It generally doesn't work to tell them, "I encrypted the entire contents of my hard drive, and I remembered the password every single time I used it, and it's only a coincidence that I'm forgetting it just now." Even if you could sell that, they would still press you for info (did it have numbers? was it someone's name? how did you choose it?), which you would definately remember (barring a lobotomy).
In any case, a normal-length passphrase (8 chars or less) could get brute forced fairly easily. If it was a longer key stored in hardware (and they didn't have the hardware), they would ask you where it was, and refusing to tell them would not be a good idea.
In the US, people are assumed innocent until proven guilty, especially when they're really nice people who work for respected open-source software companies. Chris Toshok is fairly well-known in the open-source community (I'm amazed the summary didn't mention the he's an Evolution developer). If this happened to someone you knew, and you couldn't imagine them having done it, you'd probably use the same type of language.
No, of course not. But, you could be ordered to turn over the key, and then be charged if you didn't.
Re:Could have been worse in Q4 2003. Couldn't it?
on
The Future of Security
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· Score: 1
It doesn't take that much skill to write such a virus. Heck, I could probably do it, and I can barely write a coherent line of code. All it takes is intelligence, and putting a little bit of thought into it. The only thing that saves us is that the people with those characteristics generally have the decency not to write viruses.
Maybe not stagnation, but definately not innovation:
Media Center PCs - It's like a TiVo, except 5x as expensive, less useful, and only three have been sold.
Tablet PCs - Possibly the closest MS has gotten to innovation, but still useless. It's no more useful than a PDA, but it's the size/weight of a laptop. And again, sales are in the single digits.
PocketPCs - Please. Apple was there before anyone. Palm refined the concept. The PocketPC was just MS saying "Me, too!".
XBox - The XBox does absolutely nothing that other consoles hadn't already done. XBox Live is the only remotely innovative thing about it, and it's just for-pay battle.net with voice chat.
Media Player 9 - The player is a POS. Give me iTunes/Winamp/mplayer any day. As for the codecs, WMV is no better than Divx or Quicktime MPEG-4, and WMA is (subjectively) inferior to Vorbis and AAC. The only innovation here is the DRM.
I'm normally not an MS-basher either - they make a good office suite, and a decent OS (even if their business tactics can be somewhat shady). But, when they branch out from their core compentencies, they have a tendency to start sucking.
This machine didn't bring anyone anywhere. It was never used. There's nothing special about it compared to the (much better preserved) other Saturn Vs still around.
Uptime has little to do with performance. While likely the problem is due to stupid site design (slashdotting a PHP'd dynamic page will kill any OS), Linux performs generally better (much better in the case of 2.6) than OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and similarly to FreeBSD. BSD's dominance of the uptime charts is irrelevent (as well as inaccurate, because Netcraft can't detect Linux systems with >497 days uptime).
Of course not. Stop being stupid. They could say, "Files xxx, yyy and zzz (excluding license notices) offend because..." and then go on to explain. There's no reason why they have to write out every single line.
Okay, fine. "Every lineexcept for the copyright notices". You get my drift. It's possible to specify a broad set of lines without actually writing out every one of them in full.
I have glib but not GTK installed in my system right now. apt-get install libglib-2.0 does it just fine. glib and gtk are separate packages (regardless of their developers), and I have yet to run across a distro that combines them.
GStreamer does not depend on GTK. The only dependence is on glib. I've yet to see anyone make any rational argument against a glib dependency in KDE. glib is just an extension to the C library, and no more a GNOME technology than libxml or libpng.
The correct abbreviation for pedofile is "pedo" (as you will see very quickly if you happen to stumble upon alt.sex.stories). PDF is "portable document format".
Here's a simplified example; If I record a single tone to CD, (2 minutes long, 1275 Hz, -9dB both channels) it's going to be about 85 kbits of data. But I just described the tone well enough for you to reproduce it perfectly in much less than 1kbit. What was lost?
If I record a single tone to a 96khz/24bit medium, (2 minutes long, 1275 Hz, -9dB both channels) it's going to be x kbits of data. But I just described the tone well enough for you to reproduce it perfectly in much less than 1kbit. What was lost?
Any digital sound is lossy. Get over it. 95% (statistic pulled from my ass, of course) of people can't tell the difference between CD-quality and DVDA-quality, even on a good system. A good deal more can identify MP3. Besides, uncompressed digital sound doesn't get more lossy with each generation, like MP3 does.
A CDA file consists of a certain number of ones and zeros. An MP3 file uses 1/10 that number to represent roughly the same audio. A decompressed MP3 file will not be the same as the original. If you reencode MP3, you get quality loss from generation to generation. Therefore, MP3s are lossy, and by definition lower quality than the CDs from which they are made.
If they chose to use Mplayer's format (unlikely - they're claiming mplayer stole their proprietary code), I still doubt they'd manage to do a complete clean-room implementation using the exect same symbols as the mplayer version, every single one. The chances there are lower than winning the lottery without buying a ticket.
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In any case, a normal-length passphrase (8 chars or less) could get brute forced fairly easily. If it was a longer key stored in hardware (and they didn't have the hardware), they would ask you where it was, and refusing to tell them would not be a good idea.
In the US, people are assumed innocent until proven guilty, especially when they're really nice people who work for respected open-source software companies. Chris Toshok is fairly well-known in the open-source community (I'm amazed the summary didn't mention the he's an Evolution developer). If this happened to someone you knew, and you couldn't imagine them having done it, you'd probably use the same type of language.
No, of course not. But, you could be ordered to turn over the key, and then be charged if you didn't.
It doesn't take that much skill to write such a virus. Heck, I could probably do it, and I can barely write a coherent line of code. All it takes is intelligence, and putting a little bit of thought into it. The only thing that saves us is that the people with those characteristics generally have the decency not to write viruses.
It does (or, at least, can be set up to). What are you talking about?
1GB of space is roughly 10-15 CDs. I think most people have more music than that.
I'm not really talking about stability problems. There are a lot of other ways in which both Linux and Windows are imperfect for many users.
Still, one could fit a bunch of (losslessly compressed) 32bit, 7.1 audio on a DVD-ROM, even if it wasn't technically DVD-A.
I'm normally not an MS-basher either - they make a good office suite, and a decent OS (even if their business tactics can be somewhat shady). But, when they branch out from their core compentencies, they have a tendency to start sucking.
That's what DVD-A/SACD are for.
Windows doesn't "just work" for everyone either. That hasn't kept people from using it.
This machine didn't bring anyone anywhere. It was never used. There's nothing special about it compared to the (much better preserved) other Saturn Vs still around.
Have you considered buying support from Progeny?
Uptime has little to do with performance. While likely the problem is due to stupid site design (slashdotting a PHP'd dynamic page will kill any OS), Linux performs generally better (much better in the case of 2.6) than OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and similarly to FreeBSD. BSD's dominance of the uptime charts is irrelevent (as well as inaccurate, because Netcraft can't detect Linux systems with >497 days uptime).
Why are you compiling fink? Doesn't the binary installer work?
You'd be better off installing one of the debian-based distros, like Xandros, Lindows, Libranet, MEPIS, or Knoppix.
Of course not. Stop being stupid. They could say, "Files xxx, yyy and zzz (excluding license notices) offend because..." and then go on to explain. There's no reason why they have to write out every single line.
Okay, fine. "Every lineexcept for the copyright notices". You get my drift. It's possible to specify a broad set of lines without actually writing out every one of them in full.
Ummm... They don't have to list the lines. They just have to specify them. "Every line of all files in the directory xxx/xxx/xxx" is a valid response.
I have glib but not GTK installed in my system right now. apt-get install libglib-2.0 does it just fine. glib and gtk are separate packages (regardless of their developers), and I have yet to run across a distro that combines them.
GStreamer does not depend on GTK. The only dependence is on glib. I've yet to see anyone make any rational argument against a glib dependency in KDE. glib is just an extension to the C library, and no more a GNOME technology than libxml or libpng.
The correct abbreviation for pedofile is "pedo" (as you will see very quickly if you happen to stumble upon alt.sex.stories). PDF is "portable document format".
If I record a single tone to a 96khz/24bit medium, (2 minutes long, 1275 Hz, -9dB both channels) it's going to be x kbits of data. But I just described the tone well enough for you to reproduce it perfectly in much less than 1kbit. What was lost?
Any digital sound is lossy. Get over it. 95% (statistic pulled from my ass, of course) of people can't tell the difference between CD-quality and DVDA-quality, even on a good system. A good deal more can identify MP3. Besides, uncompressed digital sound doesn't get more lossy with each generation, like MP3 does.
A CDA file consists of a certain number of ones and zeros. An MP3 file uses 1/10 that number to represent roughly the same audio. A decompressed MP3 file will not be the same as the original. If you reencode MP3, you get quality loss from generation to generation. Therefore, MP3s are lossy, and by definition lower quality than the CDs from which they are made.
If they chose to use Mplayer's format (unlikely - they're claiming mplayer stole their proprietary code), I still doubt they'd manage to do a complete clean-room implementation using the exect same symbols as the mplayer version, every single one. The chances there are lower than winning the lottery without buying a ticket.
Under ipv6, no ISP could get away with charging more for multiple IP addresses (at least, I hope not).