The University of Twente is not far from where I live. Time to break out the camping gear, work up a presentation, strip the laptop of anything important, and call in sick.
The Netherlands have the best hacking conventions in the world. The Galactic Hackers Party was held in a converted church in the middle of Amsterdam, attracted over a thousand, and generated a lot of (mostly mis-reported) press. Hacking at the End of the Universe was even better. HiP attracted way too many people, but was the first where lots of corporate security types attended just to hear what kinds of cracks and exploits were really available.
It is pretty amazing the organisers have managed to get the use of classrooms and access to the university's internet connection. They are paying for this with corporate sponsorships and are selling tent space to corporations. Too bad the economy isn't very good right now, a couple of years ago many big corps would have put up tents just to recruit the best techies in Europe. OSDN should send some of the/. crew, and write it off as a tradeshow expense.
And the UoTwente is home to the Simple Web SNMP package.
As predicted, the CPU serial number has been integrated into the registration process.
Although intel has temporarily removed the CPU ID from some of the Pentium III line, there will soon be a need for processors to have a CPU ID in order for the 99%-of-the-market-monopoly OS to function.
Anyone want to bet that starting in about 1 year, the next generation of XP will require hardware that supports a CPU ID, and the newest generation of Pentium IV will just happen to meet that requirement? They will be using the excuse that it will cut piracy, and ensure lower license prices for all legal owners, and a bunch of other well spun bullshit.
Intel will love this requirement by their long time partner M$, because now every corporation in the world will have to upgrade from non-ID CPUs to the latest ID-enabled CPUs. M$ will probably also include code for AMDs processor ID. It may only start with servers, where businesses regularly upgrade to the newest processors, but within a few years the CPU ID will certainly be required in all machines.
I haven't fully digested the impact of this report yet, there isn't enough anti-acid in the building to do that. But the preliminary results of what is sent to M$ at every activation process is very frightening, and I'm beginning to understand why the European Commission may outlaw the process in the next few months. This type of data harvesting coupled with the registration process could lead to a very targeted marketing database of every M$ powered machine in the EU, and the privacy laws of the EU may need to be enforced before this gets out of hand.
The hash function can be extremely complex, but given a small range of inputs M (only 2 double words), a hash table of possible values can be pre-calculated. The actual number of possible values for M will be very small, on the order of a few thousand, up to possibly 25,000. The input M to the RC5 hash will be a known, limited number of drive IDs, video card IDs, CD-ROM IDs, etc. micr~1.oft is in the position to have a list of every drive manufacturer and video card identification string, and could use those lists to obtain the original string from the hash.
This is what password cracking programs do, instead of trying to reverse the hash, pre-compute dictionaries and compare the outputs.
it doesn't take a brain surgeon to forge dot matrix printer logs
You've never seen log paper. No, not the kind with a logarithmic scale, but serial numbered pages. You can get it from speciality catalogs, or have a print shop make some for you. Basically a box of tractor paper where it was once run through a printer and every page has a sequential number printed on it. Missing pages are easy to spot, and its difficult to insert falsified pages.
In use where collecting hard copy evidence is necessary, such as during legal battles where the court requires both sides to document the reliability or malfunctioning of a system, or on classified security audit systems. The first few pages is where the lawyers sign off on the box, then the printer cabinet is locked with a couple of padlocks, one for each legal team. Then the system runs for a while, and the printer hopefully has logged the problems. The court keeps the original as forensic evidence, and both sides get copies.
Log paper must be pretty rare now, but IBM, Digital, Wang, and Burroughs used to have them as stock items.
You activate your 10 pieces of legally licensed software, which takes an additional 8 hours of your time just to get them all right. After a random period of time, without any changes at all to your system, one of the activation code modules gets bit-rot, and stops working. The other activation modules note this, and all shut down. Now every time you boot your computer, you get a splash screen telling you your activation keys are no longer valid. You call M$. They tell you a new set of activation keys will only cost you 40% of the original purchase price. You pay, because you have some important work stored on the machine and deadline in a few days.
It can't possibly be THIS bad can it?!
No, it can be worse. There will never be a 3 years later for your system, because you can only purchase an activation key good for, at most, 26 months. At the end of your software lease, you must pay to upgrade to the latest system. Go read some press articles about how bad it is going to get.
Me, I'm seriously considering starting a M$ certified training centre for software auditing firms. M$ has guaranteed a need for 1800 licensed auditors in Europe over the next 3 years, and they are going to create a special certification program for auditor training companies. 15 days classroom training required of every auditor in a certified firm, with a guaranteed minimum of 300Euros per seat per day. Sweet, if you have no morals.
Could you at least post a link to some photos, so we can see what these look like?
Of course, a little orange box is probably just that.:-)
But depending on what the size and style of connecters and switches look like, could tell some of us old geeks the approximate age of these boxes. The reality is probably that you have some ancient, worthless, non-functional, black-boxes. A decommutator is the receiving end of a commutator, a device for muxing analog signals. The pair would use two channels (either RF or wireline), one to keep the boxes in synch, one to pass the signals. Complex comm/decom units could pass dozens or hundreds of signals in a timesliced fashion. Great for remote telemetry where you just need the occasional sample of hundreds of voltages.
No, microwaves are not going to destroy a tiny, Si-on-plastic chip. The wavelengths are too long, even at 4GHz, to couple much power into the chip.
There are better ways to induce extremely high electomotive fields into a very tiny area. Nothing readily available to the general public, thank $DIETY:-) Plasma ovens or supercooled HF driven electromagnets with rare earth hi-mu focusing rod.
But since the chips would easily be detectable, some techno-anarchists would build a machine to punch a tiny hole in the bill, dead centre of the chip. Physical destruction would be best. A machine like a bill counter, that could de-chip 20,000 bills per hour. Take it to US gun shows, and let every paranoid gun owner run their cash through the machine. Offer it as a cash register attachment to head shops.
Of course, you saw how popular the US$1 coins have been:-)
/. needs a conspiracy tag for moderation. I don't know whether that would be a +1 or -1, though.
GoldAge seemed to be a scam. They were selling "internet accounts" measured in gold, but without having any actual gold to back up the accounts. Only governments can get away with that:-)
Wipe the software from the face of the earth. and name every KIllustrator user
So in the reply letter explain how it is impossible to even know where every copy is (unless Verpackungen translates to physical packaging, not the software itself), but the only known copies reside at the lawyer firm of Reinhard Skuhra Weise & Partner. Demand that they immediately destroy all copies of kIllustrator-Verpackungen existing in the Anwaltskanzlei.
If they don't, then they are the only ones to be in violation of their own demands. Somehow, I think the fuckheads^Wlawyers will ignore such a demand.
Seriously, this will be a test of the university of Magdeburg. If they cave in without a fight, they will never again be considered a viable school for software engineering. All potential students for the next decade will search the reputation of universities, and Universität Magdeburg will be at the bottom of the list. Certainly the university has its own lawyers, it wouldn't cost them much to fight. If they do fight this, they will assure future students of academic freedom, which will attract more of the brightest.
We shall see whether the Universität Magdeburg is a fine school, or just a doomed quivering bunch of cowardly Schafekeitfakultäten.
The original question referred to IDENT being logged by machines on the internet when a cronjob tried to FTP across the internet. Someone needs to write a new RFC deprecating the use of IDENT on internet facing computers, since the usefulness of IDENT relies on trusted hosts. Other hosts on the internet cannot be trusted, so wu-ftpd and sendmail should not be sending IDENT lookups by default.
This exact same problem, except with windoze luzers instead of supposedly clued linux luzers, blew up at an ISP here. The sysadmins had configured most machines to never send IDENT, but the secondary DNS/backup mailserver were overlooked. During the migration to a new power circuit, the primary was removed from the net[uptime 183 days], and everyone switched over to the secondary. The support lines were clogged with windoze luzers running ZoneAlarm, BlackIce, or Norton. Complaints of "every time I check my email, your machine tries to hack into mine" started to stack up. Since the sysops had the monday off after working the entire weekend, it wasn't until today the problem was fixed.
I heard that the practical joker support guy told the most whingey luzer that failing to respond to IDENT was a serious violation of the law, as only 133t h4x0r5 would try to hide their identity. He pointed the cluzer to RFC821 and a few others, and told him if he continued to block port 113 with an illegal h4x0r firewall, they would ToS him. Luzer went away, presumably chastised.
I'll have to shout the monks some liquid recovery tonight.
I just happened to be in the US on business the day the Blade hit the market. Overnight shipping to a friend's house, threw it into my bag and came back to Europe with it. Much jealousy ensued on this side of the pond. For about US$1500, I have a native sparc machine with 1Gb RAM and a 60Mb drive, and interactive performance rivals most of the bigger sun hardware at work (but as a server it is nowhere in the same league).
The blade has now become my main home machine. Its basically a PC with a sparc in place of a pentium. You buy it to out-geek your geek friends, not to win childish MHz pissing games. It can be overclocked, and there are other hardware tweaks. The RAM is a cheap PC commodity, IDE drives easily upgradable (buy a matched pair, DiskSuite comes installed, and throw out that noisy seagate), the 10/100 ethernet provides excellent thru-put. You can use any USB keyboard or mouse you want, but mouse wheel support is still lacking. Standard VGA multisync monitors work with it.
It runs all the hi-paying software that I and my conslutant friends use in our professional lives. Oracle 8i, SAP financials and tons of other stuff. Having a true sparc at home is great for brushing up over a weekend before heading out to a new client site, can't do that on an x86 box.
There are some 'bad' things, but nothing to keep you from buying a blade. Support in OpenBoot for USB hubs is lacking, so you can't have a KVM switch or hub when booting (but you can switch once booted). There is a built in smartcard reader, but absolutely no software for it yet, it reads SunRay cards, but doesn't do anything. There is almost no USB driver support for all the cool USB peripherals out there (most USB crud requires special micro~1.oft or mac drivers to work, and solaris is ignored). There is no Firewire support, except for one hacked driver for their overpriced web-cam. There is only one serial port (the second one is on the mobo, just add your own cable). The built in sound card has no internal audio connector, so you can't play audio CDs in the internal drive, and you probably couldn't hear the music over the drive anyways, the CD-ROM is the loudest peripheral I've ever had, not counting disintegrating hard drives. The real time clock is so fucked, even ntpd can't correct it.
With any luck, sun is working hard at fixing all the little problems. Most complaints come from lack of working features/drivers in Solaris, which means they'll get fixed in time. The hardware itself is pretty solid.
Go read news:comp.sys.sun.hardware, and peruse google groups, and find the B100 FAQ and you'll have a much better idea of what to expect.
On September 25, 2000 ICANN issued a resolution providing that alpha-2 (&) codes are delegable as ccTLDs only in cases where the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, on its exceptional reservation list, has issued a reservation of the code that covers any application of ISO 3166-1 that needs a coded representation in the name of the country, territory or area involved . Such conditions are met by the EU code which is therefore delegable to the Community.
In other words, the delegation from the commission offered the ICANN some money, and the ICANN quickly added an exception to the ISO 3166 rule.
Here is some more information on this. It comes out of the Information Society Promotions Office, just one of the many ways us Europeans tax euros are wasted^Wspent.
[as a brief digression, fear and loathing of the dreaded DG-13, errr... ISPO, is directly proportional to the closeness to the commission. Americans have very little to fear, but I live no more than 40Kms from them, and they equal micro~1.oft for my disdain. Think "living in the shadow of the land of Mordor"]
Last year, the ISPO put out a CFP to the big-5 usual suspects, (i.e. PWC, E&Y, D&TT, AA, KPMG) about creating a new TLD, back when ICANN was asking for new TLD proposals. But the RFP was, as the norm, heavily stacked to be given to whoever bought the last round of beers. [/rant]
The proposal called for a consultant group to approach ICANN, IANA, IETF and any who might influence the decision, on how to create a.eu TLD, put in a bid, and apply pressure to the ICANN as needed to ensure success. This was part of a buzzword driven initiative called eEurope, which sprang into being just when the e-bubble burst last year.
Moving with great haste, for the commission, just one year after the idea was proposed, a report (sorry, PDF) was given to the commission, and now they are going ahead with the creation of a registry to administer the new TLD. A longer, more detailed report was submitted at the beginning of this year.
It is interesting to note they ignored calls for the registry to be run as a business (as NSI) and they want to make it "a not-for-profit organisation operated in the public interest."
Yes, but have you tried dialing that number when Slashdot wasn't down?
Rumour has it the conversation went a little something like this:
[Kurt] Hi, cisco tech support?
[TAC] Yes
[Kurt] this is Kurt at slashdot...
[TAC] Oh my god, its about time you called us. You've been offline for nearly 24 hours, we're all going through withdrawls. Hang on a sec, our top techs are dying to help.
I talked to a friend in cisco TAC (Brussels) who said that they regularly lurk on/., and in the TAC they could see it was a major network outage since the whole of the OSDN sites were unreachable. Nothing to do but wait, or answer calls from other customers:-)
Since summer weather had come to Europe, I, personally, did not notice the outage. But I promise in the futur to not have a life.
the AC
[Note to Kurt and company, make sure you return your customer satisfaction survey. Those TAC folks live and die based on keeping a very high level of sat scores. I think they need a 4.85 (on scale of 1 to 5) just to keep their jobs within cisco, and a 4.89 to get a raise. So 5's across the board, and in the comments put a link to this/. story for their manager]
There are times you need to reboot a cisco, particularly during your CCIE exam.:-)
At the start of the 2 day CCIE exam, the proctors casually mention they knock off points for un-necessary rebooting of routers. But the progression of the modules in the test will likely wedge a routing protocol, requiring a reboot, and they are really looking for those monks wise enough to know when to reboot
IOS is an amazing mess of spagetti modules, and the fact they work together so well is a testament to cisco's dev test and solution test people. But sometimes the appletalk routing module will choke, and a reboot is the only remedy. Or NetFlow forgets, or Policy Routing doesn't. But a wise cisco expert will copy the logs and generally preserve the state of the machine for analysis after the reboot in case the machine doesn't come back. But wise cisco experts cost a lot of money.
Its a good mantra in networking "REBOOTING WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM"
I just saw an exhibit on Napoleon and his stay in Egypt. There was a number of sketches of the egyptians showing him how they moved large blocks around, with 1/4 circular wooden 'arches' strapped to the blocks.
Napoleon's thie^H^H^H^Harcheologists then used the same techniques to remove a number of obelisques and other large stones. They even removed a number of large palaces back to France for the wealthiest supporters of the little corsicain. Yup, stone by stone, until the brits sank the french in alexandria harbor. I had a dinner in one of those egyptian palaces a few years ago near Toulon.
So the egyptians already knew of this technique back in the early 1800's, and presumably the 'arches' found in a number of digs date back to the creation of the pyramid.
There was a great article a month ago in the Economist about how telecom companies over-investing in fibre was the main cause of the recent economic blues. The general sense of the story was how a few buyouts of a few metropolitan fibre companies in 97-98 sparked a huge boom in investment in laying fibre.
But once the fibre started to be lit up, a dozen large telecom companies (nortel, alcatel, lucent, etc) started to compete with each other for cheap bits. When the price started falling, everyone realised there was too much capacity, and not enough margins reselling the bandwidth.
The equipment manufacturers (cisco, lucent, redback, etc) had sold tons of fibre terminating equipment to start-up and established telcos by financing long-term loans. Those loans were based on the (bad) assumption that prices for bits would stay at the same level. Prices dropped, and now many telcos don't have the income to pay off their loans. Since there is no more investment in new fibre termination equipment, the fibre will stay dark until the next economic boom.
There just isn't enough cheap hardware available to terminate all this dark fibre. There is literally tons of very expensive kit sitting in warehouses that cisco, nortel, and lucent can't sell. When those machines have buyers, then we will see prices continue downwards.
This is an economic problem, not a last mile problem. When the economy turns back up, then that fibre will start to light up as well, and long-haul prices will stay low, but bandwidth demands will increase.
The eclipse was just starting when this got posted. The site is heavily slashdotted, but the BBC and other news sites already linked to the feed. If you can get through, there are some cool shots of the whole sky in a fish-eye lens, and telescope shots of sunspots.
The French Gendarmerie used to do this, but enough tickets were successfully fought in court to limit their use to the most heinous offenders. In France, the police have to actually witness you performing the crime to write a ticket, and with just two timestamps, it wasn't enough evidence for the courts. But for the worst offenders, if there happens to be a Gendarme patrol at the exit plaza, they can be signalled by the toll booth operator.
I've known people who have done Paris-Lyon in 2.2 hours, which puts their average speed at around 200 Km/h (the autoroute limit is 130), and didn't have any problems at the toll plazas. But I've also been stopped several times pulling out of toll plazas by Gendarmes who stand behind the toll booths and randomly pick on 1 out of every several cars. Mostly just breath tests, or to check the papers of the car for insurance. I never got a ticket, though.
They are testing a new system in France (north of Paris, mostly on the A1) where they are using airplanes to catch speeders and dangerous drivers. To avoid loopholes, they put a judge in the plane, and he radios to a judge on the ground with the complaint when you get pulled over. So you now have the sworn testimony of a judge d'instruction to fight in court (or maybe you are judged on the spot, IANAFL). Plus they have a stabilised video system in the plane for evidence. They are showing it at Le Bourget this week.
I'm glad YANAL, because those are some twisted ideas. I like them!:-)
But since these tracking systems have existed for years in commercial trucking, I doubt there would be much legal ground to stand on. But a lawyer could raise some great points in court, even if they were later thrown out.
Unfortunately this case is in small claims court. If the guy's lawyer is any good, that list, plus a few other items, will come out in court, assuming a good judge who doesn't limit the time for arguments to 5 minutes. Acme could get bitch-slapped on this one in a regular court, but I believe american small claims courts have a limit of $500. The guy will get his $450 back, and ACME will have to pay court costs. Nothing to discourage them from continuing the practice.
The AirIQ device is one of a number of commercial devices available to trucking companies to regularly track their fleets. They use a GPS to monitor position, and send the data back through a low speed satellite connection to the AirIQ office, which then offers real-time maps, lists of speeding drivers, and other services to companies.
Here in Europe many companies are starting to use them to track the contents of shipping containers which are being hi-jacked by organised groups and transported to eastern europe or re-sold within western europe. I saw some demonstations of different units at the last CeBit, amazing how small they can make the units, and the techniques they have for getting signals in and out of steel shipping containers.
I can understand trucking companies wanting to know when a driver has exceeded his maximum awake time, or gone too fast on the autobahn after taking 4 hours for lunch, or tracking the contents of a hi-jacked truck. But when such technology starts to filter into mainstream society, its time to raise a large fuss. This court case will hopefully start the fuss going in the US.
But the court already ruled on that issue, since it was raised by technical experts close to the court (pres de la cour). The court found that any French citizen who took any extra step to circumvent detection by Yahoo quite clearly was doing so to circumvent the law. That implies the citizen is the law breaker, not Yahoo.
Yahoo, to comply with the court ruling, merely has to filter the content and the IP address, and place a legal disclaimer on the web page requiring the French citizen to click on a button or pop-up to continue. Once the French citizen proceeds into the web page selling/auctioning nazi memorabilia, then it is the citizen breaking the law, not Yahoo.
Yahoo has never been required to eliminate all nazi sales on its web sites. That was the original claim by the anti-hate activist group who launched the first lawsuit, but it was thrown out by an intelligent judge. But the US media, as well as/., continue to propogate a false claim as to the ruling of the French cour.
(A site in the US, for example, could tunnel onto a French network, and act as if a French server...
Why tunnel? With the internet, the physical server can be anywhere, tunneling isn't required, just routing. But Yahoo has a physical presence in Paris (11Bis rue Torricelli), and thus must obey French law, whether they put their servers on Sealand, or in California.
Other auction sites were performing the same filtering function, for both France and Germany, which is why eBay, Amazon, &c. were never part of the lawsuit. eBay has since banned a whole bunch of sensitive items, mooting the point. Certainly the lawyer fees could have paid a dozen PHP programmers a dozen times over for such a filter.
Since the mainstream US media outlets don't seem to cover this story very well, its time to add a few facts to the discussion.
Yahoo has a commercial presence in France, both a web site (yahoo.fr), and a sales and marketing group based in Paris. This makes them liable to French law.
The French court heard that Yahoo was telling customers they could target banner ads based on IP address blocks, serving up French banners to French surfers, as well as target specific markets based on keywords.
The court ordered Yahoo to place a disclaimer on auctions when the IP block matched a French IP address, and the auction contained certain words mostly associated with nazi memorabilia. By placing a warning on the web page telling the potential bidder that such sales were against French law, Yahoo would have absolved itself of any further legal implications of such an auction. If a French citizen continues to bid/buy nazi goods, then the criminal act is being performed by an informed citizen who has chosen to bid even after being reminded of the law, not by Yahoo.
Yahoo lied to the court, claiming it was technically impossible to add a disclaimer based on IP block and keywords, despite a number of witnesses telling the court that was exactly how banner advertising works. The court didn't even require 100% accuracy, merely a good effort to inform French citizens who might happen across such an auction.
Now Yahoo has been ordered to cease all commercial activity in France, although I believe they are still operating in defiance of the court order. And they hope that by appealing to a US court they can ignore other countries laws.
The corollary to this is a French business operating in the US, but trying to claim they don't have to obey US law. If the court rules that a foreign based business doesn't have to obey the laws in other countries, could the US become a major dumping ground for toxic wastes? Oh, wait, with Bush in the whitehouse, the US will become the favorite toxic waste dump for the world:-)
Heard the other night on French news that they are starting exactly this kind of investigation. Sorry, no links to be found.
Since most DVD players sold here in region 2 are switchable or region-free, many of the new RCS DVDs don't play. But they also don't play on the rare region locked players as well. When many consumers start to complain, politicians take notice. So now France, and possibly a number of other European countries (I wasn't listening to the first part), are asking for an investigation into illegal anti-competitive practices by the entertainment industry.
Politicians here have realised that a good pro-consumer battle can bring them a good many votes, possibly equalling the votes generated by large campaign contributions the media conglomerates give to other politicians. So those politicians who don't have a record of sucking big companies dicks can maintain votes with well publicized attacks such as DVD-coding. Whether they succeed remains to be seen (its the commission, a good anti-commission rant could take hours:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The University of Twente is not far from where I live. Time to break out the camping gear, work up a presentation, strip the laptop of anything important, and call in sick.
/. crew, and write it off as a tradeshow expense.
The Netherlands have the best hacking conventions in the world. The Galactic Hackers Party was held in a converted church in the middle of Amsterdam, attracted over a thousand, and generated a lot of (mostly mis-reported) press. Hacking at the End of the Universe was even better. HiP attracted way too many people, but was the first where lots of corporate security types attended just to hear what kinds of cracks and exploits were really available.
It is pretty amazing the organisers have managed to get the use of classrooms and access to the university's internet connection. They are paying for this with corporate sponsorships and are selling tent space to corporations. Too bad the economy isn't very good right now, a couple of years ago many big corps would have put up tents just to recruit the best techies in Europe. OSDN should send some of the
And the UoTwente is home to the Simple Web SNMP package.
the AC
As predicted, the CPU serial number has been integrated into the registration process.
Although intel has temporarily removed the CPU ID from some of the Pentium III line, there will soon be a need for processors to have a CPU ID in order for the 99%-of-the-market-monopoly OS to function.
Anyone want to bet that starting in about 1 year, the next generation of XP will require hardware that supports a CPU ID, and the newest generation of Pentium IV will just happen to meet that requirement? They will be using the excuse that it will cut piracy, and ensure lower license prices for all legal owners, and a bunch of other well spun bullshit.
Intel will love this requirement by their long time partner M$, because now every corporation in the world will have to upgrade from non-ID CPUs to the latest ID-enabled CPUs. M$ will probably also include code for AMDs processor ID. It may only start with servers, where businesses regularly upgrade to the newest processors, but within a few years the CPU ID will certainly be required in all machines.
I haven't fully digested the impact of this report yet, there isn't enough anti-acid in the building to do that. But the preliminary results of what is sent to M$ at every activation process is very frightening, and I'm beginning to understand why the European Commission may outlaw the process in the next few months. This type of data harvesting coupled with the registration process could lead to a very targeted marketing database of every M$ powered machine in the EU, and the privacy laws of the EU may need to be enforced before this gets out of hand.
the AC
Exactly!
The hash function can be extremely complex, but given a small range of inputs M (only 2 double words), a hash table of possible values can be pre-calculated. The actual number of possible values for M will be very small, on the order of a few thousand, up to possibly 25,000. The input M to the RC5 hash will be a known, limited number of drive IDs, video card IDs, CD-ROM IDs, etc. micr~1.oft is in the position to have a list of every drive manufacturer and video card identification string, and could use those lists to obtain the original string from the hash.
This is what password cracking programs do, instead of trying to reverse the hash, pre-compute dictionaries and compare the outputs.
the AC
Go check out the proposed MPLampS, Electricity over IP draft.
;-)
There is hope for the people of Fremont.
the AC
it doesn't take a brain surgeon to forge dot matrix printer logs
You've never seen log paper. No, not the kind with a logarithmic scale, but serial numbered pages. You can get it from speciality catalogs, or have a print shop make some for you. Basically a box of tractor paper where it was once run through a printer and every page has a sequential number printed on it. Missing pages are easy to spot, and its difficult to insert falsified pages.
In use where collecting hard copy evidence is necessary, such as during legal battles where the court requires both sides to document the reliability or malfunctioning of a system, or on classified security audit systems. The first few pages is where the lawyers sign off on the box, then the printer cabinet is locked with a couple of padlocks, one for each legal team. Then the system runs for a while, and the printer hopefully has logged the problems. The court keeps the original as forensic evidence, and both sides get copies.
Log paper must be pretty rare now, but IBM, Digital, Wang, and Burroughs used to have them as stock items.
the AC
What am I missing?
You activate your 10 pieces of legally licensed software, which takes an additional 8 hours of your time just to get them all right. After a random period of time, without any changes at all to your system, one of the activation code modules gets bit-rot, and stops working. The other activation modules note this, and all shut down. Now every time you boot your computer, you get a splash screen telling you your activation keys are no longer valid. You call M$. They tell you a new set of activation keys will only cost you 40% of the original purchase price. You pay, because you have some important work stored on the machine and deadline in a few days.
It can't possibly be THIS bad can it?!
No, it can be worse. There will never be a 3 years later for your system, because you can only purchase an activation key good for, at most, 26 months. At the end of your software lease, you must pay to upgrade to the latest system. Go read some press articles about how bad it is going to get.
Me, I'm seriously considering starting a M$ certified training centre for software auditing firms. M$ has guaranteed a need for 1800 licensed auditors in Europe over the next 3 years, and they are going to create a special certification program for auditor training companies. 15 days classroom training required of every auditor in a certified firm, with a guaranteed minimum of 300Euros per seat per day. Sweet, if you have no morals.
the AC
Could you at least post a link to some photos, so we can see what these look like?
:-)
:-)
Of course, a little orange box is probably just that.
But depending on what the size and style of connecters and switches look like, could tell some of us old geeks the approximate age of these boxes. The reality is probably that you have some ancient, worthless, non-functional, black-boxes. A decommutator is the receiving end of a commutator, a device for muxing analog signals. The pair would use two channels (either RF or wireline), one to keep the boxes in synch, one to pass the signals. Complex comm/decom units could pass dozens or hundreds of signals in a timesliced fashion. Great for remote telemetry where you just need the occasional sample of hundreds of voltages.
Sell them on e-bay, buy me a beer
the AC
No, microwaves are not going to destroy a tiny, Si-on-plastic chip. The wavelengths are too long, even at 4GHz, to couple much power into the chip.
:-) Plasma ovens or supercooled HF driven electromagnets with rare earth hi-mu focusing rod.
:-)
There are better ways to induce extremely high electomotive fields into a very tiny area. Nothing readily available to the general public, thank $DIETY
But since the chips would easily be detectable, some techno-anarchists would build a machine to punch a tiny hole in the bill, dead centre of the chip. Physical destruction would be best. A machine like a bill counter, that could de-chip 20,000 bills per hour. Take it to US gun shows, and let every paranoid gun owner run their cash through the machine. Offer it as a cash register attachment to head shops.
Of course, you saw how popular the US$1 coins have been
the AC
/. needs a conspiracy tag for moderation. I don't know whether that would be a +1 or -1, though.
:-)
GoldAge seemed to be a scam. They were selling "internet accounts" measured in gold, but without having any actual gold to back up the accounts. Only governments can get away with that
the AC
Wipe the software from the face of the earth. and name every KIllustrator user
So in the reply letter explain how it is impossible to even know where every copy is (unless Verpackungen translates to physical packaging, not the software itself), but the only known copies reside at the lawyer firm of Reinhard Skuhra Weise & Partner. Demand that they immediately destroy all copies of kIllustrator-Verpackungen existing in the Anwaltskanzlei.
If they don't, then they are the only ones to be in violation of their own demands. Somehow, I think the fuckheads^Wlawyers will ignore such a demand.
Seriously, this will be a test of the university of Magdeburg. If they cave in without a fight, they will never again be considered a viable school for software engineering. All potential students for the next decade will search the reputation of universities, and Universität Magdeburg will be at the bottom of the list. Certainly the university has its own lawyers, it wouldn't cost them much to fight. If they do fight this, they will assure future students of academic freedom, which will attract more of the brightest.
We shall see whether the Universität Magdeburg is a fine school, or just a doomed quivering bunch of cowardly Schafekeitfakultäten.
the AC
The original question referred to IDENT being logged by machines on the internet when a cronjob tried to FTP across the internet. Someone needs to write a new RFC deprecating the use of IDENT on internet facing computers, since the usefulness of IDENT relies on trusted hosts. Other hosts on the internet cannot be trusted, so wu-ftpd and sendmail should not be sending IDENT lookups by default.
This exact same problem, except with windoze luzers instead of supposedly clued linux luzers, blew up at an ISP here. The sysadmins had configured most machines to never send IDENT, but the secondary DNS/backup mailserver were overlooked. During the migration to a new power circuit, the primary was removed from the net[uptime 183 days], and everyone switched over to the secondary. The support lines were clogged with windoze luzers running ZoneAlarm, BlackIce, or Norton. Complaints of "every time I check my email, your machine tries to hack into mine" started to stack up. Since the sysops had the monday off after working the entire weekend, it wasn't until today the problem was fixed.
I heard that the practical joker support guy told the most whingey luzer that failing to respond to IDENT was a serious violation of the law, as only 133t h4x0r5 would try to hide their identity. He pointed the cluzer to RFC821 and a few others, and told him if he continued to block port 113 with an illegal h4x0r firewall, they would ToS him. Luzer went away, presumably chastised.
I'll have to shout the monks some liquid recovery tonight.
the AC
I just happened to be in the US on business the day the Blade hit the market. Overnight shipping to a friend's house, threw it into my bag and came back to Europe with it. Much jealousy ensued on this side of the pond. For about US$1500, I have a native sparc machine with 1Gb RAM and a 60Mb drive, and interactive performance rivals most of the bigger sun hardware at work (but as a server it is nowhere in the same league).
The blade has now become my main home machine. Its basically a PC with a sparc in place of a pentium. You buy it to out-geek your geek friends, not to win childish MHz pissing games. It can be overclocked, and there are other hardware tweaks. The RAM is a cheap PC commodity, IDE drives easily upgradable (buy a matched pair, DiskSuite comes installed, and throw out that noisy seagate), the 10/100 ethernet provides excellent thru-put. You can use any USB keyboard or mouse you want, but mouse wheel support is still lacking. Standard VGA multisync monitors work with it.
It runs all the hi-paying software that I and my conslutant friends use in our professional lives. Oracle 8i, SAP financials and tons of other stuff. Having a true sparc at home is great for brushing up over a weekend before heading out to a new client site, can't do that on an x86 box.
There are some 'bad' things, but nothing to keep you from buying a blade. Support in OpenBoot for USB hubs is lacking, so you can't have a KVM switch or hub when booting (but you can switch once booted). There is a built in smartcard reader, but absolutely no software for it yet, it reads SunRay cards, but doesn't do anything. There is almost no USB driver support for all the cool USB peripherals out there (most USB crud requires special micro~1.oft or mac drivers to work, and solaris is ignored). There is no Firewire support, except for one hacked driver for their overpriced web-cam. There is only one serial port (the second one is on the mobo, just add your own cable). The built in sound card has no internal audio connector, so you can't play audio CDs in the internal drive, and you probably couldn't hear the music over the drive anyways, the CD-ROM is the loudest peripheral I've ever had, not counting disintegrating hard drives. The real time clock is so fucked, even ntpd can't correct it.
With any luck, sun is working hard at fixing all the little problems. Most complaints come from lack of working features/drivers in Solaris, which means they'll get fixed in time. The hardware itself is pretty solid.
Go read news:comp.sys.sun.hardware, and peruse google groups, and find the B100 FAQ and you'll have a much better idea of what to expect.
the AC
From the commission report page 7:
On September 25, 2000 ICANN issued a resolution providing that alpha-2 (&) codes are delegable as ccTLDs only in cases where the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, on its exceptional reservation list, has issued a reservation of the code that covers any application of ISO 3166-1 that needs a coded representation in the name of the country, territory or area involved . Such conditions are met by the EU code which is therefore delegable to the Community.
In other words, the delegation from the commission offered the ICANN some money, and the ICANN quickly added an exception to the ISO 3166 rule.
the AC
Here is some more information on this. It comes out of the Information Society Promotions Office, just one of the many ways us Europeans tax euros are wasted^Wspent.
.eu TLD, put in a bid, and apply pressure to the ICANN as needed to ensure success. This was part of a buzzword driven initiative called eEurope, which sprang into being just when the e-bubble burst last year.
[as a brief digression, fear and loathing of the dreaded DG-13, errr... ISPO, is directly proportional to the closeness to the commission. Americans have very little to fear, but I live no more than 40Kms from them, and they equal micro~1.oft for my disdain. Think "living in the shadow of the land of Mordor"]
Last year, the ISPO put out a CFP to the big-5 usual suspects, (i.e. PWC, E&Y, D&TT, AA, KPMG) about creating a new TLD, back when ICANN was asking for new TLD proposals. But the RFP was, as the norm, heavily stacked to be given to whoever bought the last round of beers. [/rant]
The proposal called for a consultant group to approach ICANN, IANA, IETF and any who might influence the decision, on how to create a
Moving with great haste, for the commission, just one year after the idea was proposed, a report (sorry, PDF) was given to the commission, and now they are going ahead with the creation of a registry to administer the new TLD. A longer, more detailed report was submitted at the beginning of this year.
It is interesting to note they ignored calls for the registry to be run as a business (as NSI) and they want to make it "a not-for-profit organisation operated in the public interest."
the AC
Yes, but have you tried dialing that number when Slashdot wasn't down?
/., and in the TAC they could see it was a major network outage since the whole of the OSDN sites were unreachable. Nothing to do but wait, or answer calls from other customers :-)
/. story for their manager]
Rumour has it the conversation went a little something like this:
[Kurt] Hi, cisco tech support?
[TAC] Yes
[Kurt] this is Kurt at slashdot...
[TAC] Oh my god, its about time you called us. You've been offline for nearly 24 hours, we're all going through withdrawls. Hang on a sec, our top techs are dying to help.
I talked to a friend in cisco TAC (Brussels) who said that they regularly lurk on
Since summer weather had come to Europe, I, personally, did not notice the outage. But I promise in the futur to not have a life.
the AC
[Note to Kurt and company, make sure you return your customer satisfaction survey. Those TAC folks live and die based on keeping a very high level of sat scores. I think they need a 4.85 (on scale of 1 to 5) just to keep their jobs within cisco, and a 4.89 to get a raise. So 5's across the board, and in the comments put a link to this
There are times you need to reboot a cisco, particularly during your CCIE exam. :-)
At the start of the 2 day CCIE exam, the proctors casually mention they knock off points for un-necessary rebooting of routers. But the progression of the modules in the test will likely wedge a routing protocol, requiring a reboot, and they are really looking for those monks wise enough to know when to reboot
IOS is an amazing mess of spagetti modules, and the fact they work together so well is a testament to cisco's dev test and solution test people. But sometimes the appletalk routing module will choke, and a reboot is the only remedy. Or NetFlow forgets, or Policy Routing doesn't. But a wise cisco expert will copy the logs and generally preserve the state of the machine for analysis after the reboot in case the machine doesn't come back. But wise cisco experts cost a lot of money.
Its a good mantra in networking "REBOOTING WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM"
the AC
Egyptions? Hmmm, free radical north africans?
I just saw an exhibit on Napoleon and his stay in Egypt. There was a number of sketches of the egyptians showing him how they moved large blocks around, with 1/4 circular wooden 'arches' strapped to the blocks.
Napoleon's thie^H^H^H^Harcheologists then used the same techniques to remove a number of obelisques and other large stones. They even removed a number of large palaces back to France for the wealthiest supporters of the little corsicain. Yup, stone by stone, until the brits sank the french in alexandria harbor. I had a dinner in one of those egyptian palaces a few years ago near Toulon.
So the egyptians already knew of this technique back in the early 1800's, and presumably the 'arches' found in a number of digs date back to the creation of the pyramid.
the AC
There was a great article a month ago in the Economist about how telecom companies over-investing in fibre was the main cause of the recent economic blues. The general sense of the story was how a few buyouts of a few metropolitan fibre companies in 97-98 sparked a huge boom in investment in laying fibre.
But once the fibre started to be lit up, a dozen large telecom companies (nortel, alcatel, lucent, etc) started to compete with each other for cheap bits. When the price started falling, everyone realised there was too much capacity, and not enough margins reselling the bandwidth.
The equipment manufacturers (cisco, lucent, redback, etc) had sold tons of fibre terminating equipment to start-up and established telcos by financing long-term loans. Those loans were based on the (bad) assumption that prices for bits would stay at the same level. Prices dropped, and now many telcos don't have the income to pay off their loans. Since there is no more investment in new fibre termination equipment, the fibre will stay dark until the next economic boom.
There just isn't enough cheap hardware available to terminate all this dark fibre. There is literally tons of very expensive kit sitting in warehouses that cisco, nortel, and lucent can't sell. When those machines have buyers, then we will see prices continue downwards.
This is an economic problem, not a last mile problem. When the economy turns back up, then that fibre will start to light up as well, and long-haul prices will stay low, but bandwidth demands will increase.
the AC
The eclipse was just starting when this got posted. The site is heavily slashdotted, but the BBC and other news sites already linked to the feed. If you can get through, there are some cool shots of the whole sky in a fish-eye lens, and telescope shots of sunspots.
News for nerds, after the fact
the AC
The French Gendarmerie used to do this, but enough tickets were successfully fought in court to limit their use to the most heinous offenders. In France, the police have to actually witness you performing the crime to write a ticket, and with just two timestamps, it wasn't enough evidence for the courts. But for the worst offenders, if there happens to be a Gendarme patrol at the exit plaza, they can be signalled by the toll booth operator.
I've known people who have done Paris-Lyon in 2.2 hours, which puts their average speed at around 200 Km/h (the autoroute limit is 130), and didn't have any problems at the toll plazas. But I've also been stopped several times pulling out of toll plazas by Gendarmes who stand behind the toll booths and randomly pick on 1 out of every several cars. Mostly just breath tests, or to check the papers of the car for insurance. I never got a ticket, though.
They are testing a new system in France (north of Paris, mostly on the A1) where they are using airplanes to catch speeders and dangerous drivers. To avoid loopholes, they put a judge in the plane, and he radios to a judge on the ground with the complaint when you get pulled over. So you now have the sworn testimony of a judge d'instruction to fight in court (or maybe you are judged on the spot, IANAFL). Plus they have a stabilised video system in the plane for evidence. They are showing it at Le Bourget this week.
the AC
I'm glad YANAL, because those are some twisted ideas. I like them! :-)
But since these tracking systems have existed for years in commercial trucking, I doubt there would be much legal ground to stand on. But a lawyer could raise some great points in court, even if they were later thrown out.
the AC
There's a number of problems:
Unfortunately this case is in small claims court. If the guy's lawyer is any good, that list, plus a few other items, will come out in court, assuming a good judge who doesn't limit the time for arguments to 5 minutes. Acme could get bitch-slapped on this one in a regular court, but I believe american small claims courts have a limit of $500. The guy will get his $450 back, and ACME will have to pay court costs. Nothing to discourage them from continuing the practice.
The AirIQ device is one of a number of commercial devices available to trucking companies to regularly track their fleets. They use a GPS to monitor position, and send the data back through a low speed satellite connection to the AirIQ office, which then offers real-time maps, lists of speeding drivers, and other services to companies.
Here in Europe many companies are starting to use them to track the contents of shipping containers which are being hi-jacked by organised groups and transported to eastern europe or re-sold within western europe. I saw some demonstations of different units at the last CeBit, amazing how small they can make the units, and the techniques they have for getting signals in and out of steel shipping containers.
I can understand trucking companies wanting to know when a driver has exceeded his maximum awake time, or gone too fast on the autobahn after taking 4 hours for lunch, or tracking the contents of a hi-jacked truck. But when such technology starts to filter into mainstream society, its time to raise a large fuss. This court case will hopefully start the fuss going in the US.
the AC
With tunneling (which consequently allows VPNs)
/., continue to propogate a false claim as to the ruling of the French cour.
But the court already ruled on that issue, since it was raised by technical experts close to the court (pres de la cour). The court found that any French citizen who took any extra step to circumvent detection by Yahoo quite clearly was doing so to circumvent the law. That implies the citizen is the law breaker, not Yahoo.
Yahoo, to comply with the court ruling, merely has to filter the content and the IP address, and place a legal disclaimer on the web page requiring the French citizen to click on a button or pop-up to continue. Once the French citizen proceeds into the web page selling/auctioning nazi memorabilia, then it is the citizen breaking the law, not Yahoo.
Yahoo has never been required to eliminate all nazi sales on its web sites. That was the original claim by the anti-hate activist group who launched the first lawsuit, but it was thrown out by an intelligent judge. But the US media, as well as
(A site in the US, for example, could tunnel onto a French network, and act as if a French server...
Why tunnel? With the internet, the physical server can be anywhere, tunneling isn't required, just routing. But Yahoo has a physical presence in Paris (11Bis rue Torricelli), and thus must obey French law, whether they put their servers on Sealand, or in California.
Other auction sites were performing the same filtering function, for both France and Germany, which is why eBay, Amazon, &c. were never part of the lawsuit. eBay has since banned a whole bunch of sensitive items, mooting the point. Certainly the lawyer fees could have paid a dozen PHP programmers a dozen times over for such a filter.
the AC
Since the mainstream US media outlets don't seem to cover this story very well, its time to add a few facts to the discussion.
:-)
Yahoo has a commercial presence in France, both a web site (yahoo.fr), and a sales and marketing group based in Paris. This makes them liable to French law.
The French court heard that Yahoo was telling customers they could target banner ads based on IP address blocks, serving up French banners to French surfers, as well as target specific markets based on keywords.
The court ordered Yahoo to place a disclaimer on auctions when the IP block matched a French IP address, and the auction contained certain words mostly associated with nazi memorabilia. By placing a warning on the web page telling the potential bidder that such sales were against French law, Yahoo would have absolved itself of any further legal implications of such an auction. If a French citizen continues to bid/buy nazi goods, then the criminal act is being performed by an informed citizen who has chosen to bid even after being reminded of the law, not by Yahoo.
Yahoo lied to the court, claiming it was technically impossible to add a disclaimer based on IP block and keywords, despite a number of witnesses telling the court that was exactly how banner advertising works. The court didn't even require 100% accuracy, merely a good effort to inform French citizens who might happen across such an auction.
Now Yahoo has been ordered to cease all commercial activity in France, although I believe they are still operating in defiance of the court order. And they hope that by appealing to a US court they can ignore other countries laws.
The corollary to this is a French business operating in the US, but trying to claim they don't have to obey US law. If the court rules that a foreign based business doesn't have to obey the laws in other countries, could the US become a major dumping ground for toxic wastes? Oh, wait, with Bush in the whitehouse, the US will become the favorite toxic waste dump for the world
the AC
Heard the other night on French news that they are starting exactly this kind of investigation. Sorry, no links to be found.
:-)
Since most DVD players sold here in region 2 are switchable or region-free, many of the new RCS DVDs don't play. But they also don't play on the rare region locked players as well. When many consumers start to complain, politicians take notice. So now France, and possibly a number of other European countries (I wasn't listening to the first part), are asking for an investigation into illegal anti-competitive practices by the entertainment industry.
Politicians here have realised that a good pro-consumer battle can bring them a good many votes, possibly equalling the votes generated by large campaign contributions the media conglomerates give to other politicians. So those politicians who don't have a record of sucking big companies dicks can maintain votes with well publicized attacks such as DVD-coding. Whether they succeed remains to be seen (its the commission, a good anti-commission rant could take hours
the AC