valuation proposition.
so they're not making up numbers. they're taking numbers and applying them to facts that are known to insiders, and creating a number that approximates the real value in dollars of that factual information.
knowledge is power, and in this case, power equals money. it's the calculation of how much knowledge equals how much power, and what the real value in dollars is.
for instance, if i took the past 2 weeks of stock variation into a time machine with $1,000 dollars i would now assuming i took the least aggressive moves at most 4 points in the day, i would at the end of those 2 weeks before fees have $1500-$2,000 if i pathed out an exact map minute by minute into a computerized trading account, i could probably have $20,000 if i further took advantage of foreign markets, i could have $100,000 in 2 weeks of statistical data send 2 weeks back in time. who says a yo-yo market is a bad thing?
if i just know that every week people are going to panic sell every time dow hits 9,000 and panic buy every time dow hits 8500 or below, i can probably wind up with $200 in gain (20%) without a time machine. they made currency and commodity markets for a reason man, for a reason.
the longer the cycle goes on the more money made.. panic selling coupled with panic buying only shafts those who aren't predicting it. although god help the hedge fund managers they're having a fucking migraine every day. humans even with computers aren't made to predict the volatility of a global recession.
"I only care about anecdotal evidence in random/. posts."
that was me in 2005. actually from most of 2000 through part of 2006
after having problems with windows 98 and malware from *cough* warez *cough* i was pretty good with using a free open source firewall, until around 2002 when it was starting to annoy me and i decided based on slashdot that 'cheap' commodity grade wifi/routers were 'equal' to the level of security i got from my dedicated free open source firewall when i manually compiled everything from the ports tree.
ya know, it's not the same level of security, in fact if i could rank the level of security, i'd give commodity routers a 1 out of 10. and the everything compiled myself route a 4 out of 10 (at least they way i was doing it) i'd give my current approach a 8 or 9 out of 10, i just don't have the money for a server with 8 gigs of rams and 2 cores and a 80+ gig hdd to have a single box hardened firewall with services running in xen based hardened virtual machines. any service that runs too slow in VM, would get offset to the current firewall, in hardened single service fashion. that's a 9 or 10. on my scale, and it's not easy. I think i could figure out from a little research and custom config of smoothwall how to set up the 10, without having to manually log in to each machine every time i needed to tweak something. dunno if i can tweak smoothwall to do full stateful inspection, but if not, i know how to do it with a ubuntu server setup.
full stateful inspection suggests some custom scripting to check for known bad data over allowed ports, and e-mails of detailed traffic by hour summaries. in other words work. i might settle for a 9.
5-point harnesses have been known to be safer than tri-point lap/shoulder belts, yet other than baby seats, where the size is age based, and which can be sold second hand at thrift stores.. the only people using a 5-point harness (and a whiplash restraint) is nascar/truck racing.
the problem, adjustable 5-point harnesses are a real pain and so the big auto market 3-point 'height adjustable' restraints as an improvement over lap belts. when adjustable 5-point restraints become affordable for the consumer segment, someone like lexus will market them to doctors who see the car crash victims at work will at least be willing to buy into 5-point harnesses.
kinda like how airbags that only actuate if a adult is sitting in the seat are considered the bastion and savior of human kind, by slowing down our forward progress in a high speed crash. the tech got cheap enough to make it a selling point. yet i don't see nascar using airbags, while they do use 5-point harnesses. the 5 point harnesses probably have a gradual release on impact rather than a hard stop. it's not impossible to design such a feature in the 4 digit price range. the easiest way to get gradual release it to take advantage of silk's tendency to stretch slowly when force is applied. silk seat belts would be expensive especially in a 5-point but they'd be safer than cotton.
then you're even more in need of some basic security. webkit is a fork of khtml khtml is coded by KDE, you know, Linux Desktop KDE. yeah, that is this culture in linux that it's all about the firewall. i have to admit the firewall is crucial to internet security, but for desktop security dealing with 'the pc is an appliance' crowd, more than a firewall is needed. malware sites running cross browser clickjacking could be coded and debugged with 1 macbook and desktop multi booting linux and windows xp/vista, in about half an hour, if your an experienced cross browser clickjacking exploit writing expert. the experience would involve at least 3 years coding browser exploit sites, and that means likely you're a salary man with the mob. which mob, depends on which language you're most fluent in. japanese, russian, english and/or italian. i'm not sure where the arabic languages or african languages fit in, but likely one or more of the bigger mobs has certain territory staked out.
desktop mac has one of the worst track records for fixing Known vulnerabilities. they're slightly worse than microsoft. the fact that most mac users think mac osX is like a super condom, when it's really the 'sponge' well, heck... true, browser exploits need to followup with malware to be persistent. yeah malware for mac os is different. but if they can make x dollars a year per infected mac user, and the typical mac user stays infected for y years where x+ y = z where z = 'the additional cost of developing mac based malware', then the business of being in the mafia makes it profitable.
i think one of the big things the mafia is missing out on is how much less money it would cost if their exploited machines became more secure from competing hackers, through the malware. but that's probably because the hackers getting paid have thought about it, and realized they could be laid off (not paid as much) if they had less work to do. when you're the employee and you understand the business far better than the owner, you can always seem to be swamps and be earning your guys a lot of money.. making you worth more.
up to a point, you don't want to do something they'll find out that would make them willing to put an international hit out on you. normal employers it's a little easier to fudge how useful you are.
i'm not booted into windows at the moment, but off hand it tells you in flat percentages the amount of bandwidth used by each active process, it has a full process tree of every running process and every file it's got allocated in memory, sadly programs that use svchost.exe still show up as svchost.exe but with the process map you can tell if say rundll32 is running svchost.exe and that's a big red flag right there.
it only warns you of specific ports when they're creating a 'listen' stack on the tcp/ip stack, so it's clearly monitoring the tcp/ip stack for new connections inbound and outbound although on outbound it only tells you the program.
oh yeah i forgot, it tells you when a program hooks in the keyboard or mouse, and it has a paranoid mode where it will give you more popups and allow finer grained control. it doesn't add every program (except for the active process map, but that's only active processes) and it logs activity it finds suspicious, and can even submit files to comodo if they're not on a whitelist of trusted apps, or ar anew different version.
i know comodo made the program for it's core business as security consultants so it really, really has a lot of awesome cutting edge features. anything a customer wants, goes on the feature list.
as a very paranoid person i have a few suggestions.
first off, there is noscript, no script only runs on gecko browsers, so you really only have firefox, icecat, ice weasel, and ephiphany, and whatever other gecko based browsers are out there... noscript is sexy, and was the first program to protect from clickjacking.
secondly i recommend getting a hardened firewall running on some cheap dumpster grade pentium 1-2,3 system, dumpster grade systems are easy to find, and if you cant' find one, there is always the option of hitting pricewatch.com and grabbing the cheapest 'no os' complete desktop, with the oldest, cheapest parts. for a beginner, smoothwall is pretty easy to learn. http://www.smoothwall.org/
i suggest going with half-open, and getting a crash course in what ports need to be opened for whatever you use besides web browsing.
then, you can worry about anti virus, and code execution protection, and outbound application level blocking on your native os. if your network isn't secure, then the best anti virus in the world isn't going to help you a lick.
well, i like comodo as a firewall far better than zone alarm. there ARE ways zone alarm can be replaced with a trojan that simply turns off all the firewall abilities of zone alarm. I've seen it happen in the wild, and was the primary reason i stopped trusting zone alarm. that was when i learned about comodo. free as in beer, and it includes code execution prevention on top of inbound and out bound firewall. yeah i know vista has code execution prevention, but it just says 'program x needs to to be run as admin and Bleep you up the ass'
comodo tells you what the program was trying to do, be it modify the registry (and even the key it's about to jack) if it's creating a file or directory, or replacing one, or even if god forbid it's trying to erase a file or directory. complete with file names and directories. hell it event ells you when iu's trying to open a port as a server, unless you mark a program as 'trusted'
avg is a product that was last good in 2002. maybe it was still passable in 2003. but by 2006 it was so far behind everything except clam av that it was equivalent to not having any real protection from hackers.
real security comes in 2 parts. 1 part firewall 1 part anti virus/malware/etc. if you're going to push a 'free' product at least pus one that includes a firewall, like comodo. version 3 of their firewall includes a very vistay popup style security against code execution. annoying, yes, but if you have to in addition to run the program click through a popup that tells you everything the program is trying to do.... well there is a chance that you'll see 'replace cmd.exe?' and wonder why fluffybunny.swf needs to replace cmd.exe.
personally, i don't even trust comodo, i have a hardened half-open hardware firewall. sometime next year, i'm getting a hardened firewall, that runs each service in a hardened sandboxed VM. so even if there is an exploit in dns caching the worst a hacker can get access to is the dns virtual machine, which i can restore from hd image the second noscript warns me or a site that i clicked a link on doesn't work the way i expect. but ya know, that's a little more secure than the department of homeland security, and a drop shy of how paranoid the millitary is. i don't inspect my hardwares firmwares before plugging them into my network.
the only thing i can find on google is that SSRI's are in trials for use with PTSD and that statins can cause memory loss by depriving the brain of cholesterol.
i'm really not seeing any 'magic pill' to make a marine forget all the people he just blew up with a grenade. i do know the military focuses hard on conditioning people to being ready to handle killing another human being, especially when they learned that in world war 1 only 30% of troops ever fired a bullet.
other than this research on mice, there doesn't seem to be any info on a magic pill to make people forget.
"Imagine if they got this stuff working for humans. They could really erase a criminals memory of an event and all the stuff that makes him bad."
you assume that criminal activity isn't caused by how the brain is wired, or how their genetic code is coded, and which codes are active, and which are repressed.
but yeah, you could reduce a criminal to a drooling idiot, the problem is he'll eventually relearn how to be a criminal, and there are going to be people saying no you can't do this to criminals. albeit in a world where a forget me pill exists some of those problems can go away by themselves, at least if information is tightly controlled.
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there are rootkit detectors, like http://www.chkrootkit.org/ which is in the synaptic's database, but not the adept one, because the adept installer is still beta quality. at least syanptic is in the adept db because it would be a pain to get software in linux if i had to use adept from kde4... *cough* i was forced to go kubuntu 6.10 beta by the 8.04.1 patch that hosed my x.org config.
as far as credit card theft goes, there are some major issues now, because for 2 some years, 'debian' and thus ubuntu, had a nasty flaw in the 'secure' connection software, so bad they made a wireshark plug in that lets you decrypt secure transmission to any affected debian/ubuntu system. the flaw is patched in debian an ubuntu, but there are still could be compromised servers running on the net. especially if a server wasn't hardened but was feature frozen based on the effected versions. if the company that had the servers set up as a one time deal, they might not even know they're affected.
weird, i've only had one application crash on kubuntu 8.10 beta, then again i only installed it on wednesday.
and there are tons of updates every day, something like 30 or so a day minimum. if you've got systems that are crashing, you should at least find a scratch drive, and report all the bugs you can find. they can't make it better if people aren't reporting bugs.
kubuntu 8.10 is coming along too, i've got the beta running, because the 8.04.1 update hosed my system. broke the x.org server, sigh.
8.10 kubuntu although still in beta has been pretty stable, there was one program that crashed on me, but didn't affect me, and there is an annoying bug with trying to configure the ethernet manually using the 'tray icon' (it won't ask for a password, and the ethernet can't be configured without a password) although, it seems like that icon is mysteriously gone today (there were some 27 updates today) plasmoids are really cool, they let you put useful widgets anywhere on the desktop, on the system bar, etc. but there aren't very many plasmoids right now.
well, all the perks at google hasn't stopped people from jumping ship and 'starting up' cuil. "pronounced cool"
in fact, from what i've heard, 'cuil' has many of the same perks as google, despite being an unproven startup, and despite google and yahoo already dominating the search space.
i really, really miss the 'fucked company' website, because it seems like the typical tech startup is hell bound to become one.
comodo as an anti virus is really not for the inexperienced. i've set it up for a couple people as an antivirus, but i've told them to pay for the support service, and if there was anything i questioned about the system i've had a paid comodo rep check the system out. the main reason i've told people to pay for it is because i don't like setting up remote administration, and then i can tell them 'if anything goes wrong just go to this website and have them open a support ticket.'
yeah it saves me a lot of trouble, and the price for the service isn't very high. the nice thing is then i only have to deal with real hardware issues. anything software related i can leave to comodo's reps.
to welcome our new military robotic overlords.
yeah i got the wrong article, the article i was looking for was the one that linked to a test of newer firewalls and gave them a score of 0-7000
it sucks that the issue comes up again and again, i think the point though was that the newer article was about out bound protection, which let firewall vendors give sp2 firewall a 0 score while having a 7000 score for the high end products.
grc.com hasn't covered the issue since 2000, so he probably thinks the windows firewall is safe enough. that being said, this problem DOES crop up with firewalls that supposedly block inbound ports ALL THE TIME. especially hardware based firewalls based on skimming their code base from linux distros and not testing them vs leak tests or Denial of service attacks.
i think the most recent one was sending a packet on certain ports with certain datagrams that caused firewalls/routers/computers to be unable to send data as long as the packets were still coming inbound. (and in some cases caused crashes or forced reboots)
as a guy who plays online video games i can testify i have an affected wireless dlink router(their cheap one though), because the latest disc hack is based on the Denial of service attack, and just by playing online games for 45 minutes i am almost 100% for sure going to encounter a disc hacker. (this is only half the reason i don't play online games with the wireless router in between my pc and the net)
it's a cheat that doesn't go to the provider of the game, but rather to the people in the game, by getting their ip address through packet sniffing, which in an older game with no anti-cheat monitoring process, it's impossible to detect the putting the interface in promiscuous mode and correlating it with people disconnecting.
ahh finally an insightful comment instead of just noise saying it would never work (especially when they produced a picture albeit of a finger, a small bone, that uses less power than thicker bones.)
I take pride in my randomly generated sentence structure, and i'm a daily abuser of the firefox spell checker.
in fact i know about 11 misspellings that the corrector doesn't add the right corrections for. but i am too lazy to submit them for inclusion in the correction dictionary.
yeah Sometimes i capitalize, but i consider that, and proper punctuation and even real grammar to be a royal pain for an organic computer that believes it is sentient. in im i rarely correct misspellings because most people don't need help understanding the words. and i'm like someone needs to test this feature of firefox.
so i use spell checking, grammar checking is always in those damn dialogues and is a real pain. i won't use spell checkers that aren't right click menus. off topic i know, but it's been more than 11 minutes since i last posted slow down cowboy
you know, dads who wanted to disappear and make a paternity suit vanish might be willing to pay more than the lawyers giving the drug to dads, but if recalling the events are key to forgetting them, then it's easier to target the lower profit marks of dads willing to go to court over a paternity suit. since guys love to brag about the one they bagged last night.
man especially if you're the paternity lawyer for all these 'buddies' in bars who sleep with women, and they forget who the lawyer was who represented them last time too. as long as their money holds out you can rinse repeat.
well you're lucky you caught me on an all nighter. usually my paranoid thoughts aren't on topic, so i go anonymous with them. and when i don't take my meds to stay up all night the paranoia flows easier and i'm more likely to post with this account. this morning i happened to be on topic and on an all nighter.
my blog explains why i was up all night. debugging kubuntu which is my primary net use OS.
windows is only for a games, and only when i don't have money to rent console games and have a decent console system.
although i'm +5 funny i seriously at times believe what i've posted and worse, it really depends how much weird shit has happened. you know, like the stock market plunging 5% but only on days i'm mad, and in a place where i've set up the computers on their security, while my home systems are turned off...
or like me making a mistake on my food stamps, despite the fact i keep every single receipt. i mean who expects their food stamps to suddenly arrive on the 27th of the previous month? when they normally go on the 14th? that's a big enough gap for a human to make the mistake, and think they have too much money. and waste their money on say coke products.
this actually happened to me, and the day i realized it had happened to me the stock market fell 500 points. i mean i know stuff about computers, a lot, but i don't do anything with that knowledge. working on computers gets really hard for me, especially debugging, but the ideas, some days they flow a mile a minute of what the capabilities of computers are.
if the world was just a model and there were lots of people like myself and you could say get them to post their ideas in a blog posted on the internet, and spot a gem from a mile a way... i mean administration would prevent you from reading memory just like on unix you cant' read someone else's memory... but what about dreams? would the system prevent you from dreaming someone elses dream? would the system stop you from posting information through a computer to a blog? would the system reward you with golden ideas and punish you with bad ones? these are questions i worry about when i'm not reading up on tech, news, politics(as long as it's not ads) the environment, or playing video games etc...
just so you know, i don't dream either. not usually i mean my mind does stuff when i sleep, but whatever it does, for all i know some famous writer or painter is getting the read and store dream my mind is working on.... because i've always had a problem writing stories and being creative on my own. but i still try once in a while, but i crave variety. i get bored thinking of the same things, except for a crack like addictions to real time strategy. i don't like to brag, but i'm level 25 on battle.net and know ever unit and every race, and i'm starting to know which units are really imbalanced and which are super weak... i still suck at figuring out what the other team is doing, but i'm pretty spot on on detecting bsers and i'm fairly good at telling when my team are rush/tech alternators with no communication skills (thus reducing the chances of winning my over 50%) btw i was a rush tech alternator for like 6 months before i learned real skill, but real skill gets weaker when you take a break from it, and i took a less stressful approach to gaming on battle.net the playing the odds, game, trying to figure out the odds of winning and which loser strat or which winning strat to play. if you do it right, the matching code makes your wins easier to predict, and thus less stress is there in games where careful strategy is required. close games drive a lot of gamers, i know it, but i have to calm down after a tight game where i had to adapt my units to theirs all game.
no karma bonus because this is really tangential.
I hate to rant about windows firewall, i really do, so i'll let pcworld do it http://www.pcworld.com/article/39841/firewalls_plug_holes_revealed_by_security_test.html
i'll give you hint windows firewall in a leak test scored a 0 out of 6-7000 points. don't recall the exact total score, but windows SP2 firewall is not 'enough firewall for the average user' even the vista sp1 firewall has questionable merit being turned on.
and they modded me +5 funny for 'it's a feature' http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130544&cid=10893558 when smbfs (now samba) had a remote execution of attacker supplied code bug.
i am so proved right.
consider also how japan makes the best TVs and such, america was the gold standard of radio and TVs for what was it, 60 years? i lost count. to date our hollywood and network television are still producing the most consistent quality live action shows, who else makes world class content? japan in animation? korea in kung-fu movies? the British in network TV supported by a household tax.
if you are behind and want to catch up, it's very hard, unless you have very smart people who figure out the moves you need to make to be #1. if you let your company be run by bean counters who are by nature envious of smart and creative people, you will loose the race. you need a guru on staff. with a 7 figure salary, his job is not to create products, it is to craft a vision of the future of your company, and all he does is learn about markets and the future, the best guy for this job is a CEO, since CEOs generally make or break a company, but if you can't have the 'vision' guy at the CEO you can hire one, but he almost has to have as much power to implement his 'great' plan as a ceo, at least if he has a gem of insight that nobody else has had yet.
because the arts attract creative types, who work for beans creative industries have thrived, because the TCO of creating a working creative company involves exploiting creative yet not very smart people. sadly in real business the idea man isn't nearly as cheap, they probably have a really good idea of how much money their idea is worth.
if you have idea man, but don't run with it, you wind up creating a competitor like the ipod. the ipod was like the 157th MP3 player on the market, i kid you not, most were based off the same waferboards, and most had hugely buggy interfaces programmed by amature hacks who thought a cd-r display would be plenty for a device that could hold 150 albums. but you know what, apple who was looking for good ideas that hadn't matured stumbled upon the mp3 market, and they started it to make people look at macs, they did what they were good at, making chic fashionable hardware. and it steamrolled, there are now 200 million ipods, and everyone has heard of itunes. it wasn't that other people didn't have the idea, it was that nobody got it right, and got the college kids to use it.
in electronics it's all about the college student, in computers some people focus on business because a business needs these typewriters on everyone's desk with e-mail to even function nowadays. but business isn't where the profit margin is. college kids are inexperienced, and want trendy hip stuff. they will overspend, and drive a trend, but not everyone can be a trend setter, that's why sony took so long to be overcome in portable music, that's why nintendo is still in the business of games.
if you worship bean counters like foldgers and maxwell house you sit here in the aughties watching starbucks make the same mistake you did when you went to blends of less pure 'good' quality beans that require mountains with some but not too much humidity.
fodgers and maxwell house were coffee house coffee in the 30's and they're what bargain coffee in the 5lbs jug that tastes stale by your last lb, instead of the 1lbs vacuum sealed pure good beans, $7 dollar a pound fresh gourmet coffees. you know it wasn't until the 80's that they really screwed with their formulas because of bean counters.
I don't drink coffee but bean counters went by smell, not taste. i can't smell the difference between a gourmet 1 lbs coffee and a 5 lbs coffee, but even i can taste the difference, and i dislike coffee.
btw i know coffee drinkers who are and aren't picky about coffee and some of them have way worse sense of taste than me, some of it is marketing, telling people the more expensive bean is superior. but that wouldn't work if there wasn't a slight taste difference, even the roasting process affects the flavor, arguably more than the bean selection, and the best roasting fuel is more expensive, and in modern times takes careful planning of where you do your r
ah but there is a good analogy. this is like Ford chugging along making model Ts suddenly realizing that this upstart, General motors is making a move on your core business making cars and you design the model A. but after 20 years you realize that the model A just isn't cutting it, and you hire a real design team and start offering cars in colors other than black, because 'design' of 'models' of cars is 'popular' just as network file transfer interoperability is becoming 'popular' for people who say use a more secure linux computer along with say a less secure gaming rig windows PC.
only in this case, the worry of losing business to companies that start considering linux + xp as a solution instead of windows server 2009 + vista. instead of worrying that linux will take your place, you decide to play nice, in making cross platform solutions easier, so that you can FUD people into believing that 'linux desktops will be too hard for your people to learn, vista can be set up by network support to look just like nt if needed, while still having all the security featerus and if you have a few linux servers they'll play nice with new vista, so you should upgrade to vista.
oh wait, that's a good analogy. sorry my bad.
your own post suggests that past history suggests that GE has been very good at Correctly Valuing 'goodwill' on balance sheets in a real world stock market valuation proposition.
so they're not making up numbers. they're taking numbers and applying them to facts that are known to insiders, and creating a number that approximates the real value in dollars of that factual information.
knowledge is power, and in this case, power equals money. it's the calculation of how much knowledge equals how much power, and what the real value in dollars is.
for instance, if i took the past 2 weeks of stock variation into a time machine with $1,000 dollars i would now assuming i took the least aggressive moves at most 4 points in the day, i would at the end of those 2 weeks before fees have $1500-$2,000 if i pathed out an exact map minute by minute into a computerized trading account, i could probably have $20,000 if i further took advantage of foreign markets, i could have $100,000 in 2 weeks of statistical data send 2 weeks back in time. who says a yo-yo market is a bad thing?
if i just know that every week people are going to panic sell every time dow hits 9,000 and panic buy every time dow hits 8500 or below, i can probably wind up with $200 in gain (20%) without a time machine. they made currency and commodity markets for a reason man, for a reason.
the longer the cycle goes on the more money made.. panic selling coupled with panic buying only shafts those who aren't predicting it. although god help the hedge fund managers they're having a fucking migraine every day. humans even with computers aren't made to predict the volatility of a global recession.
"I only care about anecdotal evidence in random /. posts."
that was me in 2005. actually from most of 2000 through part of 2006
after having problems with windows 98 and malware from *cough* warez *cough* i was pretty good with using a free open source firewall, until around 2002 when it was starting to annoy me and i decided based on slashdot that 'cheap' commodity grade wifi/routers were 'equal' to the level of security i got from my dedicated free open source firewall when i manually compiled everything from the ports tree.
ya know, it's not the same level of security, in fact if i could rank the level of security, i'd give commodity routers a 1 out of 10. and the everything compiled myself route a 4 out of 10 (at least they way i was doing it) i'd give my current approach a 8 or 9 out of 10, i just don't have the money for a server with 8 gigs of rams and 2 cores and a 80+ gig hdd to have a single box hardened firewall with services running in xen based hardened virtual machines. any service that runs too slow in VM, would get offset to the current firewall, in hardened single service fashion. that's a 9 or 10. on my scale, and it's not easy. I think i could figure out from a little research and custom config of smoothwall how to set up the 10, without having to manually log in to each machine every time i needed to tweak something. dunno if i can tweak smoothwall to do full stateful inspection, but if not, i know how to do it with a ubuntu server setup.
full stateful inspection suggests some custom scripting to check for known bad data over allowed ports, and e-mails of detailed traffic by hour summaries. in other words work. i might settle for a 9.
5-point harnesses have been known to be safer than tri-point lap/shoulder belts, yet other than baby seats, where the size is age based, and which can be sold second hand at thrift stores.. the only people using a 5-point harness (and a whiplash restraint) is nascar/truck racing.
the problem, adjustable 5-point harnesses are a real pain and so the big auto market 3-point 'height adjustable' restraints as an improvement over lap belts. when adjustable 5-point restraints become affordable for the consumer segment, someone like lexus will market them to doctors who see the car crash victims at work will at least be willing to buy into 5-point harnesses.
kinda like how airbags that only actuate if a adult is sitting in the seat are considered the bastion and savior of human kind, by slowing down our forward progress in a high speed crash. the tech got cheap enough to make it a selling point. yet i don't see nascar using airbags, while they do use 5-point harnesses. the 5 point harnesses probably have a gradual release on impact rather than a hard stop. it's not impossible to design such a feature in the 4 digit price range. the easiest way to get gradual release it to take advantage of silk's tendency to stretch slowly when force is applied. silk seat belts would be expensive especially in a 5-point but they'd be safer than cotton.
then you're even more in need of some basic security. webkit is a fork of khtml khtml is coded by KDE, you know, Linux Desktop KDE. yeah, that is this culture in linux that it's all about the firewall. i have to admit the firewall is crucial to internet security, but for desktop security dealing with 'the pc is an appliance' crowd, more than a firewall is needed. malware sites running cross browser clickjacking could be coded and debugged with 1 macbook and desktop multi booting linux and windows xp/vista, in about half an hour, if your an experienced cross browser clickjacking exploit writing expert. the experience would involve at least 3 years coding browser exploit sites, and that means likely you're a salary man with the mob. which mob, depends on which language you're most fluent in. japanese, russian, english and/or italian. i'm not sure where the arabic languages or african languages fit in, but likely one or more of the bigger mobs has certain territory staked out.
desktop mac has one of the worst track records for fixing Known vulnerabilities. they're slightly worse than microsoft. the fact that most mac users think mac osX is like a super condom, when it's really the 'sponge' well, heck... true, browser exploits need to followup with malware to be persistent. yeah malware for mac os is different. but if they can make x dollars a year per infected mac user, and the typical mac user stays infected for y years where x+ y = z where z = 'the additional cost of developing mac based malware', then the business of being in the mafia makes it profitable.
i think one of the big things the mafia is missing out on is how much less money it would cost if their exploited machines became more secure from competing hackers, through the malware. but that's probably because the hackers getting paid have thought about it, and realized they could be laid off (not paid as much) if they had less work to do. when you're the employee and you understand the business far better than the owner, you can always seem to be swamps and be earning your guys a lot of money.. making you worth more.
up to a point, you don't want to do something they'll find out that would make them willing to put an international hit out on you. normal employers it's a little easier to fudge how useful you are.
i'm not booted into windows at the moment, but off hand it tells you in flat percentages the amount of bandwidth used by each active process, it has a full process tree of every running process and every file it's got allocated in memory, sadly programs that use svchost.exe still show up as svchost.exe but with the process map you can tell if say rundll32 is running svchost.exe and that's a big red flag right there.
it only warns you of specific ports when they're creating a 'listen' stack on the tcp/ip stack, so it's clearly monitoring the tcp/ip stack for new connections inbound and outbound although on outbound it only tells you the program.
oh yeah i forgot, it tells you when a program hooks in the keyboard or mouse, and it has a paranoid mode where it will give you more popups and allow finer grained control. it doesn't add every program (except for the active process map, but that's only active processes) and it logs activity it finds suspicious, and can even submit files to comodo if they're not on a whitelist of trusted apps, or ar anew different version.
i know comodo made the program for it's core business as security consultants so it really, really has a lot of awesome cutting edge features. anything a customer wants, goes on the feature list.
as a very paranoid person i have a few suggestions.
first off, there is noscript, no script only runs on gecko browsers, so you really only have firefox, icecat, ice weasel, and ephiphany, and whatever other gecko based browsers are out there... noscript is sexy, and was the first program to protect from clickjacking.
secondly i recommend getting a hardened firewall running on some cheap dumpster grade pentium 1-2,3 system, dumpster grade systems are easy to find, and if you cant' find one, there is always the option of hitting pricewatch.com and grabbing the cheapest 'no os' complete desktop, with the oldest, cheapest parts. for a beginner, smoothwall is pretty easy to learn. http://www.smoothwall.org/
i suggest going with half-open, and getting a crash course in what ports need to be opened for whatever you use besides web browsing.
then, you can worry about anti virus, and code execution protection, and outbound application level blocking on your native os. if your network isn't secure, then the best anti virus in the world isn't going to help you a lick.
well, i like comodo as a firewall far better than zone alarm. there ARE ways zone alarm can be replaced with a trojan that simply turns off all the firewall abilities of zone alarm. I've seen it happen in the wild, and was the primary reason i stopped trusting zone alarm. that was when i learned about comodo. free as in beer, and it includes code execution prevention on top of inbound and out bound firewall. yeah i know vista has code execution prevention, but it just says 'program x needs to to be run as admin and Bleep you up the ass'
comodo tells you what the program was trying to do, be it modify the registry (and even the key it's about to jack) if it's creating a file or directory, or replacing one, or even if god forbid it's trying to erase a file or directory. complete with file names and directories. hell it event ells you when iu's trying to open a port as a server, unless you mark a program as 'trusted'
does your firewall do that? why not?
avg is a product that was last good in 2002. maybe it was still passable in 2003. but by 2006 it was so far behind everything except clam av that it was equivalent to not having any real protection from hackers.
real security comes in 2 parts. 1 part firewall 1 part anti virus/malware/etc. if you're going to push a 'free' product at least pus one that includes a firewall, like comodo. version 3 of their firewall includes a very vistay popup style security against code execution. annoying, yes, but if you have to in addition to run the program click through a popup that tells you everything the program is trying to do.... well there is a chance that you'll see 'replace cmd.exe?' and wonder why fluffybunny.swf needs to replace cmd.exe.
personally, i don't even trust comodo, i have a hardened half-open hardware firewall. sometime next year, i'm getting a hardened firewall, that runs each service in a hardened sandboxed VM. so even if there is an exploit in dns caching the worst a hacker can get access to is the dns virtual machine, which i can restore from hd image the second noscript warns me or a site that i clicked a link on doesn't work the way i expect. but ya know, that's a little more secure than the department of homeland security, and a drop shy of how paranoid the millitary is. i don't inspect my hardwares firmwares before plugging them into my network.
the only thing i can find on google is that SSRI's are in trials for use with PTSD and that statins can cause memory loss by depriving the brain of cholesterol.
i'm really not seeing any 'magic pill' to make a marine forget all the people he just blew up with a grenade. i do know the military focuses hard on conditioning people to being ready to handle killing another human being, especially when they learned that in world war 1 only 30% of troops ever fired a bullet.
other than this research on mice, there doesn't seem to be any info on a magic pill to make people forget.
"Imagine if they got this stuff working for humans. They could really erase a criminals memory of an event and all the stuff that makes him bad."
you assume that criminal activity isn't caused by how the brain is wired, or how their genetic code is coded, and which codes are active, and which are repressed.
but yeah, you could reduce a criminal to a drooling idiot, the problem is he'll eventually relearn how to be a criminal, and there are going to be people saying no you can't do this to criminals. albeit in a world where a forget me pill exists some of those problems can go away by themselves, at least if information is tightly controlled.