It'd be a tragedy, and I might loose a couple good friends, but the golden lining of the pandemic killing a couple million people in Western countries would be that it's more likely the dead would be the ones prone to believing in conspiracy theories and the like. The rest of us having gone and gotten immunized.
Finally -- Darwin Awards on a massive systematic scale.
A netbook with two spare drives containing mirrors of the main drive. Make sure it's not flash memory hdd. Remove the battery. Include only the wall wart. Make sure it functions with the battery removed and wall wart attached. (ask sales droid to demonstrate). Maybe even remove the onboard clock battery, and leave behind a photo/details of it. Just to be sure it doesn't leak and damage the motherboard.
Choose a netbook/device you think might have antique value in 20 years, and it might even turn out to be an investment to boot. Keep one of the two spare drives at a seperate physical location from where the netbook is stored. Safety deposit box would be good.
Slightly off topic, but speaking of safety deposit boxes -- VERY IMPORTANT -- you are NOT allowed access to a SD Box PRIOR to a will be probated unless you a) have the key ***AND*** you are on the list of people allowed to access the SD Box!!! So whether you found the key or not, if you're not on the access list and the will is in the SD Box, guess what?
No will for probate. You're fuxxored. ps: get a god damned will!! I'm shocked at how many people with kids don't have a will. Write one out in your own handwriting, a full page of paper. Doesn't even need a witness if it's completely in your handwriting. Do it now. Takes 15 minutes.
Hmmmm.
(( CKW goes to the next office over for 15 minutes with a writing pad... ))
Bricks are hardware, if you want to brick it, you need a hardware hack, not software.
Here's what I'd attempt (if I was rich). Open the sucker. Find a resistor. Rip it off. Solder in leads going to a USB port that you've disconnected. Hack a usb-stub kit to contain the right resistor.
Voila, now you're the only person that can use the laptop, short of another hardware hacker who has access to a nearly identical motherboard model who can figure out what's missing (or who cares to risk the hardware by guessing.
Of course, with everything being surface mount... I'm not saying this would be easy. But I am saying this'd make the netbook itself useless to the thief. You of course would still need to truecrypt the drive, to protect your privacy.
Hmmm, of course a smart thief would know that the battery and hard drive are worth money. No way of preventing him from selling those. But you could label them in a permanent way with "STOLEN, CALL XXX-XXXX OR CRIMESTOPPERS".
Welcome to development with inherently dangerous products and materials.
Watch the rest of us take ten steps back from your explosively laden piles of shit, and go do other things in places where sane sensible people have built things properly.
The only sites in the world I enable noscript on are the ones I trust very very much. All the rest either work, or they don't. Only one shit site a day doesn't work, and I don't care. It was obviously built by idiots, it couldn't have been any good.
Well come on, provide a bloody reference then! nm, page 19 of some huge *policy* pdf. No, that couldn't have been produced by bureaucrats, could it?
Still outstanding are the real world cases where it's actually been useful in catching intruders. All I hear of it doing is causing people to keep their passwords written down, or form slightly-more-complicated forms of non-repeating but clearly linearly progressing passwords.
> beaurocrat [sic]
Damn, I've *never* been able to learn how to spell that one right, despite how often I used it. Came close this time though, finally remembering that it's got water in it:)
No shit. Considering how full most production server logs are of "permission denied" errors because users *normally* mistype their passwords at the ssh and sudo prompts, I argue that, in practice, this does nothing to help admins notice intrusions earlier. No actual intruder would keep hammering away with the wrong password. Only users do that, because they KNOW they know their own password, and they must have just mistyped it.
A better method of noticing intrusions is to SHOW THE USER when and where they did things, and let them tell you - "hey, I wasn't here last night at 2am, why were my credentials being used"? That and audit pattern matching. "SoandSo doesn't have access to the HR systems, why are there login attempts? SoandSo doesn't work the midnight shift, why are there login attempts?" etc.
Would someone who is in IT Security please confirm or deny that, IN PRACTICE, regularly changing passwords has clearly and unequivocally exposed an intrusion?
I've never heard of it. Sounds like something a senior beaurocrat thought up. "Hey, I betcha this is more secure, let's do it and call it a best practice."
Sounds like "false security for show", we all know just how fond senior beaurocrats are of "for show" vs "EFFECTIVE IN PRACTICE".
Mmmm, I remember using three way lights when I was a kid in the living room. But I wouda thought they were 60/100/150. Maybe I'm too used to dimly lit rooms nowdays. Or maybe that was back in the day when lampshades kept half the light inside them, and it actually was a 250?!
My landlord has replaced all the incandescents in all the apartments with CF. Not very intelligently mind you - my bathroom is dazzling bright (4 sockets w 14W CF plus regular fluorescent), and the living room is dark as heck (1 socket, removed 100W incand, put in just a 14W CF). I'll have to move some from one to the other.
Two hundred and fifty watts? That's insane! Are you sitting on the other side of the room? Of course my place has light walls and ceilings and carpet, I guess I could see it if as someone says you have darker furnishings and colors...
I live on the 30th story of an apartment building, and some SOB a half block away has his back-yard lit by one of these ultra-bright incandescents - but they've got no reflector on it! HALF of the light goes pouring into neighbour's hards and into the F'ing sky. And onto my ceiling through my huge windows casting massive shadows and keeping the room literally 10 times brigher than it would otherwise be at night due to city-glow and all other city/neighbourhood lights combined.
And I'm on the 30th floor, a half block away.
If I was a neighbour close enough, I would have bought a pelet gun long long ago. Or maybe gave them a light housing/reflector as a chrismas present. One or the other, depending on whether they were nice people or not:)
Hey, for a long time windows paint was the only graphic program on a new PC, and it could only save in bmp. If a person had Office, at least word would do RLE to compress it. Way better than a 5MB bmp.
Nowdays paint will save as gif/bmp, but how many people know that they should use that instead of the default bmp format?
In my professional opinion (as a software guy), I'm certain that this unequiocally contravenes critimal statutes about interfering with other people's computing systems. Have the managers at Linksys serious considered the possibility of being held criminally responsible and spending time in jail?
Can *anyone* place a personal monetary value on the damage caused by this to you or your organization personally? Normally police agencies will not pursue this without a minimum of $5,000 damages.
I know! I bet GOOGLE or Yahoo can! Anyone reading this from Google? How many such routers are out there and how often do they do the redirect? You can clearly state to law enforcement that this is costing you X dollars of lost ad revenue due to hijacked DNS requests.
One serious inquiry from a real law enforcement investigator would cause them to rethink their "feature".
Do we have a GPS location? It'd be nice to go back to Google Earth / Google Maps and see what was/was-not missed in the online volunteer search.
I'm guessing that on the side of the mountain the wreckage was just so badly mangled that one would not recognize it, and/or it blends in with the other sharp small contrasting features on a mountain side.
I couldn't resist when I noticed there were zero other posts. I mean, I assumed my post would fail, there must be something broken with the comment system for there to be no posts at all when I first looked. Either that or slashdot is vastly Vastly loosing popularity for discussion.
I also thought I'd come up with more content, but then I drew a blank, and said - meh, what the hell.
I did read the article. It doesn't say anything about whether or not the 1500 jars of stuff they found were properly labelled. It states, and I quote:
"A cleanup company, contracted by DEP, is continuing to test the chemicals in a lab."
Nothing in the article provides evidence that the authorities were over-reacting. They *might* have been, but the fact that you and tons of other nuts are screaming about "big guvment comin to get us" doesn't prove SHIT by itself.
My government, which is mostly made up of people just like me, has earned some level of my trust. (Emergency services even more so than some random bureocrat). That's not to say I'll believe anything they say, nor ignore incompetence, stupidity or criminal behaviour when there is evidence of it. But I don't see any evidence here.
But you sir, have not earned even one iota of my respect. Quite the opposite.
"[...] we spray on something like nail polish and then inkjet print a kind of nail polish remover which lets us etch certain parts of the wafer. This creates a metallisation pattern so we can deposit aluminium on the back surface of the solar cell and create our metal contacts to both the P and N-type silicon simultaneously using a very cheap, low temperature pizza oven!
AHHAHAhhahahahaaaaaa.
I know what's going on. The above is "dumbed down" for the reporter, who has reported it "faithfully" - and now everyone is assuming she *actually* used nail polish, an inkjet printer, and a pizza oven. She didn't use ANY of those. She used a full blow IC Fab - the above sounds exactly like a regular old wafer etch step, just with metal instead of silicon and an "inket LIKE" application of the photoresist before the acid etch!
I have an MSc in Physics and I had a big chemistry set when I was in high-school.
A bunch of the people that replied to my message have valid points.
Did the article list the chemicals? Show pictures of the "careful or not so careful storage"?
No, all I see is massive trolls of hyperbole from both sides. I see no reason for someone to run screaming down the street yelling "WOLF, WOLF, WOOOOOLLLFFF!!!!" about how "the man" is coming to take all your shit.
I trust the firefighters and the elected officials until proven otherwise. The fact that an independent laboratory have to spend money testing shit to figure out what it is tells me something (although it isn't evidence per se).
SHOW me the EVIDENCE that "the man" is oppressing you or that they're nannying someone too much. Don't post an article on Slashdot that is full of hyperbole and wolf screamers and then defend them based on no evidence what-so-ever.
Too many bloody people screaming "the other side is coming to gets us" at the top of their voice.
Is there any blame necessary? Or are you following the lead of an over-reaction by the poster, some right wing anti-guvment type?
Look at these direct quotes from the article:
> Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home. > > Vessels of chemicals were all over the furniture and the floor, authorities said. > > Pamela A. Wilderman, Marlboro's code enforcement officer, said Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research and development in a residential area, which is a violation of zoning laws.
If I was a neighbour or someone renting a room or floor in their house, I'd be thanking GOD the fire department noticed that place before I died in a fire fed by "1500 different chemicals... (that were) all over the furniture and floor".
If he wants to do science with 1500 chemicals, he should rent a space in an industrial park. Then the fire department can use Fire Codes to force him to properly label and store his shit according to the appropriate guidelines.
>> there was an immense reduction in global dimming. > there was a measurable change in daily max. to min. temperature differences between built up and non-built-up areas
Isn't it interesting - the current screening process is totally incompetent in that 50% of all weapons and bombs in un-announced tests successfully get through, and yet there haven't been any more hijackings. So - your statement does not invalidate his, nor does your statement imply that people want more *incompetent*, *useless*, or *pointless* security procedures or rules.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be a tragedy, and I might loose a couple good friends, but the golden lining of the pandemic killing a couple million people in Western countries would be that it's more likely the dead would be the ones prone to believing in conspiracy theories and the like. The rest of us having gone and gotten immunized.
Finally -- Darwin Awards on a massive systematic scale.
I love how *their* mistake causes viral problems in YOUR browser. All one needs is some sort of cross site vulnerability now and ...
A netbook with two spare drives containing mirrors of the main drive. Make sure it's not flash memory hdd. Remove the battery. Include only the wall wart. Make sure it functions with the battery removed and wall wart attached. (ask sales droid to demonstrate). Maybe even remove the onboard clock battery, and leave behind a photo/details of it. Just to be sure it doesn't leak and damage the motherboard.
Choose a netbook/device you think might have antique value in 20 years, and it might even turn out to be an investment to boot. Keep one of the two spare drives at a seperate physical location from where the netbook is stored. Safety deposit box would be good.
Slightly off topic, but speaking of safety deposit boxes -- VERY IMPORTANT -- you are NOT allowed access to a SD Box PRIOR to a will be probated unless you a) have the key ***AND*** you are on the list of people allowed to access the SD Box!!! So whether you found the key or not, if you're not on the access list and the will is in the SD Box, guess what?
No will for probate. You're fuxxored. ps: get a god damned will!! I'm shocked at how many people with kids don't have a will. Write one out in your own handwriting, a full page of paper. Doesn't even need a witness if it's completely in your handwriting. Do it now. Takes 15 minutes.
Hmmmm.
(( CKW goes to the next office over for 15 minutes with a writing pad ... ))
Bricks are hardware, if you want to brick it, you need a hardware hack, not software.
Here's what I'd attempt (if I was rich). Open the sucker. Find a resistor. Rip it off. Solder in leads going to a USB port that you've disconnected. Hack a usb-stub kit to contain the right resistor.
Voila, now you're the only person that can use the laptop, short of another hardware hacker who has access to a nearly identical motherboard model who can figure out what's missing (or who cares to risk the hardware by guessing.
Of course, with everything being surface mount ... I'm not saying this would be easy. But I am saying this'd make the netbook itself useless to the thief. You of course would still need to truecrypt the drive, to protect your privacy.
Hmmm, of course a smart thief would know that the battery and hard drive are worth money. No way of preventing him from selling those. But you could label them in a permanent way with "STOLEN, CALL XXX-XXXX OR CRIMESTOPPERS".
Welcome to development with inherently dangerous products and materials.
Watch the rest of us take ten steps back from your explosively laden piles of shit, and go do other things in places where sane sensible people have built things properly.
The only sites in the world I enable noscript on are the ones I trust very very much. All the rest either work, or they don't. Only one shit site a day doesn't work, and I don't care. It was obviously built by idiots, it couldn't have been any good.
Good riddance.
Well come on, provide a bloody reference then! nm, page 19 of some huge *policy* pdf. No, that couldn't have been produced by bureaucrats, could it?
Still outstanding are the real world cases where it's actually been useful in catching intruders. All I hear of it doing is causing people to keep their passwords written down, or form slightly-more-complicated forms of non-repeating but clearly linearly progressing passwords.
> beaurocrat [sic]
Damn, I've *never* been able to learn how to spell that one right, despite how often I used it. Came close this time though, finally remembering that it's got water in it :)
No shit. Considering how full most production server logs are of "permission denied" errors because users *normally* mistype their passwords at the ssh and sudo prompts, I argue that, in practice, this does nothing to help admins notice intrusions earlier. No actual intruder would keep hammering away with the wrong password. Only users do that, because they KNOW they know their own password, and they must have just mistyped it.
A better method of noticing intrusions is to SHOW THE USER when and where they did things, and let them tell you - "hey, I wasn't here last night at 2am, why were my credentials being used"? That and audit pattern matching. "SoandSo doesn't have access to the HR systems, why are there login attempts? SoandSo doesn't work the midnight shift, why are there login attempts?" etc.
Would someone who is in IT Security please confirm or deny that, IN PRACTICE, regularly changing passwords has clearly and unequivocally exposed an intrusion?
I've never heard of it. Sounds like something a senior beaurocrat thought up. "Hey, I betcha this is more secure, let's do it and call it a best practice."
Sounds like "false security for show", we all know just how fond senior beaurocrats are of "for show" vs "EFFECTIVE IN PRACTICE".
Mmmm, I remember using three way lights when I was a kid in the living room. But I wouda thought they were 60/100/150. Maybe I'm too used to dimly lit rooms nowdays. Or maybe that was back in the day when lampshades kept half the light inside them, and it actually was a 250?!
My landlord has replaced all the incandescents in all the apartments with CF. Not very intelligently mind you - my bathroom is dazzling bright (4 sockets w 14W CF plus regular fluorescent), and the living room is dark as heck (1 socket, removed 100W incand, put in just a 14W CF). I'll have to move some from one to the other.
Two hundred and fifty watts? That's insane! Are you sitting on the other side of the room? Of course my place has light walls and ceilings and carpet, I guess I could see it if as someone says you have darker furnishings and colors...
I live on the 30th story of an apartment building, and some SOB a half block away has his back-yard lit by one of these ultra-bright incandescents - but they've got no reflector on it! HALF of the light goes pouring into neighbour's hards and into the F'ing sky. And onto my ceiling through my huge windows casting massive shadows and keeping the room literally 10 times brigher than it would otherwise be at night due to city-glow and all other city/neighbourhood lights combined.
And I'm on the 30th floor, a half block away.
If I was a neighbour close enough, I would have bought a pelet gun long long ago. Or maybe gave them a light housing/reflector as a chrismas present. One or the other, depending on whether they were nice people or not :)
SPOILER ffs! Thankyou!! Bastards.
> "Their attempt to surrender without having troops on their soil or their government changed, was refused. TWICE."
Fixed that for you.
> 1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
Hey, for a long time windows paint was the only graphic program on a new PC, and it could only save in bmp. If a person had Office, at least word would do RLE to compress it. Way better than a 5MB bmp.
Nowdays paint will save as gif/bmp, but how many people know that they should use that instead of the default bmp format?
In my professional opinion (as a software guy), I'm certain that this unequiocally contravenes critimal statutes about interfering with other people's computing systems. Have the managers at Linksys serious considered the possibility of being held criminally responsible and spending time in jail?
Can *anyone* place a personal monetary value on the damage caused by this to you or your organization personally? Normally police agencies will not pursue this without a minimum of $5,000 damages.
I know! I bet GOOGLE or Yahoo can! Anyone reading this from Google? How many such routers are out there and how often do they do the redirect? You can clearly state to law enforcement that this is costing you X dollars of lost ad revenue due to hijacked DNS requests.
One serious inquiry from a real law enforcement investigator would cause them to rethink their "feature".
Nice, the ACM regards copyrights and patents as a subset of "property". Good thing 1.1 and 1.2 form gaping holes the size of trucks :)
Do we have a GPS location? It'd be nice to go back to Google Earth / Google Maps and see what was/was-not missed in the online volunteer search.
I'm guessing that on the side of the mountain the wreckage was just so badly mangled that one would not recognize it, and/or it blends in with the other sharp small contrasting features on a mountain side.
I couldn't resist when I noticed there were zero other posts. I mean, I assumed my post would fail, there must be something broken with the comment system for there to be no posts at all when I first looked. Either that or slashdot is vastly Vastly loosing popularity for discussion.
I also thought I'd come up with more content, but then I drew a blank, and said - meh, what the hell.
FIVE
With regards to your comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=643785&cid=24606825 (old discussion is archived, can't post a further reply there)
> If you'd read TFA,
I did read the article. It doesn't say anything about whether or not the 1500 jars of stuff they found were properly labelled. It states, and I quote:
"A cleanup company, contracted by DEP, is continuing to test the chemicals in a lab."
Nothing in the article provides evidence that the authorities were over-reacting. They *might* have been, but the fact that you and tons of other nuts are screaming about "big guvment comin to get us" doesn't prove SHIT by itself.
My government, which is mostly made up of people just like me, has earned some level of my trust. (Emergency services even more so than some random bureocrat). That's not to say I'll believe anything they say, nor ignore incompetence, stupidity or criminal behaviour when there is evidence of it. But I don't see any evidence here.
But you sir, have not earned even one iota of my respect. Quite the opposite.
"[...] we spray on something like nail polish and then inkjet print a kind of nail polish remover which lets us etch certain parts of the wafer. This creates a metallisation pattern so we can deposit aluminium on the back surface of the solar cell and create our metal contacts to both the P and N-type silicon simultaneously using a very cheap, low temperature pizza oven!
AHHAHAhhahahahaaaaaa.
I know what's going on. The above is "dumbed down" for the reporter, who has reported it "faithfully" - and now everyone is assuming she *actually* used nail polish, an inkjet printer, and a pizza oven. She didn't use ANY of those. She used a full blow IC Fab - the above sounds exactly like a regular old wafer etch step, just with metal instead of silicon and an "inket LIKE" application of the photoresist before the acid etch!
Ahhahhahahahaa. (wipes tear) You Loosers.
I have an MSc in Physics and I had a big chemistry set when I was in high-school.
A bunch of the people that replied to my message have valid points.
Did the article list the chemicals? Show pictures of the "careful or not so careful storage"?
No, all I see is massive trolls of hyperbole from both sides. I see no reason for someone to run screaming down the street yelling "WOLF, WOLF, WOOOOOLLLFFF!!!!" about how "the man" is coming to take all your shit.
I trust the firefighters and the elected officials until proven otherwise. The fact that an independent laboratory have to spend money testing shit to figure out what it is tells me something (although it isn't evidence per se).
SHOW me the EVIDENCE that "the man" is oppressing you or that they're nannying someone too much. Don't post an article on Slashdot that is full of hyperbole and wolf screamers and then defend them based on no evidence what-so-ever.
Too many bloody people screaming "the other side is coming to gets us" at the top of their voice.
Is there any blame necessary? Or are you following the lead of an over-reaction by the poster, some right wing anti-guvment type?
Look at these direct quotes from the article:
> Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home.
>
> Vessels of chemicals were all over the furniture and the floor, authorities said.
>
> Pamela A. Wilderman, Marlboro's code enforcement officer, said Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research and development in a residential area, which is a violation of zoning laws.
If I was a neighbour or someone renting a room or floor in their house, I'd be thanking GOD the fire department noticed that place before I died in a fire fed by "1500 different chemicals ... (that were) all over the furniture and floor".
If he wants to do science with 1500 chemicals, he should rent a space in an industrial park. Then the fire department can use Fire Codes to force him to properly label and store his shit according to the appropriate guidelines.
>> there was an immense reduction in global dimming.
> there was a measurable change in daily max. to min. temperature differences between built up and non-built-up areas
There, fixed that for you.
Why does he "have" to deal with the crazies? Simply ignore them.
No no, this makes perfect sense.
Housewives don't play video games and download a bajillion "utilities". Geeks do.
Housewives want to browse the web and use e-mail, and have a stable safe system.
Geeks love the chaos and security challenges that is posed by Windows.
Isn't it interesting - the current screening process is totally incompetent in that 50% of all weapons and bombs in un-announced tests successfully get through, and yet there haven't been any more hijackings. So - your statement does not invalidate his, nor does your statement imply that people want more *incompetent*, *useless*, or *pointless* security procedures or rules.