1. Is this the first time/. took an IRC server to its limits by mentioning it ? (irc.idlenet.org)
2. Regarding the hot phase: are people with common sense and a net connection actually a faster news service than the established agencies? Kind of a peer-to-peer news ticker?
3. Regarding the bombing of Kabul last night: was that a "contra" group coming to help of the american cause because they were funded by "oddball" american entitites like the CIA (remember Nicaragua?) ?
Let's not forget another less-than-obvious way to get to the bottom of this: irc and newsgroups, the latter being a more feasible clue-getter, but the former more possible a way that these assholes communicate with each other (rather than directly).
If I was setting up a conspiracy like this the members would learn some file modification tasks for communication. Like...
- Create a file with what you've got to say
- Encrypt this file
- Use ROT-13 like technique to turn the encrypted file into even more gibberish
- Using steganography this gibberish is hidden in a bunch of totally boring holiday pictures sent by email
How can you practically get to the contents of this file *not* knowing the process? How can you get to it knowing the process but not knowing the codes or encrypt-schemes involved? How can you monitor wide parts of the internet just for the *existence* of possible questionable files?
I think it is outright impossible, and the tools are widely accessible to everyone today. A recent study which scanned the net for pictures with hidden steganography messages came up with quite some hits. One was the article description picture of a sewing machine on ebay. The message in it was not retrieved.
If you can dictate the modus operandi, anything can be hidden or concealed. You can maybe reconstruct the trafficflow if email is used, but you never get the contents. If that is a worry, just use a ebay-like technique where the "message pictures" are put up as parts of a webpage.
There is nothing the NSA, underfunded or not, could do about it.
soccerdad writes "Due to the activities of today, the internet/networking experts at my firm have been asked by some of our clients to be on standby in case anything untoward occurs. They've been monitoring backbone activity, etc., in a "just in case" mode. They've described the activity they're seeing as somewhat strange. The backbone is, according to them, at about 80% utilization -- they've never seen it above 40% before. However, the main portal sites such as Yahoo aren't having substantively higher than normal traffic. They're working on doing some traffic analysis but haven't completed that effort yet."
Weird. With all those news sites down during the hot phase (not that it was cooling down by now, but you know what I mean) one might wonder of there was actually more to it than information-hungry citizens. A timed DDoS attack? Using long-made backdoors to accurately take out specific sites at a given point? Paranoia?
Can someone more knowledgeable elaborate on the possibilities (Traffic Analysis, log checking, packet statistics,...).
What we have seen today, I think, was an impressive demonstration of the Internet. It jammed but it wouldn't break. News sites DoS'ed but came back soon. Some were online all the way through (sky.com), maybe because it ran Solaris. People set up their own news servers/mirrors.
And slashdot camde back to their motto. Well half of actually.
Not really news for nerds. But definately stuff that matters.
The facts of alerting, holiday revoking and that is public. The no talk policy is on what material with what personnel and equipment is going where to accomplish what.
You can't hide an army in high alert. But you can hide their primary goals and targets, and I am not going to go deeper on this.
We we're allowed to call family to inform them about not coming home. The comment post I did was the digital equivalent of that.
German military is in high alert as reported, divisions are currently moving out to protect the capital Berlin and the Bundestag (read: german White House) located there.
This is damn serious. Additionally equipment and materials are in the process of being turned over to other NATO forces.
Ive been using my nokia 8290 and my visor deluxe to connect to the net for the last few months. I dont need to use a serial cable because the visor and the phone connect via infared. So i can/. on the go or do whatever..
[...]
if you have a 8290 and a visor deluxe, somebody wrote a guide [umbc.edu] on howto get them to work together.
And while you're at it, turn your palm into a mobile POP-talking email client totally indepent of your desktop. Get "Top Gun Postman" by Ian Goldberg, which is a small freeware system utility enabling you to query your POP mail server while using the internal palm mail application for browsing. My palmIII couldn't do that out of the box (at least I didn't figure out how:) ).
Because your internal gsm modem won't make more than 9600 (unless you got GPRS) it would be useful to use a separate email. I filter the inbox on my "main" account and forward all mails from a specified sender (VIP, boss...) to that "cellphone" mail account (after truncating it of possible attachments). Adds some pretty nifty features to this palmIII-nokia8210 combo.
I've seen an article in the german magazine c't 4/2001 about turning a linux box into a PVR with just a cheap BT848 video tuner card and some h4x0ring around. Here in germany we have PAL, so the possibility is certainly given. Unfortunately I can't locate the article or the magazine right now, would love to point in the right direction.
But I suppose there is someone out there who can provide a link to a similar project. The box actually had quite "low"-tech components.
Well, as some people already pointed out this will let loose a lot of lawyers.
At least over here in.de a similar case has been fought and won by the tv conglomerates. This was about a normal VCR with a simple DSP and cheapo modem. It compared the actual pictures being recorded with the trail-in and trail-out the stations used to "slide" the viewer from program to commercials and back. Of course these were subject to change and there the cheapo modem came in. It would contact a central (subscription) server once in a while to suck up on the currently used frame patterns.
Reportedly worked like a charm. That is why the lawyers came kicking in.
Years ago I used to say American courts are ruled by insanity (like granting millions for the famous McDonalds coffee being too hot and lawsuits like these). These days I have to admit that the American influence has made us worse. There is the German Telekom (de facto telecommunication monopolist) suing for the exclusive use of the letter "t", the exclusive use of the color magenta (butt-ugly reddish-pink) and lately they even threw the book at some guy who hosted and maintained a website called "The black pages". The Telekom being the publisher of "The yellow pages" was wise enough to pull that one back in time. I don't know if they are still following the other lawsuits ("t" and magenta), but if you want to catch up, it's all on www.heise.de
The real proof that computers have reached human levels of "intelligence" would be a machine that will blame a mistake onto another, hierarchically lower machine.
...I think of a quote from him. IIRC it was coined on the MacWorld Expo quite a few years back (before the dotcom bubble and its unsightly demise):
"I think computer viruses should count as life. And I think it says something about human nature, that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We have created life in our own image."
Considering this reply to my comment, I feel the strong need to clarify...
Good idea - show the lawyers judges government and legal system on a whole how intelligent and balanced and mature the open source movement is by running a mailbombing and DOS attack on them
You declare (OSS movement==/. readers)? Interesting. I admit that the term "mail-bombing" was a little of. I was thinking about voicing my opinion towards those in charge. DOS attacks have not been mentioned by me. I was planning to show my maturity (and opinion) in a long, fact-ridden email.
This is BTW illegal.
Spam, Mailbombs and DOS attacks are. Valid protests by individuals aren't (at least not yet).
Thats why these guys act the way they do - because you are all dickheads who act before you think - they see you as a threat because you are incapable of rational thought.
Tell me genius how is mailbombing people going to help dimitri ? i would think it wold prove that he is a hacker with great power ?
I was about to voice the rational thoughts I am supposedly incapable of. I just need the right direction to point it at. And mailbombing is certainly not going to help. But, remember, I did not suggest it. And again, voicing my protest is certainly not going to hurt if done in a correct manner. But it might just help, and the way i see it it is the only option I have to help from abroad (aside from donating to the EFF).
Anyway this is immature and stupid - you fight cases like this in court - why dont you donate your pocket money (yeah your nick proves you are in middle school) his legal defence team.
And this paragraph proves your immaturity - readily assuming I reside in the same country as you do. I have been using this nick (in slight variations) ever since I first logged in to some remote machine on my C64 with a 300baud acoustic coupler. The nick has hence been with me for *more* than half of my real lifetime (which sums up to almost a quarter of a century now). It's hard to break old habits. And it's also hard to voice these opinions and thoughts in an "alien" language. So, if you find mistakes, slightly wrong terms or weird phrasing, don't think "middle school loser". Think "european". Thank you.
Actually, an American student in Russia was framed on marijuana charges recently. I believe it took almost 2 years for the case to get to trial. Fortunately he only had to serve a short time after the trial was finally held and he was released. He did get consular visits during his imprisonment, however. (It didn't help that the guy is a US Army reservist in intelligence.)
Looks like the army ain't too keen on retrieving their former members gone red and pothead.
Who in their right american mind would go to visit russia?
It has recently been an issue in a court trial here in germany. It revolved around child pr0n and is therefore a subject which might offend some. If this might be the case with you, please don`t read on. Or do read on and voice your opinion.
In that particular case, a computer was seized and child pron images were found in "moderate" numbers. Among these mostly harmless pictures/videoclips (they basically showed nude kids playing on the beach and stuff like that)were hardcore pictures of bestiality and rape of children. However, no matter how real these pictures looked, it is proven that they were made by a really talented gfx artist. None of the kids set into real backdrops were real, they were drawn/rendered/raytraced. While making these pictures, no one was hurt, no one was violated in his rights. No one was even touched.
So, what would you consider this digital smut now ? Still within the right of free expression, maybe even a piece of "art" (art deserves a special status by the german constitution, equal to to freedom of speech), no matter how objectionable. Who would or could be charged for these pictures?
It is an ugly question, and most people when confronted with this will say it should be outlawed. People have obviously strong feelings toward this. But when you think about it, isn't freedom defined by the freedom of those who think different?
What is the future going to bring? Will digitally made child porn be available from video stores in the near future? Is there a way to keep this stuff away from the public without interfering with the artists rights?
I would love to know what the/. community comes up with in this regard...
So, after the arrest Adobe got email-bombed by us guys (&gals) trying to voice our protest (see http://www.boycottadobe.com or.org - too lazy to check)
As it seems now, the protest has to be taken to higher ranks in the legal system.
Can anyone supply email adresses of the people involved? I mean lawyers, consulars, attorneys, judges, congresscritters, whatever?!
I think about the only way this could lead to a conviction is the sheer ignorance of a lot of the involved people (see Microsoft Antitrust case). Well, ignorance can actually be a form of violence. And there is only one cure for it, so who can i tell what is going on, what the real-life analogy is, and how i am feeling about this (even as a foreign citizen... i think, i hope actually that every voice counts!)
First off, he isn't a US citizen. He is a visitor from a foreign country. This leaves him with fewer resources, fewer rights, and little understanding of the rights he does have.
IANAL, and I don't know exactly what rights an accused foreigner has in the USA, but I'm sure that the feds are less inclined to play by the rules they have to when dealing with a citizen.
Please take a look at http://www.thedailycamera.com/news/worldnation/28a cort.html for a recent case of the US authorities denying rights of "alien" citizens. In this case the right to consular advice has been denied, and also declined postponing the execution of the convicts. The UN court actually found the Americans *guilty*. If you find this disturbing or hard to believe, feel free to search google with the terms "us deny consular rights". Quite a bunch of results. Granted, these people were convicted of murder, but this makes it a more clever stunt to me. If they were engaged in a "victimless crime" the american masses might have cried out. But in a murder case...
This also might strike fear into citizens of other nations, and convey the message that no country is as powerful as the US, which will FIND a way to subject everyone world wide to its laws.
Well, power stems from the barrel of a gun, it is said. The United States are always very prone to show theirs. No matter who is/was president.
As a Citizen of the US, I am very angry about this. Dmitry should be freed and sent home immediately, and then the White House should send an apology to the Russians for this behavior.
A beautiful thought at all. But unfortunately it won`t happen. Even admitting that they were just *a very little bit wrong* might draw reimbursement claims from Dmitry, Elcomsoft, Russia, probably all thinking forms of homo sapiens.
I know that they'd demand the same for one of our citizens cought up in a BS situation like this in another country.
If this was an american sitting in a dark russian jail exposed to killers and the risk of catching tuberculosis, they'd already have an armed-to-the-death rescue squad standing by.
This is just purely insane. Wrong as the Berlin wall. And probably nothing you can do to avoid or eliminate it...
You seem to be a real math crack, but unfortunately you are not the kind of guy who reads from beginning to end.
Right next to my signature it says exactly what you observed...
(Special note for the humor-impaired: This is supposed to be sarcastic. We all know that the mathematical path taken for this conclusion is wrong like hell)
Twenty-four days is nearly an entire month; longer, when you take weekends into account (nearly five five-day work weeks). Can you imagine how much client work would pile up if half of your department's staff took the entire month of August off? If all of them too the entire month off?
The minimun holiday allowance for Germany is 24 days as well (2 days/month). I think it is damn fair. It urges the employer to spread the work to more employess, resulting in companies not feeling like "owning" the employee.
I'm not one to crow about exploitation, but come on: they're paying Russian wages, can't they accept Russian vacations? It's not like 24 days is that much anyway, for most of the world.
You want 24 days? Check out this:
A year has 365 days. Out of that you sleep 8 hours or 122 days.
243 days remaining.
Every day you have 8 hours offwork, that's another 122 days.
121 days remaining.
On the 52 sundays each year no work is taking place.
69 days remaining.
You still with me ? Fine ! Saturday is usually 1/2 of a working day, removing 26 complete days.
43 days remaining.
With a daily break of one hour you are again removing 15 days from your workforce.
Just 28 days remaining.
And with that and a few bank holidays you are still asking for 24 days of holiday?
Damn you!
(Special note for the humor-impaired: This is supposed to be sarcastic. We all know that the mathematical path taken for this conclusion is wrong like hell)
Slashdot Mirror
1. Is this the first time /. took an IRC server to its limits by mentioning it ? (irc.idlenet.org)
2. Regarding the hot phase: are people with common sense and a net connection actually a faster news service than the established agencies? Kind of a peer-to-peer news ticker?
3. Regarding the bombing of Kabul last night: was that a "contra" group coming to help of the american cause because they were funded by "oddball" american entitites like the CIA (remember Nicaragua?) ?
If I was setting up a conspiracy like this the members would learn some file modification tasks for communication. Like...
- Create a file with what you've got to say
- Encrypt this file
- Use ROT-13 like technique to turn the encrypted file into even more gibberish
- Using steganography this gibberish is hidden in a bunch of totally boring holiday pictures sent by email
How can you practically get to the contents of this file *not* knowing the process? How can you get to it knowing the process but not knowing the codes or encrypt-schemes involved? How can you monitor wide parts of the internet just for the *existence* of possible questionable files?
I think it is outright impossible, and the tools are widely accessible to everyone today. A recent study which scanned the net for pictures with hidden steganography messages came up with quite some hits. One was the article description picture of a sewing machine on ebay. The message in it was not retrieved.
If you can dictate the modus operandi, anything can be hidden or concealed. You can maybe reconstruct the trafficflow if email is used, but you never get the contents. If that is a worry, just use a ebay-like technique where the "message pictures" are put up as parts of a webpage.
There is nothing the NSA, underfunded or not, could do about it.
It's in the german news just right now as well...
Well, what you expect from a Texan?
What we have seen today, I think, was an impressive demonstration of the Internet. It jammed but it wouldn't break. News sites DoS'ed but came back soon. Some were online all the way through (sky.com), maybe because it ran Solaris. People set up their own news servers/mirrors.
And slashdot camde back to their motto. Well half of actually.
Not really news for nerds. But definately stuff that matters.
The facts of alerting, holiday revoking and that is public. The no talk policy is on what material with what personnel and equipment is going where to accomplish what.
You can't hide an army in high alert. But you can hide their primary goals and targets, and I am not going to go deeper on this.
We we're allowed to call family to inform them about not coming home. The comment post I did was the digital equivalent of that.
probably last comment from me today...
German military is in high alert as reported, divisions are currently moving out to protect the capital Berlin and the Bundestag (read: german White House) located there.
This is damn serious. Additionally equipment and materials are in the process of being turned over to other NATO forces.
Also here in europe a lot of the news sites are down, especially heute.de (german).
/. effect because all the people wanted info at the same time ?
DoS Attack or just a
All israeli instituions and building have been ranked high security here in Germany.
Be very very scared. This is fodder for a World War.
We (members of the german army) have been put on alert, people are being revoked from holiday, all system/material checked, no talk policy.
A sufficiently sized and well-trained dog is able come up with it's own food if you live in a neighborhood sporting enough cats.
OTOH, the Sony petdogs probably have a setting to disable barking at night.
And while you're at it, turn your palm into a mobile POP-talking email client totally indepent of your desktop. Get "Top Gun Postman" by Ian Goldberg, which is a small freeware system utility enabling you to query your POP mail server while using the internal palm mail application for browsing. My palmIII couldn't do that out of the box (at least I didn't figure out how
Because your internal gsm modem won't make more than 9600 (unless you got GPRS) it would be useful to use a separate email. I filter the inbox on my "main" account and forward all mails from a specified sender (VIP, boss...) to that "cellphone" mail account (after truncating it of possible attachments). Adds some pretty nifty features to this palmIII-nokia8210 combo.
I've seen an article in the german magazine c't 4/2001 about turning a linux box into a PVR with just a cheap BT848 video tuner card and some h4x0ring around. Here in germany we have PAL, so the possibility is certainly given. Unfortunately I can't locate the article or the magazine right now, would love to point in the right direction.
But I suppose there is someone out there who can provide a link to a similar project. The box actually had quite "low"-tech components.
Well, as some people already pointed out this will let loose a lot of lawyers.
.de a similar case has been fought and won by the tv conglomerates. This was about a normal VCR with a simple DSP and cheapo modem. It compared the actual pictures being recorded with the trail-in and trail-out the stations used to "slide" the viewer from program to commercials and back. Of course these were subject to change and there the cheapo modem came in. It would contact a central (subscription) server once in a while to suck up on the currently used frame patterns.
At least over here in
Reportedly worked like a charm. That is why the lawyers came kicking in.
Years ago I used to say American courts are ruled by insanity (like granting millions for the famous McDonalds coffee being too hot and lawsuits like these). These days I have to admit that the American influence has made us worse. There is the German Telekom (de facto telecommunication monopolist) suing for the exclusive use of the letter "t", the exclusive use of the color magenta (butt-ugly reddish-pink) and lately they even threw the book at some guy who hosted and maintained a website called "The black pages". The Telekom being the publisher of "The yellow pages" was wise enough to pull that one back in time. I don't know if they are still following the other lawsuits ("t" and magenta), but if you want to catch up, it's all on www.heise.de
Brave new world.
Set it up against Sony's AIBO petbot - not really a fair fight, but something I'd love to watch.
Are there any streams of this thing in action available?
The real proof that computers have reached human levels of "intelligence" would be a machine that will blame a mistake onto another, hierarchically lower machine.
...so do they have a firewall included in the package?
You declare (OSS movement==/. readers)? Interesting. I admit that the term "mail-bombing" was a little of. I was thinking about voicing my opinion towards those in charge. DOS attacks have not been mentioned by me. I was planning to show my maturity (and opinion) in a long, fact-ridden email.
Spam, Mailbombs and DOS attacks are. Valid protests by individuals aren't (at least not yet).
I was about to voice the rational thoughts I am supposedly incapable of. I just need the right direction to point it at. And mailbombing is certainly not going to help. But, remember, I did not suggest it. And again, voicing my protest is certainly not going to hurt if done in a correct manner. But it might just help, and the way i see it it is the only option I have to help from abroad (aside from donating to the EFF).
And this paragraph proves your immaturity - readily assuming I reside in the same country as you do. I have been using this nick (in slight variations) ever since I first logged in to some remote machine on my C64 with a 300baud acoustic coupler. The nick has hence been with me for *more* than half of my real lifetime (which sums up to almost a quarter of a century now). It's hard to break old habits. And it's also hard to voice these opinions and thoughts in an "alien" language. So, if you find mistakes, slightly wrong terms or weird phrasing, don't think "middle school loser". Think "european". Thank you.
Your advice is taken. Lemme think. Um... NO!
Looks like the army ain't too keen on retrieving their former members gone red and pothead.
Who in their right american mind would go to visit russia?
Maybe Dmitry is the official rebuttal to this.
There is one scary question arising from this.
/. community comes up with in this regard...
It has recently been an issue in a court trial here in germany. It revolved around child pr0n and is therefore a subject which might offend some. If this might be the case with you, please don`t read on. Or do read on and voice your opinion.
In that particular case, a computer was seized and child pron images were found in "moderate" numbers. Among these mostly harmless pictures/videoclips (they basically showed nude kids playing on the beach and stuff like that)were hardcore pictures of bestiality and rape of children. However, no matter how real these pictures looked, it is proven that they were made by a really talented gfx artist. None of the kids set into real backdrops were real, they were drawn/rendered/raytraced. While making these pictures, no one was hurt, no one was violated in his rights. No one was even touched.
So, what would you consider this digital smut now ? Still within the right of free expression, maybe even a piece of "art" (art deserves a special status by the german constitution, equal to to freedom of speech), no matter how objectionable. Who would or could be charged for these pictures?
It is an ugly question, and most people when confronted with this will say it should be outlawed. People have obviously strong feelings toward this. But when you think about it, isn't freedom defined by the freedom of those who think different?
What is the future going to bring? Will digitally made child porn be available from video stores in the near future? Is there a way to keep this stuff away from the public without interfering with the artists rights?
I would love to know what the
So, after the arrest Adobe got email-bombed by us guys (&gals) trying to voice our protest (see http://www.boycottadobe.com or .org - too lazy to check)
As it seems now, the protest has to be taken to higher ranks in the legal system.
Can anyone supply email adresses of the people involved? I mean lawyers, consulars, attorneys, judges, congresscritters, whatever?!
I think about the only way this could lead to a conviction is the sheer ignorance of a lot of the involved people (see Microsoft Antitrust case). Well, ignorance can actually be a form of violence. And there is only one cure for it, so who can i tell what is going on, what the real-life analogy is, and how i am feeling about this (even as a foreign citizen... i think, i hope actually that every voice counts!)
Please take a look at http://www.thedailycamera.com/news/worldnation/28
Well, power stems from the barrel of a gun, it is said. The United States are always very prone to show theirs. No matter who is/was president.
A beautiful thought at all. But unfortunately it won`t happen. Even admitting that they were just *a very little bit wrong* might draw reimbursement claims from Dmitry, Elcomsoft, Russia, probably all thinking forms of homo sapiens.
If this was an american sitting in a dark russian jail exposed to killers and the risk of catching tuberculosis, they'd already have an armed-to-the-death rescue squad standing by.
This is just purely insane. Wrong as the Berlin wall. And probably nothing you can do to avoid or eliminate it...
Right next to my signature it says exactly what you observed...
You want 24 days? Check out this:
A year has 365 days. Out of that you sleep 8 hours or 122 days.
243 days remaining.
Every day you have 8 hours offwork, that's another 122 days.
121 days remaining.
On the 52 sundays each year no work is taking place.
69 days remaining.
You still with me ? Fine ! Saturday is usually 1/2 of a working day, removing 26 complete days.
43 days remaining.
With a daily break of one hour you are again removing 15 days from your workforce.
Just 28 days remaining.
And with that and a few bank holidays you are still asking for 24 days of holiday?
Damn you!
(Special note for the humor-impaired: This is supposed to be sarcastic. We all know that the mathematical path taken for this conclusion is wrong like hell)