I've *always* scanned ALL files -- because even in the DOS era, you could never rely on the extension and the functionality having anything to do with one another. (Remember XTreeGold for DOS? the *.XTP files are *executables*, called by XTG.EXE as needed.)
Occasionally even then, the front end of a virus was named whatever.com and was itself "clean" (so would be passed by most scanners), but its job was to call the REAL executable, named something like whatever.dat, which contained the virus code (and if you limited your scanner to known-executables, it would be missed). I have personally seen a virus carried in the whatever.dat part of some purported utility.
As to viruses in image files, it has always been theoretically possible to execute code placed in a GIF's comment field, and I vaguely recall there was a similar exploit possible for JPGs. The only reason this GIF exploit was never seen in the wild is because in the olden days, you couldn't count on everyone using the same viewing software; there were dozens of DOS image viewers, no two of which worked alike. NOW, a virus author can pretty much count on the majority of users using such files thru some combination of Windows, IE, and M$Office, so such formerly-obscure tricks become worth the bother. Much more so when M$ kindly offers malware authors a leg up like this.:(
53,410 bytes on disk, 36,045,800 bytes in memory (wow, that's some compression:), 16384 pixels/227 inches square. It did barf QVP (what I use to view PNGs with my old PNGless browser) but Corel Photopaint has no problem with it.
[laughing] I'll see your NT4 system, and raise you my venerable Win95 box, which has staved off thousands of would-be assaults. In fact all I do with any of my WinBoxen (95/98/ME/XP, no patches) is run a good firewall, turn off stupid shit like Messenger, don't use IE/OE, and don't click every doodad that comes my way. Result: no infections or invasions of any description.
Occurs to me this has another impact: AFAIK, at present in meatspace you can legally CALL yourself anything you want, *so long as there is no intent to defraud*.
If it becomes unlawful to call yourself whatever you want in cyberspace (and think about it, this could readily be extended to ALL nyms everywhere) it's a short step to doing the same for meatspace.
Those disease vectors we don't even think about may be the scariest ones, eh? Yeah, I'll bet the airline was happy to help with containment -- they don't need any more bad press. (Of course, it was also the right thing to do, and some airlines HAVE been known to do such things...!!)
Speaking of vectors we don't think about til it happens... Remember back before AIDS frightened the dental industry into sterilizing not only their hand tools but also the drill heads? turns out the drill head's gearing mechanism collects tissue bits from every mouth it's ever in. When I found out about this, it became flamingly obvious why EVERY time I'd had any drilling done, I'd come down with the flu within a week: the drill head was collecting and spewing germs from every mouth it passed. -- Since I found a dentist who anally sterilizes everything, I've not once come down sick after he's been in my mouth.
Actually I haven't found that it makes a whole lot of difference, so long as it's one of the "natural" style yoghurts, not the crap that's full of gelatin and stiff as jello. Regular Yoplait works pretty well for the purpose. -- I think the diff might be that too much gelatin encapsulates the living stuff, plus there's simply not enough milk in it compared to soft or "natural" yoghurt.
However, you may be confusing bacteria and yeast, the latter being what usually gets the blame for "itching and burning" (tho in my experience, the latter IS probably due to surface staph infections, not yeast at all anyway!) Gut bacteria is what the yoghurt is meant to repopulate.
*Traditional* pastuerizing doesn't sterilize a milk product, only kills off the stuff that sours it *fast*. Modern sterilization (which involves irradiating the milk as well as heat) kills off everything, so the milk rots rather than souring. Ick!!
While we're totally off-topic, the reason butter no longer tastes very good is because since ~1980 it's been made with stale-dated sterilized cream (pulled from grocery shelves), giving the butter that borderline rotted taste. The only dairy that apparently still uses *fresh* cream is Land O'Lakes, and you can sure tell the difference.
Still, AIDS is disadvantaged by comparison; airborne infections don't require that the individual do something stupid to become infected. You need merely take the wrong breath at the wrong time.
Getting the runs from antibiotics is because they also kill off big chunks of the bacteria that actually digest your food for you. A simple way to avoid (or at least reduce) the runs while taking antibiotics, is to consume a small amount of yoghurt every day, to repopulate the intestinal flora. If you can't tolerate yoghurt, cheese will do almost as well.
About 10 years ago, 60 Minutes ran a story on the upswing of TB in the US, focusing on some studies done by -- NIH?? (don't recall specifically, but one of the major gov't health outfits). One of their case studies involved the shipyards at Long Beach (which for the geographically-challenged, is just south of Los Angeles proper). Turns out EVERYONE who worked there had been exposed, and many had active infections!! (These were American workers, not immigrants.) The thought was that because it's a relatively closed work environment, there was no chance NOT to be exposed if even one infected person entered the facility. (Much akin to the prison environments discussed down this chain a ways.)
Another study involved airliners -- and the conclusion was, if you're flying, you're going to be breathing recirculated air that has a strong risk of someone's wandering TB germs floating in it -- and that if you saw anyone coughing, you should consider yourself exposed. They (the NIH or whoever it was) went so far as to recommend wearing surgical-quality masks during long flights, especially to/from countries that are a TB hotbed. (Think of it as a condom for your lungs:)
While this may sound alarmist, remember when AIDS was something that only happened to other people?? Better paranoid than epidemic.
I don't know this person (having fallen out of SW fandom some while back) but that'd be the one *I* want to see too. And hopefully he'll get the soundtrack right too!
Somewhere around here I have a bootleg audio tape from June 1977, tho by now it's pretty scratchy.
A little OT, but Troy surprised the hell out of me by being a very good movie that focuses on the personal interactions that caused the events depicted. And its CGI (despite taking a correctly back seat to the very well-managed plot and character development) is probably the most seamless I've seen to date. If you take it as historical fantasy, and don't expect a literal retelling of The Iliad, you'll like it. If you want The Iliad pristine and correct, read Homer.:)
That said, I want the original Star Wars back, the first release from 1977 without any mucking with the plotline, the visuals, or the soundtrack (which was pretty well fucked up by the re-release in 1978 -- if you didn't see it 1977, you've never heard the original soundtrack). I'm not interested in CGI "updates". I don't care if there's a tennis shoe and a potato floating in deep space. I'm not shocked that one of the Good Guys[tm] shoots first. But I *don't* want the flow of the movie interrupted by George's notions of how to "perfect" it.
Bah, sometimes people get things right the first time and just don't realise it. As Orson Scott Card said (and proceeds to violate regularly himself), the most important part of writing is knowing when to STOP.
[grin] I've tried and tried to like linux; I even went to Linuxworld back in '99, when linux for the masses was still new and exciting. Linux kept rapping my knuckles for my trouble. Finally I tried Mandrake, and tho it's not yet to where I can use it for everyday, at least I *like* it. Progress.:)
If you have an SBLive, be aware that it dumps noise onto the PCI bus, and VIA chipsets don't handle that very well; latest VIA drivers help but do not cure the problem. Intel chipsets don't seem to be bothered by it.
XP doesn't seem to have any issues with DirectX, which when games have an issue was historically the usual culprit; indeed, I've not seen that as a problem in quite some time (not since DX7 on pre-WinME boxen, in fact). XP isn't as stable as Win2K, but shouldn't be falling over even when abused -- it's pretty anal about killing apps to protect itself. When XP does crash, it's usually some Explorer component at fault. (D'oh!!) Do remember to let the stupid thing finish cooking after a restart... on my lowly P3-500, it takes about two minutes from "desktop *looks* ready" til "it actually *works*".
Anyway, my long experience is that if the hardware is sound, and basic maintenance is done, Windows of any species crashes seldom to never. I strongly recommend that once a week, you defrag whether it "needs" it or not, and run EasyCleaner http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ too.
In addition to sticking to Intel CPU and chipset, I prefer Tyan motherboards and Matrox video cards for stability -- I have four Tyans and a crapload of G200's (every which sub-model) and not once has one caused an issue. Also, make your life easier and stick to motherboards with 4 memory slots. Those with 3 memory slots get nasty about mix-and-matching different sizes/types of memory.
And remember that onboard video is an invention of the devil:)
Yeah, one BBS that I use used to go thru dynip to ELN and that worked fine. My mail domain is hosted on 1and1.com and it does work fine in itself (I can use it for mail thru 1and1 servers, tho once in a while that gets balky about outgoing mail so an alternative would be nice). I vaguely recall that ELN's server whined back at me and threw back the mail... been quite a while so I don't recall exactly, but at the time I think it was rejecting any mail or post not from an ELN domain.
Stupid Mozilla mail, I swear I am going to HURT the designer if I ever catch him.. damned thing doesn't want to send all unsent messages and there doesn't seem to be any way to force it. Anyway, sending from my domain is working thru mail.earthlink.net today, so I guess whatever was the issue before went away. (This is good, cuz today for some reason I can't send thru smtp.1and1.com... grrr. Yes, I know to use port 587. ELN seems to be blocking port 25.)
I don't know about X or how much it may have been at fault, but when I had a RH6/Gnome desktop, it spent about as much time crashing as running (conversely, Win95 on that same box NEVER crashes). OTOH my Mandrake 7.2 box, tho not used much, I can't recall having ever crashed other than when Konq couldn't cope with a CDR that probably had an open session (locked up so hard I had to power off to get the hardware back).
Anyway, as to XP crashing a lot... what CPU and chipset? I logged complaints vs hardware in the early XP newsgroups, and found that while at the time AMD had only about 10% of the market, AMD-based systems produced 70% of the "XP crashes all the time" complaints (and about half of those had VIA chipsets). This was what finally cemented me as an Intel bigot.:) Check blackviper.com for more comments on that, plus tons of info on what services you can safely kill off; that might help.
I haven't had much problem with XP crashing, tho I have noticed that after running 24/7 for 6 weeks or so, it tends to get a little flakey (doesn't crash, just does weird things once in a while). What are you doing when it crashes?
I have 768mb and 1GB RAM in my two main Winboxen (both P3s, running WinME/XP and Win98 respectively) even tho neither really *needs* that much (both max-out their use at about 450mb, with NO swapfile) because at the time RAM was $51/gig and too much beats not enough. The 768mb will probably get upped to 1GB pretty soon mainly because some PC100/133 sticks have fallen on my head and need a mission in life. I'd guess that's the case for most P2/P3 class machines now with ridiculous amounts of RAM... not "I need it" but rather, "why the hell not?"
One also has to wonder whether China would stand idly by, or if they'd decide to back N.Korea by pouring their endless supply of troops over the border. And whether said troops would stop at the DMZ, or keep right on coming until all of Korea was effectively Chinese territory.
I recall this was one argument against S.Korea annexing N.Korea some years ago (when it might have been militarily feasible), that China simply wouldn't allow it.
The description reminds me of Idi Amin (I've seen the documentary video that followed him around for a while -- talk about whacked). Details differ but the ultra-paranoid mindset is the same. To such a person, ANYTHING can be construed as an attack, and WILL be responded to accordingly.
Not merely whacked, but a ticking bomb that could be set off by anything at all (or even nothing but his imagination).
BTW, the reason N.Korea has such a large military is because it's the only way to ensure that you eat regularly. So everyone who can do so signs up.
He's said that before. Several times. Shortly before announcing the next Star Wars film.
I remember back in 1977, Lucas swore up and down that the original Star Wars was a standalone film and there absolutely would NEVER be a sequel, because he didn't believe in sequels, period (he said something to the effect that only losers with no ability to create new material ever made sequels). Then Star Wars became a big hit -- and suddenly it was the first of a trilogy, and soon afterward was transmogrified into the 4th of nine that Lucas *now* swore up and down "he'd always planned to do".
Lucas is a master of "Hollywood truth": only what I say TODAY is true, and how dare you imply that I said something different yesterday!
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I've *always* scanned ALL files -- because even in the DOS era, you could never rely on the extension and the functionality having anything to do with one another. (Remember XTreeGold for DOS? the *.XTP files are *executables*, called by XTG.EXE as needed.)
:(
Occasionally even then, the front end of a virus was named whatever.com and was itself "clean" (so would be passed by most scanners), but its job was to call the REAL executable, named something like whatever.dat, which contained the virus code (and if you limited your scanner to known-executables, it would be missed). I have personally seen a virus carried in the whatever.dat part of some purported utility.
As to viruses in image files, it has always been theoretically possible to execute code placed in a GIF's comment field, and I vaguely recall there was a similar exploit possible for JPGs. The only reason this GIF exploit was never seen in the wild is because in the olden days, you couldn't count on everyone using the same viewing software; there were dozens of DOS image viewers, no two of which worked alike. NOW, a virus author can pretty much count on the majority of users using such files thru some combination of Windows, IE, and M$Office, so such formerly-obscure tricks become worth the bother. Much more so when M$ kindly offers malware authors a leg up like this.
I noticed that too. Quite sucks, if you ask me. And when you get stuff like
Bug whitepapers
Best deals: Bug
that just looks stupid.
53,410 bytes on disk, 36,045,800 bytes in memory (wow, that's some compression :), 16384 pixels/227 inches square. It did barf QVP (what I use to view PNGs with my old PNGless browser) but Corel Photopaint has no problem with it.
:)
Now that I've got it, what do I *DO* with it?
[laughing] I'll see your NT4 system, and raise you my venerable Win95 box, which has staved off thousands of would-be assaults. In fact all I do with any of my WinBoxen (95/98/ME/XP, no patches) is run a good firewall, turn off stupid shit like Messenger, don't use IE/OE, and don't click every doodad that comes my way. Result: no infections or invasions of any description.
Tho my firewall logs are a sight to behold...
Occurs to me this has another impact: AFAIK, at present in meatspace you can legally CALL yourself anything you want, *so long as there is no intent to defraud*.
If it becomes unlawful to call yourself whatever you want in cyberspace (and think about it, this could readily be extended to ALL nyms everywhere) it's a short step to doing the same for meatspace.
LOL!! So would my dentist :)
Those disease vectors we don't even think about may be the scariest ones, eh? Yeah, I'll bet the airline was happy to help with containment -- they don't need any more bad press. (Of course, it was also the right thing to do, and some airlines HAVE been known to do such things...!!)
Speaking of vectors we don't think about til it happens... Remember back before AIDS frightened the dental industry into sterilizing not only their hand tools but also the drill heads? turns out the drill head's gearing mechanism collects tissue bits from every mouth it's ever in. When I found out about this, it became flamingly obvious why EVERY time I'd had any drilling done, I'd come down with the flu within a week: the drill head was collecting and spewing germs from every mouth it passed. -- Since I found a dentist who anally sterilizes everything, I've not once come down sick after he's been in my mouth.
Actually I haven't found that it makes a whole lot of difference, so long as it's one of the "natural" style yoghurts, not the crap that's full of gelatin and stiff as jello. Regular Yoplait works pretty well for the purpose. -- I think the diff might be that too much gelatin encapsulates the living stuff, plus there's simply not enough milk in it compared to soft or "natural" yoghurt.
However, you may be confusing bacteria and yeast, the latter being what usually gets the blame for "itching and burning" (tho in my experience, the latter IS probably due to surface staph infections, not yeast at all anyway!) Gut bacteria is what the yoghurt is meant to repopulate.
*Traditional* pastuerizing doesn't sterilize a milk product, only kills off the stuff that sours it *fast*. Modern sterilization (which involves irradiating the milk as well as heat) kills off everything, so the milk rots rather than souring. Ick!!
While we're totally off-topic, the reason butter no longer tastes very good is because since ~1980 it's been made with stale-dated sterilized cream (pulled from grocery shelves), giving the butter that borderline rotted taste. The only dairy that apparently still uses *fresh* cream is Land O'Lakes, and you can sure tell the difference.
Same here :)
Still, AIDS is disadvantaged by comparison; airborne infections don't require that the individual do something stupid to become infected. You need merely take the wrong breath at the wrong time.
Getting the runs from antibiotics is because they also kill off big chunks of the bacteria that actually digest your food for you. A simple way to avoid (or at least reduce) the runs while taking antibiotics, is to consume a small amount of yoghurt every day, to repopulate the intestinal flora. If you can't tolerate yoghurt, cheese will do almost as well.
About 10 years ago, 60 Minutes ran a story on the upswing of TB in the US, focusing on some studies done by -- NIH?? (don't recall specifically, but one of the major gov't health outfits). One of their case studies involved the shipyards at Long Beach (which for the geographically-challenged, is just south of Los Angeles proper). Turns out EVERYONE who worked there had been exposed, and many had active infections!! (These were American workers, not immigrants.) The thought was that because it's a relatively closed work environment, there was no chance NOT to be exposed if even one infected person entered the facility. (Much akin to the prison environments discussed down this chain a ways.)
:)
Another study involved airliners -- and the conclusion was, if you're flying, you're going to be breathing recirculated air that has a strong risk of someone's wandering TB germs floating in it -- and that if you saw anyone coughing, you should consider yourself exposed. They (the NIH or whoever it was) went so far as to recommend wearing surgical-quality masks during long flights, especially to/from countries that are a TB hotbed. (Think of it as a condom for your lungs
While this may sound alarmist, remember when AIDS was something that only happened to other people?? Better paranoid than epidemic.
I don't know this person (having fallen out of SW fandom some while back) but that'd be the one *I* want to see too. And hopefully he'll get the soundtrack right too!
Somewhere around here I have a bootleg audio tape from June 1977, tho by now it's pretty scratchy.
A little OT, but Troy surprised the hell out of me by being a very good movie that focuses on the personal interactions that caused the events depicted. And its CGI (despite taking a correctly back seat to the very well-managed plot and character development) is probably the most seamless I've seen to date. If you take it as historical fantasy, and don't expect a literal retelling of The Iliad, you'll like it. If you want The Iliad pristine and correct, read Homer. :)
That said, I want the original Star Wars back, the first release from 1977 without any mucking with the plotline, the visuals, or the soundtrack (which was pretty well fucked up by the re-release in 1978 -- if you didn't see it 1977, you've never heard the original soundtrack). I'm not interested in CGI "updates". I don't care if there's a tennis shoe and a potato floating in deep space. I'm not shocked that one of the Good Guys[tm] shoots first. But I *don't* want the flow of the movie interrupted by George's notions of how to "perfect" it.
Bah, sometimes people get things right the first time and just don't realise it. As Orson Scott Card said (and proceeds to violate regularly himself), the most important part of writing is knowing when to STOP.
[grin] I've tried and tried to like linux; I even went to Linuxworld back in '99, when linux for the masses was still new and exciting. Linux kept rapping my knuckles for my trouble. Finally I tried Mandrake, and tho it's not yet to where I can use it for everyday, at least I *like* it. Progress. :)
:)
If you have an SBLive, be aware that it dumps noise onto the PCI bus, and VIA chipsets don't handle that very well; latest VIA drivers help but do not cure the problem. Intel chipsets don't seem to be bothered by it.
XP doesn't seem to have any issues with DirectX, which when games have an issue was historically the usual culprit; indeed, I've not seen that as a problem in quite some time (not since DX7 on pre-WinME boxen, in fact). XP isn't as stable as Win2K, but shouldn't be falling over even when abused -- it's pretty anal about killing apps to protect itself. When XP does crash, it's usually some Explorer component at fault. (D'oh!!) Do remember to let the stupid thing finish cooking after a restart... on my lowly P3-500, it takes about two minutes from "desktop *looks* ready" til "it actually *works*".
Anyway, my long experience is that if the hardware is sound, and basic maintenance is done, Windows of any species crashes seldom to never. I strongly recommend that once a week, you defrag whether it "needs" it or not, and run EasyCleaner http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ too.
In addition to sticking to Intel CPU and chipset, I prefer Tyan motherboards and Matrox video cards for stability -- I have four Tyans and a crapload of G200's (every which sub-model) and not once has one caused an issue. Also, make your life easier and stick to motherboards with 4 memory slots. Those with 3 memory slots get nasty about mix-and-matching different sizes/types of memory.
And remember that onboard video is an invention of the devil
Yeah, one BBS that I use used to go thru dynip to ELN and that worked fine. My mail domain is hosted on 1and1.com and it does work fine in itself (I can use it for mail thru 1and1 servers, tho once in a while that gets balky about outgoing mail so an alternative would be nice). I vaguely recall that ELN's server whined back at me and threw back the mail... been quite a while so I don't recall exactly, but at the time I think it was rejecting any mail or post not from an ELN domain.
... grrr. Yes, I know to use port 587. ELN seems to be blocking port 25.)
Stupid Mozilla mail, I swear I am going to HURT the designer if I ever catch him.. damned thing doesn't want to send all unsent messages and there doesn't seem to be any way to force it. Anyway, sending from my domain is working thru mail.earthlink.net today, so I guess whatever was the issue before went away. (This is good, cuz today for some reason I can't send thru smtp.1and1.com
Ah. Well, there again... with older hardware, we've reached the "what the hell, there's no other use for it" stage of upgrading :)
I don't know about X or how much it may have been at fault, but when I had a RH6/Gnome desktop, it spent about as much time crashing as running (conversely, Win95 on that same box NEVER crashes). OTOH my Mandrake 7.2 box, tho not used much, I can't recall having ever crashed other than when Konq couldn't cope with a CDR that probably had an open session (locked up so hard I had to power off to get the hardware back).
:) Check blackviper.com for more comments on that, plus tons of info on what services you can safely kill off; that might help.
Anyway, as to XP crashing a lot... what CPU and chipset? I logged complaints vs hardware in the early XP newsgroups, and found that while at the time AMD had only about 10% of the market, AMD-based systems produced 70% of the "XP crashes all the time" complaints (and about half of those had VIA chipsets). This was what finally cemented me as an Intel bigot.
I haven't had much problem with XP crashing, tho I have noticed that after running 24/7 for 6 weeks or so, it tends to get a little flakey (doesn't crash, just does weird things once in a while). What are you doing when it crashes?
I have 768mb and 1GB RAM in my two main Winboxen (both P3s, running WinME/XP and Win98 respectively) even tho neither really *needs* that much (both max-out their use at about 450mb, with NO swapfile) because at the time RAM was $51/gig and too much beats not enough. The 768mb will probably get upped to 1GB pretty soon mainly because some PC100/133 sticks have fallen on my head and need a mission in life. I'd guess that's the case for most P2/P3 class machines now with ridiculous amounts of RAM... not "I need it" but rather, "why the hell not?"
They do? I had tried that and couldn't get it to work, using Moz v1.5; the domain is hosted with 1and1. What am I missing?
Something to speculate on: What happens if someone assassinates N.Korea's glorious leader?
The real question there is -- to what degree would this create a power vacuum, who is likely to take over, and are they saner or less-sane??
One also has to wonder whether China would stand idly by, or if they'd decide to back N.Korea by pouring their endless supply of troops over the border. And whether said troops would stop at the DMZ, or keep right on coming until all of Korea was effectively Chinese territory.
I recall this was one argument against S.Korea annexing N.Korea some years ago (when it might have been militarily feasible), that China simply wouldn't allow it.
The description reminds me of Idi Amin (I've seen the documentary video that followed him around for a while -- talk about whacked). Details differ but the ultra-paranoid mindset is the same. To such a person, ANYTHING can be construed as an attack, and WILL be responded to accordingly.
Not merely whacked, but a ticking bomb that could be set off by anything at all (or even nothing but his imagination).
BTW, the reason N.Korea has such a large military is because it's the only way to ensure that you eat regularly. So everyone who can do so signs up.
The difference is that Sir Alec Guiness would still have HAD that "rest of his career" without Star Wars, and Lucas more than likely would not have.
He's said that before. Several times. Shortly before announcing the next Star Wars film.
I remember back in 1977, Lucas swore up and down that the original Star Wars was a standalone film and there absolutely would NEVER be a sequel, because he didn't believe in sequels, period (he said something to the effect that only losers with no ability to create new material ever made sequels). Then Star Wars became a big hit -- and suddenly it was the first of a trilogy, and soon afterward was transmogrified into the 4th of nine that Lucas *now* swore up and down "he'd always planned to do".
Lucas is a master of "Hollywood truth": only what I say TODAY is true, and how dare you imply that I said something different yesterday!
About which the guy sitting next to me said: "Just fucking DIE already and get it the hell over with!!"