Well, blackice should probably default to logging, but not alerting about the most common scans and such, but it's certainly useful for detecting a large number of attacks coming from specific addresses or blocks.
I think it's a pretty good piece of software myself as far as protection for novices goes, but I don't work in ISP tech support, and have no desire to:)
I've used it in combination with a hardware firewall for years. The hardware firewall catches 99% of the crap as far as scans and such, and blackice catches server-attacks such as badly formatted HTTP requests, DNS hacks, FTP exploit attempts, and such.
I look at my new 04 Prius with more computer sensors and monitoring than I can shake a stick at. There's literally a sensor monitoring every component in the car, and it can pinpoint trouble spots very accurately.
When something goes wrong, what happens? You get a big triangle on the display and a "service vehicle" message.
What the hell?
Why not put up some diagnostic info on the screen? "ABS Failure in Braking System", "O2 Sensor clogged", "MG2 - Generator Failure", etc? Maybe even a nice like "star trekky" diagram pointing to the component, or the area of the car the problem is located at.
But that would make it possible for other people to diagnose problems, and possibly fix them. Toyota doesn't want that.
They want people to bring their cars into the dealership for a few reasons - first, because they make the money on (out of warrantee) repairs. Secondly, because the dealership reports faults back to Toyota, who can then investigate the problem to determine if they had a bad run of components, or there was a design defect.
Another one to look at is the new Epson Photo R800 - it can print both regular media as well as CD/DVD, and has seperate ink tanks for each colour. Prints with glossy ink, but has the capability to insert a "flat black" cart, or a "glossy" cart to modify how the output looks. Interesting...
I've got a slightly older Epson model at work which handles CD/DVD media, and it does a beautiful job. About 3 min per disc to print.
I also still recommend people use a CFS system for high-volume colour printing, but it's not as much of an issue if you're just doing disc labels.
This is a great idea - granted, it takes special media (which sounds like it's just basically double-sided), but if it gets popular enough, it should be cheap and easy to find.
Although I like colour inkjet printable CDs/DVDs that the new epsons can produce at low cost, this is a great way to label something that doesn't need to be in colour with the associated ink costs, etc.
Wonder what the resolution of the printing is, and how long it takes...
Maybe the top side could be used for additional data storage as well if you don't need a label?
How do you find Uniserve? I'm going to need to switch DSL providers in the next few weeks, but need something that will provide a static IP, and aren't hyper-anal (read: Shaw) about running servers and bandwidth caps.
That's because Fido is targetting their coverage exclusively at large cities that have the highest density of customers.
Making lots of cell sites in the middle of nowhere (ie: outside calgary / edmonton, and the corridor inbetween) does provide great cell service for Alberta's wildlife, but doesn't rake-in profits for the company.
Here's what I do:
I use my CityFido service in Vancouver and save bigtime. $40 (early subscriber price) for unlimited local calling each month is just heaven compared to Telus and Rogers ripoffs.
When I travel outside of the Fido-supported area (which basically covers 99% of my travels), I just pop in a Rogers/Cantel pay-as-you-go SIM card and use their more extensive (and expensive) rural service.
Here's another vote for GiTS "StandAlone / Complex" and "2nd GIG". Probably one of the best series of all-time. Great plotline (the "complex" episodes), and a number of the "stand alone" episodes which are also great.
Highly recommended!
Although I've (cawf) seen the entire SAC series and am working on watching the 2nd GIG series right now, I'm going to buy them the second they're released on DVD by Bandai.
Truely top-notch storytelling and animation, and for those (like me), who believe there is more to animation than sex and violence, this is the series to watch.
Well, there's probably some company in China that's already prototyped a cheap knockoff in the last day or two that'll be on the market in 2 weeks for $25:)
As for the alarm side of things, instead of noise, I'd personally like a laptop security system that had a smokecloak-type system installed in it:
http://www.smokecloak.com
When the alarm goes off, it generates an enormous amount of smoke/fog from a liquid. Gets a LOT of attention and in a small room, would prevent anything else from being stolen.
I'd definately have one of those installed if I owned a retail business.
Infact, I wish they'd make a car model - would make it pretty tough to steal a car if the passenger compartment slowly (so that the thief would hopefully be smart enough to stop safely before the vision was totally obscured) filled with dense smoke so the thief couldn't see.
Thank you! I was searching for the iarchitech site a year or so back and found that it had vanished. Thanks for the mirror!
It documents, in excruciating painful detail one of the most godawful applications I have to use on a daily basis at work.
Lotus Notes
I can barely express how much I loathe that program/system. As an email system, it sucks. As a document database it sucks. The web interface sucks. Yet for some unknown and ill-conceived reason, the IT people at work picked it to run our internal intranet.
I can only assume that someone either got a hell of an all-expenses-paid, 6 month vacation to a tropical destination out of it, got a large infusion of free cash, or were terminally brain-damaged when they picked this software.
Or possibly they were the aforementioned techy-type referred-to in the/. article who doesn't give/care about users, but design/pick products based on their own needs and expectations.
For all of it's faults, I'd go with MS Exchance in a fraction of a heartbeat if the decision was up to me. Sure it's got issues, but at least it's user friendly and doesn't go to extreme lengths seemingly designed to frustrate users...
Selective Availability can be enabled in different geographic regions. They could quite easily turn it on in the middle east when a conflict arises, and leave it off everywhere else.
The catch of course is that many Allied troops use civillian GPS units (Garmin and the like) because they're a heck of a lot better for casual use than the military models (which are built like tanks, but are also heavy, ackward to use, lack features, and are large).
Another factor is that European countries are working on putting up their own GPS network which will be independant from the US network, so in a few years, new receivers should be able to take readings from both GPS networks and increase the accuracy even more (and have redundancy, which is nice seeing as how GPS is absolutely vital to many forms of transportation and rescue).
Well, the easiest way to stop annoying car alarms would be to ban the motion/proximity detection variety that go off if you touch/breath/look at a car with one installed.
I have no problems with car alarms that go off if doors are forced open, windows are broken, or the ignition is messed with - those are legit.
It's the bloody motion/vibration detectors that cause most of the problems.
I like the fuel efficiency, the nice quiet ride, the smooth acceleration, etc.
I don't care about "going fast" because I drive in the city and "going fast" from one stoplight to the next is just plain stupid.
The fact that it's an '04 Prius with an 8-year warranty may also have something to do with it - my car is already modded pretty seriously, seeing as how I have never seen another one on the road in person, I'm pretty happy with it's "uniqueness":)
Yup. There are CDs made especially for audio recording - they have a special "audio header" on them that identifies them as made for audio recording.
Old CD audio recorders used to require this type of media, they wouldn't work with normal CD-R media. The idea being that if you restricted the burners to audio-only CD-Rs, you could tax those more (usually 4-8x more) and leave the data CDs alone.
Of course, everyone screamed bloody murder and worked out hacks to enable recording on regular CDs. Manufacturers who made machines that worked on regular CDs got all the business and manufacturers who made the "crippled" units hardly sold anything.
Hmm - I would've sent the guy some money if I had known he needed it, but he never seemed to update his client or anything so I never visited his website after the initial "Oh, so that's what torrent does" sort of mention.
I did donate to Azureus though because their client/tracker server is damn fine and they do a lot of work on it.
Ah well, I'm happy that he got a job at Valve though - I've got an enormous respect for those folks and their work.
The real reason for the inflated damage estimates is that it sounds impressive in the media, which generates FUD, which generates more viewers, which sells advertising space.
If a virus came out and the news reported it as causing "a few thousand dollars of damage across north america", would anyone give a damn? So the news directors and reporters try and figure out a more "interesting" damage estimate that they can broadcast. So, pump up those numbers! The virus caused $250 MILLION OF DAMAGES, suddenly sounds impressive and formidable.
It has about as much bearing as when the RIAA sues people for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars because "the song they had shared 'could' have been sent to everyone on the planet, thus depriving the record company of any profits whatsoever".
The reality is that in the office I work for, one person clicked on the attachment and got their machine infected. He continued working as normal and called the IT guys who came around and fixed it.
Total lost productivity time? A 30 second phone call. Total lost revenue? $0.
Compared to people just plain ol' "slacking on the job", viruses do a negligable amount of damage.
Funny how you never hear about the '$50 billion in lost revenue' from employees taking three 15-minute "smoke breaks" every day.
I'm wondering if these get couriered-out for personal hand-delivery, or can they be intercepted somewhere?
It would be simple for someone in the right job, in the right place to make a few hundred big-ones by simply "losing" academy screeners put in someone's in-box, or mailbox, and handing them off to the right person at the right time...
I've been using POPFile for over a year here, and even random-word (or gibberish spam) VERY rarely makes it through.
Infact I can count the number of spam messages that POPFile has mis-classified in the last 6 months on my fingers... On one hand... Using less than 5 fingers. I'm pretty careful with giving out my real email address, so I usually only get 4 or 5 spams a day.
That said, my current classification accuracy is 98.84% - which means that spam just isn't an issue for me anymore:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, blackice should probably default to logging, but not alerting about the most common scans and such, but it's certainly useful for detecting a large number of attacks coming from specific addresses or blocks.
:)
I think it's a pretty good piece of software myself as far as protection for novices goes, but I don't work in ISP tech support, and have no desire to
I've used it in combination with a hardware firewall for years. The hardware firewall catches 99% of the crap as far as scans and such, and blackice catches server-attacks such as badly formatted HTTP requests, DNS hacks, FTP exploit attempts, and such.
N.
I look at my new 04 Prius with more computer sensors and monitoring than I can shake a stick at. There's literally a sensor monitoring every component in the car, and it can pinpoint trouble spots very accurately.
When something goes wrong, what happens? You get a big triangle on the display and a "service vehicle" message.
What the hell?
Why not put up some diagnostic info on the screen? "ABS Failure in Braking System", "O2 Sensor clogged", "MG2 - Generator Failure", etc? Maybe even a nice like "star trekky" diagram pointing to the component, or the area of the car the problem is located at.
But that would make it possible for other people to diagnose problems, and possibly fix them. Toyota doesn't want that.
They want people to bring their cars into the dealership for a few reasons - first, because they make the money on (out of warrantee) repairs. Secondly, because the dealership reports faults back to Toyota, who can then investigate the problem to determine if they had a bad run of components, or there was a design defect.
N.
Seconded. If users need to be ID'ed, the proper way is either getting them to pick a short "PIN" number, or just use personal info.
Security needs to be tempered with "being reasonable". It is, afterall, an internet account, not access to a missile silo or something...
N.
Ya... yet another reason I couldn't get my DNS entry away from verisign fast enough.
Moved it to register.com, who have provided nearly flawless service. It's not the cheapest out there, but it's reliable.
N.
Another one to look at is the new Epson Photo R800 - it can print both regular media as well as CD/DVD, and has seperate ink tanks for each colour. Prints with glossy ink, but has the capability to insert a "flat black" cart, or a "glossy" cart to modify how the output looks. Interesting...
I've got a slightly older Epson model at work which handles CD/DVD media, and it does a beautiful job. About 3 min per disc to print.
I also still recommend people use a CFS system for high-volume colour printing, but it's not as much of an issue if you're just doing disc labels.
N.
This is a great idea - granted, it takes special media (which sounds like it's just basically double-sided), but if it gets popular enough, it should be cheap and easy to find.
Although I like colour inkjet printable CDs/DVDs that the new epsons can produce at low cost, this is a great way to label something that doesn't need to be in colour with the associated ink costs, etc.
Wonder what the resolution of the printing is, and how long it takes...
Maybe the top side could be used for additional data storage as well if you don't need a label?
N.
A bit offtopic, but...
How do you find Uniserve? I'm going to need to switch DSL providers in the next few weeks, but need something that will provide a static IP, and aren't hyper-anal (read: Shaw) about running servers and bandwidth caps.
N.
That's because Fido is targetting their coverage exclusively at large cities that have the highest density of customers.
Making lots of cell sites in the middle of nowhere (ie: outside calgary / edmonton, and the corridor inbetween) does provide great cell service for Alberta's wildlife, but doesn't rake-in profits for the company.
Here's what I do:
I use my CityFido service in Vancouver and save bigtime. $40 (early subscriber price) for unlimited local calling each month is just heaven compared to Telus and Rogers ripoffs.
When I travel outside of the Fido-supported area (which basically covers 99% of my travels), I just pop in a Rogers/Cantel pay-as-you-go SIM card and use their more extensive (and expensive) rural service.
Win-win for me!
N.
Yes, it will be on-sale by Bandai/Manga Ent apparently for around $30/DVD. Hopefully they make a box set available.
It's also going to be aired (dubbed most likely) on US Television.
The info on the SA/C episodes is from the Production IG forum:
4 &t =1921&s=0844ce20502c08467e54a542dfade28a
http://64.41.72.200/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=1
Where they list each episode, and if it's SA or C.
N.
Here's another vote for GiTS "StandAlone / Complex" and "2nd GIG". Probably one of the best series of all-time. Great plotline (the "complex" episodes), and a number of the "stand alone" episodes which are also great.
Highly recommended!
Although I've (cawf) seen the entire SAC series and am working on watching the 2nd GIG series right now, I'm going to buy them the second they're released on DVD by Bandai.
Truely top-notch storytelling and animation, and for those (like me), who believe there is more to animation than sex and violence, this is the series to watch.
N.
Heck, they raised $29,000+ in around a week from their readers to help out a guy's family that had fallen on hard times.
If HardOCP needed big money to help in a lawsuit that was a clear "load of crap", there would be a LOT of people donating to support them.
Well, there's probably some company in China that's already prototyped a cheap knockoff in the last day or two that'll be on the market in 2 weeks for $25 :)
As for the alarm side of things, instead of noise, I'd personally like a laptop security system that had a smokecloak-type system installed in it:
http://www.smokecloak.com
When the alarm goes off, it generates an enormous amount of smoke/fog from a liquid. Gets a LOT of attention and in a small room, would prevent anything else from being stolen.
I'd definately have one of those installed if I owned a retail business.
Infact, I wish they'd make a car model - would make it pretty tough to steal a car if the passenger compartment slowly (so that the thief would hopefully be smart enough to stop safely before the vision was totally obscured) filled with dense smoke so the thief couldn't see.
N.
Thank you! I was searching for the iarchitech site a year or so back and found that it had vanished. Thanks for the mirror!
/. article who doesn't give/care about users, but design/pick products based on their own needs and expectations.
It documents, in excruciating painful detail one of the most godawful applications I have to use on a daily basis at work.
Lotus Notes
I can barely express how much I loathe that program/system. As an email system, it sucks. As a document database it sucks. The web interface sucks. Yet for some unknown and ill-conceived reason, the IT people at work picked it to run our internal intranet.
I can only assume that someone either got a hell of an all-expenses-paid, 6 month vacation to a tropical destination out of it, got a large infusion of free cash, or were terminally brain-damaged when they picked this software.
Or possibly they were the aforementioned techy-type referred-to in the
For all of it's faults, I'd go with MS Exchance in a fraction of a heartbeat if the decision was up to me. Sure it's got issues, but at least it's user friendly and doesn't go to extreme lengths seemingly designed to frustrate users...
Argh.
Selective Availability can be enabled in different geographic regions. They could quite easily turn it on in the middle east when a conflict arises, and leave it off everywhere else.
The catch of course is that many Allied troops use civillian GPS units (Garmin and the like) because they're a heck of a lot better for casual use than the military models (which are built like tanks, but are also heavy, ackward to use, lack features, and are large).
Another factor is that European countries are working on putting up their own GPS network which will be independant from the US network, so in a few years, new receivers should be able to take readings from both GPS networks and increase the accuracy even more (and have redundancy, which is nice seeing as how GPS is absolutely vital to many forms of transportation and rescue).
N.
No carrier? I havn't had a carrier in 6 years :)
N.
Well, the easiest way to stop annoying car alarms would be to ban the motion/proximity detection variety that go off if you touch/breath/look at a car with one installed.
I have no problems with car alarms that go off if doors are forced open, windows are broken, or the ignition is messed with - those are legit.
It's the bloody motion/vibration detectors that cause most of the problems.
N.
I have absolutely no need to mod my car...
:)
I like the fuel efficiency, the nice quiet ride, the smooth acceleration, etc.
I don't care about "going fast" because I drive in the city and "going fast" from one stoplight to the next is just plain stupid.
The fact that it's an '04 Prius with an 8-year warranty may also have something to do with it - my car is already modded pretty seriously, seeing as how I have never seen another one on the road in person, I'm pretty happy with it's "uniqueness"
N.
Yup. There are CDs made especially for audio recording - they have a special "audio header" on them that identifies them as made for audio recording.
Old CD audio recorders used to require this type of media, they wouldn't work with normal CD-R media. The idea being that if you restricted the burners to audio-only CD-Rs, you could tax those more (usually 4-8x more) and leave the data CDs alone.
Of course, everyone screamed bloody murder and worked out hacks to enable recording on regular CDs. Manufacturers who made machines that worked on regular CDs got all the business and manufacturers who made the "crippled" units hardly sold anything.
Little wonder that you never see them anymore.
Hmm - I would've sent the guy some money if I had known he needed it, but he never seemed to update his client or anything so I never visited his website after the initial "Oh, so that's what torrent does" sort of mention.
I did donate to Azureus though because their client/tracker server is damn fine and they do a lot of work on it.
Ah well, I'm happy that he got a job at Valve though - I've got an enormous respect for those folks and their work.
N.
The real reason for the inflated damage estimates is that it sounds impressive in the media, which generates FUD, which generates more viewers, which sells advertising space.
If a virus came out and the news reported it as causing "a few thousand dollars of damage across north america", would anyone give a damn? So the news directors and reporters try and figure out a more "interesting" damage estimate that they can broadcast. So, pump up those numbers! The virus caused $250 MILLION OF DAMAGES, suddenly sounds impressive and formidable.
It has about as much bearing as when the RIAA sues people for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars because "the song they had shared 'could' have been sent to everyone on the planet, thus depriving the record company of any profits whatsoever".
The reality is that in the office I work for, one person clicked on the attachment and got their machine infected. He continued working as normal and called the IT guys who came around and fixed it.
Total lost productivity time? A 30 second phone call. Total lost revenue? $0.
Compared to people just plain ol' "slacking on the job", viruses do a negligable amount of damage.
Funny how you never hear about the '$50 billion in lost revenue' from employees taking three 15-minute "smoke breaks" every day.
Ack, I stand corrected :)
:)
At least I got the Graham bit right
I even paypal'ed him a few bucks for such a great piece of software. Easily the best piece of free software that I downloaded last year!
N.
I'm wondering if these get couriered-out for personal hand-delivery, or can they be intercepted somewhere?
It would be simple for someone in the right job, in the right place to make a few hundred big-ones by simply "losing" academy screeners put in someone's in-box, or mailbox, and handing them off to the right person at the right time...
N.
Oh, indeed it does. Paul's POPFile software doesn't even break a sweat with this sort of sillyness...
;)
Here's a real-world sample from today:
Subject line: "GOT X(a)n@x, Vali(u)m, Viagr@, Som@ Di3t Pills Many M3ds QSDPA"
(the rest of the message was garbled in a similar fashion)
Scores
Bucket / Count / Probability
spam / 88 / 0.999999
inbox / 73 / 2.833932e-039
Heh... Not a chance spammer dudes, not a chance
N.
I've been using POPFile for over a year here, and even random-word (or gibberish spam) VERY rarely makes it through.
:)
Infact I can count the number of spam messages that POPFile has mis-classified in the last 6 months on my fingers... On one hand... Using less than 5 fingers. I'm pretty careful with giving out my real email address, so I usually only get 4 or 5 spams a day.
That said, my current classification accuracy is 98.84% - which means that spam just isn't an issue for me anymore
N.