Actually a Ferengi would a better match. Talaxians just look stupid. Ferengi put the almighty dollar (okay, gold-spanked latinum or whatever it is) above all else, like Bill.
Maybe slashdot could use a regular Ferengi for Enron, Wordlcom, Xerox, (whatever the next one will be). With a Borgified Ferengi for Microsoft:)
We could make this so-called war on drugs a real war. We go in to Columbia with some military force and start taking out the cartels. I'm not trolling -- I'm serious. I'm sure our satellites must be able to detect some large drug facilities. We'll just go in there and bomb them.
These people are well funded and well armed. Unlike the likes of the Taliban they can afford decent arms. How long would the US be prepared to prosecute a war where many Americans, both military and civilian, would most likely be killed.
Look back to the 19th century when drugs were legal. No one was stealing and there were no crack babies.
Indeed crack is kind of form of a drug that you might expect prohibition to encourage. Consider what happened when they made alcohol illegal in the US. The black market tended to cook up spirits rather than beer.
One thing that was good about Dr Who was that most of the stories were two or three hours long giving the chance for characters to develop better than the typical 50 minutes long most episodes are now.
If a programme was originally produced for the US market then it is typically under 45 minutes. Indeed the BBC typically shows "hour long" imports in a 45 minute slot. Originally Dr Who was shown in a 25 minute slot with each story taking up between 2 and 6, most commonly 4, episodes. The two episode stories would have about the same length of programme content as single episode of many current series.
Absolutely every legal entity has a home in some
country somewhere or other. No more.com,.edu,.mil,.net, or.org. The names
which belong to organisations based in the United States should be using the.us top level domain.
Or some subgrouping of it. A bit like the way Canada used to do things before someone decided that yet another.misc was needed and.ca would fit the bill. Whilst there is a need for a.misc gTLD changing.com,.net,.org and a bunch of ccTLDs into.miscs was really just stupid.
There is, I suppose, the argument that there are a few,
very few, genuinely international organisations which should have domain names
not tied to any particular country.
Quite a few could probably go along the lines of who.un, unesco.un, etc.
The International Red Cross is the kind of
organisation which comes to mind as the type which has the moral right to the
irc.org domain name.
Or even irc.int or redcross.int
Re:Possible MS Project Names
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2
Plutonium - the "most powerful" platform
How about Ununoctium? Which probably is chemically inert.
Is it a shame that Joss Whedon is doing so many series that his shows are starting to suffer? No doubt. Is all the acting up to snuff? No - Michelle Trachtenberg seems to be the Scrappy Doo of BtVS.
Actually Michelle is quite good when she is given something decent to do. Problem is that for much of S6 she wasn't.
Sometimes I wonder if they block sites for any stupid reason they can think up, or if they do a massive search for "sex" or something in a page or domain name and don't police their own results.
These products are mostly compiled using programs which search for "offensive material". Since these are dumb programs they find "bad stuff" where no human would think of looking. Then things are augmented by human additions and exceptions. Both due to complains and to reflect the political views of those selling the product. Whilst they will claim that everything added is vetted by humans this is self evidently impossible.
I have no need to see outside the craft (one of the downsides mentioned. The passengers would be seated in wide rows only a few deep- think of the current tube and turn it 90 degrees, so only a few people would have window seats).
One rather important reason why airliners are tubes is that that is a good shape to resist preasure differences. Indeed there were problems with cracking on the front part of the 747.
The major problem with large height is that your cellphone might appear in many cells simultaneously and the networks might become confused.
Confused because the the network dosn't think the cells are adjacent or possibly even the handset is trying to roam back and forth between different networks.
(And this could be one of the reasons why you can't use a cellphone inside an airplane)
The major reason is that the avionics systems arn't certified to handle cellphones, in the cabin. Apparently people sucessfully made calls from the planes hijacked on September the 11th using cellphones. One possible approach would be to install picocells in aircraft.
The public won't blame them when someone cracks the system, because folks like you will jump up and blame the telco for not following Nortel's proceedures (as documented on page 497 of the installation guide!)
The telco managed to read the rest of the installation manual. They must have since they have hardware people can use to make telephone calls with. As opposed to a pile of hardware which dosn't do anything useful.
Sprint used the DMS the way Nortel intended the box to be used: Powered Up, Connected to the public network, switching telephone calls.
So Nortel shipped Sprint some hardware which was pre configured, they also have access to the rest of Sprint's network to configure it to realise that the new box was there? Or did Nortel ship Sprint some hardware which Sprint needed to configure? If Sprint gave Nortel access to their network then it was their responsibility to ensure that they did so in a secure way. If Sprint configured their own hardware then it's their responsibility to know what they were doing.
Surely you don't believe this statement, do you? The default state of the gear is insecure. If the customer "wires it up to the public network" they're turning it on.
"Turn it on" would simply be a case of applying power to it. (Which in the case of telephone switching equiptment is typically 50V DC from a battery.)
If they do so without taking an additional step of setting the passwords, the system is vulnerable. The default state is what you get PRIOR to taking the additional steps.
Actually it's even worst than that. Since you can't simply plug it into the telephone network and expect it to work. You'd first need to configure both it and other bits of the telephone network in order for it to do anything at all.
Saying that it's secure until you wire it up and turn it on is absurd.
If it's simply wired and powered up then it is perfectly secure. It's once it has been configured to be part of the telephone network and such things as dialup remote admin ports have been configured that it becomes insecure.
The use of default passwords wasn't out of line with the time. Nowadays you'd have to explicitly switch it on to get it to work.
Since the telephone numbers of the configuration modems were apparently random then most likely someone had do do some sort of configuration. It's not as if using a dialup modem is the only way to remotely configure the system anyway. Alternatives would be a private IP or X25 network or a direct line to a NOC. Indeed using a dialup connection has the problem that a misconfiguration could disable the dialup line.
Heck, over the weekend I was reading about the Alcatel ADSL modem. Apparently the tftp server on it doesn't even HAVE a password- that modem looks wide open to me.
The TFTP protocol dosn't use passwords. The question would be more "why does an ADSL modem need a TFTP server in the first place?"
To be fair to Nortel, these particular systems were hacked 7 years ago, at a time where encryption on the internet was a rarity, and orginally designed well over a decade ago.
This has nothing to do with the internet. Configuration was apparently by a dialup modem on an obscure telephone number.
Right now it looks like some of them might not. It's probably an issue of how easy it would be for someone to switch supplier. Even though modern telephone systems are highly modular you can't mix and match bits from different suppliers.
The truth here is that problems with Microsoft software are treated differently than problems with open source software...M$ glitches are somewhat more official--M$ products will crash because computers crash--that's just something they do. A modern day computer user that just wants to use Quicken, Office, and e-mail has come to expect problems--they save often.
You also see similar double standards with Windows freeware (e.g. MSIE) being considered good, because they don't cost anything. But open source is "bad", because it's free...
The reviewers comments about theme management menu choices seem very sound to me. As a long time user of Linux on the desktop I often find that default menu layouts for Gnome & KDE are confusing and unintuitive.
Some of this probably depends on what distribution you are using. Anyway the way Windows does it isn't exactly intuitive.
Lack of options: Well, yes and no. There has been a serious attempt at providing sensible defaults for a lot of stuff, and hide away rare and/or strange options into the gconf system.
What is and isn't a commonly used option is a rather subjective thing. That's before you consider that any configuation really should be settable or even mandatable by the sysadmin. Quite possibly on a per user/group basis to deal with tweakers who'd never get any work done if they could tweak all day.
What Palladium is proposing is that the boot decryption keys are embedded in the CPU itself. They need AMD & Intel's cooperation for this, of course, and now they have it. This way, it's all but impossible to modify the boot code or to view the encryption keys, except perhaps by shaving the top off the CPU & examining the ROM mask directly with a (very) high-powered microscope.
Which apparently means that you need a boot program custom building for each machine. How long before the tools to do this leak?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually a Ferengi would a better match. Talaxians just look stupid. Ferengi put the almighty dollar (okay, gold-spanked latinum or whatever it is) above all else, like Bill.
:)
Maybe slashdot could use a regular Ferengi for Enron, Wordlcom, Xerox, (whatever the next one will be). With a Borgified Ferengi for Microsoft
The people who own MS stock are desperately praying that nothing happens to stop Microsofts stock price from rising.
:)
Or at least don't fall as quickly as the rest of the US stock market
We could make this so-called war on drugs a real war. We go in to Columbia with some military force and start taking out the cartels. I'm not trolling -- I'm serious. I'm sure our satellites must be able to detect some large drug facilities. We'll just go in there and bomb them.
These people are well funded and well armed. Unlike the likes of the Taliban they can afford decent arms. How long would the US be prepared to prosecute a war where many Americans, both military and civilian, would most likely be killed.
Look back to the 19th century when drugs were legal. No one was stealing and there were no crack babies.
Indeed crack is kind of form of a drug that you might expect prohibition to encourage. Consider what happened when they made alcohol illegal in the US. The black market tended to cook up spirits rather than beer.
Thus, the most addictive drug is legal, and one of the most destructive (alcohol) is legal too.
Nicotine would best be described as a "legal hard drug", as well as being a highly toxic alkaloid.
Marijuana, barely addictive and with minor health affects (less than nicotine) is still illegal.
Depends how it's ingested. Breathing the smoke from burning plants probably isn't too healthy regardless of if they contain any drugs or not.
What about that other great BBC series, Blakes 7? I'd love to see that revived. Would be very cool with modern special effects.
So long as they didn't concentrate on special effects over plot. Though Farscape uses some of the same ideas.
One thing that was good about Dr Who was that most of the stories were two or three hours long giving the chance for characters to develop better than the typical 50 minutes long most episodes are now.
If a programme was originally produced for the US market then it is typically under 45 minutes. Indeed the BBC typically shows "hour long" imports in a 45 minute slot.
Originally Dr Who was shown in a 25 minute slot with each story taking up between 2 and 6, most commonly 4, episodes. The two episode stories would have about the same length of programme content as single episode of many current series.
Absolutely every legal entity has a home in some country somewhere or other. No more .com, .edu, .mil, .net, or .org. The names
which belong to organisations based in the United States should be using the .us top level domain.
.misc was needed and .ca would fit the bill. .misc gTLD changing .com, .net, .org and a bunch of ccTLDs into .miscs was really just stupid.
Or some subgrouping of it. A bit like the way Canada used to do things before someone decided that yet another
Whilst there is a need for a
There is, I suppose, the argument that there are a few, very few, genuinely international organisations which should have domain names not tied to any particular country.
Quite a few could probably go along the lines of who.un, unesco.un, etc.
The International Red Cross is the kind of organisation which comes to mind as the type which has the moral right to the irc.org domain name.
Or even irc.int or redcross.int
Plutonium - the "most powerful" platform
How about Ununoctium? Which probably is chemically inert.
Is it a shame that Joss Whedon is doing so many series that his shows are starting to suffer? No doubt. Is all the acting up to snuff? No - Michelle Trachtenberg seems to be the Scrappy Doo of BtVS.
Actually Michelle is quite good when she is given something decent to do. Problem is that for much of S6 she wasn't.
The people categorizing URL's and sites are not much better than trained monkeys.
Most likely they are programs rather than people anyway.
Just because a site gets blocked isn't part of a conspiracy.
You can hide quite a bit of conspiracy within such a pool of incompetance.
Sometimes I wonder if they block sites for any stupid reason they can think up, or if they do a massive search for "sex" or something in a page or domain name and don't police their own results.
These products are mostly compiled using programs which search for "offensive material". Since these are dumb programs they find "bad stuff" where no human would think of looking. Then things are augmented by human additions and exceptions. Both due to complains and to reflect the political views of those selling the product.
Whilst they will claim that everything added is vetted by humans this is self evidently impossible.
To that end, he composed a piece which involved a pianist holding his hands over a piano keyboard for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
The length, 273 seconds, is also a quite deliberate choice.
Mike Batt's problem is crediting Cage on the album. Yes, he did it for a laugh, but by doing so, did he inadvertantly claim legal liability?
Someone decided "derived work", in which case covered by copyright until at least 2062.
I have no need to see outside the craft (one of the downsides mentioned. The passengers would be seated in wide rows only a few deep- think of the current tube and turn it 90 degrees, so only a few people would have window seats).
One rather important reason why airliners are tubes is that that is a good shape to resist preasure differences. Indeed there were problems with cracking on the front part of the 747.
The major problem with large height is that your cellphone might appear in many cells simultaneously and the networks might become confused.
Confused because the the network dosn't think the cells are adjacent or possibly even the handset is trying to roam back and forth between different networks.
(And this could be one of the reasons why you can't use a cellphone inside an airplane)
The major reason is that the avionics systems arn't certified to handle cellphones, in the cabin. Apparently people sucessfully made calls from the planes hijacked on September the 11th using cellphones.
One possible approach would be to install picocells in aircraft.
Nokia phones will even work when locked.
Unfortunatly some phones have a problem of having no timeout on keypresses when in locked mode. So can easily generate spurious emergency calls.
The public won't blame them when someone cracks the system, because folks like you will jump up and blame the telco for not following Nortel's proceedures (as documented on page 497 of the installation guide!)
The telco managed to read the rest of the installation manual. They must have since they have hardware people can use to make telephone calls with. As opposed to a pile of hardware which dosn't do anything useful.
Sprint used the DMS the way Nortel intended the box to be used: Powered Up, Connected to the public network, switching telephone calls.
So Nortel shipped Sprint some hardware which was pre configured, they also have access to the rest of Sprint's network to configure it to realise that the new box was there? Or did Nortel ship Sprint some hardware which Sprint needed to configure?
If Sprint gave Nortel access to their network then it was their responsibility to ensure that they did so in a secure way. If Sprint configured their own hardware then it's their responsibility to know what they were doing.
Surely you don't believe this statement, do you? The default state of the gear is insecure. If the customer "wires it up to the public network" they're turning it on.
"Turn it on" would simply be a case of applying power to it. (Which in the case of telephone switching equiptment is typically 50V DC from a battery.)
If they do so without taking an additional step of setting the passwords, the system is vulnerable. The default state is what you get PRIOR to taking the additional steps.
Actually it's even worst than that. Since you can't simply plug it into the telephone network and expect it to work. You'd first need to configure both it and other bits of the telephone network in order for it to do anything at all.
Saying that it's secure until you wire it up and turn it on is absurd.
If it's simply wired and powered up then it is perfectly secure. It's once it has been configured to be part of the telephone network and such things as dialup remote admin ports have been configured that it becomes insecure.
The use of default passwords wasn't out of line with the time. Nowadays you'd have to explicitly switch it on to get it to work.
Since the telephone numbers of the configuration modems were apparently random then most likely someone had do do some sort of configuration. It's not as if using a dialup modem is the only way to remotely configure the system anyway. Alternatives would be a private IP or X25 network or a direct line to a NOC. Indeed using a dialup connection has the problem that a misconfiguration could disable the dialup line.
Heck, over the weekend I was reading about the Alcatel ADSL modem. Apparently the tftp server on it doesn't even HAVE a password- that modem looks wide open to me.
The TFTP protocol dosn't use passwords. The question would be more "why does an ADSL modem need a TFTP server in the first place?"
To be fair to Nortel, these particular systems were hacked 7 years ago, at a time where encryption on the internet was a rarity, and orginally designed well over a decade ago.
This has nothing to do with the internet. Configuration was apparently by a dialup modem on an obscure telephone number.
Really, how do these folks stay in business?
Right now it looks like some of them might not.
It's probably an issue of how easy it would be for someone to switch supplier. Even though modern telephone systems are highly modular you can't mix and match bits from different suppliers.
The truth here is that problems with Microsoft software are treated differently than problems with open source software...M$ glitches are somewhat more official--M$ products will crash because computers crash--that's just something they do. A modern day computer user that just wants to use Quicken, Office, and e-mail has come to expect problems--they save often.
You also see similar double standards with Windows freeware (e.g. MSIE) being considered good, because they don't cost anything. But open source is "bad", because it's free...
The reviewers comments about theme management menu choices seem very sound to me. As a long time user of Linux on the desktop I often find that default menu layouts for Gnome & KDE are confusing and unintuitive.
Some of this probably depends on what distribution you are using. Anyway the way Windows does it isn't exactly intuitive.
Lack of options: Well, yes and no. There has been a serious attempt at providing sensible defaults for a lot of stuff, and hide away rare and/or strange options into the gconf system.
What is and isn't a commonly used option is a rather subjective thing. That's before you consider that any configuation really should be settable or even mandatable by the sysadmin. Quite possibly on a per user/group basis to deal with tweakers who'd never get any work done if they could tweak all day.
What Palladium is proposing is that the boot decryption keys are embedded in the CPU itself. They need AMD & Intel's cooperation for this, of course, and now they have it. This way, it's all but impossible to modify the boot code or to view the encryption keys, except perhaps by shaving the top off the CPU & examining the ROM mask directly with a (very) high-powered microscope.
Which apparently means that you need a boot program custom building for each machine. How long before the tools to do this leak?