Anonymous access through 802.11 hotspots is already a law-enforcement headache, especially in crowded (sub)urban areas like NYC, Seattle, and No. Virginia. It's too easy to wardrive until you find a nice open access point, do some dirty deeds (dirt cheap!), and be gone within an hour. As long as there are enough of them around to make blanket stakeouts infeasible, there isn't much that law enforcement can do.
The question of whether wide-area 802.16 access can be anonymous/untraceable will be a HUGE deal. And it depends on a lot of factors. Maybe somebody who knows more about the standard can help me sort this out, too...
In order to get anonymous access, you can't have a billing relationship with the ISP. This would require that you hijack a legitimate user's connection, or fool the base station into granting you a session without really being authorized.
1) What kind of security features does the protocol offer? Do they have WPA or something like it, or do they expect encryption and auth to happen at a higher level? Because if traffic isn't strongly protected, I can envision a whole range of piggy-backing tricks to inject traffic into someone else's session, mostly centered around spoofing.
2) What kind of cheap/hackable client equipment will be available? If the user-premises gear is ISP-owned (likely) and expensive (also likely), it's not going to be easy for the geeks to run down to Fry's and start pulling them apart to make them do neat tricks. WiFi has been so hackable and popular for exactly that reason.
3) A side effect of having costly, ISP-owned quipment (#2) may be to affect the speed at which security problems get fixed. In my experience, the expensive, telco-like equipment doesn't get as much maintenance attention from vendors (firmware upgrades) as the cheap, million-run devices that are owned by the end users. But I could be wrong about that--any ideas?
4) Has the working group learned anything from the experiences with 802.11 and its various security issues? Somehow I doubt it, but this might be their big chance to show the world.
"Forensics" on a live system is a misnomer. For incident response, collecting live data on open ports, running processes, logged on users, and mounted devices is useful and sometimes necessary. Investigators should be sure to check -- gingerly -- whether any encrypted volumes are mounted.
Why a "misnomer"? Forensics, in the usage of the phrase "computer forensics", is an extension of our usage of forensics to refer to the presentation of evidence in court. The word initially means "methods pertaining to proving a proposition by logical argument". It doesn't matter whether the collection of data is live or not, it's still "forensics".
Your statements, despite your credentials, suffers from the failing of being Windows-centric (come on "registry keys"?), and (worse, still) Encase-Centric. And your advice about pulling the plug is horrifically oversimplified.
What happens when someone's walked into your LAMPS servers through an unpatched OpenSSH vulnerability, but hasn't installed a rootkit? If you just "pull the plug", the real evidence of the intrusion goes bye-bye because none of it was written to the hard drive. You'll probably want to look at netstat, maybe take a core dump to a remote machine, and generally examine the state of the running machine. THEN, depending on the type of filesystem, you either A) pull the plug, B) issue a 'flush' and then pull the plug, or C) go through the machine's normal shutdown procedure.
Think about it: If you just pull the plug without thinking the matter through, you stand a good change of fucking things up. Yes, many sysadmins cause problems by trying to do too much work on their own, or taking steps that actually destroy existing evidence, but that's no reason to give blanket advice that can be as shitty as it is good!
The correct solution: train the sysadmins to be first responders, or at least train them enough to be capable of keeping their hands off the systems until qualified help arrives. Whether you have in-house incident response people or you hire an outside firm, make sure that your admins consult with them before moving on anything that could lead to a legal issue.
Your biases are reflective of desktop experience on Windows platforms, which is a large part of forensic work, I'll grant. But it's far from all of it, and it's actually counter-productive on many non-Windows machines. For instance: are you familiar with a thing called tmpfs? It's a RAM-based filesystem for the/tmp directory (or any other mount point, potentially) that allows seamless file-and-directory semantics but that never writes anything to disk.
Guess what? JUST ABOUT EVERY LINUX DISTRO USES TMPFS, NOWADAYS! Can you imagine how badly you would screw up investigations if you went around pulling plugs on a bunch of Linux machines, and losing the entire contents of their/tmp directories in the process? That's liable to get you in the doghouse, that's for sure!
There's no excuse for looking like an expert but giving poor advice, even if this IS Slashdot.
Again, i am not implying anything, i just don't like it when people take a transitory scientific paradigm as dogma.
Jesus Teabagging Christ. In the 19th Century, BEFORE the experimental evidence to support relativity was in, you would have been a grade-A, unscientific idiot to start gabbing about how you couldn't accelerate that rocket to 3x10^6 km/sec. You may have been right, but it would be entirely coincidental because without evidence, you're talking out your ass!
Besides, the original poster isn't saying "There's no evidence to support teleportation," he's pointing out (correctly) that there are a number of concrete, well-demonstrated experimental and theoretical results that provide evidence against teleportation. Big fucking difference, mate! This is more like saying, in the 19th century, that if you start accelerating an object to 3x10^6 km/sec, that object will continue accelerating on its own with no additional energy input.
Notice the difference? There are things that HAVE ALREADY BEEN DISPROVEN, as opposed to things that have yet to be proven OR disproven. And teleportation, like FTL travel, seems to be in the latter category.
(For the record, I was a student of Alan Sokal's at NYU, and this is one of his favorite PoMo arguments to debunk.)
Wait a minute, though... Of ALL the criminal cases in this country that end in conviction, upwards of 90% never go to trial, period. So I don't think you can start a specific argument about computer crime based on this.
And yes, I will admit, I have seen many MANY instances of Federal or local law-enforcement agencies (don't want to name names) that did absolutely stupid things in computer crime investigations--truly amatuerish, moronic, bumbling clod-like behavior. But I have also seen very good work, top-notch hero shit, from those same outfits. So I don't think you can premise an argument on failues of sophisitication in law-enforcement agencies, because you're dealing with a very diverse and mixed bag, even just within a given agency.
But the REAL point is that you don't need to actually go on the stand to get investigative experience. That's trial experience, and it speaks to a different set of skills. You'd be surprised at how few cases some of the top people in the forensics field have ever actually testified in. But they still have experience, because they still performed investigations: collecting and analyzing data, preparing hypotheses and testing them until they have a provable, probable theory, and presenting those findings in a useful way.
Like I said, this isn't true of every agent or officer that ever worked as an investigator, but my original point is that you can't get this experience outside of actually doing it. The fact that some of the people working in this field haven't learned very much just says that those people are idiots. And yes, there are some idiots in LE agencies, the same as every organization.
And BTW, computer forensics don't take that long at all, in most cases. If you're talking about having to run keyword searches against the hard drives, network shares, and email archives (including backup tapes) for 200+ users, that will surely take a while, but it's only because of the volume of data involved. Criminal cases involving computer forensics rarely, in my experience, involve more than a handful of data sources, of which hard drives are probably the largest type. And at 25-40 MB/sec, you can search a lot of data in a day.
Investigative work has VERY little to do with proprietary methods, for a couple of reasons:
1) Every investigation, especially when dealing with computer crime, is going to be different. There aren't really any super-secret methods that ANYone who does normal work in the field (networking, programming, sysadmining) wouldn't already know.
2) Most investigative work has to hew to legal standards for evidence, even if the issue probably isn't going to court, because it MIGHT go to court. Meaning that all of your methods as an investigator have to meet standards for scientific evidence, which requires (among other things) that those methods be widely accepted in the field and peer reviewed. It's hard to keep things secret when they have to be peer reviewed to be useful at all.
3) Good investigators get that way through experience, not training. I've met people with significantly less pure technical skill than I have who can make me look like a fool on the investigative front. The difference is that these kinds of people have years or decades of experiential learning, closed cases, and lessons learned behind them. Skill and method is important, but it's far from being the whole story. And besides, you can always learn new skills by picking up a book/taking a class and then applying them, but you can only get experience from time and getting your ass kicked repeatedly.
(As I've noted elsewhere, I ought to disclose that I work for Steve, so take as you will.)
Steve also gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago to the NYLUG, which any of you New Yorkers might have caught. I think they have video footage of the talk on the website, www.nylug.org. The talk was better-than-average for this kind of thing.
The book has some great war stories, too. The entertainment value is worth something....Although I should disclose that I work with him, so you'll probably want to judge for yourself.
I'll bite. No, this doesn't necessarily mean that a rat could be trained to fly a plane. A rat has millions of neurons, but most of them are taken up full-time doing specific things (strangely enough, a lot of that is scent processing). But if you can define goals for the rat, you can probably train it to do a lot of things, including a subset of the plane-flying challenge.
You don't want to think of the neurons as "hardware" exactly, either. The process of building and training a neural network is about replacing the programming component of building a system, not about replacing the hardware. Writing a piece of software to fly a plane by itself is hard work--complicated task, not easily reduced to algorithmic instruction sets. Lots of tiny rule modifications needed to the basic set of "maintain altitude and heading". The trick with neural nets is that you set up the network, and then you train it by trial and error to do the task. It programs itself, essentially.
We can and do build neural net simulations in pure software, which is where most of the research has been done so far. But neural net simulations on computers are VERY computationally expensive and take up a shitload of memory, so there are limits as to how big you can make your simulation and still do anything with it. This is a big problem, because neural nets can potentially do incredibly interesting things (like, say sentience!) if they get big enough--but we don't have computers big enough to model neural nets as complicated as we'd like.
I know the article says that these guys are only using this project to investigate how neurons work in the real world, but the potential applications of this are big. Neural nets using actual neurons, not expensive simulations, could be cheap enough to build and train that they would find commercial uses.
What? Talk about wrong-ass. The speed of an electric charge in a wire has just about nothing to do with the speed of the chip. This is so backwards I thought you were trolling.
Chip performance is about how much work can be done in a certain amount of time. Latency might be affected by the speed of charge, but throughput doesn't have to be. You want to move 2x the data in the same amount of time? Double the width of all the data paths in the CPU, and you'll get close to it.
A P4 has more than 10 million transistors in it, a very large portion of which are switching at any given time. You have to think about the fact that computational work is being done in parallel all over the CPU, with multiple pathways carrying information and multiple registers acting on it AT THE SAME TIME.
So yeah, ONE electron might move at 0.8c (and I think you're wrong about that, BTW), but remember that there are BILLIONS of electrons moving together in a modern CPU. The wire speed has shit to do with anything.
Not quite. You're an idiot. Since when is a program that does illegal things, with or without legal uses, become illegal itself?
So now nmap and SATAN are illegal? How about Ettercap and Dsniff, which are ONLY useful as penetration and MITM tools?
Oh, WAIT! They're not! And neither is any of the exploit code that gets posted every single day on the net, despite the fact that these programs are written specifically to break into vulnerable software.
Did you think for even five seconds before posting that?
It's a tit-for-tat situation. The French government was tapping phones on Air France flights to the UK and the US for years. They handed over tons of big-money business deals to French companies that way. Primarily, they were using it to secure contracts for Airbus.
And in the US, the primary beneficiary for Echelon information was Boeing--these two companies are essentially each others' sole global competitor. Each one is also so heavily subsidized by its respective government that they're both nationalized in everything but name.
I won't say the the US and Boeing are blameless or innocent or even nice people, but this is a game that everybody is playing. We just happen to be very, VERY good at it.
Has anyone ever taken a look at some of the stuff available in the 2.6 configuration options? Do a 'make menuconfig' and browse through the "General Setup" and "Processor Type and Features" submenus. A bunch of it is wholly useless to 99.9% of the installations out there.
But it's there as an option, if you want it, like most everything else. Have a tulip ethernet card? Include the driver. If you don't, leave it out. Old BIOS doesn't do ACPI? Leave it out. Don't need a keyboard driver because it's an appliance system? Leave it out.
Why the hell not just include the real-time business as options? Is the maintenance really that much more challenging?
Your point about using unique bill keys is right on--I didn't even think about that. That would work much better.
As for the theory about RFID tags in money, how about those pictures from a couple months back of the trucker/ConspiracyNut microwaving his wad? Classic. Doesn't get any better.
Re:More important....
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, the first time I was introduced to Canadian money (on a trip to Seattle to see my uncle), my good-ol' Unc confused me by referring to Canadian quarters as "funny money" and implied that there was something sneaky about the little buggers. Which there was--imagine my surprise when I came home to LA a week later, hit the arcade, and discovered that I had about $4.00 worth of CN quarters.
That's a lot of rounds of Street Fighter that I missed out on!
But seriously, I think that any American pretension toward implying that foreign currency is fake or "confederate" is probably just joking. I have a hard time imagining that anyone could have their history/poli.sci. that fucked up.
Looooong article, but worth the read
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I highly recommend RTFAing. It's a good story, and lots of juicy techy details.
The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that whatever technical features they introduce to protect banknotes, it doesn't do a damn bit of good unless every high-school dropout grocery clerk can use those features effectively to identify bad notes. You could have forty kinds of anti-counterfeiting devices on a note, but unless the public can easily and quickly use those features, they aren't going to help.
This got me started thinking on using crypto to protect banknotes--try embedding an RFID-type device into every banknote, with a simple chip that can perform a SHA-1 signing back-ending the RFID mechanism. An RF device sends a random number to the bill, which receives that number and SHA-1 signs it, and returns the signature. If you put the same private key into all of the bills, you could build relatively simple, hand-held currency scanners that all have the public key and can verify that the bill is real.
This has its problems: 1) Can we actually build a chip/RF mechanism small enough and robust enough to be used in paper currency? 2) I can imagine this kind of mechanism adding a lot of expense to the note manufacturing process. 3) In order to use this, you'd have to distribute gazillions of RF scanners to the point-of-sale. Expensive, and not fast to get that kind of gadget penetration. 4) Tamper-resistence: you have to build the SHA-1 chips so that they can't be broken open. This is similar to the MS Trusted Computing issue--is it possible to store a key in a physical device such that the key cannot be extracted physically?
That last problem is the worst--it's a lot like the DVD CSS encryption scheme problem. It works find until ONE INSTANCE of the private key gets broken, and then everybody has the key to every single banknote in circulation. And then the whole thing is kaput, money down the drain (literally). So it would be awfully important to solve the tamper-proofing issue, before you went ahead with this idea.
Shit, I gotta get a girlfriend--posting coherent ideas to Slashdot at 11 on a Friday night is pretty busted.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to use something like this for non-broadcase Ethernet either, now that I think of it.
Um, yes, it WOULD be a bad idea. WEP/WPA/WPA2 are all server-client protocols, in that they encrypt transmissions between a number of remote clients and a single central point. In order to make the analogy hold to wired Ethernet, you would have to make every Ethernet switch/hub/router support the crypto interaction with clients. As well as replacing every NIC in existence.
And even then, the encryption wouldn't buy you much, because it only encrypts between the Ethernet hosts and the switch. It CAN'T encrypt transmissions past the switch, because it would be hiding the IP addresses and port numbers that are need to route the packets at an IP level. If you wanted to move the link-level encrypted packets further, you would have to either decrypt them and transmit them upstream in the clear, or you'd have to configure every single route in between your endpoints with the WEP-ish key. Which would defeat the point of encrypting, because in order to use this on the Internet, everybody on the Net would have to have the same key.
This is one of the reasons why we have things like IPSEC and VPNs--they're based on PKI systems, or they're built with a centralized authenticator/concentrator, or both. And they encrypt IP packet contents, not the IP packet itself (including the header info), meaning that any router can pass them without having to open the crypto-envelope.
WEP and its relatives are link-level encryption, and only meant for a single physical hop, and they're not particularly scalable. They're niche solutions that either wouldn't work or wouldn't be worthwhile for most other applications.
Actually, the economic consensus (I know, I know, to the extent that their IS an economic consensus) is that the recent oil price spikes are NOT sending the economy reeling, and probably won't anytime soon. In past oil-induced recessions, the higher price of energy was coupled closely with high inflation rates. That's not happening right now, due to other factors in the economy:
- the US economy and GDP isn't nearly as dependent on oil as it was in the 1970s. MPG is up, more people use mass transit, and less of the population is employed in oil-needy industries (manufacturing) and more in oil-indifferent industries (office jobs, tech work).
- interest rates are stable and cool.
- the economy is otherwise healthy and stable.
On top of that, the oil price issues right now aren't entirely a result of US policies overseas. The oil market is highly sensitive to the political status of the Mideast generally, and to the House of Saud in particular. The troubles in Saudi Arabia are somewhat masked in the press by the war in Iraq and domestic terrorism, but things are far from happy in that country.
Al-Qaeda isn't just the sworn enemy of the US--they have serious problems with the Saudis, too. One of their stated goals is the overthrow of the current regime. So assuming that we weren't in Iraq, I would imagine that more Islamic fundamentalist terrorist resources would be hitting the US and the Saudis directly.
So maybe all the world's problems aren't caused by the Iraq war and GW Bush. I'll admit, the guy isn't doing a particularly good job of handling things, but he did get handed a live grenade when he took office.
First of all, RTFA. They're seeking to BRING the internet to the underprivileged in countries that are least likely to get it otherwise. That's the whole point.
Second of all, it's not like censorship and oppression uniquely affect the poorest of the poor. There's a thing called the "middle class", or perhaps "Bourgeoisie" (if you're that kind of cat). Everybody who isn't politically/economically elite can suffer from these kinds of things. Take a look at China: the Great Firewall blocks the traffic of the wage-slave and entrepreneur alike.
And yes, it's more likely that those in the middle class will have the resources, education, perspective, and political voice to resist censorship on their own, but that's a tendency, not a binary situation.
Besides, tools like these don't magically make oppressive governments stop being evil--the tools have to be applied to the problem by motivated actors. It turns out (despite what Marx thought) that the middle class is the source of a hell of a lot more political resistance to government than the poor.* This isn't a denigration of the poor--it's just an observed fact of social change movements around the world in the last 50 years. So the logic follows that giving tools to fight oppression to the middle class permits them to carry the fight for everybody.
* Personally, I chalk this up to the fact that the line between the middle class and the workers that Marx noticed has blurred and become a really big, fat zone. A huge portion of the American/European middle class are wage-earners, which would make them "workers" according to Marxist thought. But they also own a substantial amount of property (houses, cars, boats, bank accounts, investments), which would make them capitalists. Funny old world we live in, isn't it?
The GPL doesn't need to have that specific phrase in it. Copyright itself gives the owner the power to do that, if you've violated the license agreement that you accepted the software under.
The GPL is the specific terms of a contract under which you are allowed to use the program. The author agrees to let you use the software, and you agree to abide by his license. At the point where you have broken the license terms, you've breached the contract.
When one party breaches contract, the other party's obligations under that contract evaporate--the copyright owner no longer has to let you use his software. In theory, that could mean that he takes you to court and compels you to stop using the software with a cease-and-desist order. More likely, he will sue you for damages (if there are any), or if we're talking about GPL licenses, he'll probably just get the court to compel you to stop violating the GPL.
If you think that's out of whack, try looking at the license that comes with the BitKeeper software that's currently used to work with the Linux kernel. The license specifies that you cannot use BitKeeper to write software that competes with BitKeeper!
The only "additional right" that the GPL gives you is what it specifies in the license: to use, modify, copy, and redistribute original copies or copies of derived works, AND that you provide source code to anyone who asks. You are correct in that you can only get these rights if you agree to abide by the GPL. If you fail to abide by the GPL or "ignore" it, the copyright owner can force you to stop distributing, AND to stop using, that piece of GPLd software.
But that EXACTLY what Microsoft is doing, too! Their license, the Windows EULA, just happens to have a lot more restrictions that the GPL. MS lets you use the software, provided that don't reverse-engineer or decompile it, and they don't let you make copies. IN return for agreeing to their restrictions, you get to use their software. You can also choose to "ignore" the MS EULA, but that means you have to stop using their software because you give up your rights to it.
If you think that the GPL just "gives additional rights", think again. IT IS A RESTRICTION. If Linux was released in the public domain, unrestricted, MS could borrow as many parts as it wanted to without any worry. If Linux was released under a BSD license, MS could steal the TCP/IP stack and incorporate it into Windows (like they did in the early '90s with the UNIX stack). The GPL forbids that kind of bevhavior, and gives users less rights than they would have under some licenses, but more rights than under others.
"A private corporation -- e.g. a small business owned by one person -- can make an anonymous donation to a homeless shelter just because the owner wants to. It is illegal for the CEO of a publicly held corporation to do the same thing."
First of all, a small business owned by one person (corporate or not) doesn't have any shareholders besides that one dude. THAT's why he can do whatever he wants--it has nothing to do with the corporate status of his business.
Second of all, corporate officers are compelled to act in the best interests of their shareholders, but there's not law that says they can't make philanthropic donations. When tornados wreck the Midwest, Budweiser sends beer trucks full of drinking water and emergency supplies to help out. They happen to get good PR out of it, but there's no law that says that they have to justify things this way. If Bud didn't have any marked trucks to make a photo-op, and their marketing department forgot to issue a press release, is the CEO suddenly a criminal?
Think about it this way: If all of your shareholders agree that you should make an anonymous donation to a homeless shelter, you'd be breaching your obligations if you DIDN'T make the donations--they own the business, so they decide what goes. It so happens that MOST shareholders want companies in which they're invested to just make money, and the shareholders make philanthropic decisions on their own. But nothing says it has to work like that, and it often doesn't.
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Anonymous access through 802.11 hotspots is already a law-enforcement headache, especially in crowded (sub)urban areas like NYC, Seattle, and No. Virginia. It's too easy to wardrive until you find a nice open access point, do some dirty deeds (dirt cheap!), and be gone within an hour. As long as there are enough of them around to make blanket stakeouts infeasible, there isn't much that law enforcement can do.
The question of whether wide-area 802.16 access can be anonymous/untraceable will be a HUGE deal. And it depends on a lot of factors. Maybe somebody who knows more about the standard can help me sort this out, too...
In order to get anonymous access, you can't have a billing relationship with the ISP. This would require that you hijack a legitimate user's connection, or fool the base station into granting you a session without really being authorized.
1) What kind of security features does the protocol offer? Do they have WPA or something like it, or do they expect encryption and auth to happen at a higher level? Because if traffic isn't strongly protected, I can envision a whole range of piggy-backing tricks to inject traffic into someone else's session, mostly centered around spoofing.
2) What kind of cheap/hackable client equipment will be available? If the user-premises gear is ISP-owned (likely) and expensive (also likely), it's not going to be easy for the geeks to run down to Fry's and start pulling them apart to make them do neat tricks. WiFi has been so hackable and popular for exactly that reason.
3) A side effect of having costly, ISP-owned quipment (#2) may be to affect the speed at which security problems get fixed. In my experience, the expensive, telco-like equipment doesn't get as much maintenance attention from vendors (firmware upgrades) as the cheap, million-run devices that are owned by the end users. But I could be wrong about that--any ideas?
4) Has the working group learned anything from the experiences with 802.11 and its various security issues? Somehow I doubt it, but this might be their big chance to show the world.
"Forensics" on a live system is a misnomer. For incident response, collecting live data on open ports, running processes, logged on users, and mounted devices is useful and sometimes necessary. Investigators should be sure to check -- gingerly -- whether any encrypted volumes are mounted.
/tmp directory (or any other mount point, potentially) that allows seamless file-and-directory semantics but that never writes anything to disk.
/tmp directories in the process? That's liable to get you in the doghouse, that's for sure!
Why a "misnomer"? Forensics, in the usage of the phrase "computer forensics", is an extension of our usage of forensics to refer to the presentation of evidence in court. The word initially means "methods pertaining to proving a proposition by logical argument". It doesn't matter whether the collection of data is live or not, it's still "forensics".
Your statements, despite your credentials, suffers from the failing of being Windows-centric (come on "registry keys"?), and (worse, still) Encase-Centric. And your advice about pulling the plug is horrifically oversimplified.
What happens when someone's walked into your LAMPS servers through an unpatched OpenSSH vulnerability, but hasn't installed a rootkit? If you just "pull the plug", the real evidence of the intrusion goes bye-bye because none of it was written to the hard drive. You'll probably want to look at netstat, maybe take a core dump to a remote machine, and generally examine the state of the running machine. THEN, depending on the type of filesystem, you either A) pull the plug, B) issue a 'flush' and then pull the plug, or C) go through the machine's normal shutdown procedure.
Think about it: If you just pull the plug without thinking the matter through, you stand a good change of fucking things up. Yes, many sysadmins cause problems by trying to do too much work on their own, or taking steps that actually destroy existing evidence, but that's no reason to give blanket advice that can be as shitty as it is good!
The correct solution: train the sysadmins to be first responders, or at least train them enough to be capable of keeping their hands off the systems until qualified help arrives. Whether you have in-house incident response people or you hire an outside firm, make sure that your admins consult with them before moving on anything that could lead to a legal issue.
Your biases are reflective of desktop experience on Windows platforms, which is a large part of forensic work, I'll grant. But it's far from all of it, and it's actually counter-productive on many non-Windows machines. For instance: are you familiar with a thing called tmpfs? It's a RAM-based filesystem for the
Guess what? JUST ABOUT EVERY LINUX DISTRO USES TMPFS, NOWADAYS! Can you imagine how badly you would screw up investigations if you went around pulling plugs on a bunch of Linux machines, and losing the entire contents of their
There's no excuse for looking like an expert but giving poor advice, even if this IS Slashdot.
"We use Skype mostly, and mobile phones to receive calls from people not on Skype."
Miss Cleo told me that they use mobile phones to call 911.
No, really--did you even read that quote you cut-n-paste'd?
Again, i am not implying anything, i just don't like it when people take a transitory scientific paradigm as dogma.
Jesus Teabagging Christ. In the 19th Century, BEFORE the experimental evidence to support relativity was in, you would have been a grade-A, unscientific idiot to start gabbing about how you couldn't accelerate that rocket to 3x10^6 km/sec. You may have been right, but it would be entirely coincidental because without evidence, you're talking out your ass!
Besides, the original poster isn't saying "There's no evidence to support teleportation," he's pointing out (correctly) that there are a number of concrete, well-demonstrated experimental and theoretical results that provide evidence against teleportation. Big fucking difference, mate! This is more like saying, in the 19th century, that if you start accelerating an object to 3x10^6 km/sec, that object will continue accelerating on its own with no additional energy input.
Notice the difference? There are things that HAVE ALREADY BEEN DISPROVEN, as opposed to things that have yet to be proven OR disproven. And teleportation, like FTL travel, seems to be in the latter category.
(For the record, I was a student of Alan Sokal's at NYU, and this is one of his favorite PoMo arguments to debunk.)
Somebody else put the website together. Yes, we know it needs work. There is a "feedback" link, if you're interested.
Wait a minute, though... Of ALL the criminal cases in this country that end in conviction, upwards of 90% never go to trial, period. So I don't think you can start a specific argument about computer crime based on this.
And yes, I will admit, I have seen many MANY instances of Federal or local law-enforcement agencies (don't want to name names) that did absolutely stupid things in computer crime investigations--truly amatuerish, moronic, bumbling clod-like behavior. But I have also seen very good work, top-notch hero shit, from those same outfits. So I don't think you can premise an argument on failues of sophisitication in law-enforcement agencies, because you're dealing with a very diverse and mixed bag, even just within a given agency.
But the REAL point is that you don't need to actually go on the stand to get investigative experience. That's trial experience, and it speaks to a different set of skills. You'd be surprised at how few cases some of the top people in the forensics field have ever actually testified in. But they still have experience, because they still performed investigations: collecting and analyzing data, preparing hypotheses and testing them until they have a provable, probable theory, and presenting those findings in a useful way.
Like I said, this isn't true of every agent or officer that ever worked as an investigator, but my original point is that you can't get this experience outside of actually doing it. The fact that some of the people working in this field haven't learned very much just says that those people are idiots. And yes, there are some idiots in LE agencies, the same as every organization.
And BTW, computer forensics don't take that long at all, in most cases. If you're talking about having to run keyword searches against the hard drives, network shares, and email archives (including backup tapes) for 200+ users, that will surely take a while, but it's only because of the volume of data involved. Criminal cases involving computer forensics rarely, in my experience, involve more than a handful of data sources, of which hard drives are probably the largest type. And at 25-40 MB/sec, you can search a lot of data in a day.
Investigative work has VERY little to do with proprietary methods, for a couple of reasons:
1) Every investigation, especially when dealing with computer crime, is going to be different. There aren't really any super-secret methods that ANYone who does normal work in the field (networking, programming, sysadmining) wouldn't already know.
2) Most investigative work has to hew to legal standards for evidence, even if the issue probably isn't going to court, because it MIGHT go to court. Meaning that all of your methods as an investigator have to meet standards for scientific evidence, which requires (among other things) that those methods be widely accepted in the field and peer reviewed. It's hard to keep things secret when they have to be peer reviewed to be useful at all.
3) Good investigators get that way through experience, not training. I've met people with significantly less pure technical skill than I have who can make me look like a fool on the investigative front. The difference is that these kinds of people have years or decades of experiential learning, closed cases, and lessons learned behind them. Skill and method is important, but it's far from being the whole story. And besides, you can always learn new skills by picking up a book/taking a class and then applying them, but you can only get experience from time and getting your ass kicked repeatedly.
(As I've noted elsewhere, I ought to disclose that I work for Steve, so take as you will.)
Steve also gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago to the NYLUG, which any of you New Yorkers might have caught. I think they have video footage of the talk on the website, www.nylug.org. The talk was better-than-average for this kind of thing.
...Although I should disclose that I work with him, so you'll probably want to judge for yourself.
The book has some great war stories, too. The entertainment value is worth something.
I'll bite. No, this doesn't necessarily mean that a rat could be trained to fly a plane. A rat has millions of neurons, but most of them are taken up full-time doing specific things (strangely enough, a lot of that is scent processing). But if you can define goals for the rat, you can probably train it to do a lot of things, including a subset of the plane-flying challenge.
You don't want to think of the neurons as "hardware" exactly, either. The process of building and training a neural network is about replacing the programming component of building a system, not about replacing the hardware. Writing a piece of software to fly a plane by itself is hard work--complicated task, not easily reduced to algorithmic instruction sets. Lots of tiny rule modifications needed to the basic set of "maintain altitude and heading". The trick with neural nets is that you set up the network, and then you train it by trial and error to do the task. It programs itself, essentially.
We can and do build neural net simulations in pure software, which is where most of the research has been done so far. But neural net simulations on computers are VERY computationally expensive and take up a shitload of memory, so there are limits as to how big you can make your simulation and still do anything with it. This is a big problem, because neural nets can potentially do incredibly interesting things (like, say sentience!) if they get big enough--but we don't have computers big enough to model neural nets as complicated as we'd like.
I know the article says that these guys are only using this project to investigate how neurons work in the real world, but the potential applications of this are big. Neural nets using actual neurons, not expensive simulations, could be cheap enough to build and train that they would find commercial uses.
Sounds like Microsoft's Trusted Computing Initiative isn't getting as much executive support as it might've.
Remember that, Bill? When you said you were going to make all the Windows computers secure by focusing all your energies on securing your code?
Now, it's not your fault, and you won't do anything to fix it? Then why on earth did you tell everyone that you would?
What? Talk about wrong-ass. The speed of an electric charge in a wire has just about nothing to do with the speed of the chip. This is so backwards I thought you were trolling.
Chip performance is about how much work can be done in a certain amount of time. Latency might be affected by the speed of charge, but throughput doesn't have to be. You want to move 2x the data in the same amount of time? Double the width of all the data paths in the CPU, and you'll get close to it.
A P4 has more than 10 million transistors in it, a very large portion of which are switching at any given time. You have to think about the fact that computational work is being done in parallel all over the CPU, with multiple pathways carrying information and multiple registers acting on it AT THE SAME TIME.
So yeah, ONE electron might move at 0.8c (and I think you're wrong about that, BTW), but remember that there are BILLIONS of electrons moving together in a modern CPU. The wire speed has shit to do with anything.
Not quite. You're an idiot. Since when is a program that does illegal things, with or without legal uses, become illegal itself?
So now nmap and SATAN are illegal? How about Ettercap and Dsniff, which are ONLY useful as penetration and MITM tools?
Oh, WAIT! They're not! And neither is any of the exploit code that gets posted every single day on the net, despite the fact that these programs are written specifically to break into vulnerable software.
Did you think for even five seconds before posting that?
It's a tit-for-tat situation. The French government was tapping phones on Air France flights to the UK and the US for years. They handed over tons of big-money business deals to French companies that way. Primarily, they were using it to secure contracts for Airbus.
And in the US, the primary beneficiary for Echelon information was Boeing--these two companies are essentially each others' sole global competitor. Each one is also so heavily subsidized by its respective government that they're both nationalized in everything but name.
I won't say the the US and Boeing are blameless or innocent or even nice people, but this is a game that everybody is playing. We just happen to be very, VERY good at it.
Has anyone ever taken a look at some of the stuff available in the 2.6 configuration options? Do a 'make menuconfig' and browse through the "General Setup" and "Processor Type and Features" submenus. A bunch of it is wholly useless to 99.9% of the installations out there.
But it's there as an option, if you want it, like most everything else. Have a tulip ethernet card? Include the driver. If you don't, leave it out. Old BIOS doesn't do ACPI? Leave it out. Don't need a keyboard driver because it's an appliance system? Leave it out.
Why the hell not just include the real-time business as options? Is the maintenance really that much more challenging?
How do you know I'm not a bot, huh? I don't remember getting no Turing test, man!
-MoralHazard's Eliza-over-HTTP backend
I prefer the time-honored method of exploiting the guilibility and horniness of the human species (may the supply never run short!):
1) Tar your data up in a nice, big file--pad it with BS to get it up to at least a couple dozen megs;
2) Encrypt it with something strong--AES-256 should do it--and keep the key safe;
3) Rename the ciphertext file to "XXX Brittany Spears Double Penetration ATM moneyshot!!!.mpg" or something similar;
4) Share it with your favorite KaZaA client, rate it high, and watch the mirroring happen.
Your point about using unique bill keys is right on--I didn't even think about that. That would work much better.
As for the theory about RFID tags in money, how about those pictures from a couple months back of the trucker/ConspiracyNut microwaving his wad? Classic. Doesn't get any better.
Actually, the first time I was introduced to Canadian money (on a trip to Seattle to see my uncle), my good-ol' Unc confused me by referring to Canadian quarters as "funny money" and implied that there was something sneaky about the little buggers. Which there was--imagine my surprise when I came home to LA a week later, hit the arcade, and discovered that I had about $4.00 worth of CN quarters.
That's a lot of rounds of Street Fighter that I missed out on!
But seriously, I think that any American pretension toward implying that foreign currency is fake or "confederate" is probably just joking. I have a hard time imagining that anyone could have their history/poli.sci. that fucked up.
I highly recommend RTFAing. It's a good story, and lots of juicy techy details.
The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that whatever technical features they introduce to protect banknotes, it doesn't do a damn bit of good unless every high-school dropout grocery clerk can use those features effectively to identify bad notes. You could have forty kinds of anti-counterfeiting devices on a note, but unless the public can easily and quickly use those features, they aren't going to help.
This got me started thinking on using crypto to protect banknotes--try embedding an RFID-type device into every banknote, with a simple chip that can perform a SHA-1 signing back-ending the RFID mechanism. An RF device sends a random number to the bill, which receives that number and SHA-1 signs it, and returns the signature. If you put the same private key into all of the bills, you could build relatively simple, hand-held currency scanners that all have the public key and can verify that the bill is real.
This has its problems:
1) Can we actually build a chip/RF mechanism small enough and robust enough to be used in paper currency?
2) I can imagine this kind of mechanism adding a lot of expense to the note manufacturing process.
3) In order to use this, you'd have to distribute gazillions of RF scanners to the point-of-sale. Expensive, and not fast to get that kind of gadget penetration.
4) Tamper-resistence: you have to build the SHA-1 chips so that they can't be broken open. This is similar to the MS Trusted Computing issue--is it possible to store a key in a physical device such that the key cannot be extracted physically?
That last problem is the worst--it's a lot like the DVD CSS encryption scheme problem. It works find until ONE INSTANCE of the private key gets broken, and then everybody has the key to every single banknote in circulation. And then the whole thing is kaput, money down the drain (literally). So it would be awfully important to solve the tamper-proofing issue, before you went ahead with this idea.
Shit, I gotta get a girlfriend--posting coherent ideas to Slashdot at 11 on a Friday night is pretty busted.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to use something like this for non-broadcase Ethernet either, now that I think of it.
Um, yes, it WOULD be a bad idea. WEP/WPA/WPA2 are all server-client protocols, in that they encrypt transmissions between a number of remote clients and a single central point. In order to make the analogy hold to wired Ethernet, you would have to make every Ethernet switch/hub/router support the crypto interaction with clients. As well as replacing every NIC in existence.
And even then, the encryption wouldn't buy you much, because it only encrypts between the Ethernet hosts and the switch. It CAN'T encrypt transmissions past the switch, because it would be hiding the IP addresses and port numbers that are need to route the packets at an IP level. If you wanted to move the link-level encrypted packets further, you would have to either decrypt them and transmit them upstream in the clear, or you'd have to configure every single route in between your endpoints with the WEP-ish key. Which would defeat the point of encrypting, because in order to use this on the Internet, everybody on the Net would have to have the same key.
This is one of the reasons why we have things like IPSEC and VPNs--they're based on PKI systems, or they're built with a centralized authenticator/concentrator, or both. And they encrypt IP packet contents, not the IP packet itself (including the header info), meaning that any router can pass them without having to open the crypto-envelope.
WEP and its relatives are link-level encryption, and only meant for a single physical hop, and they're not particularly scalable. They're niche solutions that either wouldn't work or wouldn't be worthwhile for most other applications.
Actually, the economic consensus (I know, I know, to the extent that their IS an economic consensus) is that the recent oil price spikes are NOT sending the economy reeling, and probably won't anytime soon. In past oil-induced recessions, the higher price of energy was coupled closely with high inflation rates. That's not happening right now, due to other factors in the economy:
- the US economy and GDP isn't nearly as dependent on oil as it was in the 1970s. MPG is up, more people use mass transit, and less of the population is employed in oil-needy industries (manufacturing) and more in oil-indifferent industries (office jobs, tech work).
- interest rates are stable and cool.
- the economy is otherwise healthy and stable.
On top of that, the oil price issues right now aren't entirely a result of US policies overseas. The oil market is highly sensitive to the political status of the Mideast generally, and to the House of Saud in particular. The troubles in Saudi Arabia are somewhat masked in the press by the war in Iraq and domestic terrorism, but things are far from happy in that country.
Al-Qaeda isn't just the sworn enemy of the US--they have serious problems with the Saudis, too. One of their stated goals is the overthrow of the current regime. So assuming that we weren't in Iraq, I would imagine that more Islamic fundamentalist terrorist resources would be hitting the US and the Saudis directly.
So maybe all the world's problems aren't caused by the Iraq war and GW Bush. I'll admit, the guy isn't doing a particularly good job of handling things, but he did get handed a live grenade when he took office.
First of all, RTFA. They're seeking to BRING the internet to the underprivileged in countries that are least likely to get it otherwise. That's the whole point.
Second of all, it's not like censorship and oppression uniquely affect the poorest of the poor. There's a thing called the "middle class", or perhaps "Bourgeoisie" (if you're that kind of cat). Everybody who isn't politically/economically elite can suffer from these kinds of things. Take a look at China: the Great Firewall blocks the traffic of the wage-slave and entrepreneur alike.
And yes, it's more likely that those in the middle class will have the resources, education, perspective, and political voice to resist censorship on their own, but that's a tendency, not a binary situation.
Besides, tools like these don't magically make oppressive governments stop being evil--the tools have to be applied to the problem by motivated actors. It turns out (despite what Marx thought) that the middle class is the source of a hell of a lot more political resistance to government than the poor.* This isn't a denigration of the poor--it's just an observed fact of social change movements around the world in the last 50 years. So the logic follows that giving tools to fight oppression to the middle class permits them to carry the fight for everybody.
* Personally, I chalk this up to the fact that the line between the middle class and the workers that Marx noticed has blurred and become a really big, fat zone. A huge portion of the American/European middle class are wage-earners, which would make them "workers" according to Marxist thought. But they also own a substantial amount of property (houses, cars, boats, bank accounts, investments), which would make them capitalists. Funny old world we live in, isn't it?
The GPL doesn't need to have that specific phrase in it. Copyright itself gives the owner the power to do that, if you've violated the license agreement that you accepted the software under.
The GPL is the specific terms of a contract under which you are allowed to use the program. The author agrees to let you use the software, and you agree to abide by his license. At the point where you have broken the license terms, you've breached the contract.
When one party breaches contract, the other party's obligations under that contract evaporate--the copyright owner no longer has to let you use his software. In theory, that could mean that he takes you to court and compels you to stop using the software with a cease-and-desist order. More likely, he will sue you for damages (if there are any), or if we're talking about GPL licenses, he'll probably just get the court to compel you to stop violating the GPL.
If you think that's out of whack, try looking at the license that comes with the BitKeeper software that's currently used to work with the Linux kernel. The license specifies that you cannot use BitKeeper to write software that competes with BitKeeper!
The only "additional right" that the GPL gives you is what it specifies in the license: to use, modify, copy, and redistribute original copies or copies of derived works, AND that you provide source code to anyone who asks. You are correct in that you can only get these rights if you agree to abide by the GPL. If you fail to abide by the GPL or "ignore" it, the copyright owner can force you to stop distributing, AND to stop using, that piece of GPLd software.
But that EXACTLY what Microsoft is doing, too! Their license, the Windows EULA, just happens to have a lot more restrictions that the GPL. MS lets you use the software, provided that don't reverse-engineer or decompile it, and they don't let you make copies. IN return for agreeing to their restrictions, you get to use their software. You can also choose to "ignore" the MS EULA, but that means you have to stop using their software because you give up your rights to it.
If you think that the GPL just "gives additional rights", think again. IT IS A RESTRICTION. If Linux was released in the public domain, unrestricted, MS could borrow as many parts as it wanted to without any worry. If Linux was released under a BSD license, MS could steal the TCP/IP stack and incorporate it into Windows (like they did in the early '90s with the UNIX stack). The GPL forbids that kind of bevhavior, and gives users less rights than they would have under some licenses, but more rights than under others.
"A private corporation -- e.g. a small business owned by one person -- can make an anonymous donation to a homeless shelter just because the owner wants to. It is illegal for the CEO of a publicly held corporation to do the same thing."
First of all, a small business owned by one person (corporate or not) doesn't have any shareholders besides that one dude. THAT's why he can do whatever he wants--it has nothing to do with the corporate status of his business.
Second of all, corporate officers are compelled to act in the best interests of their shareholders, but there's not law that says they can't make philanthropic donations. When tornados wreck the Midwest, Budweiser sends beer trucks full of drinking water and emergency supplies to help out. They happen to get good PR out of it, but there's no law that says that they have to justify things this way. If Bud didn't have any marked trucks to make a photo-op, and their marketing department forgot to issue a press release, is the CEO suddenly a criminal?
Think about it this way: If all of your shareholders agree that you should make an anonymous donation to a homeless shelter, you'd be breaching your obligations if you DIDN'T make the donations--they own the business, so they decide what goes. It so happens that MOST shareholders want companies in which they're invested to just make money, and the shareholders make philanthropic decisions on their own. But nothing says it has to work like that, and it often doesn't.