I can't think of any technical reasons for not being able to boot from a CF disk. As a matter of fact, I've got a couple SBCs (single board computers) that can boot from CF sitting next to me on my desk right now.
About the only think I can think of for handhelds is either the cost of developing this capability, since more handhelds are pretty much custom hardware.
Does anyone know where the TRG SuperPilot stands on this? Or any other handhelds?
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Then embed a single image per page into the word document.
This presupposes access to Word. I don't have access to Word. I've made a point of it. Yes, I do have both AbiWord and StarOffice installed, so I could theoretically generate Word documents. However, Word is a closed format, which most people I deal with can't easily read, whereas all of text, html, dvi, postscript, and pdf are much more accessible to the general population.
In fact, I dare say that there isn't a single person with access to a computer who couldn't read (at least) one of those five formats. Even those with visual impairments should have no problems reading the text version of my resume.
And that's what this is all about, open access. It's funny, but I've noticed every decision I've been making lately has in some way supported personal freedoms (search for other articles by me lately to see....). It's amazing when you suddenly realize you're living up to your ideals... Free software, free choices, etc...
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When your kid asks for a new bicycle (to go upstairs/fuel for his car/ etc...) give him a loaded gun instead - it's safer that way.
Being at work, I don't have the numbers on me, but more children die (individually) as a result of falling down stairs, drowning, or being hit by a car while on a bicycle each year than by negligent firearms use. Not that anyone can really be expected to know that, considering how one-sided the media can be about these issues.
I'd feel my children to be a lot safer with a gun in the house than a pool in the back yard or stairs to fall down. Just because I managed to survive both pools and stairs to reach breeding age doesn't mean that they're inherently safer. In fact, they're much more dangerous.
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Well, you see, a gun is made to kill/break/hurt something. Maybe a person, maybe a tasty animal, maybe a target, but something.
So are clubs. So are knives. Yet you don't see the same rabid attacks against them. I maintain that they are all tools. Nothing more, nothing less.
A club was originally designed to bash something in order to kill/break/hurt it. Do we have regulation? No. Is it easy to obtain? Damn straight, if there are trees or construction or anything of a suitable shape out there. Are they incredibly prevalent in society? Well, I see them used every time I watch a baseball game . . . Are they blamed when someone's beaten to death? No. Can they be used for good OR evil? Yes.
Same with knives. Originally designed to cut and stab things. You can buy them in a sporting goods department. You can buy them from RonCo. You can get them in any kitchen store. They're probably more prevalent than any other object intended as a weapon. Do a quick check: how many knives are there in your house right now? Don't you think you should check this knife proliferation? Do we have to treat you with kid gloves because you might flip out and go on a stabbing spree?
Anyway, you can't compare gun control to hacking control, or anything else, because a gun is a weapon, designed to hurt something, and other things cause damages as a side effect.
Sure you can. I could easily use ping, traceroute, nmap, the latest DDoS scripts, etc, as weapons against your system. I could crash it, hurting either your hardware, your ISP's hardware, potentially a business' revenue. One exists in the physical realm (guns), the other in the electronic realm ("hacking" tools). They can both be used as weapons, both offensive and defensive. How they're used is the responsibility of the user. Neither has an inherent evil nor an inherent good, anymore than that thick piece of wood you're brandishing to either scare off the strangers, or coerce money from the locals with. They just exist.
(Sorry, guns do not have a side effect of reducing crime,
I beg to differ. Just the very act of training with a gun, knowing how to use it, knowing you don't have to be a victim reduces crime. It gives you a level of self-confidence and self-assurance in yourself and your abilities. Sure, you might not have a gun on you at the time, but predators can smell fear and intimidation. If you have that self-confidence in yourself, you become less attractive as prey.
Plus, if you do have a gun, you don't necessarily need to use it. It's a method of last resort to have to shoot someone. Every personal protection course I've ever taken (NRA-sponsored, no less) emphasizes that the best course of action is to get away as quickly as possible. Barring that, try to find a non-violent solution (this could be as simple as shouting, or telling someone you have a gun, or showing it, but you'd better be prepared to use it at that point). Otherwise, as a last resort, use violence of whatever kind is necessary to protect yourself and/or your family.
Personally, I plan to take every step possible to defend what's mine. That means in the physical world, having access to firearms, being trained in their use, and having the resolve to use them should that need ever arise. I don't intend to sit idly by waiting for the police to show up at some indeterminate point in the future, because of something happening right now.
In the electronic world, it means using the same tools that likely attackers of my systems are going to use. Being familiar with how they work, what they do, and why they do it is invaluable to protecting my boxen. If I'm unable to do so, I'm just begging to be a victim, and can only attempt to put the pieces back together again after the harm has been done.
In both cases, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
nor of holding back government oversteps)
Realizing you might not necessarily be familiar with American history, I again beg to differ. There was this little spat between England and the colonies. And wouldn't you know it, those crazy gun-weilding wackos managed to revolt against an oppresive government.
Do I think it's likely to happen today? No, there are too many sheeple, and folks who think the government has our best interests at heart instead of its own. Any/. reader should know how often the government sides with us poor citizenry.
So yes, it's possible for guns to hold back government oversteps, and be used in constructive and defensive ways. It's also true that hacking tools can be used in a similar manner. Anyone who tells you otherwise has an agenda to advance, and certainly isn't looking out for your best interests.
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No, a loaded gun might kill someone, as will any number of other tools. I'm sure any enterprising individual would be able to find a way to kill someone with the contents of, say, a kitchen. Or a game closet. Or a pencil case. Or their car. Or a thimbleful of water.
This brushes one of the things that really torques me off. A lot of people, whether they realize it or not, ignorantly assume that bullets have some magical property that causes them to instantly kill someone if they're hit with them. (Case in point, UPS guy to the front desk of my apartment complex when delivering a couple cases of ammo: "Whoever that guy is, you sure don't want to piss him off.")
This simply isn't true. Yes, if you're shot, there's a chance you'll die. But unless it's a well-placed shot, it isn't likely. Especially when using non-hollowpoint bullets.
Not to mention, all of my gun-weilding friends are some of the most responsible people I know. They're well aware of the potential for abuse that owning a firearm has, and always practice safe handling techniques, and pass on this knowledge and concern about safety whenever they introduce a new person to how much fun it is to blow away a paper target or go plinking. (You have no idea how satisfying it is to shoot surplus tax forms on Tax Day.) Coincidentally, these very same people are almost all highly skilled technically, and most are concerned with computer security in one way or another, and use knowledge of exploits and "hacking" tools to accomplish their day jobs.
A loaded gun is probably less dangerous than a fueled-up car. And as far as children are concerned, less dangerous than any of: a pool, stairs, household cleaners, bicycles, a busy street.
One of the problems, as I see it, is that there are just too many script kiddies out there who act without thinking. They have no sense of responsibility, so they have no way of realizing the harm their actions cause, or worse, delight in it. This doesn't mean that the rest of us should be prevented from using the same tools for useful purposes. It means we should make the victims less likely to be victims, through empowerment. That means publishing exploits, pressuring vendors to release fixes, and being constantly vigilant against future threats. Sticking our collective heads in the sand and loudly proclaiming there isn't a problem will just make it easier for the more pragmatic, less socially responsible to sneak up on us from behind.
(damn, I didn't think I could pull that back on topic)
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... pry it out of my cold, dead hands. No, wait, that's my guns, but the principle is the same.
It's very disheartening to read about the cluelessness of these idiots. "Hacking" serves a very useful purpose in the computer world, and from skimming the MSNBC article, it's clear the lawmakers either don't know, or don't care, how horrible this treaty is.
Being in a network security class right now, I can definitely say that, were it not for hacking, in the original sense, very few networks out there would be secure. Reverse engineering protocols, examining the "oh shit"s in them, and publishing the results seem to be the only way to bring to light problems, and hopefully get them fixed. (I'm thinking s/key, securid, Firewall-1, etc here specifically, and know there are others.)
If it suddenly becomes illegal to post new vulnerabilities to mailing lists like BugTraq, if it suddenly becomes illegal to write or possess or use tools like nmap, or SATAN, or even traceroute and ping, will just serve to immediately make criminals out of a large percentage of the computer-literate population.
And let's face it, like any other such law which tries to "protect" law-abiding citizens by making something which can be used for both good and ill illegal, the end result is either creating more victims (in this case, because people won't know about the latest exploits, and be able to lock down their boxes), or creating more criminals (since I doubt, regardless of law, whether or not most people who use these tools, for good or ill, will stop using them).
Not to mention those engaged in illegal cracking activities now have no more incentive than they did before to stop.
I agree that the "massive wave of cybercrime" is likely nothing more than a bunch of script kiddies using well-known exploits to attack web sites and servers that, in all honesty, really should have been secured in the first place. Somehow, this all seems like the electronic equivalent of Columbine, where, because a certain type of tool was used to commit an illegal act, there are now more calls from talking heads and people with their own agendas to advance spouting off how evil these tools are, and how we have to protect the public.
Well, here's a news flash... The tools themselves have no inherent evil. It's only the use the individual users put the tools to that can be judged to be "good" or "evil". A hammer, a kitchen knife, a copy of gdb, or perl...they're all just tools. They sit there until someone takes it upon themselves to use said tools for a particular purpose. Just because someone used a kitchen knife to stab a person to death, or a copy of nmap to discover an idiot left the r* services on, is no reason everyone should be banned from owning kitchen knives or nmap, on the off-chance they themselves will be either perpetrator or victim in the future.
There is some hope, however. If this Draft Cybercrime Treaty is approved, I can only hope it will hasten the acceptance of other tools, such as the remailer networks, onion routing, freenet, etc. Yeah, we'll all probably technically be criminals at that point, but maybe then at least we'll be able to keep out both the script kiddies and the lawmakers, and get on with our lives, knowing at least we will be secure, while the rest of the (digital) world collapses under its own folly.
(can anyone tell me why I need to select "plain old text" to get html tags to work?!)
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Those of us who dont have 4 digit uids have more compromises to make, I guess:-)
Compromises? Nah. It's just educating the clueless that there's more to life than just Microsoft Word.
I was recently looking for a new job, back in the June-August timeframe. Surprisingly, once I pointed out the fact that there were all these other readable versions of my resume online, a lot of people had no problems accepting text or html.
The really disturbing part is people would see my resume online, which has links to all these versions, and still would call me and ask for a Word copy.
I just made the conscious decision that I didn't want to deal with anyone who couldn't handle ASCII, and I ended up still dealing with everyone who called me and asked about a Word version.
(And the UID is a fluke... I found out about "that slashdot thing" and decided to register about a week later, so I could customize my content.)
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Under current law, census data on individuals can be used only to benefit the Census Bureau, which has balked at turning over files to the budget office without greater assurances of individual privacy. However, the Congressional number crunchers are not taking no for an answer. Republicans may tack an amendment allowing Congress access to census data onto an appropriations bill before Congress adjourns for the elections.
The records the budget office wants are not themselves from the 2000 Census; they are voluntary responses to monthly surveys, with confidentiality promised. Forcing the bureau to give them up would set a disturbing precedent. Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta, who supervises the Census Bureau, warned Congress this month that amending the census law would "seriously compromise" the department's ability to safeguard taxpayers' privacy and "to assure continued high response rates of the American public to census surveys."
It seems to me as though the government is attempting to modify its own "privacy policy" with regard to the Census Bureau's data, and then use the already-collected information (from when the old (current) privacy policy was/is in force) for new uses, which would clearly have not been expected, based upon the privacy policy citizens were aware of at the time they were filling out these surveys and providing their personal information.
It seems to me that, if it's possible to sue web sites and corporations for such abuses of the public trust, we should be able to also sue the government for such. Not that I expect it likely to happen, given that the two major parties are both intent on becoming Big Brother.
I suppose all we can do is engage in an active campaign of disinformation if/when we're asked to fill out these surveys. That, or move to a free country, if one existed.
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before some enterprising individual writes a virus to exploit this, say, automatic sharing of updates to virus protectors? Say, removing the signatures of certain virii? Or possibly, hell, just turning the protector itself into an infector?
As for distributed conversations, unless there's some strong crypto in there, not to mention good anonymization of the packets, I sure wouldn't want to discuss anything private, since any old schmoe with a little know-how along the conversation path would be able to read all about whatever I was discussing.
Yes, I/msg over irc now. But usually it's on a private server, and the nut-kicking principle can apply. Not so if everyone is suddenly a "peer".
What I'd prefer to see is something similar to the cypherpunk remailer networks for irc, something akin to onion routing or somesuch. Probably too much overhead though, and living in the States, I couldn't even work on it and release it.
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I can only heap loads of praise upon one of my college professors for requiring that all project reports be turned in as Postscript. He then went on to give us a brief LaTeX tutorial, and I've been using it ever since.
It's been almost a seven years now since I was introduced to it, and even though I've had to make LaTeX do some pretty heinous things for people who have gotten used to the horried output of WYSIWYG word processors, it's been a faithful companion. Even when I need to write something up for work, I write it in LaTeX, then either provide.ps,.pdf, or.html output for various folks.
I've even gone so far as to tell headhunters and potential employers, "No, I do not have a Word copy of my resume. If one of text, html, pdf, postscript or dvi isn't readable by you, then I'm not interested." (Yes, I keep my resume in LaTeX too)
Long live LaTeX!:-)
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of course, what's to stop Microsoft from releasing versions that won't work under Wine,
ever?
What, indeed?
I mean, Microsoft would never sink so low as to add code to their software to prevent it from running someplace they didn't want it, would they? Such as, oh, Windows x.yy terminating with an error message when run under DR-DOS?
Or, turning things around a bit, "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
No, it could never ever happen.
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Actually, in the book there was a joint Soviet/American mission, as well as a Chinese mission. The Chinese got there first, landed on Europa, and started pumping water into their tanks. The lights from the ship attracted some plant-like animal which destroyed the ship. The remaining Chinese astronaut (one of two not on/near the ship at the time) then started transmitting to the Leonov even though the Chinese had been maintaining radio silence until that point. He described what had happened, and kept transmitting until they lost the signal. They never regained it.
Having just read the book (and working on 2061), I'm really disappointed by what was left out of the movie. Not that it's a poor movie, but the book is (almost always) so much better.
I can't really say that I'm surprised. We're moving so swiftly towards the New World Order, where any views which go contrary to the masses are labelled thoughtcrimes, and the offenders forced into re-education camps or simply silenced in the night, that it makes sense that the UN would go after this.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but even if I strongly disagree or become deeply offended at what someone else is saying, I'm still willing to defend to the death their right to say it. It doesn't matter to me if it's the KKK, neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, or the Scientologists. And yes, I realize that the freedoms I seen deteriorate in the States aren't necessarily granted anywhere else in the world. That doesn't stop me from believing everyone should have those rights. We don't seen to have that freedom anymore in the US, so why not have the UN going around to ensure that no one does?
Whatever happened to diversity? Diversity of opinion is just as important as any other kind of diversity.
The best way these things is the way a state government official in one of the southern states (can't recall which right now) where the KKK has adopted a stretch of highway through one of those adopt-a-road programs is handling it. They can't deny the KKK the right to adopt the highway. Instead, this person has introduced legislation to rename it the Rosa Parks Memorial Highway.
That is, IMHO, the best way to handle these things.
--- Yeah, this is pretty fscking disjointed. It's been a long day, a long night at class, and I really should be asleep, but . . .
Looks like they want emailed comments to be in either PDF, Word >= 7.0, or Wordperfect >= 7.0. Whatever happened to plain vanilla ascii? Since they're planning to put this stuff up on their website, one might have thought that ASCII or HTML might have been an acceptable format. Maybe they need to be enlightened about requiring closed formats themselves.
Also, I urge everyone to act responsibly. Show them that we can give well-reasoned arguments for why DeCSS isn't covered by the DMCA's prohibitions. Spamming them isn't going to do anything to help us, and will likely hurt us in the long run.
Be sure to stress how DeCSS is designed so that Linux users can watch legally-purchased DVDs, and how DVDs can be copied without needing to decrypt them. In all the articles on/. so far on this (as well as most other sites carrying the DeCSS articles), plenty of valid reasons have been given, from those above, to just plain bad crypto being used, etc. Read the comments. Distill them into reasoned letters, and get them in!
Re:Use ISO Time and Date formats!
on
Happy Odd Day!
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· Score: 1
What about non-english speakers? Using 3-letter designations is language-specific, and still not internationally portable.
Use ISO Time and Date formats!
on
Happy Odd Day!
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Date formats like MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are ambiguous and confusing, especially for the majority of any calendar year. I really wish people would start using International Standard Date and Time Notation, which is YYYY-MM-DD (see ISO 8601). They're much less confusing, can't mean something different in another notational system, and put units from largest to smallest. Adding in the time continues the trend with YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm-ss.
Anyone have a link to the patent or the patent number? The only link patents.ibm.com has for GraphOn is US5274794 issued in 1993 titled "Method and apparatus for transferring coordinate data between a host computer and display device", which might or might not cover it. Certainly predates most popular acceptance of Linux, and the file date of Jan 22, 1991 seems a little early.
I think it would be more like, "I'd like 2 mole-bytes of memory please."
Clerk hands over a small flask, "That'll be five bucks."
If/when this comes to fruition, people will talk about today's paltry storage capacities the same way we currently talk about those "old 1K machines". Of course the downside is you'll probably need 500 or 600 mole-bytes to run everyone's favorite Redmond graphical shell.
(for those who don't remember their chemistry, a mole is 6.02e23 "things", i.e., molecules, atoms, minutes until class is over.... Compare that with a terabyte, which is roughly 1e12 bytes, and you're talking vast increases in capacity. As for how much is in a mole, take 18 mL of water and drink it. You've just swallowed a mole of water...feel full?)
Manipulating anything on this vast a scale, in terms of individually accessing each molecule, boggles the mind. But it's sure going to be fun.
Mmm.....years and years of MP3s stored in memory...
Every time a new version of WINE comes out, I try the following apps:
- Quicken 98 (last version to offer win3.1 support) - TurboTax - SimCity 2000
And sad to say, later versions have had WORSE results. I realize that I could *probably* replace quicken w/ gnucash, but AFAIK, there's no replacement for TurboTax. And, well, SC2K is just SO addictive (not to mention SCC for Palm).
Has anyone had any success with these apps? I've even tried snarfing the.DLLs from another Lose machine I have access to, and things went from bad to worse (I suspect it's because I don't have the same hardware, so some DLLs are completely fscking wrong). Since the machine I want to use all this on is wholly linux, never to be sullied by M$, I don't have the option of installing under Lose and then copying over.
I realize that there's the option to try VMware, but I've heard Bad Things about VMware for Linux & SMP machines (albeit annecdotally, and I don't know the particular setup). Not to mention that it would entail having to sully my machine w/ Lose 95/98/NoThanks.
It'll be nice when Wine is to the point where it's support for "foreign binaries" like java and no one needs to even think to run it (mind you, thinking is a Good Thing).
If we wanted to divorce ourselves from having to use stego w/i audio data, we could probably set up a nice (though likely high-bandwidth) stream using something along the lines of chaffing and winnowing (see this article and this article) to hide the audio stream.
Of course, we'd need to have a stream going in each direction. So maybe each person could throw in their mp3 collections or something... That way, you're sending legit data (albeit they could probably slam you for some sort of copyright violations), as well as what you really want to communicate.
I definitely agree that stego is much more useful for static information, which is why I didn't put any effort into coming up with a way to stego a 'net-phone conversation.
Hmmm...I wonder which of my friends would like to try this & annoy @Home.:-)
I wouldn't be so quick to use PGP, or GPG, in such a circumstance. PGP headers, sure, but it makes no sense to give the cracking team clues as to how the message might be broken.
One of the first things I learned when I set out to learn about crypto was that you should always assume the enemy knows the algorithm you're using. It basically boils down to a strong algorithm will remain strong, even when the attacker has knowledge of what's being used, while a weak one won't matter anyway.
There are programs that will help to mask PGP messages by stripping off the standard headers on the encrypted messages (which generally means you need to know who sent the message, and to which key). This helps to slow down attackers, but it's not going to keep a determined attacker from figuring out what you're using.
The point where stripping off headers will really help is if you're trying to hide the encrypted stream in another data stream (steganography). But I'm not sure how practical it would be to use stego for a real-time phone conversation between 2 or more people.
then they should do it themselves, instead of mandating that everyone make it "easy" for them. Especially here in the United States of Amerika, nothing says I need to make it easy for anyone to understand what I'm saying.
Not to mention that people who really want to have private conversations still will be able to, by piggybacking on top of (or tunneling with) "truly" secure protocols. There are internet phone apps that use PGP, will probably ones that use GPG, there are secure ytalk's floating around, etc.
The hell with government observation. It's their problem if they can't read my mail, or tap my phone, not mine, nor my ISP's.
The IETF, bowing down to opening up holes in secure protocols, will IMHO, completely invalidate any stance they have about any commitment to security. After all, would you buy a safe which is secure, "except for this spot right here, which will only be cut through by Authorized Personnel [or anyone else who tries]"?
Compromising security for the sole purpose of being friendly to government is ridiculous. Do you think they'd reciprocate on their own security so that we can tap into their communications? Of course not. But then, who ever said life was fair?
Even compromising security so that something will be accepted for use in multiple countries doesn't work. What self-respecting nation would want to use something that has backdoors the US (or any other) government can use to eavesdrop on its citizenry? Even when told, "We won't do it unless we have to. We mean it this time. You can trust us. Would we lie? Again?" I seriously doubt anyone with even a modicum of concern would believe that, or use a backdoored protocol.
Just look at the Clipper chip, the export version of Lotus Notes, etc. How many do you see in widespread deployment?
My personal feelings are echoed by the statement (Jefferson?) that people who choose to give up some freedom for security deserve neither. And yes, I would rather see a criminal get away with a crime to avoid sacrificing any innocent's privacy, since only dumb criminals would use dumb protocols to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't think of any technical reasons for not being able to boot from a CF disk. As a matter of fact, I've got a couple SBCs (single board computers) that can boot from CF sitting next to me on my desk right now.
About the only think I can think of for handhelds is either the cost of developing this capability, since more handhelds are pretty much custom hardware.
Does anyone know where the TRG SuperPilot stands on this? Or any other handhelds?
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eval "tr/$from/$to/";
Ick. Why eval tr when you could use the built-in tr/// (or the equivalent, 1-letter-less y///)?
(I just wish slashcode would allow <code> for things like this)
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I'm too lazy to translate this into 2 lines or less of perl. Maybe someone wants to do so, just for the possible karma?
Seems tr(1) would suffice, too...
<sigh>
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Then embed a single image per page into the word document.
This presupposes access to Word. I don't have access to Word. I've made a point of it. Yes, I do have both AbiWord and StarOffice installed, so I could theoretically generate Word documents. However, Word is a closed format, which most people I deal with can't easily read, whereas all of text, html, dvi, postscript, and pdf are much more accessible to the general population.
In fact, I dare say that there isn't a single person with access to a computer who couldn't read (at least) one of those five formats. Even those with visual impairments should have no problems reading the text version of my resume.
And that's what this is all about, open access. It's funny, but I've noticed every decision I've been making lately has in some way supported personal freedoms (search for other articles by me lately to see....). It's amazing when you suddenly realize you're living up to your ideals... Free software, free choices, etc...
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When your kid asks for a new bicycle (to go upstairs/fuel for his car/ etc...) give him a loaded gun instead - it's safer that way.
Being at work, I don't have the numbers on me, but more children die (individually) as a result of falling down stairs, drowning, or being hit by a car while on a bicycle each year than by negligent firearms use. Not that anyone can really be expected to know that, considering how one-sided the media can be about these issues.
I'd feel my children to be a lot safer with a gun in the house than a pool in the back yard or stairs to fall down. Just because I managed to survive both pools and stairs to reach breeding age doesn't mean that they're inherently safer. In fact, they're much more dangerous.
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Well, you see, a gun is made to kill/break/hurt something. Maybe a person, maybe a tasty animal, maybe a target, but something.
/. reader should know how often the government sides with us poor citizenry.
So are clubs. So are knives. Yet you don't see the same rabid attacks against them. I maintain that they are all tools. Nothing more, nothing less.
A club was originally designed to bash something in order to kill/break/hurt it. Do we have regulation? No. Is it easy to obtain? Damn straight, if there are trees or construction or anything of a suitable shape out there. Are they incredibly prevalent in society? Well, I see them used every time I watch a baseball game . . . Are they blamed when someone's beaten to death? No. Can they be used for good OR evil? Yes.
Same with knives. Originally designed to cut and stab things. You can buy them in a sporting goods department. You can buy them from RonCo. You can get them in any kitchen store. They're probably more prevalent than any other object intended as a weapon. Do a quick check: how many knives are there in your house right now? Don't you think you should check this knife proliferation? Do we have to treat you with kid gloves because you might flip out and go on a stabbing spree?
Anyway, you can't compare gun control to hacking control, or anything else, because a gun is a weapon, designed to hurt something, and other things cause damages as a side effect.
Sure you can. I could easily use ping, traceroute, nmap, the latest DDoS scripts, etc, as weapons against your system. I could crash it, hurting either your hardware, your ISP's hardware, potentially a business' revenue. One exists in the physical realm (guns), the other in the electronic realm ("hacking" tools). They can both be used as weapons, both offensive and defensive. How they're used is the responsibility of the user. Neither has an inherent evil nor an inherent good, anymore than that thick piece of wood you're brandishing to either scare off the strangers, or coerce money from the locals with. They just exist.
(Sorry, guns do not have a side effect of reducing crime,
I beg to differ. Just the very act of training with a gun, knowing how to use it, knowing you don't have to be a victim reduces crime. It gives you a level of self-confidence and self-assurance in yourself and your abilities. Sure, you might not have a gun on you at the time, but predators can smell fear and intimidation. If you have that self-confidence in yourself, you become less attractive as prey.
Plus, if you do have a gun, you don't necessarily need to use it. It's a method of last resort to have to shoot someone. Every personal protection course I've ever taken (NRA-sponsored, no less) emphasizes that the best course of action is to get away as quickly as possible. Barring that, try to find a non-violent solution (this could be as simple as shouting, or telling someone you have a gun, or showing it, but you'd better be prepared to use it at that point). Otherwise, as a last resort, use violence of whatever kind is necessary to protect yourself and/or your family.
Personally, I plan to take every step possible to defend what's mine. That means in the physical world, having access to firearms, being trained in their use, and having the resolve to use them should that need ever arise. I don't intend to sit idly by waiting for the police to show up at some indeterminate point in the future, because of something happening right now.
In the electronic world, it means using the same tools that likely attackers of my systems are going to use. Being familiar with how they work, what they do, and why they do it is invaluable to protecting my boxen. If I'm unable to do so, I'm just begging to be a victim, and can only attempt to put the pieces back together again after the harm has been done.
In both cases, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
nor of holding back government oversteps)
Realizing you might not necessarily be familiar with American history, I again beg to differ. There was this little spat between England and the colonies. And wouldn't you know it, those crazy gun-weilding wackos managed to revolt against an oppresive government.
Do I think it's likely to happen today? No, there are too many sheeple, and folks who think the government has our best interests at heart instead of its own. Any
So yes, it's possible for guns to hold back government oversteps, and be used in constructive and defensive ways. It's also true that hacking tools can be used in a similar manner. Anyone who tells you otherwise has an agenda to advance, and certainly isn't looking out for your best interests.
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
A loaded gun will kill someone.
No, a loaded gun might kill someone, as will any number of other tools. I'm sure any enterprising individual would be able to find a way to kill someone with the contents of, say, a kitchen. Or a game closet. Or a pencil case. Or their car. Or a thimbleful of water.
This brushes one of the things that really torques me off. A lot of people, whether they realize it or not, ignorantly assume that bullets have some magical property that causes them to instantly kill someone if they're hit with them. (Case in point, UPS guy to the front desk of my apartment complex when delivering a couple cases of ammo: "Whoever that guy is, you sure don't want to piss him off.")
This simply isn't true. Yes, if you're shot, there's a chance you'll die. But unless it's a well-placed shot, it isn't likely. Especially when using non-hollowpoint bullets.
Not to mention, all of my gun-weilding friends are some of the most responsible people I know. They're well aware of the potential for abuse that owning a firearm has, and always practice safe handling techniques, and pass on this knowledge and concern about safety whenever they introduce a new person to how much fun it is to blow away a paper target or go plinking. (You have no idea how satisfying it is to shoot surplus tax forms on Tax Day.) Coincidentally, these very same people are almost all highly skilled technically, and most are concerned with computer security in one way or another, and use knowledge of exploits and "hacking" tools to accomplish their day jobs.
A loaded gun is probably less dangerous than a fueled-up car. And as far as children are concerned, less dangerous than any of: a pool, stairs, household cleaners, bicycles, a busy street.
One of the problems, as I see it, is that there are just too many script kiddies out there who act without thinking. They have no sense of responsibility, so they have no way of realizing the harm their actions cause, or worse, delight in it. This doesn't mean that the rest of us should be prevented from using the same tools for useful purposes. It means we should make the victims less likely to be victims, through empowerment. That means publishing exploits, pressuring vendors to release fixes, and being constantly vigilant against future threats. Sticking our collective heads in the sand and loudly proclaiming there isn't a problem will just make it easier for the more pragmatic, less socially responsible to sneak up on us from behind.
(damn, I didn't think I could pull that back on topic)
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
... pry it out of my cold, dead hands. No, wait, that's my guns, but the principle is the same.
It's very disheartening to read about the cluelessness of these idiots. "Hacking" serves a very useful purpose in the computer world, and from skimming the MSNBC article, it's clear the lawmakers either don't know, or don't care, how horrible this treaty is.
Being in a network security class right now, I can definitely say that, were it not for hacking, in the original sense, very few networks out there would be secure. Reverse engineering protocols, examining the "oh shit"s in them, and publishing the results seem to be the only way to bring to light problems, and hopefully get them fixed. (I'm thinking s/key, securid, Firewall-1, etc here specifically, and know there are others.)
If it suddenly becomes illegal to post new vulnerabilities to mailing lists like BugTraq, if it suddenly becomes illegal to write or possess or use tools like nmap, or SATAN, or even traceroute and ping, will just serve to immediately make criminals out of a large percentage of the computer-literate population.
And let's face it, like any other such law which tries to "protect" law-abiding citizens by making something which can be used for both good and ill illegal, the end result is either creating more victims (in this case, because people won't know about the latest exploits, and be able to lock down their boxes), or creating more criminals (since I doubt, regardless of law, whether or not most people who use these tools, for good or ill, will stop using them).
Not to mention those engaged in illegal cracking activities now have no more incentive than they did before to stop.
I agree that the "massive wave of cybercrime" is likely nothing more than a bunch of script kiddies using well-known exploits to attack web sites and servers that, in all honesty, really should have been secured in the first place. Somehow, this all seems like the electronic equivalent of Columbine, where, because a certain type of tool was used to commit an illegal act, there are now more calls from talking heads and people with their own agendas to advance spouting off how evil these tools are, and how we have to protect the public.
Well, here's a news flash... The tools themselves have no inherent evil. It's only the use the individual users put the tools to that can be judged to be "good" or "evil". A hammer, a kitchen knife, a copy of gdb, or perl...they're all just tools. They sit there until someone takes it upon themselves to use said tools for a particular purpose. Just because someone used a kitchen knife to stab a person to death, or a copy of nmap to discover an idiot left the r* services on, is no reason everyone should be banned from owning kitchen knives or nmap, on the off-chance they themselves will be either perpetrator or victim in the future.
There is some hope, however. If this Draft Cybercrime Treaty is approved, I can only hope it will hasten the acceptance of other tools, such as the remailer networks, onion routing, freenet, etc. Yeah, we'll all probably technically be criminals at that point, but maybe then at least we'll be able to keep out both the script kiddies and the lawmakers, and get on with our lives, knowing at least we will be secure, while the rest of the (digital) world collapses under its own folly.
(can anyone tell me why I need to select "plain old text" to get html tags to work?!)
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
Those of us who dont have 4 digit uids have more compromises to make, I guess :-)
Compromises? Nah. It's just educating the clueless that there's more to life than just Microsoft Word.
I was recently looking for a new job, back in the June-August timeframe. Surprisingly, once I pointed out the fact that there were all these other readable versions of my resume online, a lot of people had no problems accepting text or html.
The really disturbing part is people would see my resume online, which has links to all these versions, and still would call me and ask for a Word copy.
I just made the conscious decision that I didn't want to deal with anyone who couldn't handle ASCII, and I ended up still dealing with everyone who called me and asked about a Word version.
(And the UID is a fluke... I found out about "that slashdot thing" and decided to register about a week later, so I could customize my content.)
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
It seems to me as though the government is attempting to modify its own "privacy policy" with regard to the Census Bureau's data, and then use the already-collected information (from when the old (current) privacy policy was/is in force) for new uses, which would clearly have not been expected, based upon the privacy policy citizens were aware of at the time they were filling out these surveys and providing their personal information.
It seems to me that, if it's possible to sue web sites and corporations for such abuses of the public trust, we should be able to also sue the government for such. Not that I expect it likely to happen, given that the two major parties are both intent on becoming Big Brother.
I suppose all we can do is engage in an active campaign of disinformation if/when we're asked to fill out these surveys. That, or move to a free country, if one existed.
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
before some enterprising individual writes a virus to exploit this, say, automatic sharing of updates to virus protectors? Say, removing the signatures of certain virii? Or possibly, hell, just turning the protector itself into an infector?
/msg over irc now. But usually it's on a private server, and the nut-kicking principle can apply. Not so if everyone is suddenly a "peer".
As for distributed conversations, unless there's some strong crypto in there, not to mention good anonymization of the packets, I sure wouldn't want to discuss anything private, since any old schmoe with a little know-how along the conversation path would be able to read all about whatever I was discussing.
Yes, I
What I'd prefer to see is something similar to the cypherpunk remailer networks for irc, something akin to onion routing or somesuch. Probably too much overhead though, and living in the States, I couldn't even work on it and release it.
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
I can only heap loads of praise upon one of my college professors for requiring that all project reports be turned in as Postscript. He then went on to give us a brief LaTeX tutorial, and I've been using it ever since.
.ps, .pdf, or .html output for various folks.
:-)
It's been almost a seven years now since I was introduced to it, and even though I've had to make LaTeX do some pretty heinous things for people who have gotten used to the horried output of WYSIWYG word processors, it's been a faithful companion. Even when I need to write something up for work, I write it in LaTeX, then either provide
I've even gone so far as to tell headhunters and potential employers, "No, I do not have a Word copy of my resume. If one of text, html, pdf, postscript or dvi isn't readable by you, then I'm not interested." (Yes, I keep my resume in LaTeX too)
Long live LaTeX!
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
Urk! They say memory's the second thing to go, yadda yadda yadda. I should have actually looked for the quote instead of trusting my memory.
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
of course, what's to stop Microsoft from releasing versions that won't work under Wine,
ever?
What, indeed?
I mean, Microsoft would never sink so low as to add code to their software to prevent it from running someplace they didn't want it, would they? Such as, oh, Windows x.yy terminating with an error message when run under DR-DOS?
Or, turning things around a bit, "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
No, it could never ever happen.
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It's pretty pathetic when karma can drop when you do nothing
Actually, in the book there was a joint Soviet/American mission, as well as a Chinese mission. The Chinese got there first, landed on Europa, and started pumping water into their tanks. The lights from the ship attracted some plant-like animal which destroyed the ship. The remaining Chinese astronaut (one of two not on/near the ship at the time) then started transmitting to the Leonov even though the Chinese had been maintaining radio silence until that point. He described what had happened, and kept transmitting until they lost the signal. They never regained it.
Having just read the book (and working on 2061), I'm really disappointed by what was left out of the movie. Not that it's a poor movie, but the book is (almost always) so much better.
I can't really say that I'm surprised. We're moving so swiftly towards the New World Order, where any views which go contrary to the masses are labelled thoughtcrimes, and the offenders forced into re-education camps or simply silenced in the night, that it makes sense that the UN would go after this.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but even if I strongly disagree or become deeply offended at what someone else is saying, I'm still willing to defend to the death their right to say it. It doesn't matter to me if it's the KKK, neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, or the Scientologists. And yes, I realize that the freedoms I seen deteriorate in the States aren't necessarily granted anywhere else in the world. That doesn't stop me from believing everyone should have those rights. We don't seen to have that freedom anymore in the US, so why not have the UN going around to ensure that no one does?
Whatever happened to diversity? Diversity of opinion is just as important as any other kind of diversity.
The best way these things is the way a state government official in one of the southern states (can't recall which right now) where the KKK has adopted a stretch of highway through one of those adopt-a-road programs is handling it. They can't deny the KKK the right to adopt the highway. Instead, this person has introduced legislation to rename it the Rosa Parks Memorial Highway.
That is, IMHO, the best way to handle these things.
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Yeah, this is pretty fscking disjointed. It's been a long day, a long night at class, and I really should be asleep, but . . .
Looks like they want emailed comments to be in either PDF, Word >= 7.0, or Wordperfect >= 7.0. Whatever happened to plain vanilla ascii? Since they're planning to put this stuff up on their website, one might have thought that ASCII or HTML might have been an acceptable format. Maybe they need to be enlightened about requiring closed formats themselves.
/. so far on this (as well as most other sites carrying the DeCSS articles), plenty of valid reasons have been given, from those above, to just plain bad crypto being used, etc. Read the comments. Distill them into reasoned letters, and get them in!
Also, I urge everyone to act responsibly. Show them that we can give well-reasoned arguments for why DeCSS isn't covered by the DMCA's prohibitions. Spamming them isn't going to do anything to help us, and will likely hurt us in the long run.
Be sure to stress how DeCSS is designed so that Linux users can watch legally-purchased DVDs, and how DVDs can be copied without needing to decrypt them. In all the articles on
What about non-english speakers? Using 3-letter designations is language-specific, and still not internationally portable.
Date formats like MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are ambiguous and confusing, especially for the majority of any calendar year. I really wish people would start using International Standard Date and Time Notation, which is YYYY-MM-DD (see ISO 8601). They're much less confusing, can't mean something different in another notational system, and put units from largest to smallest. Adding in the time continues the trend with YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm-ss.
Please, please, please? With sugar on top?
Anyone have a link to the patent or the patent number? The only link patents.ibm.com has for GraphOn is US5274794 issued in 1993 titled "Method and apparatus for transferring coordinate data between a host computer and display device", which might or might not cover it. Certainly predates most popular acceptance of Linux, and the file date of Jan 22, 1991 seems a little early.
I think it would be more like, "I'd like 2 mole-bytes of memory please."
Clerk hands over a small flask, "That'll be five bucks."
If/when this comes to fruition, people will talk about today's paltry storage capacities the same way we currently talk about those "old 1K machines". Of course the downside is you'll probably need 500 or 600 mole-bytes to run everyone's favorite Redmond graphical shell.
(for those who don't remember their chemistry, a mole is 6.02e23 "things", i.e., molecules, atoms, minutes until class is over.... Compare that with a terabyte, which is roughly 1e12 bytes, and you're talking vast increases in capacity. As for how much is in a mole, take 18 mL of water and drink it. You've just swallowed a mole of water...feel full?)
Manipulating anything on this vast a scale, in terms of individually accessing each molecule, boggles the mind. But it's sure going to be fun.
Mmm.....years and years of MP3s stored in memory...
Every time a new version of WINE comes out, I try the following apps:
.DLLs from another Lose machine I have access to, and things went from bad to worse (I suspect it's because I don't have the same hardware, so some DLLs are completely fscking wrong). Since the machine I want to use all this on is wholly linux, never to be sullied by M$, I don't have the option of installing under Lose and then copying over.
- Quicken 98 (last version to offer win3.1 support)
- TurboTax
- SimCity 2000
And sad to say, later versions have had WORSE results. I realize that I could *probably* replace quicken w/ gnucash, but AFAIK, there's no replacement for TurboTax. And, well, SC2K is just SO addictive (not to mention SCC for Palm).
Has anyone had any success with these apps? I've even tried snarfing the
I realize that there's the option to try VMware, but I've heard Bad Things about VMware for Linux & SMP machines (albeit annecdotally, and I don't know the particular setup). Not to mention that it would entail having to sully my machine w/ Lose 95/98/NoThanks.
It'll be nice when Wine is to the point where it's support for "foreign binaries" like java and no one needs to even think to run it (mind you, thinking is a Good Thing).
If we wanted to divorce ourselves from having to use stego w/i audio data, we could probably set up a nice (though likely high-bandwidth) stream using something along the lines of chaffing and winnowing (see this article and this article) to hide the audio stream.
:-)
Of course, we'd need to have a stream going in each direction. So maybe each person could throw in their mp3 collections or something... That way, you're sending legit data (albeit they could probably slam you for some sort of copyright violations), as well as what you really want to communicate.
I definitely agree that stego is much more useful for static information, which is why I didn't put any effort into coming up with a way to stego a 'net-phone conversation.
Hmmm...I wonder which of my friends would like to try this & annoy @Home.
One of the first things I learned when I set out to learn about crypto was that you should always assume the enemy knows the algorithm you're using. It basically boils down to a strong algorithm will remain strong, even when the attacker has knowledge of what's being used, while a weak one won't matter anyway.
There are programs that will help to mask PGP messages by stripping off the standard headers on the encrypted messages (which generally means you need to know who sent the message, and to which key). This helps to slow down attackers, but it's not going to keep a determined attacker from figuring out what you're using.
The point where stripping off headers will really help is if you're trying to hide the encrypted stream in another data stream (steganography). But I'm not sure how practical it would be to use stego for a real-time phone conversation between 2 or more people.
then they should do it themselves, instead of mandating that everyone make it "easy" for them. Especially here in the United States of Amerika, nothing says I need to make it easy for anyone to understand what I'm saying.
Not to mention that people who really want to have private conversations still will be able to, by piggybacking on top of (or tunneling with) "truly" secure protocols. There are internet phone apps that use PGP, will probably ones that use GPG, there are secure ytalk's floating around, etc.
The hell with government observation. It's their problem if they can't read my mail, or tap my phone, not mine, nor my ISP's.
The IETF, bowing down to opening up holes in secure protocols, will IMHO, completely invalidate any stance they have about any commitment to security. After all, would you buy a safe which is secure, "except for this spot right here, which will only be cut through by Authorized Personnel [or anyone else who tries]"?
Compromising security for the sole purpose of being friendly to government is ridiculous. Do you think they'd reciprocate on their own security so that we can tap into their communications? Of course not. But then, who ever said life was fair?
Even compromising security so that something will be accepted for use in multiple countries doesn't work. What self-respecting nation would want to use something that has backdoors the US (or any other) government can use to eavesdrop on its citizenry? Even when told, "We won't do it unless we have to. We mean it this time. You can trust us. Would we lie? Again?" I seriously doubt anyone with even a modicum of concern would believe that, or use a backdoored protocol.
Just look at the Clipper chip, the export version of Lotus Notes, etc. How many do you see in widespread deployment?
My personal feelings are echoed by the statement (Jefferson?) that people who choose to give up some freedom for security deserve neither. And yes, I would rather see a criminal get away with a crime to avoid sacrificing any innocent's privacy, since only dumb criminals would use dumb protocols to begin with.