A stop sign is a safety device which regulates traffic flow in the interest of all people who take part in the traffic system (pedestrians, bikers, cyclists,...). It's the law.
If you roll over a stop sign with absolutely NO ONE near you, there is basically nothing to regulate. Whether you comply or not, it yields no advantages, disadvantages or risks to anyone.
As in this specific sitution there is nothing to regulate, the law itself becomes irrelevant. Rolling over a stop sign in this case (where no one is around to see) is not breaking the law. It is just plain stupid to comply to it.
This applies to another thing about traffic which I came to dub "the American disease" when visiting the US. The constant non-useage of turn signals. A lot of americans don't use it at all (and i consider this wrong).
But then again, often I do not use it, because NOBODY is around to see it. Does this give a machine the right to issue a ticket for me? Technically it's possible to put up machines that scan the cars for blink signals when approaching on a turn lane. But if this is the only car for hundreds of yards around, should the machine be allowed to do so? I think not. But being the totally unbiased entity it is, it would. The only solution is not to allow machines do too much in terms of law enforcement.
I do not know a SINGLE biker here in Germany who has ever gotten a red light ticket.
Legalese in.de requires the govt to have proof that a) the car and b) an identifiable person has commited the red light/speeding offense. For that purpose the cams around here make a FRONT shot of the offending vehicle, which gives you a clear view of the license plate AND the driver.
If there is only the plate visible, you can talk yourself out of it if you're lucky. If they only see your face, they won't even get you at all.
How many bikers Do you know that have a license plate in FRONT of their rides? And exactly how good are you at recognizing people when they wear a helmet? See, there is nothing bikers have to worry about (except for laser pistols that don't take pictures but relay the measurements to the patrol car parked around the next corner.
While it is absolutely correct that (at least here in.de) horsepower/displacement on your machine is limited for the first few years of your license, and while there really are people who take revenge against cameras, bikers are those hit least.
We have something similar around here (.de). It consists of the standard laser speed pistol cops use and a special sign that has a display built in, showing you the measured speed in real time while you are approaching.
This is used as a educational approach of getting the speeders to comply in residential areas which allow only a slow speed.
What happens is this: a) People use it to measure how accurate their speedometer is displaying their speed, and how much speed "buffer" they have before a "live" system will trigger and take a picture.
b) People just plainly ignore it
c) Kids take their cars to the area where the system currently sits and while one takes off from the beginning of the road the other one wait by the sign to produce a nice picture of his buddy's taillights and the sign saying "83".
There is a OSS tool that does exactly that by a guy called "titus", unfortunately I can't find a download link right now.
Another thing I would miss dearly on such a CD is nmapNT. It requires a patched TCP/IP stack but after that it works just as beautifully as it's *ix counterparts.
Re:Yet another reason to love duct tape...
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 2
The military has used duct tape for a long time to repair damage while in flight or on the ground from debris or bullets.
Interesting side note: The german military nicks their official duct tape "Panzertape" - literally that's "tank tape". Weird stuff though. Won't stick to anything except for itself. Guess it's perfect for selaing that punctured tube. I used some of it when I had a needle-sized hole in my car's engine cooling system (in the hose). I kept losing water at a slow rate before doing it, and had to refill every other day. After I sealed it I literally forgot about it until it appeared on the inspection invoice.
google does not cache images. You really could have just linked to this picture [americantower.com] of the states' tower locations
Did any of the people modding this post up bother to check the link in question? It is a link to a google-cached site, alrite, but it sure gives me fancy-schmancy graphics (read: i-m-a-g-e)
It it really reasonable to - in order to improve the efficiency of a system - introduce ineficiency into that system and and expect a positive outcome?
Look at your keyboard... What does is say next to the tab key? QWERTY or DVORAK? Inefficiency won, next question.
Every other day you find a statement on slashdot that is so simple and so true it should deserve a mod point from anyone - too bad I don't have any to share right now.
Maybe it is not widely known, but Google *can* and will ban certain queries/results/terms/sites/whatever appropriate. This is probably a factor (or should I say expected result) of their rerouting change which basically determines the geographical position of a surfer and redirects to the appropriately themed google (say.de,.fr and whatever else they are running).
The probably best documented case of this is the "Operation Clambake" exclusion which was restored after heavy protests. But there were copyright issues involved so this might nut cut the cheese all the way.
What worries me more is the exponation of companies towards insane or just plainly stupid government regulations. Sometime in February a single state within Germany (which is a federal republic composed of 16 states after all) ordered their local Internet providers for exclusion of questionable material, which in this case primarily concerns fascist/white-supremacist sites like stormfront.org. Checking google.com with the query "stormfront.org" delivers a link which is clearly a site in question. Sending the same string to google.de returns nothing. Softening the query to just "stormfront" gives a couple of hits on google.com, including the nazi site. Same string for google.de gives a bunch of sites, none of which is questionable in content. Most of them are sites discussing the current situation on this case.
For the german-speaking crowd, or for those who can get their hands on a decent translator) here are some heise.de articles covering the situation:...1......2......3...
This is a sad state of affeirs, and you won't have to go as far as China to find behaviour which should be immoral to the pluralistic and open community the planet pretends to be nowadays.
Depends. Given the current state of the world in which the US defines "terrorism" as most anything that does not follow the US way of life and commerce the BBS piracy i did ten years ago might well be "e-terrorism". And it was real. So it's a bite.
Look in the classifieds of your local newspaper, where the non-geeks hide. You will find quite some people there trying to get a buck out of their old typewriter type-of-computer. Lots of 486 und P75/100/133 boxes to get there. My firewall/router runs a 486/75 with 32megs on a linux fli4l minidist system and crunches seti in its spare time (ok, that IS 1 packet every 12 days, but what the fuck....)
One might argue that a EULA is more binding because someone agreed to it actively, instead of a law which one basically accepts passively. Oftentimes the laws may have been passed before you were even born, so there's not much realistically you can do, but you have every option of clicking 'accept' or 'do not accept' when the LA comes up.
To me that is not within the definition of option. You order a W2K copy because you want to use it on your machine. You pay real bucks for the package. Upon installation you have the choice of accepting the EULA (and actually getting something for your money) or not accepting the EULA and trying to get the dealer accept the item (with broken shrinkwraps) for a return.
Basically, you don't purchase a product, but an "license" or allowance to use it. Not accepting does not give you limited functionality. It gives you just plain nothing.
So, you thought desktop/application firewalls were safe? Think again.
Although MS engineers are not really well-known for implementing clever and working solution, I fear that they might have come up with a similar or even advanced technique of establishing a "stealth" connection.
A corporate firewall/packet filter with some sort of IDS enabled and all MS IPs blocked _might_ work if used in conjunction with an application firewall on each individual machine. On the other hand it might trade in too much flexibility for security. If the individual machine depends on http availability your pretty much lost. You can piggyback/tunnel basically anything through that. Disabling IE and using Netscape might put a hold to that.
But there ain't no verification of that unless someone can produce the w2k sources... And if someone does MS will have a patch ready and automatically deployed in RECORD time...
I placed an unpatched Windows machine on the internet with no firewall protection whatsoever and shared the Inetpub directory. I wanted to know, how long it'll take before someone decides to crack into my machine. Sure enough, it took only two days.
Can you elaborate some more? What OS version, what services enabled, what do you mean by "inetpub" dir? My Documents? Sharing by SAMBA?
The point I want to make is that, I'm sure those army computers have been accessed by crackers plenty of times before.
In case you haven't done it already, go get a copy of Clifford Stoll's "Cuckoos Egg". It is a quite easy read for a book concentrating on a hack, but then again it is not quite dense on details. Then you will realize that there were times, when people could actually take CONTROL of army machines from ABROAD and no one even wanted to investigate. FBI quote: "We can't investigate without a loss/damage of more than $1m. How much is that you lost? 75cents in billed cpu time?" Other agencies were not quite as verbose but just as uninterested...
IT is a value added resource in most companies but, sadly, in most companies it really doesn't directly contribute to the bottom line of profits vs. losses.
I don't know... Maybe it does not add up to P&L in a common way, but in an invisible way it does. Imagine stripping all the IT from your workplace. People would need to get back to faxing stuff (type letter in typewriter, go to fax machine, type number, wait, redial if necessary, wait, retrieve original, file it and go to next task). People would spend more time on the phone. People would spend hours looking for some papers that have mistakenly been put into the wrong cabinet. The list is endless.
To me IT is becoming more and more of an utility. Imagine stripping water from your office. It would require some employeee to spend his time regularly retrieving bottled water for the coffee machine or some delivery contract. This would sure subtract from profits, as manhours are wasted for tasks that could be automated (think turning the faucet and washing your hands instead of pumping water from the tank/bottles).
We have always lived in three dimensions, so visualizing 4 dimensions Per Se is almost impossible coz our nuerons have been hardwired for 3 dimensions.
Breaking up these limitations is not as hard as it might seem. The traditional length X width X depth is just an example of a 3d room. I understood multi-dimensionality with this simple analogy:
Imagine the "room of cookies"
1st dim: color (red, green, blue,...) 2nd dim: shape (round, square, triangular,...) 3rd dim: consistency (very hard, hard, soft,...) 4th dim: size (from very small to very large)
There you have it. A 4dim room that can be used to express any kind of cookie in a mathematical vector. For adding more dimensions all you have to make sure is that the new dimension os orthogonal, which means that the new component/unit has to be linear independent of all the other components/unit (which could for instance be the 5th dimension of texture (like smooth, rugged, etc.)
(Not an native english speaker, so please excuse me for using incorrect/half correct words.)
If I shoot a Michigander while standing in Canada, the Canadians better well ship me off to the US when they come calling. The Italians committed a crime physically in the United States by wired control. This isn't an obscure law. The Italian cops hacked into an American computer and destroyed intellectual property
Let's keep stuff comparable. We were talking about a "victimless" (in a physical sense) crime.
So: If you access a website brandishing sodomy, and that site happens to be located in Kentucky, should the law be able to fly your out of Italy for a fair trial in a country you don't know for breaking a law you were not aware of?
China has recently reorganised their laws according the web. They made it almost impossible to publish things on the web without being traceable. But in the (still) likely case someone does publish some regime criticism, and you click on the corresponding link sent to you by a friend via email - do you think it is right to be extradited and rot in the cell next to the publisher?
Slashdot Mirror
A stop sign is a safety device which regulates traffic flow in the interest of all people who take part in the traffic system (pedestrians, bikers, cyclists, ...). It's the law.
If you roll over a stop sign with absolutely NO ONE near you, there is basically nothing to regulate. Whether you comply or not, it yields no advantages, disadvantages or risks to anyone.
As in this specific sitution there is nothing to regulate, the law itself becomes irrelevant. Rolling over a stop sign in this case (where no one is around to see) is not breaking the law. It is just plain stupid to comply to it.
This applies to another thing about traffic which I came to dub "the American disease" when visiting the US. The constant non-useage of turn signals. A lot of americans don't use it at all (and i consider this wrong).
But then again, often I do not use it, because NOBODY is around to see it. Does this give a machine the right to issue a ticket for me? Technically it's possible to put up machines that scan the cars for blink signals when approaching on a turn lane. But if this is the only car for hundreds of yards around, should the machine be allowed to do so? I think not. But being the totally unbiased entity it is, it would. The only solution is not to allow machines do too much in terms of law enforcement.
I do not know a SINGLE biker here in Germany who has ever gotten a red light ticket.
.de requires the govt to have proof that a) the car and b) an identifiable person has commited the red light/speeding offense. For that purpose the cams around here make a FRONT shot of the offending vehicle, which gives you a clear view of the license plate AND the driver.
.de) horsepower/displacement on your machine is limited for the first few years of your license, and while there really are people who take revenge against cameras, bikers are those hit least.
Legalese in
If there is only the plate visible, you can talk yourself out of it if you're lucky. If they only see your face, they won't even get you at all.
How many bikers Do you know that have a license plate in FRONT of their rides? And exactly how good are you at recognizing people when they wear a helmet? See, there is nothing bikers have to worry about (except for laser pistols that don't take pictures but relay the measurements to the patrol car parked around the next corner.
While it is absolutely correct that (at least here in
We have something similar around here (.de). It consists of the standard laser speed pistol cops use and a special sign that has a display built in, showing you the measured speed in real time while you are approaching.
This is used as a educational approach of getting the speeders to comply in residential areas which allow only a slow speed.
What happens is this:
a) People use it to measure how accurate their speedometer is displaying their speed, and how much speed "buffer" they have before a "live" system will trigger and take a picture.
b) People just plainly ignore it
c) Kids take their cars to the area where the system currently sits and while one takes off from the beginning of the road the other one wait by the sign to produce a nice picture of his buddy's taillights and the sign saying "83".
...would be uptime for win32.
There is a OSS tool that does exactly that by a guy called "titus", unfortunately I can't find a download link right now.
Another thing I would miss dearly on such a CD is nmapNT. It requires a patched TCP/IP stack but after that it works just as beautifully as it's *ix counterparts.
Interesting side note: The german military nicks their official duct tape "Panzertape" - literally that's "tank tape". Weird stuff though. Won't stick to anything except for itself. Guess it's perfect for selaing that punctured tube. I used some of it when I had a needle-sized hole in my car's engine cooling system (in the hose). I kept losing water at a slow rate before doing it, and had to refill every other day. After I sealed it I literally forgot about it until it appeared on the inspection invoice.
Hmmmm... some weird loops, the cam is annihilated, the cam windows blacks and you'd still have to tune into CNN to find out what is going on?
Did any of the people modding this post up bother to check the link in question? It is a link to a google-cached site, alrite, but it sure gives me fancy-schmancy graphics (read: i-m-a-g-e)
to anyone who can... mod parent up
Look at your keyboard... What does is say next to the tab key? QWERTY or DVORAK? Inefficiency won, next question.
...while the odds for any other combination being picked are just the same...
The german lottery works with 6 picks from 49 possible, and the odds for ANY combination pulled from this are 1 to 13 billion IIRC
Every other day you find a statement on slashdot that is so simple and so true it should deserve a mod point from anyone - too bad I don't have any to share right now.
mod parent up, please
Maybe it is not widely known, but Google *can* and will ban certain queries/results/terms/sites/whatever appropriate. This is probably a factor (or should I say expected result) of their rerouting change which basically determines the geographical position of a surfer and redirects to the appropriately themed google (say .de, .fr and whatever else they are running).
...1... ...2... ...3...
The probably best documented case of this is the "Operation Clambake" exclusion which was restored after heavy protests. But there were copyright issues involved so this might nut cut the cheese all the way.
What worries me more is the exponation of companies towards insane or just plainly stupid government regulations. Sometime in February a single state within Germany (which is a federal republic composed of 16 states after all) ordered their local Internet providers for exclusion of questionable material, which in this case primarily concerns fascist/white-supremacist sites like stormfront.org. Checking google.com with the query "stormfront.org" delivers a link which is clearly a site in question. Sending the same string to google.de returns nothing. Softening the query to just "stormfront" gives a couple of hits on google.com, including the nazi site. Same string for google.de gives a bunch of sites, none of which is questionable in content. Most of them are sites discussing the current situation on this case.
For the german-speaking crowd, or for those who can get their hands on a decent translator) here are some heise.de articles covering the situation:
This is a sad state of affeirs, and you won't have to go as far as China to find behaviour which should be immoral to the pluralistic and open community the planet pretends to be nowadays.
Depends. Given the current state of the world in which the US defines "terrorism" as most anything that does not follow the US way of life and commerce the BBS piracy i did ten years ago might well be "e-terrorism". And it was real. So it's a bite.
...and there's more...
www.fli4l.de
www.coyotelinux.[com|org|net] too lazy to check
www.freesco.org
www.smoothwall.org
Bring your CV, there might be a job opening...
Look in the classifieds of your local newspaper, where the non-geeks hide. You will find quite some people there trying to get a buck out of their old typewriter type-of-computer. Lots of 486 und P75/100/133 boxes to get there. My firewall/router runs a 486/75 with 32megs on a linux fli4l minidist system and crunches seti in its spare time (ok, that IS 1 packet every 12 days, but what the fuck....)
To me that is not within the definition of option. You order a W2K copy because you want to use it on your machine. You pay real bucks for the package. Upon installation you have the choice of accepting the EULA (and actually getting something for your money) or not accepting the EULA and trying to get the dealer accept the item (with broken shrinkwraps) for a return.
Basically, you don't purchase a product, but an "license" or allowance to use it. Not accepting does not give you limited functionality. It gives you just plain nothing.
Is that a choice?
So, you thought desktop/application firewalls were safe? Think again.
Although MS engineers are not really well-known for implementing clever and working solution, I fear that they might have come up with a similar or even advanced technique of establishing a "stealth" connection.
A corporate firewall/packet filter with some sort of IDS enabled and all MS IPs blocked _might_ work if used in conjunction with an application firewall on each individual machine. On the other hand it might trade in too much flexibility for security. If the individual machine depends on http availability your pretty much lost. You can piggyback/tunnel basically anything through that. Disabling IE and using Netscape might put a hold to that.
But there ain't no verification of that unless someone can produce the w2k sources... And if someone does MS will have a patch ready and automatically deployed in RECORD time...
...just maybe the folks at userfriendly.org did a strip not only inspiring laughter but also envisioning the future with this piece...
Can you elaborate some more? What OS version, what services enabled, what do you mean by "inetpub" dir? My Documents? Sharing by SAMBA?
In case you haven't done it already, go get a copy of Clifford Stoll's "Cuckoos Egg". It is a quite easy read for a book concentrating on a hack, but then again it is not quite dense on details. Then you will realize that there were times, when people could actually take CONTROL of army machines from ABROAD and no one even wanted to investigate. FBI quote: "We can't investigate without a loss/damage of more than $1m. How much is that you lost? 75cents in billed cpu time?" Other agencies were not quite as verbose but just as uninterested...
I don't know... Maybe it does not add up to P&L in a common way, but in an invisible way it does. Imagine stripping all the IT from your workplace. People would need to get back to faxing stuff (type letter in typewriter, go to fax machine, type number, wait, redial if necessary, wait, retrieve original, file it and go to next task). People would spend more time on the phone. People would spend hours looking for some papers that have mistakenly been put into the wrong cabinet. The list is endless.
To me IT is becoming more and more of an utility. Imagine stripping water from your office. It would require some employeee to spend his time regularly retrieving bottled water for the coffee machine or some delivery contract. This would sure subtract from profits, as manhours are wasted for tasks that could be automated (think turning the faucet and washing your hands instead of pumping water from the tank/bottles).
The comma is used in Germany (all of Europe?) as a decimal separator... pi would be 3,141...
The point is used as a thousand separator, as in 3.500.000 citizens.
9 ft/s, eh? Can we have that in furlongs per fortnight please? I am so much more accustomed to the unit.
For the metrically non-challenged:
9ft/s = 2,7432 meter/s
thats = 9,87 km/h or 6,13 miles/h
And for collectors of odd figures and measurements: that speed equals 7769 nautical miles per presidential term.
Breaking up these limitations is not as hard as it might seem. The traditional length X width X depth is just an example of a 3d room. I understood multi-dimensionality with this simple analogy:
Imagine the "room of cookies"
1st dim: color (red, green, blue,...)
2nd dim: shape (round, square, triangular,...)
3rd dim: consistency (very hard, hard, soft,...)
4th dim: size (from very small to very large)
There you have it. A 4dim room that can be used to express any kind of cookie in a mathematical vector. For adding more dimensions all you have to make sure is that the new dimension os orthogonal, which means that the new component/unit has to be linear independent of all the other components/unit (which could for instance be the 5th dimension of texture (like smooth, rugged, etc.)
(Not an native english speaker, so please excuse me for using incorrect/half correct words.)
So: If you access a website brandishing sodomy, and that site happens to be located in Kentucky, should the law be able to fly your out of Italy for a fair trial in a country you don't know for breaking a law you were not aware of?
China has recently reorganised their laws according the web. They made it almost impossible to publish things on the web without being traceable. But in the (still) likely case someone does publish some regime criticism, and you click on the corresponding link sent to you by a friend via email - do you think it is right to be extradited and rot in the cell next to the publisher?