Blocking Greeting Cards at the Router
on
Sysadmin Day. Yay.
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't call a sysadmin incompetent for not stopping greeting cards at the router. That's the netadmin's job. Even then, I wouldn't discredit someone for not blocking them at the router. It could be a very tedious task to track down all the netblocks owned by the greeting card companies to add to the incoming access list. You'd have to be one hard core net nazi to limit email usage that much!
To opt out, wait until a notice is sent from your local carrier. It will probably be sent with a bill (Look through the crap that comes with your bill). That notice will give instructions. There's no national 800 number or anything like that. If you're lucky, your carrier will decide to not use the opt-out method and you won't have to do a thing. As an example, someone previously posted a URL to Qwest, showing that they're not going to do the opt-out method.
This is another good example of the bells' corruption . I work for the IPTA. We recently had a meeting where we discussed all these types of charges. There's a fedral charge that appears on your phone bill. Usually $4 - $5. None of thet money goes to the government. The bells just worked the legal system so they could identify it as federal.
Blame the US Court of Appeals. They're the ones that instructed the FCC to use an opt-out method.
Taken from Chairman Powell's public statement: "But we conclude, albeit somewhat reluctantly, that under the court's constitutional analysis, companies may satisfy the somewhat less stringent requirement of giving consumers the chance to "opt-out" of intracompany communications-related use of CPNI.(1)
(1) The court instructed the Commission to consider an opt-out strategy, which the court concluded was "an obvious and substantially less restrictive alternative" to opt-in. U.S. West v. FCC, 182 F.3d 1224, 1238 (10th Cir. 1999), cert. denied 530 U.S. 1213 (2000)"
To crack WEP, all you need to do is run a tool that monitors the traffic and cracks it. After collecting enough traffic, it only takes a second or so to crack.
Securityfocus.com is excellent. I subscribe to all the mailing lists to keep up to date on what's happening. If you just want to learn about security, get some books. Follow the CISSP recommended reading. Honestly, security is a full time job. If you want to do the best you can without investing a lot of time, learn how to set up a firewall, keep up to date on vendor patches, and lock down any services exposed to the internet. Most vendors have guides on locking down services. Mix those things with common sense like good passwords, and you should be fine. IMO, most of these seminars are a waste of money. Most are just repeats of information that's already out there. It's not like there's super secret hacker information that only those that pay $ can learn how to protect against.
"What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs."
That's funny. I ran their home page through the W3C Validator and found all sorts of errors.
Never buy a barebone system from them or have them test equipment. Whoever does their installing doesn't know what the heck they're doing. All 3 barebone systems I bought from them had messed up cabling. Upside down floppy drive cable, incorrect connections from case to motherboard, etc. Also, they keep all the cool stuff that comes in the mobo box. I prefer to buy a motherboard bundle and everything else individually. Other than that assembly complaint, their service is awesome and their prices with shipping are hard to beat when building a system or even several systems. I only go to a local shop for urgent needs and pricewatch when ordering large quantities of expensive items (i.e. a dozen or so 120GB WDs with 8MB buffer).
The truth about this book and news about Greg Bear
on
The Owner-Builder Book
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· Score: 1
Read the user reviews on Amazon. It seems to be closely related to the Get Rich Quick crap, although not as useless. Here's the most interesting review on Amazon.
The main part of this book contains some useful information and some helpful hints for owner-builders. However, beware a major problem that nearly destroyed the reading experience for me. The writing goes until page 272. But the book contains 314 pages. So what do pages 272-314 contain? Look at the cover of the book, where it says "Valuable Coupons Inside! $100 Value". Most of the 42 pages contain full-page ads for the author's seminars, audiotapes, workshops and special reports. To see this for yourself, go to the "Look Inside" feature (click on book picture) and look at the last page of the table of contents. I found these ads irritating, because although this is supposedly a reference book in and of itself, it asks you to shell out $6.00-$99.00 each item for more information. Excuse me, but shouldn't information like "Staying on Schedule" be included in the "Owner-Builder" book? The author offers the explanation that he couldn't "fit" all of this info into the book. He sure didn't have a problem tacking on 42 extra pages of shameless bids for more money. Get a book that doesn't reach into your wallet, like the excellent "Complete Guide to Contracting Your Home".
Also, I'd like to make use of this post to make everyone aware that Greg Bear's books Forge of God and Anvil of Stars are going to be part of a motion picture trilogy. The news just hit today and can be seen at his web site, www.gregbear.com
    If you want to compare Linux to Windows, I'd be willing to bet my life that Windows has more security holes. There's only a limited number of people that review Windows' code. GNU/Linux, however is made up of many different smaller components that have the love and affection of their programmers. Linux is made from love. Windows is made from corporate greed. The programmers that make Windows have deadlines and upper management telling them to stop working on one project so they can put resources into creating new features. This is all my opinion, of course, but it's a very logical conclusion.
    There will probably never be a truly secure operating system as long as humans are involved in making it. We make mistakes. It only takes one overlooked mistake in a protocol or the code for a system to be compromised. A good example is the recent SNMP exploit. The protocol itself was not created with security in mind, so many vendors were vulnerable. The best chance we have at a human created, secure OS is one that focuses on security, such as OpenBSD.
   If our government (I'm speaking of my country, the USA) adopted OpenBSD and threw enough resources behind it, other governments would have to throw a whole lot of money and effort into finding something our efforts failed to see. The way things stand though, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to bring our systems crawling to their knees.
   For instance, lets say one of the employees at eEye was hired by Cuba to find exploits in NT and remain silent to everyone else, it would cost them very little to hack into our systems. The guys at eEye and other security firms find exploits such as buffer overflows all the time, and I'm sure enough money could convince one employee to commit treason. Heck, they could just use the unpatched exploits already out there and do it for free!
   The point is that all we can do as system and network admins is to keep up to date on known exploits. We patch our systems and networks and make it so that only a true hacker could bypass our efforts. Script kiddies would be stopped dead in their tracks and 99.9% of the time, that's all the defense we require. In this respect, the amount of patched exploits should have very little effect on the decision making process. However, keep those unpatched exploits in mind.
Thanks. I should also mention that I double checked on apostrophe usage and found that it doesn't have to be a proper noun. Damn my last english teacher!
I didn't even get that far before returning here to complain about the poor writing skills! I hope to god that writer has a backup career.
The first sentence sets the ugly tone of incompetence.
"How much would you give not to have show up at your desk every day?"
The second paragraph keeps pace with a misplaced comma in what I guess he thought was a proper noun.
"...follow them on the computer maker's network."
The third paragraph isn't so bad.
The infamous fourth paragraph. This is where I decided to hit the all mighty back button. What a confusing beginning to a run on sentence!
"Sun says will save it $150 million annually, and the program is essentially an advertisement for the company's marketing pitch that business runs better on a network of big computers than smaller boxes powered by software from rival Microsoft Corp. "
Actually, it's not just a few religous fanatics. In general, the US population is divided almost in half. Polls about cloning for the purpose of stem cell research or other medical uses appears to be at about 60% pro.
Personally, I'm for cloning for the purpose of biological enhancement. I couldn't care less about curing diseases. Come on, it's not like humans are an endangered species! On the other hand, as a fellow human being I believe that if we're going to look into disease related stuff, lets focus on being prepared for a virus that could wipe us off the face of Earth.
Without religion, we would progress so much faster. That would be a great thing. But without religion, a lot of evil would emerge from people that have no other reason to hold morals. I wish there were a way to know for sure what would happen under all these hypothetical scenarios. *sigh*
You have a very good point. I certainly wouldn't want anyone dead. However, it's important to acknowledge that abortion is a very controversial subject. SPAM and aggressive online marketing on the other hand is a definite no-no. I would find it hard to believe that the people that create this crap truly believe that what they're doing is justifiable. The only justification they have is the lack of laws which allows them to continue intruding our computers. I've talked to so many parents that feel helpless. They want their kids to have access to the wealth of information on the internet, but they know that there is no silver bullet when it comes down to blocking inappropriate material. It would be no different if someone hopped in a plane and dropped hardcore porn over a city knowing that schoolyards would be hit.
A Slashdot reader putting him/herself down by putting down Slashdot readers. I find that very interesting. However, I am curious as to why you would think that computer geeks in general would feel morally superior. For someone who seems to be a right wing extremist, you sure come off as being prejudice against computer geeks.
Mortal judgement, huh? Do me a favor and go back to school. Once you realize your idiocy, feel free to debate issues of MORAL judgement with me. On second thought, never mind. I wouldn't want to waste too much time arguing with a hippie piece of crap such as yourself.
Anyone who has read Greg Bear's book, _Queen of Angels_ will like this one. We start up list that isn't maintained in any one location to avoid being shut down. This list will consist of the real physical addresses of known spammers/con-artists and the crap they're peddling. Business addresses as well as their home addresses will be listed. We post this list on several web sites and newsgroups so anyone who wants to beat the shit out of these bastards can have their way. The law is never going to be able to keep up with technology, so we take it upon ourselves to make life as a spammer dangerous. I'd be willing to bet that spam would decrease considerably after a few smackdowns.
DVD is what we use today. Laser disc never really was a competing product in most consumers eyes.
Taken from http://www.starlaser.com/dvd-lasr.htm
Laser Disc Disadvantages
Laser Discs are too expensive for the average consumer to own. With the exception of MCA, and Warner, most Laser publishers have raised list prices to $40.00 and up for a first-run movie. Worse, many titles are only available as "special box-set editions" at prices over $100.00. To justify the price, these box sets often include CD soundtracks, posters, books, and other stuff you may not want. Laser Discs are large, heavy, and fragile. Great care must be taken in storage to prevent warpage, jacket damage, and deterioration of the disc's aluminum coating. With even the best of care, a few poorly manufactured discs will loose their aluminum reflective qualities over time, resulting in increased video noise. This problem is aggravated by many publishers who refuse to take defective discs once they have "gone out of print". Caught in the middle are the dealers (like us) who have angry customers on one side and suppliers refusing defective returns on the other.
Laser Discs are "hard encoded" in NTSC video. Even though many LV players have S-video outputs, all laser discs, exhibit a characteristic "crosshatch" distortion caused by the NTSC color subcarrier. This is most noticeable in small text, where the letters seem to be "floating" amidst background of moving fine-grain diagonal mesh. Since all NTSC broadcasts have the same distortion, many Laser Disc owners don't notice the distortion until they compare it with component video or true S-video.
Quite often, by the time the anti-virus vendor updates the DAT files, the worm has already propogated to every freaking node on the internet. Anti-virus is still a must, but not the total solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call a sysadmin incompetent for not stopping greeting cards at the router. That's the netadmin's job. Even then, I wouldn't discredit someone for not blocking them at the router. It could be a very tedious task to track down all the netblocks owned by the greeting card companies to add to the incoming access list. You'd have to be one hard core net nazi to limit email usage that much!
Telling by your posting score, somebody hasn't read any Douglas Adams.
To opt out, wait until a notice is sent from your local carrier. It will probably be sent with a bill (Look through the crap that comes with your bill). That notice will give instructions. There's no national 800 number or anything like that. If you're lucky, your carrier will decide to not use the opt-out method and you won't have to do a thing. As an example, someone previously posted a URL to Qwest, showing that they're not going to do the opt-out method.
This is another good example of the bells' corruption . I work for the IPTA. We recently had a meeting where we discussed all these types of charges. There's a fedral charge that appears on your phone bill. Usually $4 - $5. None of thet money goes to the government. The bells just worked the legal system so they could identify it as federal.
Why was this modded down?
Taken from Chairman Powell's public statement:
"But we conclude, albeit somewhat reluctantly, that under the court's constitutional analysis, companies may satisfy the somewhat less stringent requirement of giving consumers the chance to "opt-out" of intracompany communications-related use of CPNI.(1)
(1) The court instructed the Commission to consider an opt-out strategy, which the court concluded was "an obvious and substantially less restrictive alternative" to opt-in. U.S. West v. FCC, 182 F.3d 1224, 1238 (10th Cir. 1999), cert. denied 530 U.S. 1213 (2000)"
Contact the Court of Appeals and complain. Also, contact your local representative.
-Lucas
I believe it's closer to 2 million which isn't a lot if you transfer any large files. Thanks for bringing that fact up, though. :)
To crack WEP, all you need to do is run a tool that monitors the traffic and cracks it. After collecting enough traffic, it only takes a second or so to crack.
2 03 S0008
http://www.networkmagazine.com/article/NMG20011
My suggestion would be to use IPSec for encryption on top of WEP.
-Lucas
Securityfocus.com is excellent. I subscribe to all the mailing lists to keep up to date on what's happening. If you just want to learn about security, get some books. Follow the CISSP recommended reading. Honestly, security is a full time job. If you want to do the best you can without investing a lot of time, learn how to set up a firewall, keep up to date on vendor patches, and lock down any services exposed to the internet. Most vendors have guides on locking down services. Mix those things with common sense like good passwords, and you should be fine. IMO, most of these seminars are a waste of money. Most are just repeats of information that's already out there. It's not like there's super secret hacker information that only those that pay $ can learn how to protect against.
That's funny. I ran their home page through the W3C Validator and found all sorts of errors.
Never buy a barebone system from them or have them test equipment. Whoever does their installing doesn't know what the heck they're doing. All 3 barebone systems I bought from them had messed up cabling. Upside down floppy drive cable, incorrect connections from case to motherboard, etc. Also, they keep all the cool stuff that comes in the mobo box. I prefer to buy a motherboard bundle and everything else individually. Other than that assembly complaint, their service is awesome and their prices with shipping are hard to beat when building a system or even several systems. I only go to a local shop for urgent needs and pricewatch when ordering large quantities of expensive items (i.e. a dozen or so 120GB WDs with 8MB buffer).
Read the user reviews on Amazon. It seems to be closely related to the Get Rich Quick crap, although not as useless. Here's the most interesting review on Amazon.
The main part of this book contains some useful information and some helpful hints for owner-builders. However, beware a major problem that nearly destroyed the reading experience for me. The writing goes until page 272. But the book contains 314 pages. So what do pages 272-314 contain? Look at the cover of the book, where it says "Valuable Coupons Inside! $100 Value". Most of the 42 pages contain full-page ads for the author's seminars, audiotapes, workshops and special reports. To see this for yourself, go to the "Look Inside" feature (click on book picture) and look at the last page of the table of contents. I found these ads irritating, because although this is supposedly a reference book in and of itself, it asks you to shell out $6.00-$99.00 each item for more information. Excuse me, but shouldn't information like "Staying on Schedule" be included in the "Owner-Builder" book? The author offers the explanation that he couldn't "fit" all of this info into the book. He sure didn't have a problem tacking on 42 extra pages of shameless bids for more money. Get a book that doesn't reach into your wallet, like the excellent "Complete Guide to Contracting Your Home".
Also, I'd like to make use of this post to make everyone aware that Greg Bear's books Forge of God and Anvil of Stars are going to be part of a motion picture trilogy. The news just hit today and can be seen at his web site, www.gregbear.com
    If you want to compare Linux to Windows, I'd be willing to bet my life that Windows has more security holes. There's only a limited number of people that review Windows' code. GNU/Linux, however is made up of many different smaller components that have the love and affection of their programmers. Linux is made from love. Windows is made from corporate greed. The programmers that make Windows have deadlines and upper management telling them to stop working on one project so they can put resources into creating new features. This is all my opinion, of course, but it's a very logical conclusion.
    There will probably never be a truly secure operating system as long as humans are involved in making it. We make mistakes. It only takes one overlooked mistake in a protocol or the code for a system to be compromised. A good example is the recent SNMP exploit. The protocol itself was not created with security in mind, so many vendors were vulnerable. The best chance we have at a human created, secure OS is one that focuses on security, such as OpenBSD.
   If our government (I'm speaking of my country, the USA) adopted OpenBSD and threw enough resources behind it, other governments would have to throw a whole lot of money and effort into finding something our efforts failed to see. The way things stand though, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to bring our systems crawling to their knees.
   For instance, lets say one of the employees at eEye was hired by Cuba to find exploits in NT and remain silent to everyone else, it would cost them very little to hack into our systems. The guys at eEye and other security firms find exploits such as buffer overflows all the time, and I'm sure enough money could convince one employee to commit treason. Heck, they could just use the unpatched exploits already out there and do it for free!
   The point is that all we can do as system and network admins is to keep up to date on known exploits. We patch our systems and networks and make it so that only a true hacker could bypass our efforts. Script kiddies would be stopped dead in their tracks and 99.9% of the time, that's all the defense we require. In this respect, the amount of patched exploits should have very little effect on the decision making process. However, keep those unpatched exploits in mind.
   Welcome to the real world!
Thanks! The http download worked for me at about 140kb/sec.
-Lucas
Thanks. I should also mention that I double checked on apostrophe usage and found that it doesn't have to be a proper noun. Damn my last english teacher!
I knew I would screw something up and look like an ass . Replace "misplaced comma" in my previous comment with "misplaced apostrophe."
I didn't even get that far before returning here to complain about the poor writing skills! I hope to god that writer has a backup career.
The first sentence sets the ugly tone of incompetence.
"How much would you give not to have show up at your desk every day?"
The second paragraph keeps pace with a misplaced comma in what I guess he thought was a proper noun.
"...follow them on the computer maker's network."
The third paragraph isn't so bad.
The infamous fourth paragraph. This is where I decided to hit the all mighty back button. What a confusing beginning to a run on sentence!
"Sun says will save it $150 million annually, and the program is essentially an advertisement for the company's marketing pitch that business runs better on a network of big computers than smaller boxes powered by software from rival Microsoft Corp. "
That picture of a terraformed Mars you linked to sent a chill down my spine. How intriguing.
It would take decades of research to prepare considering mankind has no experiencec visiting other planets that can support life.
Actually, it's not just a few religous fanatics. In general, the US population is divided almost in half. Polls about cloning for the purpose of stem cell research or other medical uses appears to be at about 60% pro.
Click here for a poll
Personally, I'm for cloning for the purpose of biological enhancement. I couldn't care less about curing diseases. Come on, it's not like humans are an endangered species! On the other hand, as a fellow human being I believe that if we're going to look into disease related stuff, lets focus on being prepared for a virus that could wipe us off the face of Earth.
Without religion, we would progress so much faster. That would be a great thing. But without religion, a lot of evil would emerge from people that have no other reason to hold morals. I wish there were a way to know for sure what would happen under all these hypothetical scenarios. *sigh*
You have a very good point. I certainly wouldn't want anyone dead. However, it's important to acknowledge that abortion is a very controversial subject. SPAM and aggressive online marketing on the other hand is a definite no-no. I would find it hard to believe that the people that create this crap truly believe that what they're doing is justifiable. The only justification they have is the lack of laws which allows them to continue intruding our computers. I've talked to so many parents that feel helpless. They want their kids to have access to the wealth of information on the internet, but they know that there is no silver bullet when it comes down to blocking inappropriate material. It would be no different if someone hopped in a plane and dropped hardcore porn over a city knowing that schoolyards would be hit.
A Slashdot reader putting him/herself down by putting down Slashdot readers. I find that very interesting. However, I am curious as to why you would think that computer geeks in general would feel morally superior. For someone who seems to be a right wing extremist, you sure come off as being prejudice against computer geeks.
Mortal judgement, huh? Do me a favor and go back to school. Once you realize your idiocy, feel free to debate issues of MORAL judgement with me. On second thought, never mind. I wouldn't want to waste too much time arguing with a hippie piece of crap such as yourself.
Anyone who has read Greg Bear's book, _Queen of Angels_ will like this one. We start up list that isn't maintained in any one location to avoid being shut down. This list will consist of the real physical addresses of known spammers/con-artists and the crap they're peddling. Business addresses as well as their home addresses will be listed. We post this list on several web sites and newsgroups so anyone who wants to beat the shit out of these bastards can have their way. The law is never going to be able to keep up with technology, so we take it upon ourselves to make life as a spammer dangerous. I'd be willing to bet that spam would decrease considerably after a few smackdowns.
DVD is what we use today. Laser disc never really was a competing product in most consumers eyes.
Taken from http://www.starlaser.com/dvd-lasr.htm
Laser Disc Disadvantages
Laser Discs are too expensive for the average consumer to own. With the exception of MCA, and Warner, most Laser publishers have raised list prices to $40.00 and up for a first-run movie. Worse, many titles are only available as "special box-set editions" at prices over $100.00. To justify the price, these box sets often include CD soundtracks, posters, books, and other stuff you may not want.
Laser Discs are large, heavy, and fragile. Great care must be taken in storage to prevent warpage, jacket damage, and deterioration of the disc's aluminum coating. With even the best of care, a few poorly manufactured discs will loose their aluminum reflective qualities over time, resulting in increased video noise. This problem is aggravated by many publishers who refuse to take defective discs once they have "gone out of print". Caught in the middle are the dealers (like us) who have angry customers on one side and suppliers refusing defective returns on the other.
Laser Discs are "hard encoded" in NTSC video. Even though many LV players have S-video outputs, all laser discs, exhibit a characteristic "crosshatch" distortion caused by the NTSC color subcarrier. This is most noticeable in small text, where the letters seem to be "floating" amidst background of moving fine-grain diagonal mesh. Since all NTSC broadcasts have the same distortion, many Laser Disc owners don't notice the distortion until they compare it with component video or true S-video.
Quite often, by the time the anti-virus vendor updates the DAT files, the worm has already propogated to every freaking node on the internet. Anti-virus is still a must, but not the total solution.