Unfortunately, it takes a turning event to make significant change.
I doubt voting will be the solution. I'm still hopeful, but......
Fortunately, the armed forces are made up of humans (for now), and those humans have family and friends in the civilian sector. When they're ordered to turn on American civilians, it won't be the revolutionaries against the military, it will be the revolutionaries AND a good portion of the military against the remainder of the government's military.
It won't be a good day in American history, but it will definitely make the history books. But remember, history is written by the victors. If the revolutionaries win, it will be the birth of a new America, taken from the tyranny. If the government stops the uprising, it will be the strong government stopping a disillusioned band of malcontents.
The military is already planning for such an event to occur.
Without significant planning and organization, any civilian unrest will not go over well. Sure, there are plenty of guns in the hands of Joe-Citizen, but in a situation of a single individual versus a squad who have the tactical advantage, the individual will never win. There will never be enough order without a random figure inside that organization realizing the potential for failure, and reporting to the government, and without a driving factor to encourage it, there will never be an organized group.
This administration is running on it's own agenda, and not listening to the people that they represent. The majority are very unhappy with their actions. An armed revolution could happen, but like I said, it won't be pretty, and in the first days (or years?) of it, the majority of losses will be on the revolutionaries side.
At very best, the administration will make a significant series of choices which drive the military to a coup. There, an organized and trained group will have the tactical advantage.
I feel this administration WILL continue it's tradition of making bad choices, and something will come of that. I'm not much of a fortune teller, so I'll continue pretending that voting does count, and voicing my opinion means something.
Actually, the mentality I was going for was don't escalate a problem if you can't handle the consequences. I did go farther with him on it.
If I hacked the other kid's account (ignoring the legal problems), the kid would do something more. etc.. etc.. etc..
It's a game that can't be won until it's way beyond what he's willing to handle.
If he doesn't learn what the cause and consequence of the problem was, so he can fix it in the future, he'll keep making the same mistakes, and have bigger problems later on.
There is a time and a place for revenge. It must be thought out properly, and handled in a way that will be to your advantage.
I have a friend who's a great example of that. She has an obnoxious neighbor that's been doing all kinds of things to her. She's absolutely sure she knows who the neighbor is, but has no evidence. I told her not to do anything about it in a physical fashion. She has all kinds of plans of what to do, but she won't do them now.
She asked the police and a lawyer what to do, and they told her the same thing. Without evidence, there's nowhere to go with it.
So, our revenge will be getting the crazy neighbor put in jail. It'll be perfectly legal on our part. We're putting together a video surveillance system for her house. It's amazing what you can do with a few bucks and a bunch of spare parts.:) I think the total cost will be about $50, if you don't include all the stuff I have laying around. We don't let the neighbor know anything about what we're doing, and it'll all be set up when the neighbor isn't home. She'll do something again soon, and we'll have documentation of what she's doing. THEN we can let the law handle it.
The last thing the neighbor did was egg my friends car. Before that, she put in anonymous calls to local law enforcement about all kinds of crazy things. Once we have evidence of a few things, all the previous things can be tied to her. Ahhh, criminal trespass, harassment, vandalism. In civil court, I'd be willing to bet that we could get a judgement ordering the neighbor to move out. I already told her that after I set up the equipment, I'll be more than happy to work with law enforcement on the matter, and testify in court. "Yes, I set up the equipment. This is how it works. I swear under oath the video was not tampered with."
I warned her though, it may not be the neighbor she thinks it is. You have to be VERY sure about who you're getting your revenge on, and do it right so you don't get your hands dirty.
I did this once before for someone. A lunitic shot up another friend's store late one night. I put the security images on DVD, then went to the guys house, and recorded evidence showing that the vehicle in the security footage was the same as the vehicle at the defendant's house. It was easy. We knew the make, model, and color of the vehicle, plus some distinguishing features. The security footage didn't get the license plate number, but mine did.
When the police showed up, they found the gun in the vehicle still, and matched it up to 4 other shootings in the same area. The guy is nicely tucked away in jail now.
The dirty revenge, contemplated by my friend was to go do something physical to the guy, his house, vehicle, and/or store. That's the dirty revenge that would have gotten my friend put in jail instead. We're all much happier with the clean way.
I had a blast doing that once working with a cam house. It wasn't Sub7, but something like it. I'd open and close their CD drive, and keep popping up on the screen "Feed Me Seymour!" It was so much more fun, because I could see their faces when I was doing it.:)
For parents, they're harder. The older they get, the more in denial they'll be.
It'll probably be a good case of identity theft, before they ask "so what can I do to protect myself?" Just try to explain things to them, and be prepared for the day that they come to you because their bank account is short several hundred dollars, or [insert evil case here]. That's when they'll start listening.
I've had some good success through demonstration, and letting them make mistakes.
My girlfriend is pretty good with her computer. She made mistakes before I met her, and learned from them.
Her son has his own computer, and had made mistakes himself. With some stupid online game, someone got into his account, and messed it all up. His password was his own first name. I showed him some password scanning utilities, and explained how they work. I then described for him what a "good" password is.
He then asked me "Can you hack their account, and mess it up?" I told him that I could, but I won't. Could I? Maybe. Maybe they were just as stupid themselves, and used easy passwords. Maybe if I looked around enough, there was something exploitable on the site. I wouldn't though, to teach him that revenge doesn't solve anything.
I've shown both of them the joys of packet sniffing. While most of it was over their heads, showing them their own password was useful. "Look, I'm a hacker, and I can see everything you've done. To avoid me doing this, you should.... "
Honestly, the best way I've found to protect myself is to learn what the bad guys are doing, and solve the problem. You have to teach them what the problems are, and how to protect themselves.
It's usually better to teach someone yourself. You can judge if they are absorbing the information, instead of letting them skim over the pages that are greek to them. "Password security? Ya, I have a password. It's 1234."
I've seen so many people in office environments who are just told "don't do this", but they don't understand why, so they'll still make mistakes. How many zombie machines are out there on the Internet right now, because people didn't understand what not to do and why?
Be Mr. Evil Hacker for a while. Mess with them. Tell them exactly what you did, and how to fix it. If you keep messing with them, it's very likely they won't keep making the same mistakes. There's no need to do anything particularly damaging. More than likely, they'll do it on their own.:)
In the last couple years, I've reinstalled Windows on my XP workstation three or four times, from using bad practices. It's my own dumb fault for doing things that I know I probably shouldn't be doing. Of course, I'm doing them to see how they work.:) Neither my girlfriends machine, nor her son's machine have had anything bad happen to them. I've even broken my Linux box, from doing very ill advised things. Doing it once gives me the experience of "what happens if....?", so I can help other people later. For me, I don't really care if I completely hose an OS installation. I'll wipe it out and reinstall. I always have another machine that I can use.:)
Your piracy example has some serious flaws. There was piracy by many groups.
I'm looking at the recent past, that people are still living with. Not many people remember if pirates kidnapped their long dead ancestors or not. Well, except the black americans, but we won't go there.
Recent memory is that America has been funding unrest at their homes. In the last decade, American planes have bombed their homes. American troops have shot their families. Sure, if I was there, I'd hate America too. Our recent actions haven't been helping in the least to change this. That's what has to change, to change the current atmosphere between us.
You do realize that the American government has been screwing around in the middle east for decades, right? We've financed wars, overthrown leaders, put in our own puppets, just to yank them out of power later when they don't behave exactly as we'd like.
If we hadn't started this whole game in the first place, there would be no issue. They wouldn't care about the great American evil in the least.
But, we did start the game. We have screwed with them for decades. Some of them are standing up to us now, and we call it terrorism. Of course they think we're the great evil, and anything we do is evil. Sure, American television, radio, and movies would be evil to them, because they come out of what we do.
We've had plenty of opportunities to step out of it, and let countries do as they'd like. We could have played right with the UN, to keep something resembling peace in the world. In real life, it hasn't happened like that.
We are **WAY** past the point of saying "oh, sorry 'bout that. We'll leave now, have a nice day.", but at least it would be a start. Instead, we continue on the path, and keep screwing with them.
If you turn it around, and ask "what if..." What if the middle eastern countries financed civil wars in the Americas? What if one country decided to invade America, and try to push their rule upon us? We'd fight back. There's no big surprise there. No one likes outside influences telling them what to do.
People get crap pay to do that stuff on the Internet. I think for a few million, it's not all that bad of a thing. It's all a matter of the price tag.
Hell, for the all time low price of just 10 million, I'd let someone do all that. For 15 million, they can even publish the pictures on the front page of every news site there is. I'd even do it with a shit eating grin on my face. Maybe a bit too literally.:)
Most of the people I know wouldn't care in the least. Anyone else, I don't care what they think.
Really, it's all academic. It's not going to happen, because the real offer will never be made. Anyone with that kind of money can go to any 3rd world country, buy a town, and do whatever they want to every person in the town.
Which brings to mind something I was seeing in the news for a while.. The white slave trade. Girls being bought and sold for just a few hundred dollars, and being forced into the sex trade. If they can be had so easily, why can't I seem to find where to buy one? I checked ebay, and there are no listings.:)
Have you noticed all the less than friendly laws passed recently?
If they decide to do anything to him, they'll be shipping him off to a Southeastern Cuba vacation spot. It's a very exclusive resort, you can only show up by invitation (an invitation that you cannot refuse). How did the Eagles put it? "You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave..."
How did the summary of the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" go?
1) The US Gov't doesn't like you
2) They arrest you and hold you at places undisclosed, without access to a lawyer (or even a phone)
3) They "encourage" you to confess. Although it cannot be "torture", it will be anything that isn't seen as torture by the current administration (are electrodes to the nads torture? Nah.)
4) Once you've given your spontanious confession, it will be used against you.
Now, on spontanious confessions. Most guys have spilled their guts to their girlfriends and/or wives, to get them to shut up (tactfully put, if I must say so myself). Now, what are you going to do against trained agents? You'll crumble in seconds. You'll confess to anything they tell you to, just to get you to shut up.
For a person publishing information on the Internet, where all the bad guys can get a hold of it, you are quite likely one of the bad guys trying to get said information to them quickly. (I'd think an email would have been better, but this is our government we're talking about). Since the document is giving detailed information on circumventing national security (ha!), he's a terrorist.
The war on terror will be won, it doesn't matter how many innocent (or mostly innocent) civilians get taken down with them.
{sigh}
What happened to the days where the boogy man was the red in a submarine just off shore with a stockpile of nukes?
It's just a new boogy man, to make the government look like it's protecting the people. They never do ask, why are the bad guys screwing with us in the first place. Oh ya, because we've been screwing with them for decades.
Last time I was in Amsterdam, it was odd to see the blue lights at the walkways to home and business front doors. Someone there explained to me, it was to keep the junkies out. The junkies would sit out of view of the street and shoot up. The blue lights were there, so they wouldn't be able to see their veins, so they couldn't shoot up there.
I was invited to take a job at good pay there. Then they started going through the issues with me about taxes. I don't remember specifically (it's been a while), but there was something about setting up a shell corporation to send my pay to, who would then pay all of my expenses. Every so often, I would need to fold the company, and start a new one. It was simply a matter of how things worked there, or at least that's what I was lead to believe. In the end, I didn't go, so I don't have first hand experience with doing that.
It is a beautiful place. I don't say that like most potheads. I don't smoke pot.:)
I may visit again, but I have no plans of every staying there.
Ya, she got it back immediately. They closed the account, and opened a new one for her on the spot. Some banks are great, especially if you come in once a week and talk to the people there. If they're familiar with you, they don't feel that you're trying to run a scam.
You use a magnet? Some of us use telepathy. I close my eyes and focus on where I want to be, and manipulate the electromagnetic patterns on the ethernet cables of the server that runs Slashdot. The latency is a lot lower than using that pesky Internet thing.:)
A box of checks never arrived at their house. While waiting patiently for the 1-2 week delivery time, someone used the account information (name, routing and account numbers) to pay their home telephone bill. Brilliant, I must say.
I was with them at the bank, when they reported it. Law enforcement got a giggle out of it too.
Bad guys aren't always very smart. A lot of things they do are out of desperation. Some utility is going to be shut off, and they see a box of checks in a mailbox (actually sitting at the front door). Utilities are paid.
We never found out what happened with that. I hope local law enforcement went and gave them a ride to the court house. There really wasn't a need for our involvement, they already had our statement. "Checks never got here. We didn't pay that."
You're wondering the same thing I was not too long ago. Should I? Could I? I WILL!
I recently bought a 40' bus to make into an RV. I started considering various things about it. The bus has huge spaces to store batteries. It has a whole lot of real estate on the roof for solar panels. I could use the solar panels to charge the batteries, and replace the heavy diesel engine with an electric motor at a fraction of the weight.
I started crunching numbers on my own. Then I talked to some folks who are already doing EV conversions. The bus only has about 250hp and gets almost 10mpg, which is comparible to many SUV's, although it weighs a whole lot more (roughly 30k pounds). The gearing allows that seemingly low horsepower to move the heavy weight.
If I stuffed the lower sections of the bus to a reasonably heavy weight (roughly 8 tons), it would take days or weeks to charge the batteries, and even then I would only get about 100 to 200 miles out of it. The cost would be more than I could possibly spend in the rest of my life on diesel fuel, even at the recent high prices.
You can convert a car. There are several companies offering kits of some variety. You will lose a good bit of storage space to the batteries, and a lot of the performance due to the added weight. You'll most likely only get 100 miles or so on a full charge in ideal conditions.
A conversion car should be small and light. Unfortunately, that means you don't have a lot of room for batteries, which means you'll need to recharge more. Don't plan on going far from home, or you'll be catching a ride with a tow truck.
The worst part is, unless you are really close friends with someone willing to sell you parts under wholesale, or you have a rich friend willing to finance your project, you'll put more into the car than it'll ever be worth.
Now, with all that said, I *DO* eventually plan on building a small electric car to run to the grocery store with. It'll be a matter of when the price of solar panels drop more, and I have some free time on my hands. A sand rail / rail car / dune buggy with something resembled an enclosed body is what I'm thinking of. It won't be practical for much, but it'll be a fun hobby. Don't set your expectations too high if you start building one. There are garages all over the world where people have started all kinds of fun projects and never finished.
I've talked to spammers about their business. You actually get interesting information, if you don't appear to want to kill them.:)
About 5 years ago, they were hopeful to have 1 in 100 to 1 in 300 actually buy.
About 2 years ago, that dropped to 1 in 10,000
About 1 year ago, that dropped to 1 in 100,000
People are ignoring the spams. There are and always will be newbies who will look, see the amazing offer, and spend money. Unfortunately for all of us, less people are buying because of the spams. I say unfortunately for us, because it makes the spammers work more aggressively to make a sale. Where they could have sent out 10,000 and made 100 sales, now they have to send out 10,000,000 to make the same money.
It should be obvious to spammers that it's a terrible business to attempt to be in, but new people get into it every day, attempting to make a buck.
I've had people ask me to help them spam. The answer is always no, but I explain why. Besides being a terrible business to be in, there is no profit, and they seriously risk losing their online business over it. More and more providers have gotten pissy over it, so they'll find their sites shut down within days.
Take a nice conversation message board, say like this page, strip it down to the individual words, with a count of how many times each word appears. Knock off the top x percent (say 5%) assuming those are on the topic of discussion. Then knock off the bottom x percent because they're either obscure or misspelled. Recycle those words into the text to put into the spam messages. Sure, it'll be nonsensical, but judging by most of the emails I've seen over the years, most people can't write well formed messages anyways.
It's really sad. One beautiful place I found for only $400,000 was built in what is obviously wetlands. Well, obvious if you look at the satellite photo. Maybe it's not obvious if you drove up, but you'd have to be an idiot.
It's really sad that I'll have to specify "I want a house that won't be flooded when it rains." I expect I'll have to spell it out.
I don't know why this seems to stink to me, but...
For those that don't know, on my site, we run a lot of news. Even I miss a few of the finer points, but sometimes things come together a little too well, and are way too obvious.
Recently, an ex-CIA analyst warned that he believes there will be a "terrorist" event in June or July of this year. The event will be blamed on the al-Qaeda. It will actually be an event created by the CIA (or more importantly, bad faction of them).
So, guys at NASA are screaming "don't launch, we aren't ready", but the administration is pushing it. July 2 was scrubbed due to weather.
July 4th. If a terrorist was to strike against America, wanting to hurt us emotionally, wouldn't that seem like a prime date? Everyone remembers September 11th, and it won't be forgotten anytime soon. If there was a July 4th attack, who could celebrate it after that??
July 4th also has a few wonderful things to cover terrorist activity. To a civilian, what's the difference between a firework or a larger rocket powere projectile being fired? I know to me, the morter style fireworks sound like what I'd expect a military morter to sound like, only a bit quieter.
Why would the government do this? Because the people become outraged that someone could do something against America, and demand action. They'll in turn give the government power to do anything they need (or want) to accomplish it. Look at 9/11, the government was given the power to effectively destroy two other countries, in the name of stopping "terrorism". We're coming up on campaign season, and the Republican administration knows that they're really hurting right now, and don't have much of a chance of keeping their power.
If something did happen to the shuttle, I guarantee it would be attributed to a terrorist attack.
I believe the ex-CIA analyst who reported his suspicion did so with the hopes that if there was a government plan to do something, they wouldn't.
I really hope nothing happens. That's all this country needs is another decade or two of suspicions on how bad the government can really be.
I lived in Florida for years. Some of those storms are awesome. Blinding rain, several lightning strikes per minute, heavy winds.
The house I grew up in was hit by lightning more times than I can remember. I remember sometimes (at least a few times a summer) lightning would strike the house, and then arc inside the house from the stove to the kitchen sink.
Once, in one of the freak storms you're describing, I was driving up US Hwy 19 between Homosassa and Crystal River (i.e., middle of freakin' nowhere). It went from just a little rain to blinding rain where I slowed to about 10mph because I could no longer see the vehicle that was about 5 carlengths in front of me. In the sudden darkness, rain started blowing through the drivers window seals. That was odd, since the windows didn't leak. A couple seconds later, something HIT the drivers side of my car. Like, I thought someone had bumped into me in the rain, but I couldn't see anything. In less than a mile, the storm cleared, and I pulled over. There were no visible marks on my car. The next day in the paper, they showed a picture of the roof that had been blown off a building and wrapped around the power lines. That was exactly where I experienced what I described above.
Ya, when tropical storms blow through, we usually check to make sure there's some beer in the fridge. Everything else is handled on an as-needed basis. Generally, if the power goes out, it doesn't go out for long. Even hurricanes are the same way. They're just big thunderstorms.:)
I evacuated someone a couple years ago. The power was out, the windows were leaking because of the wind blowing the rain towards his house (multi-million dollar house, and it leaked). He couldn't drive his car because there were trees down. I happened to have a 4wd SUV. Crossing the bridges (Tampa to St. Pete) was a little touchy but not bad. I got around downed trees and debris in the road with no problem, but his Porsche wouldn't have done quite so well.
In one of the hurricanes that year, a friend lost the solar water heater panels for his pool. They heard them flapping around for a few minutes, and then saw them flying down the street.
With all that said, I'm moving back out there. My girlfriend has lived in LA her whole live, and has never experienced a Florida thunderstorm. She's terrified of living through a thunderstorm. I already told her, "Don't worry". We're shopping for the house right now, but one of my qualifications is for it to be out of the flood zones. Oh, one of those pesky things that people forget about until their house gets flooded. Lots of the brand new houses that we've found online so far are so low, the first good storm that comes through will flood their houses. I can't believe people are still building houses in these areas, but it seems that they're trying to build everywhere lately.
Honestly, I've found the Geek Squad to be on the same level as the sales staff in most large retail chains. That is, they know how to read the label to you, and sell it, but not much more.
At the local Best Buy store, they were having some sale, and they were doing several promotional events. One of the ones that seemed interesting was a "Stump The Geek" booth.
As the first "Geek" put it, you ask them a question, they answer. If they're wrong, you get a free T-shirt or other promotional items. I threw the girl a couple moderately hard questions. After 5 or 6 questions, she got someone more experienced than herself over. He informed me that I had to ask questions from the queue cards. They had a stack of about 100 questions with answers. As it turns out, they were to have taken the cards home and memorized the answers. Not fair.
But hey, in the interest of fairness I offered to have the tables turned. "You guys know the questions and answers. I've only seen the first 5 or 6 cards. Ask me the next 10 questions. If I answer right, I win. If I answer any wrong, I'll leave you guys alone."
I got 8 questions right, and on the 9th, the answer on the card was wrong. I explained to them why it was wrong, and why the correct answer was correct. The 10th question turned out to be just as bogus.
For example, a question was "How can data be sent to a printer." Their answer was USB. They had no clue that parallel, serial, and IR were correct answers too. "We only stock USB printers." I had to explain that there are still a good number of parallel printers in use, and it's very likely that a customer having problems may be using a 5 year old parallel printer.
Another one was, "What's the fastest WAN connection?". Being that I do network stuff a *LOT*, I had fun with this one. I believe their "right" answer was DSL. I started rattling off some of the OC speeds, and it got blank stares.
They conceeded that I knew their job better than they did. I had time on my hands. I believe the people I was with had gone off to look at movies. I started going through all their cards. I made two stacks. "Right" and "Wrong". The "Right" stack had valid question answer pairs. The "Wrong" were just plain wrong. I tried to discuss these with their senior guy, who drew a blank after I explained a few of the "Wrong" ones. A lot of his answers revolved around "We only stock...."
Trained monkeys with flash cards. If it's not on their flash card, they aren't going to know the answer. It applies through most chain stores though, so don't even hope for the "My store is better than your store" fight. I've spent time giving right answers to customers in stores on many (MANY) occasions.
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Unfortunately, it takes a turning event to make significant change.
I doubt voting will be the solution. I'm still hopeful, but......
Fortunately, the armed forces are made up of humans (for now), and those humans have family and friends in the civilian sector. When they're ordered to turn on American civilians, it won't be the revolutionaries against the military, it will be the revolutionaries AND a good portion of the military against the remainder of the government's military.
It won't be a good day in American history, but it will definitely make the history books. But remember, history is written by the victors. If the revolutionaries win, it will be the birth of a new America, taken from the tyranny. If the government stops the uprising, it will be the strong government stopping a disillusioned band of malcontents.
The military is already planning for such an event to occur.
http://www.google.com/search?q=domestic+civil+dis
Without significant planning and organization, any civilian unrest will not go over well. Sure, there are plenty of guns in the hands of Joe-Citizen, but in a situation of a single individual versus a squad who have the tactical advantage, the individual will never win. There will never be enough order without a random figure inside that organization realizing the potential for failure, and reporting to the government, and without a driving factor to encourage it, there will never be an organized group.
This administration is running on it's own agenda, and not listening to the people that they represent. The majority are very unhappy with their actions. An armed revolution could happen, but like I said, it won't be pretty, and in the first days (or years?) of it, the majority of losses will be on the revolutionaries side.
At very best, the administration will make a significant series of choices which drive the military to a coup. There, an organized and trained group will have the tactical advantage.
I feel this administration WILL continue it's tradition of making bad choices, and something will come of that. I'm not much of a fortune teller, so I'll continue pretending that voting does count, and voicing my opinion means something.
Actually, the mentality I was going for was don't escalate a problem if you can't handle the consequences. I did go farther with him on it.
If I hacked the other kid's account (ignoring the legal problems), the kid would do something more. etc.. etc.. etc..
It's a game that can't be won until it's way beyond what he's willing to handle.
If he doesn't learn what the cause and consequence of the problem was, so he can fix it in the future, he'll keep making the same mistakes, and have bigger problems later on.
There is a time and a place for revenge. It must be thought out properly, and handled in a way that will be to your advantage.
I have a friend who's a great example of that. She has an obnoxious neighbor that's been doing all kinds of things to her. She's absolutely sure she knows who the neighbor is, but has no evidence. I told her not to do anything about it in a physical fashion. She has all kinds of plans of what to do, but she won't do them now.
She asked the police and a lawyer what to do, and they told her the same thing. Without evidence, there's nowhere to go with it.
So, our revenge will be getting the crazy neighbor put in jail. It'll be perfectly legal on our part. We're putting together a video surveillance system for her house. It's amazing what you can do with a few bucks and a bunch of spare parts.
The last thing the neighbor did was egg my friends car. Before that, she put in anonymous calls to local law enforcement about all kinds of crazy things. Once we have evidence of a few things, all the previous things can be tied to her. Ahhh, criminal trespass, harassment, vandalism. In civil court, I'd be willing to bet that we could get a judgement ordering the neighbor to move out. I already told her that after I set up the equipment, I'll be more than happy to work with law enforcement on the matter, and testify in court. "Yes, I set up the equipment. This is how it works. I swear under oath the video was not tampered with."
I warned her though, it may not be the neighbor she thinks it is. You have to be VERY sure about who you're getting your revenge on, and do it right so you don't get your hands dirty.
I did this once before for someone. A lunitic shot up another friend's store late one night. I put the security images on DVD, then went to the guys house, and recorded evidence showing that the vehicle in the security footage was the same as the vehicle at the defendant's house. It was easy. We knew the make, model, and color of the vehicle, plus some distinguishing features. The security footage didn't get the license plate number, but mine did.
When the police showed up, they found the gun in the vehicle still, and matched it up to 4 other shootings in the same area. The guy is nicely tucked away in jail now.
The dirty revenge, contemplated by my friend was to go do something physical to the guy, his house, vehicle, and/or store. That's the dirty revenge that would have gotten my friend put in jail instead. We're all much happier with the clean way.
I had a blast doing that once working with a cam house. It wasn't Sub7, but something like it. I'd open and close their CD drive, and keep popping up on the screen "Feed Me Seymour!" It was so much more fun, because I could see their faces when I was doing it.
I just replied about kids. Look 'round for it.
For parents, they're harder. The older they get, the more in denial they'll be.
It'll probably be a good case of identity theft, before they ask "so what can I do to protect myself?" Just try to explain things to them, and be prepared for the day that they come to you because their bank account is short several hundred dollars, or [insert evil case here]. That's when they'll start listening.
I've had some good success through demonstration, and letting them make mistakes.
.... "
:)
:) Neither my girlfriends machine, nor her son's machine have had anything bad happen to them. I've even broken my Linux box, from doing very ill advised things. Doing it once gives me the experience of "what happens if....?", so I can help other people later. For me, I don't really care if I completely hose an OS installation. I'll wipe it out and reinstall. I always have another machine that I can use. :)
My girlfriend is pretty good with her computer. She made mistakes before I met her, and learned from them.
Her son has his own computer, and had made mistakes himself. With some stupid online game, someone got into his account, and messed it all up. His password was his own first name. I showed him some password scanning utilities, and explained how they work. I then described for him what a "good" password is.
He then asked me "Can you hack their account, and mess it up?" I told him that I could, but I won't. Could I? Maybe. Maybe they were just as stupid themselves, and used easy passwords. Maybe if I looked around enough, there was something exploitable on the site. I wouldn't though, to teach him that revenge doesn't solve anything.
I've shown both of them the joys of packet sniffing. While most of it was over their heads, showing them their own password was useful. "Look, I'm a hacker, and I can see everything you've done. To avoid me doing this, you should
Honestly, the best way I've found to protect myself is to learn what the bad guys are doing, and solve the problem. You have to teach them what the problems are, and how to protect themselves.
It's usually better to teach someone yourself. You can judge if they are absorbing the information, instead of letting them skim over the pages that are greek to them. "Password security? Ya, I have a password. It's 1234."
I've seen so many people in office environments who are just told "don't do this", but they don't understand why, so they'll still make mistakes. How many zombie machines are out there on the Internet right now, because people didn't understand what not to do and why?
Be Mr. Evil Hacker for a while. Mess with them. Tell them exactly what you did, and how to fix it. If you keep messing with them, it's very likely they won't keep making the same mistakes. There's no need to do anything particularly damaging. More than likely, they'll do it on their own.
In the last couple years, I've reinstalled Windows on my XP workstation three or four times, from using bad practices. It's my own dumb fault for doing things that I know I probably shouldn't be doing. Of course, I'm doing them to see how they work.
There are several aspects to the way.
Being that we have a good ol' Christian running the country, it could be looked at as a furthering the crusades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade
Your piracy example has some serious flaws. There was piracy by many groups.
I'm looking at the recent past, that people are still living with. Not many people remember if pirates kidnapped their long dead ancestors or not. Well, except the black americans, but we won't go there.
Recent memory is that America has been funding unrest at their homes. In the last decade, American planes have bombed their homes. American troops have shot their families. Sure, if I was there, I'd hate America too. Our recent actions haven't been helping in the least to change this. That's what has to change, to change the current atmosphere between us.
You do realize that the American government has been screwing around in the middle east for decades, right? We've financed wars, overthrown leaders, put in our own puppets, just to yank them out of power later when they don't behave exactly as we'd like.
If we hadn't started this whole game in the first place, there would be no issue. They wouldn't care about the great American evil in the least.
But, we did start the game. We have screwed with them for decades. Some of them are standing up to us now, and we call it terrorism. Of course they think we're the great evil, and anything we do is evil. Sure, American television, radio, and movies would be evil to them, because they come out of what we do.
We've had plenty of opportunities to step out of it, and let countries do as they'd like. We could have played right with the UN, to keep something resembling peace in the world. In real life, it hasn't happened like that.
We are **WAY** past the point of saying "oh, sorry 'bout that. We'll leave now, have a nice day.", but at least it would be a start. Instead, we continue on the path, and keep screwing with them.
If you turn it around, and ask "what if..." What if the middle eastern countries financed civil wars in the Americas? What if one country decided to invade America, and try to push their rule upon us? We'd fight back. There's no big surprise there. No one likes outside influences telling them what to do.
People get crap pay to do that stuff on the Internet. I think for a few million, it's not all that bad of a thing. It's all a matter of the price tag.
:)
:)
Hell, for the all time low price of just 10 million, I'd let someone do all that. For 15 million, they can even publish the pictures on the front page of every news site there is. I'd even do it with a shit eating grin on my face. Maybe a bit too literally.
Most of the people I know wouldn't care in the least. Anyone else, I don't care what they think.
Really, it's all academic. It's not going to happen, because the real offer will never be made. Anyone with that kind of money can go to any 3rd world country, buy a town, and do whatever they want to every person in the town.
Which brings to mind something I was seeing in the news for a while.. The white slave trade. Girls being bought and sold for just a few hundred dollars, and being forced into the sex trade. If they can be had so easily, why can't I seem to find where to buy one? I checked ebay, and there are no listings.
No shit. If someone threw millions my way, you'd be amazed what I'd do.
Or the shorter list, what I wouldn't do.
Ha!
Have you noticed all the less than friendly laws passed recently?
If they decide to do anything to him, they'll be shipping him off to a Southeastern Cuba vacation spot. It's a very exclusive resort, you can only show up by invitation (an invitation that you cannot refuse). How did the Eagles put it? "You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave..."
How did the summary of the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" go?
1) The US Gov't doesn't like you
2) They arrest you and hold you at places undisclosed, without access to a lawyer (or even a phone)
3) They "encourage" you to confess. Although it cannot be "torture", it will be anything that isn't seen as torture by the current administration (are electrodes to the nads torture? Nah.)
4) Once you've given your spontanious confession, it will be used against you.
Now, on spontanious confessions. Most guys have spilled their guts to their girlfriends and/or wives, to get them to shut up (tactfully put, if I must say so myself). Now, what are you going to do against trained agents? You'll crumble in seconds. You'll confess to anything they tell you to, just to get you to shut up.
For a person publishing information on the Internet, where all the bad guys can get a hold of it, you are quite likely one of the bad guys trying to get said information to them quickly. (I'd think an email would have been better, but this is our government we're talking about). Since the document is giving detailed information on circumventing national security (ha!), he's a terrorist.
The war on terror will be won, it doesn't matter how many innocent (or mostly innocent) civilians get taken down with them.
{sigh}
What happened to the days where the boogy man was the red in a submarine just off shore with a stockpile of nukes?
It's just a new boogy man, to make the government look like it's protecting the people. They never do ask, why are the bad guys screwing with us in the first place. Oh ya, because we've been screwing with them for decades.
s/muslim/christian/
s/islam/christianity/
That isn't a new war, it's been going on for centuries.
How do you think Christianity got to Europe? Have you ever asked what happend to the older religions?
Last time I was in Amsterdam, it was odd to see the blue lights at the walkways to home and business front doors. Someone there explained to me, it was to keep the junkies out. The junkies would sit out of view of the street and shoot up. The blue lights were there, so they wouldn't be able to see their veins, so they couldn't shoot up there.
:)
I was invited to take a job at good pay there. Then they started going through the issues with me about taxes. I don't remember specifically (it's been a while), but there was something about setting up a shell corporation to send my pay to, who would then pay all of my expenses. Every so often, I would need to fold the company, and start a new one. It was simply a matter of how things worked there, or at least that's what I was lead to believe. In the end, I didn't go, so I don't have first hand experience with doing that.
It is a beautiful place. I don't say that like most potheads. I don't smoke pot.
I may visit again, but I have no plans of every staying there.
Ya, she got it back immediately. They closed the account, and opened a new one for her on the spot. Some banks are great, especially if you come in once a week and talk to the people there. If they're familiar with you, they don't feel that you're trying to run a scam.
I haven't used format in years.
mke2fs -j
(I like ext3)
People get a kick out of it when I'll take a brand new computer, and the first thing I do is wipe the drive.
You use a magnet? Some of us use telepathy. I close my eyes and focus on where I want to be, and manipulate the electromagnetic patterns on the ethernet cables of the server that runs Slashdot. The latency is a lot lower than using that pesky Internet thing.
Actually, that happened to a friend I knew.
A box of checks never arrived at their house. While waiting patiently for the 1-2 week delivery time, someone used the account information (name, routing and account numbers) to pay their home telephone bill. Brilliant, I must say.
I was with them at the bank, when they reported it. Law enforcement got a giggle out of it too.
Bad guys aren't always very smart. A lot of things they do are out of desperation. Some utility is going to be shut off, and they see a box of checks in a mailbox (actually sitting at the front door). Utilities are paid.
We never found out what happened with that. I hope local law enforcement went and gave them a ride to the court house. There really wasn't a need for our involvement, they already had our statement. "Checks never got here. We didn't pay that."
You're wondering the same thing I was not too long ago. Should I? Could I? I WILL!
I recently bought a 40' bus to make into an RV. I started considering various things about it. The bus has huge spaces to store batteries. It has a whole lot of real estate on the roof for solar panels. I could use the solar panels to charge the batteries, and replace the heavy diesel engine with an electric motor at a fraction of the weight.
I started crunching numbers on my own. Then I talked to some folks who are already doing EV conversions. The bus only has about 250hp and gets almost 10mpg, which is comparible to many SUV's, although it weighs a whole lot more (roughly 30k pounds). The gearing allows that seemingly low horsepower to move the heavy weight.
If I stuffed the lower sections of the bus to a reasonably heavy weight (roughly 8 tons), it would take days or weeks to charge the batteries, and even then I would only get about 100 to 200 miles out of it. The cost would be more than I could possibly spend in the rest of my life on diesel fuel, even at the recent high prices.
You can convert a car. There are several companies offering kits of some variety. You will lose a good bit of storage space to the batteries, and a lot of the performance due to the added weight. You'll most likely only get 100 miles or so on a full charge in ideal conditions.
A conversion car should be small and light. Unfortunately, that means you don't have a lot of room for batteries, which means you'll need to recharge more. Don't plan on going far from home, or you'll be catching a ride with a tow truck.
The worst part is, unless you are really close friends with someone willing to sell you parts under wholesale, or you have a rich friend willing to finance your project, you'll put more into the car than it'll ever be worth.
Now, with all that said, I *DO* eventually plan on building a small electric car to run to the grocery store with. It'll be a matter of when the price of solar panels drop more, and I have some free time on my hands. A sand rail / rail car / dune buggy with something resembled an enclosed body is what I'm thinking of. It won't be practical for much, but it'll be a fun hobby. Don't set your expectations too high if you start building one. There are garages all over the world where people have started all kinds of fun projects and never finished.
Actually, there are several groups that put up a pretty decent fight against Internet broadcasters.
Check out somafm.com. They have a bit of their legal history on their about page.
http://somafm.com/about/
I've talked to spammers about their business. You actually get interesting information, if you don't appear to want to kill them.
About 5 years ago, they were hopeful to have 1 in 100 to 1 in 300 actually buy.
About 2 years ago, that dropped to 1 in 10,000
About 1 year ago, that dropped to 1 in 100,000
People are ignoring the spams. There are and always will be newbies who will look, see the amazing offer, and spend money. Unfortunately for all of us, less people are buying because of the spams. I say unfortunately for us, because it makes the spammers work more aggressively to make a sale. Where they could have sent out 10,000 and made 100 sales, now they have to send out 10,000,000 to make the same money.
It should be obvious to spammers that it's a terrible business to attempt to be in, but new people get into it every day, attempting to make a buck.
I've had people ask me to help them spam. The answer is always no, but I explain why. Besides being a terrible business to be in, there is no profit, and they seriously risk losing their online business over it. More and more providers have gotten pissy over it, so they'll find their sites shut down within days.
That's not all that hard to do.
Take a nice conversation message board, say like this page, strip it down to the individual words, with a count of how many times each word appears. Knock off the top x percent (say 5%) assuming those are on the topic of discussion. Then knock off the bottom x percent because they're either obscure or misspelled. Recycle those words into the text to put into the spam messages. Sure, it'll be nonsensical, but judging by most of the emails I've seen over the years, most people can't write well formed messages anyways.
The ex-CIA analyst I cited didn't specify the shuttle. He specified June or July.
He wasn't my friend. It was a public announcement carried by all the major media just over a month ago.
It's really sad. One beautiful place I found for only $400,000 was built in what is obviously wetlands. Well, obvious if you look at the satellite photo. Maybe it's not obvious if you drove up, but you'd have to be an idiot.
It's really sad that I'll have to specify "I want a house that won't be flooded when it rains." I expect I'll have to spell it out.
I don't know why this seems to stink to me, but...
For those that don't know, on my site, we run a lot of news. Even I miss a few of the finer points, but sometimes things come together a little too well, and are way too obvious.
Recently, an ex-CIA analyst warned that he believes there will be a "terrorist" event in June or July of this year. The event will be blamed on the al-Qaeda. It will actually be an event created by the CIA (or more importantly, bad faction of them).
So, guys at NASA are screaming "don't launch, we aren't ready", but the administration is pushing it. July 2 was scrubbed due to weather.
July 4th. If a terrorist was to strike against America, wanting to hurt us emotionally, wouldn't that seem like a prime date? Everyone remembers September 11th, and it won't be forgotten anytime soon. If there was a July 4th attack, who could celebrate it after that??
July 4th also has a few wonderful things to cover terrorist activity. To a civilian, what's the difference between a firework or a larger rocket powere projectile being fired? I know to me, the morter style fireworks sound like what I'd expect a military morter to sound like, only a bit quieter.
Why would the government do this? Because the people become outraged that someone could do something against America, and demand action. They'll in turn give the government power to do anything they need (or want) to accomplish it. Look at 9/11, the government was given the power to effectively destroy two other countries, in the name of stopping "terrorism". We're coming up on campaign season, and the Republican administration knows that they're really hurting right now, and don't have much of a chance of keeping their power.
If something did happen to the shuttle, I guarantee it would be attributed to a terrorist attack.
I believe the ex-CIA analyst who reported his suspicion did so with the hopes that if there was a government plan to do something, they wouldn't.
I really hope nothing happens. That's all this country needs is another decade or two of suspicions on how bad the government can really be.
Ok, return with your flames now.
You forgot the tornado's. :)
:)
I lived in Florida for years. Some of those storms are awesome. Blinding rain, several lightning strikes per minute, heavy winds.
The house I grew up in was hit by lightning more times than I can remember. I remember sometimes (at least a few times a summer) lightning would strike the house, and then arc inside the house from the stove to the kitchen sink.
Once, in one of the freak storms you're describing, I was driving up US Hwy 19 between Homosassa and Crystal River (i.e., middle of freakin' nowhere). It went from just a little rain to blinding rain where I slowed to about 10mph because I could no longer see the vehicle that was about 5 carlengths in front of me. In the sudden darkness, rain started blowing through the drivers window seals. That was odd, since the windows didn't leak. A couple seconds later, something HIT the drivers side of my car. Like, I thought someone had bumped into me in the rain, but I couldn't see anything. In less than a mile, the storm cleared, and I pulled over. There were no visible marks on my car. The next day in the paper, they showed a picture of the roof that had been blown off a building and wrapped around the power lines. That was exactly where I experienced what I described above.
Ya, when tropical storms blow through, we usually check to make sure there's some beer in the fridge. Everything else is handled on an as-needed basis. Generally, if the power goes out, it doesn't go out for long. Even hurricanes are the same way. They're just big thunderstorms.
I evacuated someone a couple years ago. The power was out, the windows were leaking because of the wind blowing the rain towards his house (multi-million dollar house, and it leaked). He couldn't drive his car because there were trees down. I happened to have a 4wd SUV. Crossing the bridges (Tampa to St. Pete) was a little touchy but not bad. I got around downed trees and debris in the road with no problem, but his Porsche wouldn't have done quite so well.
In one of the hurricanes that year, a friend lost the solar water heater panels for his pool. They heard them flapping around for a few minutes, and then saw them flying down the street.
With all that said, I'm moving back out there. My girlfriend has lived in LA her whole live, and has never experienced a Florida thunderstorm. She's terrified of living through a thunderstorm. I already told her, "Don't worry". We're shopping for the house right now, but one of my qualifications is for it to be out of the flood zones. Oh, one of those pesky things that people forget about until their house gets flooded. Lots of the brand new houses that we've found online so far are so low, the first good storm that comes through will flood their houses. I can't believe people are still building houses in these areas, but it seems that they're trying to build everywhere lately.
Honestly, I've found the Geek Squad to be on the same level as the sales staff in most large retail chains. That is, they know how to read the label to you, and sell it, but not much more.
At the local Best Buy store, they were having some sale, and they were doing several promotional events. One of the ones that seemed interesting was a "Stump The Geek" booth.
As the first "Geek" put it, you ask them a question, they answer. If they're wrong, you get a free T-shirt or other promotional items. I threw the girl a couple moderately hard questions. After 5 or 6 questions, she got someone more experienced than herself over. He informed me that I had to ask questions from the queue cards. They had a stack of about 100 questions with answers. As it turns out, they were to have taken the cards home and memorized the answers. Not fair.
But hey, in the interest of fairness I offered to have the tables turned. "You guys know the questions and answers. I've only seen the first 5 or 6 cards. Ask me the next 10 questions. If I answer right, I win. If I answer any wrong, I'll leave you guys alone."
I got 8 questions right, and on the 9th, the answer on the card was wrong. I explained to them why it was wrong, and why the correct answer was correct. The 10th question turned out to be just as bogus.
For example, a question was "How can data be sent to a printer." Their answer was USB. They had no clue that parallel, serial, and IR were correct answers too. "We only stock USB printers." I had to explain that there are still a good number of parallel printers in use, and it's very likely that a customer having problems may be using a 5 year old parallel printer.
Another one was, "What's the fastest WAN connection?". Being that I do network stuff a *LOT*, I had fun with this one. I believe their "right" answer was DSL. I started rattling off some of the OC speeds, and it got blank stares.
They conceeded that I knew their job better than they did. I had time on my hands. I believe the people I was with had gone off to look at movies. I started going through all their cards. I made two stacks. "Right" and "Wrong". The "Right" stack had valid question answer pairs. The "Wrong" were just plain wrong. I tried to discuss these with their senior guy, who drew a blank after I explained a few of the "Wrong" ones. A lot of his answers revolved around "We only stock...."
Trained monkeys with flash cards. If it's not on their flash card, they aren't going to know the answer. It applies through most chain stores though, so don't even hope for the "My store is better than your store" fight. I've spent time giving right answers to customers in stores on many (MANY) occasions.