The new crop of Russian trolls on slashdot seems to be quite large and very vocal. I'm seeing a disproportionate number of posts attacking both Georgia and anyone who seems to support the Georgians. I have no idea if the Russians are really using the RBN to engage in cyberwar with Georgia as per the original article. A few posts note some legitimate reasons why various Georgian web sites are down or inaccessible. On the other hand, the number and vehemence of the pro-Russian posts even just here on slashdot is remarkable.
So, are the Russians attempting to influence public opinion around the world by astroturfing their side of the story anyplace they can post it? Sure looks like it. Lots of the pro-Russian posts have grammatical errors that indicate the English is not the first language of the poster (as opposed to the usual slashdot poster's bad grammar and spelling that just indicates how poorly these subjects are taught in U.S. schools).
Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on sovereign immunity. Note the bolded passages....
In a constitutional monarchy, such as the United Kingdom, the sovereign is the historical origin of the authority which creates the courts. Thus the courts had no power to compel the sovereign to be bound by the courts, as they were created by the sovereign for the protection of his or her subjects. This position was drastically altered for the United Kingdom by the Crown Proceedings Act 1947 which made the government generally liable, with limited exceptions, in tort and contract. Even before this time it was possible to claim against the Crown with the Attorney-General's fiat (i.e. permission.) This was called a petition of right. Alternatively, Crown servants could be sued in place of the Crown (and the Crown as a matter of course paid.) Further, Mandamus and Prohibition were always available against Ministers because they derive from the prerogative. However, even after the Crown Proceedings Act, 1947, lawsuits against the Sovereign in his or her personal, private capacity are still inadmissible in British law.
The 11th amendment applies to the states, suits between states and between a state and the federal government. The federal government's sovereign immunity originates in Article III, Section2 of the constitution. It doesn't say it explicitly but that's the way the Supreme Court has ruled.
As one of the other posters pointed out, the doctrine of sovereign immunity has been around for a long time. For the U.S. government, it's in the constitution. From the majority of the above comments, looks like lots of people didn't pay attention in their high school government or civics class. Pay attention the next time somebody explains what the government can and cannot do. You may be tested in ways you never imagined.
Actually, Congress in particular and the federal government in general are usually exempt from most of the "do good" laws and regulations that they inflict on the remainder of the citizenry. Things like the minimum wage laws, anti-discrimination laws, etc. don't apply to the government unless Congress decides to include itself.
Nothing new here other than you just realized it. It's not corruption. It's business as usual.
That's exactly my point. In the pre-Microsoft days, the types of software that were contributed and the contributing community were tiny and very specialized. An OSS community existed but was hardly a force to be reckoned with in the market. It took M$ forcing Windoze down everyone's throat to get OSS to provide a real enterprise class OS. *BSD has been around ever since the AT&T consent decree but never got any real traction with users until *BSD and Linux were the only alternatives to Microsoft's buggy bloatware and vaporware.
Technically it is quite true that M$ help to create the OSS movement, they were such an unreliable and deceitful supplier of software that they really did do more than anybody else to drive customers to OSS.
Somewhat of an overstatement or at least an over simplification. You need only look at the programs that started out in/usr/contrib from long before M$ was even Billy G's wet dream. Programs like grep and awk easily come to mind.
That being said, M$ is what made OSS into a viable, enterprise level force in the computer software business. From their buggy programs and operating systems to their use of vaporware to string the market along, M$'s unwillingness to allow any competitor to survive (DR-DOS or OS/2 anyone? How about WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, etc?) made open source software necessary. Linux and *BSD would still be hobby toys if there was really a competitive commercial software marketplace with real choice.
Microsoft didn't actually create OSS. Open source software existed long before Microsoft. Microsoft is what made OSS necessary as the only way to offer a competitive, alternative product. One that couldn't be squeezed out of existence through contractual agreements that forbade offering the alternative.
Cheers,
Dave
P.S. I've been using Linux since 1998 and I was an OS/2 user prior to that.
As a guess, the artillery round was spinning as was at least one of the rockets engaged (visible in the video). Any sort of insulator means taking out either shell casing or explosive or both. Tends to make the round less lethal and may also mess with the ballistics. The other guy has to do this to all of his rounds since he doesn't know which ones will be engaged by a laser defense. So you end up making the other guy let's say 25% less effective everywhere because you have a laser defense at a few places.
A friend of our gave us his NordicTrak when he and his wife decided they liked a treadmill better. I like the NordicTrak since it's zero impact so there's less chance of injuring my knees. It's also a full body exercise since you use both your arms and your legs. I set it up where I can see the TV and I put in about 15 minutes a day on it plus I walk another mile and a half with the dog. This gives me about three miles of exercise every day. I'll probably bump the time on the NordicTrak to 20 minutes this fall.
I like having the NordicTrak since it means I don't really care whether the weather is good for whatever outdoor exercise I might try instead (walking, running, biking, etc.). Also, since I don't have to go out to a gym, there goes another possible excuse for not exercising. Putting it where I could see the TV means I can workout and watch something so I don't have to give up too much to still fit in a workout. This works even better if I work out first thing in the morning so a little unscheduled overtime doesn't bump the workout either.
Seems to work. I'm not as thin as I was when I was in college thirty years ago but the inseam on my pants is still greater than my waste size (33 x 34) which isn't too bad for an old fart like me (52) who eats and drinks pretty much whatever I want. And, yes, I like good food, good wine and good beer (current favorite is New Belgium's "1554" black ale).
Oh yeah. Lots of coffee to boost my metabolism probably helps. And, yes, fidgeting burns lots of calories.
Yes but a caching name server is (or at least was for a long time) the Red Hat default. Go figure. That's all most people want or need. Any bets that lots of the people who got bit with this built the machine internally with the caching name server RPM installed and then just edited or copied over the production named.conf file to turn it into their "real" name server when the box went into production?
Does this mean I'm going to start getting e-mails from someone who purports to be in Cuba and has thousands of cigars that they can export for a huge profit if only I front them the money to bribe some official and they'll split the take with me?
She grew up in Titusville neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama. She felt and heard the church bombing in 1963 and a schoolmate died in it. She's the daughter of a minister and a school teacher. Her father was an assistant dean at DU which probably got her a free ride for her education there. Nice but hardly a silver spoon. Very much self-made.
Mr. Obama spent a significant portion of his childhood in Indonesia. A little money goes a long way there. Still, couldn't have been easy being raised by a single mother and/or his grandparents. Sorry, but no silver spoon here either. May have had it a little easier than Condi but that's not saying much.
I don't recall that Mr. Obama came from a well to do family nor did Condi Rice. Success is possible for those who choose to succeed. Likewise, economic failure is also the result of lifestyle choices.
I'm one of those who always describes my politics as libertarian with a lowercase "l". The original libertarian concept was individual liberty with personal responsibility. It seems a lot of current day Libertarians leave off the responsibility part.
Really sad because I see a lot of people who don't agree with the extremes of either major party. They want the (supposed) fiscal responsibility of the Republicans without the "Let's cram fundamentalist Christianity down everyone's throat." They want the respect for individual choice of the Democrats without the "We'll tax everyone else to pay for those who suffer due to their own lifestyle choices." You should get both from the Libertarian Party. Instead you get "Dude, we gotta legalize drugs so I can get stoned whenever I want."
I thought about doing something like that but I didn't want to be off line that long. I run my own mail, DNS and web server. On the other hand, every D-Link router I've seen runs a very similar CLI when you telnet in. I'm guessing the same code or with only minimal tweaks could login and reboot the OP's router for him.
I had the same problem with a D-Link ISDN router. I just assumed that the router's bit bucket got full after a while and I had to reset it to empty the bit bucket;)
I wrote a little perl script to telnet into the router and do the reboot and then added the script to cron so the router got rebooted every night at a time when I thought I could afford to take the down time. I have an old, partial version of the script if you think it would be of any help.
I ended up using ndiswrapper to get the built-in wireless card for my notebook working. It's a Broadcom 4306 so there isn't much choice. The open source drivers (bcm43xx and another one I don't remember) I tried would not connect to my WAP if I enabled *any* level of security which is completely unacceptable to me. I need the laptop to work and frequently my only way to access the Internet with it is via a wireless connection. Thus, I end up using ndiswrapper.
The alternative to not using ndiswrapper is to not run Linux and run Windoze on it instead. That gives me a crappier laptop and doesn't solve the problem either. Every once in a while I check the state of open source drivers for it but so far, so bad.
Exactly. Until Microsoft and Windoze became dominant in the mid '90s, the same thing could be said for computers in general and software development in particular. There were umpteen different programming languages like PL/I, FORTRAN, COBOL, C, JOVIAL, Ada, Lisp, SNOBOL, CMS-2, etc. and just as many different, incompatible operating environments and hardware platforms if not more. Any one language was different on each platform (if it ran on more than one) as was job control.
Programmers and projects coped. The market operated and unfortunately gave us Microsoft but what the hay.
The traits are: the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking, and callous behavior of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism.
Which means that the more impressive change is not the technology of Intelliwiki but what it says about the institutional change at Langley.
I don't think the fear was only that the other guys would have a mole inside the organization. There is also the fear that the fact that we know something can get out accidently (press release, loose talk, etc.) and the other guys will know we have an asset. The leak could be something like the briefing papers left on the tube the other day in London where someone just wasn't careful.
As intel gets disseminated to people further from the source, there is a tendency to treat all of the information the same. Stuff gleaned from newspapers and open sources gets blended with stuff true true intel sources. A careful analysis of what is released can then yield how it is known. There are enough well meaning idiots in the press doing this sort of analysis that the bad guys don't have to have an intel staff; they can just read the papers and watch the news.
When I worked at a TLA company in the '80s, there was a project to implement something like this. They spent a lot of money but the nut they couldn't crack wasn't technical. It was deciding who could see what information. That is, even within the CIA not everyone has access to all information. Just knowing that we know something is enough for someone to infer that we must have insider access. That sort of thing.
I wonder if they have layers of data such that only people with certain clearances can see certain levels of information. Likewise, intel is usually compartmentalized such that people working on, say, information about Iran can't see equivalent data about, say, China. The theory is that they don't have a need to know.
If you're screwed up enough to snuff yourself, maybe it's a good idea. Remove yourself from the gene pool. Do it with style, originality and a little panache and you might even get a Darwin Award.
Just contributing a little bias for the next researcher.
Slashdot Mirror
The new crop of Russian trolls on slashdot seems to be quite large and very vocal. I'm seeing a disproportionate number of posts attacking both Georgia and anyone who seems to support the Georgians. I have no idea if the Russians are really using the RBN to engage in cyberwar with Georgia as per the original article. A few posts note some legitimate reasons why various Georgian web sites are down or inaccessible. On the other hand, the number and vehemence of the pro-Russian posts even just here on slashdot is remarkable.
So, are the Russians attempting to influence public opinion around the world by astroturfing their side of the story anyplace they can post it? Sure looks like it. Lots of the pro-Russian posts have grammatical errors that indicate the English is not the first language of the poster (as opposed to the usual slashdot poster's bad grammar and spelling that just indicates how poorly these subjects are taught in U.S. schools).
Cheers,
Dave
Nah. But just see how many people here get upset if you cut off their access to pirated pr0n, movies and tunes or even threaten the possibility.
Cheers,
Dave
Cheers,
Dave
Cheers,
Dave
Cheers,
Dave
Actually, Congress in particular and the federal government in general are usually exempt from most of the "do good" laws and regulations that they inflict on the remainder of the citizenry. Things like the minimum wage laws, anti-discrimination laws, etc. don't apply to the government unless Congress decides to include itself.
Nothing new here other than you just realized it. It's not corruption. It's business as usual.
Cheers,
Dave
That's exactly my point. In the pre-Microsoft days, the types of software that were contributed and the contributing community were tiny and very specialized. An OSS community existed but was hardly a force to be reckoned with in the market. It took M$ forcing Windoze down everyone's throat to get OSS to provide a real enterprise class OS. *BSD has been around ever since the AT&T consent decree but never got any real traction with users until *BSD and Linux were the only alternatives to Microsoft's buggy bloatware and vaporware.
Cheers,
Dave
Somewhat of an overstatement or at least an over simplification. You need only look at the programs that started out in /usr/contrib from long before M$ was even Billy G's wet dream. Programs like grep and awk easily come to mind.
That being said, M$ is what made OSS into a viable, enterprise level force in the computer software business. From their buggy programs and operating systems to their use of vaporware to string the market along, M$'s unwillingness to allow any competitor to survive (DR-DOS or OS/2 anyone? How about WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, etc?) made open source software necessary. Linux and *BSD would still be hobby toys if there was really a competitive commercial software marketplace with real choice.
Microsoft didn't actually create OSS. Open source software existed long before Microsoft. Microsoft is what made OSS necessary as the only way to offer a competitive, alternative product. One that couldn't be squeezed out of existence through contractual agreements that forbade offering the alternative.
Cheers,
Dave
P.S. I've been using Linux since 1998 and I was an OS/2 user prior to that.
As a guess, the artillery round was spinning as was at least one of the rockets engaged (visible in the video). Any sort of insulator means taking out either shell casing or explosive or both. Tends to make the round less lethal and may also mess with the ballistics. The other guy has to do this to all of his rounds since he doesn't know which ones will be engaged by a laser defense. So you end up making the other guy let's say 25% less effective everywhere because you have a laser defense at a few places.
Cheers,
Dave
A friend of our gave us his NordicTrak when he and his wife decided they liked a treadmill better. I like the NordicTrak since it's zero impact so there's less chance of injuring my knees. It's also a full body exercise since you use both your arms and your legs. I set it up where I can see the TV and I put in about 15 minutes a day on it plus I walk another mile and a half with the dog. This gives me about three miles of exercise every day. I'll probably bump the time on the NordicTrak to 20 minutes this fall.
I like having the NordicTrak since it means I don't really care whether the weather is good for whatever outdoor exercise I might try instead (walking, running, biking, etc.). Also, since I don't have to go out to a gym, there goes another possible excuse for not exercising. Putting it where I could see the TV means I can workout and watch something so I don't have to give up too much to still fit in a workout. This works even better if I work out first thing in the morning so a little unscheduled overtime doesn't bump the workout either.
Seems to work. I'm not as thin as I was when I was in college thirty years ago but the inseam on my pants is still greater than my waste size (33 x 34) which isn't too bad for an old fart like me (52) who eats and drinks pretty much whatever I want. And, yes, I like good food, good wine and good beer (current favorite is New Belgium's "1554" black ale).
Oh yeah. Lots of coffee to boost my metabolism probably helps. And, yes, fidgeting burns lots of calories.
Cheers,
Dave
Yeah. It's hard to be taken seriously when you make stupid grammatical errors. Your typical /. post is one thing but a book review is another.
Hopefully, this guy had a good editor for his own book. They're invaluable.
Cheers,
Dave
Yes but a caching name server is (or at least was for a long time) the Red Hat default. Go figure. That's all most people want or need. Any bets that lots of the people who got bit with this built the machine internally with the caching name server RPM installed and then just edited or copied over the production named.conf file to turn it into their "real" name server when the box went into production?
Cheers,
Dave
Does this mean I'm going to start getting e-mails from someone who purports to be in Cuba and has thousands of cigars that they can export for a huge profit if only I front them the money to bribe some official and they'll split the take with me?
Hmm. I was afraid of that.
Cheers,
Dave
You really should check you facts. Here's the wikipedia article on Condi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice
She grew up in Titusville neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama. She felt and heard the church bombing in 1963 and a schoolmate died in it. She's the daughter of a minister and a school teacher. Her father was an assistant dean at DU which probably got her a free ride for her education there. Nice but hardly a silver spoon. Very much self-made.
Here's the wiki article for Barack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Mr. Obama spent a significant portion of his childhood in Indonesia. A little money goes a long way there. Still, couldn't have been easy being raised by a single mother and/or his grandparents. Sorry, but no silver spoon here either. May have had it a little easier than Condi but that's not saying much.
Cheers,
Dave
Thanks. I try to say what I mean.
I don't recall that Mr. Obama came from a well to do family nor did Condi Rice. Success is possible for those who choose to succeed. Likewise, economic failure is also the result of lifestyle choices.
Cheers,
Dave
I'm one of those who always describes my politics as libertarian with a lowercase "l". The original libertarian concept was individual liberty with personal responsibility. It seems a lot of current day Libertarians leave off the responsibility part.
Really sad because I see a lot of people who don't agree with the extremes of either major party. They want the (supposed) fiscal responsibility of the Republicans without the "Let's cram fundamentalist Christianity down everyone's throat." They want the respect for individual choice of the Democrats without the "We'll tax everyone else to pay for those who suffer due to their own lifestyle choices." You should get both from the Libertarian Party. Instead you get "Dude, we gotta legalize drugs so I can get stoned whenever I want."
Cheers,
Dave
I thought about doing something like that but I didn't want to be off line that long. I run my own mail, DNS and web server. On the other hand, every D-Link router I've seen runs a very similar CLI when you telnet in. I'm guessing the same code or with only minimal tweaks could login and reboot the OP's router for him.
Cheers,
Dave
I'll give b43 a try. I think the predecessor was bc43. I run WPA Radius for authentication to my WAP (Yes, I am paranoid) so we'll see how it does.
Cheers,
Dave
I had the same problem with a D-Link ISDN router. I just assumed that the router's bit bucket got full after a while and I had to reset it to empty the bit bucket ;)
I wrote a little perl script to telnet into the router and do the reboot and then added the script to cron so the router got rebooted every night at a time when I thought I could afford to take the down time. I have an old, partial version of the script if you think it would be of any help.
Cheers,
Dave
I ended up using ndiswrapper to get the built-in wireless card for my notebook working. It's a Broadcom 4306 so there isn't much choice. The open source drivers (bcm43xx and another one I don't remember) I tried would not connect to my WAP if I enabled *any* level of security which is completely unacceptable to me. I need the laptop to work and frequently my only way to access the Internet with it is via a wireless connection. Thus, I end up using ndiswrapper.
The alternative to not using ndiswrapper is to not run Linux and run Windoze on it instead. That gives me a crappier laptop and doesn't solve the problem either. Every once in a while I check the state of open source drivers for it but so far, so bad.
Cheers,
Dave
Exactly. Until Microsoft and Windoze became dominant in the mid '90s, the same thing could be said for computers in general and software development in particular. There were umpteen different programming languages like PL/I, FORTRAN, COBOL, C, JOVIAL, Ada, Lisp, SNOBOL, CMS-2, etc. and just as many different, incompatible operating environments and hardware platforms if not more. Any one language was different on each platform (if it ran on more than one) as was job control.
Programmers and projects coped. The market operated and unfortunately gave us Microsoft but what the hay.
Cheers,
Dave
These are the same people who become managers and make the big bucks. See http://www.softpanorama.org/Social/Toxic_managers/psychopath_in_the_corner_office.shtml
Cheers,
Dave
Which means that the more impressive change is not the technology of Intelliwiki but what it says about the institutional change at Langley.
I don't think the fear was only that the other guys would have a mole inside the organization. There is also the fear that the fact that we know something can get out accidently (press release, loose talk, etc.) and the other guys will know we have an asset. The leak could be something like the briefing papers left on the tube the other day in London where someone just wasn't careful.
As intel gets disseminated to people further from the source, there is a tendency to treat all of the information the same. Stuff gleaned from newspapers and open sources gets blended with stuff true true intel sources. A careful analysis of what is released can then yield how it is known. There are enough well meaning idiots in the press doing this sort of analysis that the bad guys don't have to have an intel staff; they can just read the papers and watch the news.
Cheers,
Dave
When I worked at a TLA company in the '80s, there was a project to implement something like this. They spent a lot of money but the nut they couldn't crack wasn't technical. It was deciding who could see what information. That is, even within the CIA not everyone has access to all information. Just knowing that we know something is enough for someone to infer that we must have insider access. That sort of thing.
I wonder if they have layers of data such that only people with certain clearances can see certain levels of information. Likewise, intel is usually compartmentalized such that people working on, say, information about Iran can't see equivalent data about, say, China. The theory is that they don't have a need to know.
Still an interesting problem.
Cheers,
Dave
If you're screwed up enough to snuff yourself, maybe it's a good idea. Remove yourself from the gene pool. Do it with style, originality and a little panache and you might even get a Darwin Award.
Just contributing a little bias for the next researcher.
Cheers,
Dave