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User: Deagol

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  1. Re:PGP sign? on Regarding the Use of Digital Data in Court? · · Score: 2
    There used to be a public PGP timestamp service on the internet. One of the PGP USENET groups would have daily (weekly?) summaries of the hashes posted from the server for further record (I assume).

    One would create a detached signature of the document and mail it to the server (or perhaps the whole signed/encrypted document). The server would sign whatever you sent, then send that back to you.

    You could then verify that you signed the document (possibly implying that you wrote it), and then verify the date in which you did so.

    I don't know what happend to the service, but there's a for-pay service which is similar. Check out this place.

  2. Re:won't ever work on Regarding the Use of Digital Data in Court? · · Score: 2
    The same reasons why video is in-admissable in court apply here.

    You telling me that all those Caught On Tape shows on FOX are wrong when they end a clip by saying something along the lines of, "and the video evidence was enough to convince a judge to convict him"?

  3. Re:What about LIDS? on Real World Linux Security, 2nd Edition · · Score: 1

    That would be LSD.

  4. Re:What about ATMs? on OS/2 Going, Going... Gone · · Score: 2

    I would guess that it was because they began including the video driver in kernel space with NT4. I remember all the computer rags talking about the phenomenal speed increase with the corresponding drop in reliability.

  5. Re:What if... on Finnish Taxi Drivers Must Pay Music Royalties · · Score: 2

    If summer camps can get sued for the same thing, then why not? (Search for it -- it's happened.)

  6. Re:Turnaround Time on PGP's New Release, Source Code, and PRZ · · Score: 2

    Or better yet, use a timestamp server.

  7. So what are options for Americans? on 239 MPG Car · · Score: 2
    So we're a 1-car family. We have a '93 Mazda Navajo, which is a re-badged 2-door Ford Explorer, with a 4-L V6 engine. The best fuel efficiency I've recorded is 20mpg, though I average 18mpg for highway trips (the majority of travel this thing now sees). I'm not ashamed of this car, as we travel off-road a lot (hey, this is Utah!) and have rural property which requires a 4x4 to access it. We often haul stuff inside, as well as outside (trailer), which would not be possible in a conventional car.

    (You know, it's a no-win situation. We own a single vehicle which does everything we require, but it sucks in fuel efficiency. Yet, if we get a second, more efficient car, we'd be acused of being the typical glutonous American family.)

    I'd like to get a better car, though, for commuting. One to optimize my tax burden (which, for me means any car over 12 years of age) and fuel efficiency (obviouly better than 20mpg, say 30-50mpg).

    Diesel is an option, as I live in a farm town and it's readily available.

    So... let's hear some sugegstions! I just hope the VW Rabbit isn't the only matching car. :)

  8. Re:I have another suggestion... on Is SEVIS Likely to Cause Problems For Foreign Students? · · Score: 2
    Granted, I'll attribute a lot of that to the immigrants and minorities that have way too many children for their own good...

    That's a rather racist (or xenophobic) remark, don't you think?

    Just look in your own backyard for over-breeding.

    You obviously don't live in an area with a high Mormon population, do you? Well I do. Most Mormons are not minorities (at least here in Utah) or immigrants. Most typical Mormon families seem to have at least 4 kids. Hell, most of families with 4+ kids that I know personally seem to have educated parents, so you'd at least think they'd know better.

    You should have seen the local paper during election time: "So-and-So, a life-long Republican, has been married for 43 years, has 5 children, 22 grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren. Blah-blah-blah..." Damned near every candidate had 5 kids, and they wore it like a badge of pride. It made me sick

    Don't get me wrong -- I'm not one of those bitter, anti-child freaks from alt.support.childfree, but responsible people should know better than to crank out kids just for the sake of doing so. I don't care if you have the financial means to support five kids (many do), or the emotional means (most do not), take a good look at the problems of this planet and think before you decide to procreate yet again. It's just plain selfish to have that many offspring.

    No, the Mormon folks aren't the only group which tend to crank out kids. I recall many jokes about Catholics having the same trait. But really, it crosses all ethnic, racial, demographic, and economic classes. In many poorer countries, it can be attributed to lack of education and access to birth control. In more modernized countries... I don't know why people would want that many kids.

    And yes, I do have kids -- 2 of 'em. And we made sure that after we had a replacement for each parent, we took permanent steps to make sure 2 kids was all we'd ever have.

  9. Go work for a small ISP on Making the Jump From Sysadmin to Network Administrator? · · Score: 2
    I recently moved into a small rural town, which happens to have a small ISP. Since the owner knows I'm a UNIX admin telecommuting to the university which employs me (and he has little in the way of UNIX expertise), he's been interested in my services. I've mentioned casually that I'd be willing to do some lite side work for free, with the experience being my pay. We'd then see if the arrangement might get more formal (that is, I get paid).

    Note that this is for wireless installs and support (of which I have zero experience), since I already have a little experience with leased lines and routers. But the same thing could apply to anyone for any skill. Seek out smaller shops that may not be able to afford a full-time senior-level admin, and see if you can barter your experience.

  10. Re:Kind of like Slashdot on Salon, Nearly No Money and Ultramercials · · Score: 3, Funny
    How does CmdrTaco sleep at night??!

    On a big, cushy, VC-funded bed, I'm sure. ;-)

  11. Time To Implement "Project White Noise" on Cyber Security Enhancement Act Passes Senate · · Score: 3, Interesting
    A while back, I was inspired (by the news of yet another anti-privacy law that got passed) to start a project that would fill the ether with encrypted email for the sake of pissing off three-letter agencies who are on witch hunts.

    It was meant to be like the old usenet practice of adding "spook fodder" to the end of posts. Also, like type II anonymous remailers, it was designed to help thwart traffic analysis.

    There'd be a set of scripts (or easy to compile programs) that would sit on a client machine. These scripts would have a list of email recipients (either static, or snarfed periodically from a current source), and it would send out an encrypted "message" to each address according to a set of rules defined coupled to that address.

    Messges could be sent at random intervals or with a specific frequency.

    The payload could either be encrypted, plaintext, or crypto-grade random garbage.

    The encryption could be symetric, asymetric, or even with a throw-away one-time-pad (generated on the fly and then discarded).

    The payload of encrypted messages could be plain text, garbage, or another encrypted message.

    Of course, this could be done with the current anonymous remailers. But I've found the remailers to be already overloaded and unreliable. Because the project's goal is primarily to add noise to existing email traffic, it would lend itself to be served by clients with sporadic connections.

    There's the possibility of propogating real messages in this system, but running SMTP servers on sporadic clients seems like a bad idea (even discounting the potential for abuse by spammers, etc.). I was thinking of a store-and-forward type of system, using P2P networks. The software could be a P2P client. It would queue a "real" message by sharing it out. Other clients would search for a designated string to find these messgaes and download them (there'd obviously need to be some sanity checking to prevent garbage inputs). Once the originating client knows that the message has been downloaded "x" number of times (some redundancy would be desireable, I would think), it would remove the message from the queue so the recipient doesn't get thousands of copies of the message.

    I know, this idea is really rough around the edges. I had a really nice write-up a while back, but I lost it. The fact that my coding skills don't extend beyond half-page sed/awk/perl/bash scripts (don't laugh, I'm just a sysadmin) hasn't helped in my realization of this idea. :)

    If anyone knows of a project that even remotely comes close to what I have described, please post links!

  12. Re:oh well on EMI Customer Relations Tells It Like It Is · · Score: 5, Insightful
    (Sorry, this turned into a stream-of-thought rant, more then the well-structured response I intended.)

    I think that this point of view is propogated by the distillation of the labels' back catalog of music.

    I'm 30, so my pop music consumption began in earnest in the early-to-mid mid-80's, when I got my first radio. I'm sure there was a lot of crap in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, but I never hear hear it anymore. What I hear on the radio is the popular stuff from those eras.

    Today, what little I hear on the radio (and used to see on MTV), they pump out a lot of crap. Sure, there's good stuff, but it will bubble to the top over the next ten years and wind up in rotation on whatever "best hits of the 80's, 90's..." Clear Channel affiliate is out there at the time.

    Do you think that in 20 years, people will get stoned and go soul searchin to N'Sync and Britney Spears albums, like people still do to Pink Floyd's The Wall? I highly doubt it. Will we see "Laser Backstreet Boys" at the local planetarium 30 years from now?

    There's pop music, truly groundbreaking music, and then there's utter crap. Sometimes they overlap, and everyone's threshold is obviously different for each category.

    I simply love the Beatles. I freely admit that their first albums were no better in content than current boy bands. I'd argue that they grew and contributed to musical history in their later albums. Bands just don't have that kind of shelf life anymore, so they never get time to grow anymore. Joplin, Marley, and Hendrix, also from that era, made some truly soul-shaking music. I don't get that from any current music.

    Though I've consumed my fair share of pop music in the 80's and 90's, I can't think of any groups/performers I've followed that have had similar impact on people (as opposed to musical trends). Some of my favoites are Suzzane Vega, Enya, Kirst MacColl, Cheryl Crow, I don't know if any of them will stand the test of time. My wife introduced me to 80's rock these past five years or so (Cinderella, Bon Jovi, Great White), and while those feel more timeless and relavent today than those I loved in that era (Cindy Lauper, Huey Lewis, The Cars, Dire Straits), I don't know if those will last 20 more years either.

    Another factor, IMO, is the seeming death of the theme album. I ask this question with all honesty: is there anything from the 90's and later that is equivalent to Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, The Wall, and Bat Out of Hell? I'm open to expand my contemporary music tastes here -- let the titles fly.

    Having spewed all of that, I'll state that 2nd-hand music sources have been my primary source for a long time. It seems that every college town has a great used music store nearby (any Von's or JL Records fans from Purdue?). Several years ago, I discovered secondspin.com, which I have used almost exlusively since the first RIAA lawsuits began in the late 90's. I haven't bought I new album in quite a while, and these crippled CDs will only reinforce that behavior for me.

    Who knows... maybe there's a scientific reason for the generational gap in musical tastes. Perhaps the hormone-charged angst most go through in our teens and early twenties cause us all to bond to whatever music we listen to at the time -- like a duckling that imprints on the first living thing it encounters. I like to think I'm really being objective when I say that the quality of music has been diminishing over time. Maybe it's the homogenization of Clear Channel and the like? If I could get music from the 20's thru 50's produced with today's recording technology (instead of scratchy mono tapes we have in the archives), I'd have a lot of it in my collection.

  13. Re:What a waste this is. on Tidal Power a Reality · · Score: 2
    As far as dotting the landscape goes, there are two extremes. The first would be to utilize the vast expanses of unpopulated, undesriable land. Places like the Nevada test sites have been considered for this. The other extreme is to decorate existing and new man-made structures. Wind turbines on skyscrapers can't make the horizon look any worse, and if every home used those solar cell shingles to generate power in a distibuted fashion, we'd be in good shape. On of my gripes with urban sprawl is the vast waste of real estate on parking lots (Wal Mart, Home Depot, etc.). These huge blacktop lots get damned hot in the summer, so why no provide structures to shade then and put solar pannels on the structures?

    There isn't a lack of feasible green remedies to these problems. Unfortunately, our fair corporate citizens will never sacrifice a few cents a share for a few quarters to invest in these technologies. Remember, profits trump the health of the environment.

  14. Is it me... on Homing In On Laser Weapons · · Score: 2

    Or did anyone else of Project CrossBow when they read this headline? "There's no defense like a good offense!"

  15. Re:Got a letter from my federal rep this weekend.. on British Columbia Bows To Breast Cancer Patent · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If anyone could test for these genes without paying royalties, then the guy who made the discovery will not have ANY incentive to do the same in the future! This applies to drug companies as well. Sure we pay steep prices for them, but an enourmous amount of money goes into their development.

    Yeah, it's not like any truly innovative discovery or method would result is being paid big lecture fees, possible Nobel Prize nominations, textbook royalties, or anything. Especially in the areas of deadly diseases, right? Yeah, of all the biology and med students I've met throughout college, none of them ever had the desire to cure/detect a disease that killed a best friend or family member -- they simply wanted to own new home in the burbs, with a 4-car garage and have a SUV in eash stall.

    It's bloody greed (on a corporate level, more likely, than a personal scientist one), plain and simple. I was driving to work about a year ago and listening to NPR. One of the quick news blurbs was that some huge drug company's board had decided to can all further research on treatment for some really bad disease (multiple sclerosis, I think). Why? Because one of the patents on the process was about to expire!

    "Mr. chairman, I vote we stop all research into this horrible, degenerative disease because we won't be able to recoup our costs. No, the fact that our Viagra clone and hair regeneration products will cover the costs tenfold -- we need to spend that money on TV commercials and free samples to physicians."

  16. Re:It's all in the Expectations ... on System Adminstration and Corporate Ethics? · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Legality aside, this attitude (which seems to be echoed by many) truly offends me as a person, as well as an admin.

    Where does your logic end? Hidden cameras and microphones at the water cooler? Your office/cubicle? The bathroom? They'll owned by the corp, no? Human decency be damned, I guess.

    I'm dismayed that so many fellow admins are actually defending practices like this.

  17. Re:What timing! on Windows vs Linux On Security · · Score: 2
    Ditch wu-ftpd. For minimal setups, use proftpd, and for more comlex needs, use pureftpd. Search freshmeat for both packages. Use iptables and wrappers accordingly, too. And if you're industrious, throw in a chroot config and use the grsecurity pacthes to thwart the majority of buffer/stack/overrun/etc. attacks.

    Security is like an ogre -- it has layers! And updating your RPM/package is only the first, most minimal, layer.

    I still wouldn't use wu-ftpd if my paycheck depended on it. :) Just my opinion, of course.

  18. Re:Jewellery!!! on What Can I Do With My Meteorite? · · Score: 3, Informative

    That was gonna be my suggesiton. As a satisfied customer (I bought wedding bands for my wife and I in '97), check out Talisman Jewlers and their meteorite jewlery. I've been eyeing some of these items for years (for the cool factor), but I haven't taken the time to order yet.

  19. Re:"geeks" are being defined. on The Rise and Fall of the Geek · · Score: 2
    I don't like the fact that he calls us "pasty, long haired, UN*X t-shirt wearing" individuals.

    Hmmm... I need to go get a tan, get a haircut, and toss out my RSA in Perl t-shirt. Stupid stereotypes!

  20. Re:Happy about a BSA raid? on Former DrinkOrDie Member Chris Tresco Answers · · Score: 5, Insightful
    When he said "happy about it", the "it" in question was the DRM stuff. If all software were DRM-enabled, and a company was audited, you could basically just say "Hey, it's running, so it must be registered and legeit, so bugger off!"

    A world of DRM software might reduce revenue for the BSA. "Poor, poor BSA!"

  21. I'm more interested in the PC it came with on Review: Lindows 2.0 Dissected · · Score: 2

    The article links to a pcmag.com review of the Microtel $200 PC that Wal Mart sells (which these guys were going to review, but review Lindows instead). I've been eyeing these for my 2nd grade daughter as a good starter machine. However, the linked review is pretty weak. Has any thorough review been done of this machine?

  22. Is there a "Pro Se For Dummies" out there? on Google sued as PetsWarehouse Lawsuit Continues. · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I remember about 10 years ago, I was watching some daily rag show (Entertainment Tonight, or maybe Hard Copy). Anyway, there was some story about some bimbo-former-housewife-turned-amature-litigator. She made her living my suing freakin' everybody around her and getting them to settle. She sued a family because the kids (a few doors down) were playing basketball in the driveway too loud, and it distressed her. I remember the poor father (paraphrased), "I hate the idea of settling, but we just can't afford a lawyer..."

    If some wench with a few hours' paralegal experience can cause problems, why can't the average Joe use the same technique in defense?

    In spite of the saying "a man representing himself has a fool for a client", I assume a person with nothing to loose should be able to defend himself.

    Take me, for example. I make a modest salary, have a home, wife/kids, car etc. I'd be hard pressed to come up with more than a grand or two to retain a lawyer if I were ever sued. For a civil suit like this, what could I really loose? I can't fathom a judge forcing a family out on the street, or taking their only means of transport. Can a judgement that would make a family destitute really be made against them? (Cite/link example, if there are, please.)

    Obviously, IANAL. I'm just curious. Is the only option for us middle class folk to either settle for what we can afford or start a defense fund? I can't accept that -- it says that society sucks far more than I currently believe.

    Would some lawyer (or someone who's gone the pro se route) speak up. An online resource (one really geard towards pro se defense) would be awesome.

  23. Re:Fanning drops the ball on Shawn Fanning Interview · · Score: 2
    If he could get rich filming a three-way between him, Hilary Rosen, and Jack Valenti, and selling copies on the internet, then he would.

    Only if Rosen was naked and rolling in a pile of money.

  24. Re:The truth about security on Web Hacking: Attacks and Defense · · Score: 2
    The bandwidth consumption, system overhead, and problems resulting from Code Red, Nimbda, Slapper, etc. are quite real. Ask anyone who's either been hit directly or felt the side effects. So there are real threats out there.

    That said, I quite often don't follow the hype. I will occasionally visit a vulnerability site just to make sure nothing truly new, clever, and dangerous is on the loose. A decent admin will have most bases covered.

    For example, when all those SSH/OpenSSH hack came through early this year (and late last year), I wasn't overly concerned, even though I manage a ton of OpenSSH servers. Why? Because I'm smart enough to use tcp_wrappers to keep the l33t AOL and AT&T Broadband hackers from messing with my systems and I turned off protocol 1 suport long ago.

    Sure, I went out and upgraded OpenSSL/OpenSSH on the vulnerable machines. Who wouldn't? But I didn't need to make a mad dash to upgrade because I had devices in place to keep things in check.

    I don't believe that the industry is trying to discredit "hackers". Like it or not "hackers" is pretty much a negative term these days. No, the industry uses this kind of hype and hysteria to... make money!

  25. Re:Look like windows? on Red Hat 8.0 Released · · Score: 5, Informative
    the ability to browse SMB shares would be a must

    Launch Konqueror. Type in the URL: "smb://smbserver/share".