Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries
Yeah, like the neighborhood drug pusher giving away free samples to the kids to get 'em hooked. Shame on you, Bill. Oh, wait a minute, that's the new business model - to hell with ethics and morals as long as you can make a buck. How much money is enough, Bill? Huh?
I've been wondering when the governments of the world would start doing something like this. No need to overtly outlaw encryption, just arm-twist the folks on the backbone to drop or block encrypted traffic or just modify it so that it can't be decrypted.
I used to work for Sun back in the early 90's, when Linux was first getting off the ground. We had finally gotten X to run under Linux, and so I figured I'd see what it would do on a 386SX/25 laptop with 16MB of RAM. It was pretty slow, but as long as I wasn't doing anything it was fine. When the screensaver kicked in, I saw the traditional Sun logo, and that gave me an idea for a prank.
I went down to engineering and got one of the old metal Sun logos, the ones that used to be on the front of Sun-2 boxes, and put it over the logo of the laptop, fired it up in my office, and waited for the first victim to wander by. A while later, one of the senior software developers walked into my office to ask me something, and spied the laptop with the Sun logo and the screensaver running with the Sun logo on it. "How'd you get a Sparc laptop? I didn't think they were in production yet!" I have lots of friends... [chuckle]...
It didn't take long for the prank to be found out, but it sure was fun for a while...:)
Reminds me of the time that I got Wine running under A/UX (Apple's version of UNIX, SVR4 flavor) - I was working for Apple at the time, and it was fun to see people's faces when they'd come by and see the Windows logo on the screen on what was obviously a Mac, but that's a story for another time. Sure was a fair bit of work, but it worth the prank value...:)
It's time to browse with Lynx again. Who would have thought that would come up again for people who weren't blind?
I use Lynx all the time. It's much faster to browse cnn.com or foxnews.com or any of the other heavier graphics sites with a text-only browser than it is with a browser that automatically downloads all the graphics, sound files, videos, etc. on the page.
Try it on your Linux/*BSD box sometime - you'll be amazed at how much faster cnn.com comes up in lynx!
I run 7.0 now - I was running 6.2, then upgraded to 7.0 - a 10 minute task, by the way - and gained a noticeable performance increase. I haven't had the time or the inclination to run any benchmarks, but for a MySQL/Escapade/IMAP/squid server, I can certainly tell the difference.
And this is a big deal because... why? Because Linus' name is on it? Slashdot reminds me of the idiots who used to follow Tolstoy around and write down every word he said, "to save for posterity".
Ask them if they use envelopes when they mail out bills or other correspondence. "Of course I do!" will usually be the response. Then ask them if they'd mind if you listened in while they talked on the phone or in person to their doctor or lawyer or spouse or significant other. "That's none of your business!" will again be the usual response. "But why? If you're not concerned about privacy, why should you care about other people seeing what bills you pay, what you write or say to your lawyer or doctor or spouse or lover?"
How does that work? I've got a Verisign dongle that works with my PayPal account, and I'd love to be able to use it with my Linux box... anyone know how?
Abuse? What are you talking about? Port-agile programs aren't new, just not well-known. And there's *plenty* of reason to mask what port you're running a listener on - to avoid getting your server hacked because you're running **TP listeners on well-known ports that script kiddies can find easily. Most UNIX-like operating systems can handle a fair number of inbound connections easily (think *BSD).
Even with NTP servers it's too easy to have your systems end up out of clock sync Really? How often do you run NTP? I've run it once a day for 20+ years and I've *never* had my server out of sync for more than a second or two between synchs. Maybe you're running crappy hardware?
The Carroll Doctrine (aka the "automobile exception", aka Carroll v. US) says that although they can seize a locked container in transit, they can't search it without a warrant. If no warrant is forthcoming, they have to return the locked container unsearched - they can't destroy it or confiscate it. There have been plenty of court cases since (California v. Acevedo, US v. Chadwick, US v. Ross, Chambers v. Maroney, et. al.) that have clearly established the rights of "persons" (as opposed to merely "citizens") under the Fourth Amendment. And even though the USSC has said that people crossing into the US have a diminished expectation of privacy and border guards have expanded powers of search and seizure because of the exigent nature of the circumstances surrounding a border crossing (in particular, no probable cause is needed before a search), there still is no support as far as I've been able to find for the warrantless search of a locked container absent any sort of either probable cause or even reasonable suspicion. It follows that the government can search my hard drive without a warrant at a border crossing, but what happens when they happen across that TOPSECRET encrypted folder?
It's going to interesting the first time one of these cases reaches the USSC. What happens if I encrypt my data with AES 256 (certified for TOP SECRET data), I get stopped at the border, and I refuse to give up my encryption key? Since I'm a citizen, they can't deny me entry, they can't hold me until I give up my key, and they can't decrypt the data. An interesting situation. As a former police officer, I know how I'd handle the situation without breaking the law and without holding the subject in jail, but I doubt that most DHS folks would have that much creative imagination.
I thought to myself, their must be some higher level idiom that protects against buffer overflow, because no sane architect would implement such a dangerous function otherwise. Man, was I ever naive.
Naive about the purpose of C, anyway. C was never designed to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot. Writing C requires you to think, which is sadly out of vogue these days, as you point out later. C was never designed to protect you from yourself, as explicitly pointed out by Dennis Ritchie many times. If you want a language that will protect you from yourself, program in VB.
So yes, Java doesn't teach very darn much about the harsh realities of actually thinking.
But C obviously does - like checking boundary conditions. I don't understand how you can slam C in one breath, then praise it in the next.
In reality, people have to realize that predicting weather is an inherently unstable mathematical problem, so longer-term forecasts are usually not that accurate.
And probably never will be. When I studied meterology in college years ago, I remember the complex math in Methods In Climatology, one of our textbooks, and it was every bit as bad as the math I had to take for physics. And that was 30+ years ago - it's only gotten even more complicated since...
Yet another idiot trying to be a smartass who winds up showing his ignorance to half the technical world. Since the Earth is more-or-less a closed system (ignoring the negligible effect of heat radiating off into space), everything that happens affects everything else. You just think that because hurricanes are getting stronger that it won't affect folks in the corn belt? Then you wonder why you're freezing your ass off in the middle of the coldest winter in 70 years... it's all related...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, crap ... one less place to stash the bodies of my enemies...
Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries
Yeah, like the neighborhood drug pusher giving away free samples to the kids to get 'em hooked. Shame on you, Bill. Oh, wait a minute, that's the new business model - to hell with ethics and morals as long as you can make a buck. How much money is enough, Bill? Huh?
Everyone in the Bush Administration is trying to make it illegal - so why is it OK for the military, but not for everyone else? What's up with that?
Lots of alternatives to choose from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowing_system
And thank you for posting your snarky comment before doing 30 seconds worth of research.
Lucky guy ... I lusted after Lalla Ward for years after I saw her in Doctor Who in the mid 80's...
-better at
+blatant about
Which is an attack that we were warned about well in advance - and chose to do nothing about.
I've been wondering when the governments of the world would start doing something like this. No need to overtly outlaw encryption, just arm-twist the folks on the backbone to drop or block encrypted traffic or just modify it so that it can't be decrypted.
kill -9 1 ;)
I used to work for Sun back in the early 90's, when Linux was first getting off the ground. We had finally gotten X to run under Linux, and so I figured I'd see what it would do on a 386SX/25 laptop with 16MB of RAM. It was pretty slow, but as long as I wasn't doing anything it was fine. When the screensaver kicked in, I saw the traditional Sun logo, and that gave me an idea for a prank.
... [chuckle]...
:)
:)
I went down to engineering and got one of the old metal Sun logos, the ones that used to be on the front of Sun-2 boxes, and put it over the logo of the laptop, fired it up in my office, and waited for the first victim to wander by. A while later, one of the senior software developers walked into my office to ask me something, and spied the laptop with the Sun logo and the screensaver running with the Sun logo on it. "How'd you get a Sparc laptop? I didn't think they were in production yet!" I have lots of friends
It didn't take long for the prank to be found out, but it sure was fun for a while...
Reminds me of the time that I got Wine running under A/UX (Apple's version of UNIX, SVR4 flavor) - I was working for Apple at the time, and it was fun to see people's faces when they'd come by and see the Windows logo on the screen on what was obviously a Mac, but that's a story for another time. Sure was a fair bit of work, but it worth the prank value...
It's time to browse with Lynx again. Who would have thought that would come up again for people who weren't blind?
I use Lynx all the time. It's much faster to browse cnn.com or foxnews.com or any of the other heavier graphics sites with a text-only browser than it is with a browser that automatically downloads all the graphics, sound files, videos, etc. on the page.
Try it on your Linux/*BSD box sometime - you'll be amazed at how much faster cnn.com comes up in lynx!
I knew ACC personally ... a great, gentle, and humble man. Rest in peace, old friend...
I run 7.0 now - I was running 6.2, then upgraded to 7.0 - a 10 minute task, by the way - and gained a noticeable performance increase. I haven't had the time or the inclination to run any benchmarks, but for a MySQL/Escapade/IMAP/squid server, I can certainly tell the difference.
And this is a big deal because ... why? Because Linus' name is on it? Slashdot reminds me of the idiots who used to follow Tolstoy around and write down every word he said, "to save for posterity".
Ask them if they use envelopes when they mail out bills or other correspondence. "Of course I do!" will usually be the response. Then ask them if they'd mind if you listened in while they talked on the phone or in person to their doctor or lawyer or spouse or significant other. "That's none of your business!" will again be the usual response. "But why? If you're not concerned about privacy, why should you care about other people seeing what bills you pay, what you write or say to your lawyer or doctor or spouse or lover?"
How does that work? I've got a Verisign dongle that works with my PayPal account, and I'd love to be able to use it with my Linux box ... anyone know how?
Abuse? What are you talking about? Port-agile programs aren't new, just not well-known. And there's *plenty* of reason to mask what port you're running a listener on - to avoid getting your server hacked because you're running **TP listeners on well-known ports that script kiddies can find easily. Most UNIX-like operating systems can handle a fair number of inbound connections easily (think *BSD).
Even with NTP servers it's too easy to have your systems end up out of clock sync
Really? How often do you run NTP? I've run it once a day for 20+ years and I've *never* had my server out of sync for more than a second or two between synchs. Maybe you're running crappy hardware?
The Carroll Doctrine (aka the "automobile exception", aka Carroll v. US) says that although they can seize a locked container in transit, they can't search it without a warrant. If no warrant is forthcoming, they have to return the locked container unsearched - they can't destroy it or confiscate it. There have been plenty of court cases since (California v. Acevedo, US v. Chadwick, US v. Ross, Chambers v. Maroney, et. al.) that have clearly established the rights of "persons" (as opposed to merely "citizens") under the Fourth Amendment. And even though the USSC has said that people crossing into the US have a diminished expectation of privacy and border guards have expanded powers of search and seizure because of the exigent nature of the circumstances surrounding a border crossing (in particular, no probable cause is needed before a search), there still is no support as far as I've been able to find for the warrantless search of a locked container absent any sort of either probable cause or even reasonable suspicion. It follows that the government can search my hard drive without a warrant at a border crossing, but what happens when they happen across that TOPSECRET encrypted folder?
It's going to interesting the first time one of these cases reaches the USSC. What happens if I encrypt my data with AES 256 (certified for TOP SECRET data), I get stopped at the border, and I refuse to give up my encryption key? Since I'm a citizen, they can't deny me entry, they can't hold me until I give up my key, and they can't decrypt the data. An interesting situation. As a former police officer, I know how I'd handle the situation without breaking the law and without holding the subject in jail, but I doubt that most DHS folks would have that much creative imagination.
I thought to myself, their must be some higher level idiom that protects against buffer overflow, because no sane architect would implement such a dangerous function otherwise. Man, was I ever naive.
Naive about the purpose of C, anyway. C was never designed to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot. Writing C requires you to think, which is sadly out of vogue these days, as you point out later. C was never designed to protect you from yourself, as explicitly pointed out by Dennis Ritchie many times. If you want a language that will protect you from yourself, program in VB.
So yes, Java doesn't teach very darn much about the harsh realities of actually thinking.
But C obviously does - like checking boundary conditions. I don't understand how you can slam C in one breath, then praise it in the next.
Of course there is, and her name is Angelina Jolie... :)
Was that smartass remark supposed to be insightful, or just an attempt at a slam? What a clever little boy you are to point out the obvious!
In reality, people have to realize that predicting weather is an inherently unstable mathematical problem, so longer-term forecasts are usually not that accurate.
And probably never will be. When I studied meterology in college years ago, I remember the complex math in Methods In Climatology, one of our textbooks, and it was every bit as bad as the math I had to take for physics. And that was 30+ years ago - it's only gotten even more complicated since...
Yet another idiot trying to be a smartass who winds up showing his ignorance to half the technical world. Since the Earth is more-or-less a closed system (ignoring the negligible effect of heat radiating off into space), everything that happens affects everything else. You just think that because hurricanes are getting stronger that it won't affect folks in the corn belt? Then you wonder why you're freezing your ass off in the middle of the coldest winter in 70 years... it's all related...
Yeah, and then Katrina came and woke you up, huh?