It's much worse than that. Slashdot and most other tech sites only report on feats like this one. There's no reporting done on the actual science or the breakthroughs of robotics. For example, I was honestly surprised a month ago to learn of the invention of Scale Invariant Feature Transforms last year. This awesome computer vision technique allows a robot to recognise objects based on key features of the object, in real time, with minimal training. This means you could have a robot that can learn to associate an utterance for "ball" with a ball and then pick the ball from a collection of similar or dissimilar objects on command. There is already another paper which extends this work to incorporate background invariance into the transformation so the robot would be able to find the object in real live situations using uncallibrated cameras. There's even an open source library for performing these kinds of transformations.. unfortunately about the only use it appears to be getting is in creating panaroma images. Feature recognition on entire scenes could just as easily be used for navigation in a mobile robot.
around and around we go. Honeypots in no way help you secure your machine against known attacks. They may be good for finding out about unknown attacks but seeing as blackhats never use their zero-day exploits on Honeypots and know when they're on a Honeypot, so they never use them as intemediate hosts, Honeypots are good for nothing. Unless you consider watching script kiddies go about being script kiddies productive. In which case you should slap yourself firmly in the head and go back to securing your machine.
Although blackhats do indeed attack machines simply to use them as intermediate hosts, they don't use their zero-day exploits to do it. They keep them in reserve for when they can't get into a well secured machine. Intermediate hosts are deliberately chosen for their poor security so they need not use zero-day exploits. Now at this point you might be thinking that a honeypot is still useful cause if a blackhat uses it as an intermediate host then the scripts they use to do this zero-day exploit will have to pass through the intermediate host. Well 1) Honeypots are deliberately designed so that blackhats can't use them as intermediate hosts, and 2) blackhats never use intermediate hosts that they are not 100% aware of what the machine is used for. No-one except a script kiddie gets into a honeypot and doesn't know it is a honeypot for more than 15 minutes. It's simply too easy to tell a machine that has a purpose from a machine that is a deliberate trap.
or the number of women who find blackhat linux geeks sexy has increased in the last 3 months and they were all out on dates instead of hacking stupid Honeynet Project machines. It could be anything. Because it could be anything it's not a scientific measurement, it's not even a measurement, it's a useless observation of how long that particular set of linux boxes took to be owned.
By your own admission, the conditions under which the "experiment" is being repeated are not the same, therefore it is not a measurement of anything. If I note that it takes 3 minutes to boil water on my stove and then repeat the experiment 3 months later on your stove I have not measured anything about the rate of boiling water. I've changed more than one variable at a time, therefore I am unable to make any sensible conclusion from my experiment. Either your stove is has a different boiling water efficiency to mine or the rate of boiling water at different times of year is not a constant. If you add in a million other variables, such as the tempature in your kitchen vs mine, whether or not you have a stove fan, the quality of water in your district vs mine, the iron content of your cookware, etc, you get an experiment that is so wildly useless that you can't honestly call it scientific. That's what The Honeynet Project is, a big boiling pot of useless variables.
It's such a bullshit comparison. Windows XP gets owned in 3 minutes after starting up. Linux takes 3 weeks. Wooo! Linux must be harder to own! No, there's just more losers out there trying to break into random Windows XP boxes than there are losers out there trying to break into random Linux boxes. If you actually went and asked a representative sample of script kiddies which OS they found easier to attack and why you might get some valuable information, but it's more fun to "catch" hackers in your "honeypot". About the only good thing that could ever come out of The Honeypot Project is previously unknown attack methods. For example, if someone got root using some local exploit no-one had seen before we could reverse engineer the script they used and fix the bug. But this has never happened. Why? Cause no-one who has zero day exploits goes around using them on random machines. They use their zero day exploits to attack specific machines for a specific purpose, because they know that every time they use the exploit the run the risk of it being discovered.
The number of variables in this study are not even remotely controlled. There are no sensible conclusions you can draw from this, except that an unpatched systems are susceptible to attack and that there are still people out there who are attacking susceptible systems. For all we know an increase in the cost of beef in Tokyo is encouraging the russian mafia to hire more hackers to fake livestock reports and therefore there's less hackers available to attack the useless machines involved in these tests.
Wow, what a brilliant part of the Microsoft plan! How could we possibly not have recognised this as part of their ploy!
Maybe, just maybe this isn't part of the great SCO/MS conspiracy and you're just confused cause you don't have half the article cause you don't read the news site it is posted on and you don't follow this author's work?
It's a follow on from another article. If you havn't read the other article then it makes no sense to read this article. The only reason why the brain dead Slashdot editors posted it is because the brain dead OSNews.com had it. I'm sure neither Eugenia over at OSNews, nor timothy here on Slashdot read anything more than the title of the article. Not even knowing what VR4 was refering to they posted it.
It's a technical comparison between the Solaris and Linux kernels. He's not interested in your opinions of which makes a better embedded operating system for a toaster oven.
Before VLAD magazine entered the virus scene it mainly consisted of traders and spreaders. People used to write viruses with the sole goal of spreading them on other people's machines. These were the bad guys. The traders were a special kind of user who wasn't afraid of viruses, enjoyed studying and collecting them and trading them with other users. When VLAD entered the scene we had a specific moto: write viruses, but do no harm. We never spread our creations. We wrote viruses that were deliberately ineffective if they were released into the wild (hell, 90% of my viruses didn't even work) and we made it a derogatory act to cause harm to computers by refusing to ever put a destructive payload in a virus. The result was a reduction of the number of viruses in the wild.
We were happy the group 29a picked up our principles and stuck by them. There were other virus groups that didn't. I'm reminded of the short lived Immortal Riot. They didn't write very interesting viruses, but they wrote some nasty stuff and they encouraged people to spread their viruses and wrote destructive payloads. The result? No-one actually read their magazine, they just downloaded it to get a virus to infect their enemy's computer with. With no-one actually reading their magazine the virus authors got nothing out of it, so they all quit.
sounds great. Really. And with the right tools people like my brother, who can't code to save their lives, but really like to customize everything they can, would be able to make all sorts of cool apps.
It also helps to use a dictionary written in the last 20 years. Here's a link for ya: first genetic evidence uncovered of how major changes in body shapes occured during early animal evolution. Of course, no matter how much evidence is collected, and no matter how much research is done, the creationists will never admit their fantasy is wrong. Even if we layed down a giant phenological map of how every creature on earth day was evolved from a single source, the creationists would point to the species that have since gone extinct as reason why the "theory" is incorrect.
So Phenology is the study of what? Maybe back before we could sequence DNA and observe the difference between two different species at a genetic level you could make these kinds of arguments, but today there is no question.
If you want proof that a single cell creature can evolve, we can do that experiment in a day. If you want proof that one species is descended from another we can look at DNA similarities. Of course, the alternative explaination (it's like that cause God made it that way) can explain anything, so there's really no point discussing the matter with someone who is willing to resort to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, and FireFox is immune to spyware too.
It's much worse than that. Slashdot and most other tech sites only report on feats like this one. There's no reporting done on the actual science or the breakthroughs of robotics. For example, I was honestly surprised a month ago to learn of the invention of Scale Invariant Feature Transforms last year. This awesome computer vision technique allows a robot to recognise objects based on key features of the object, in real time, with minimal training. This means you could have a robot that can learn to associate an utterance for "ball" with a ball and then pick the ball from a collection of similar or dissimilar objects on command. There is already another paper which extends this work to incorporate background invariance into the transformation so the robot would be able to find the object in real live situations using uncallibrated cameras. There's even an open source library for performing these kinds of transformations.. unfortunately about the only use it appears to be getting is in creating panaroma images. Feature recognition on entire scenes could just as easily be used for navigation in a mobile robot.
around and around we go. Honeypots in no way help you secure your machine against known attacks. They may be good for finding out about unknown attacks but seeing as blackhats never use their zero-day exploits on Honeypots and know when they're on a Honeypot, so they never use them as intemediate hosts, Honeypots are good for nothing. Unless you consider watching script kiddies go about being script kiddies productive. In which case you should slap yourself firmly in the head and go back to securing your machine.
Although blackhats do indeed attack machines simply to use them as intermediate hosts, they don't use their zero-day exploits to do it. They keep them in reserve for when they can't get into a well secured machine. Intermediate hosts are deliberately chosen for their poor security so they need not use zero-day exploits. Now at this point you might be thinking that a honeypot is still useful cause if a blackhat uses it as an intermediate host then the scripts they use to do this zero-day exploit will have to pass through the intermediate host. Well 1) Honeypots are deliberately designed so that blackhats can't use them as intermediate hosts, and 2) blackhats never use intermediate hosts that they are not 100% aware of what the machine is used for. No-one except a script kiddie gets into a honeypot and doesn't know it is a honeypot for more than 15 minutes. It's simply too easy to tell a machine that has a purpose from a machine that is a deliberate trap.
or the number of women who find blackhat linux geeks sexy has increased in the last 3 months and they were all out on dates instead of hacking stupid Honeynet Project machines. It could be anything. Because it could be anything it's not a scientific measurement, it's not even a measurement, it's a useless observation of how long that particular set of linux boxes took to be owned.
By your own admission, the conditions under which the "experiment" is being repeated are not the same, therefore it is not a measurement of anything. If I note that it takes 3 minutes to boil water on my stove and then repeat the experiment 3 months later on your stove I have not measured anything about the rate of boiling water. I've changed more than one variable at a time, therefore I am unable to make any sensible conclusion from my experiment. Either your stove is has a different boiling water efficiency to mine or the rate of boiling water at different times of year is not a constant. If you add in a million other variables, such as the tempature in your kitchen vs mine, whether or not you have a stove fan, the quality of water in your district vs mine, the iron content of your cookware, etc, you get an experiment that is so wildly useless that you can't honestly call it scientific. That's what The Honeynet Project is, a big boiling pot of useless variables.
It's such a bullshit comparison. Windows XP gets owned in 3 minutes after starting up. Linux takes 3 weeks. Wooo! Linux must be harder to own! No, there's just more losers out there trying to break into random Windows XP boxes than there are losers out there trying to break into random Linux boxes. If you actually went and asked a representative sample of script kiddies which OS they found easier to attack and why you might get some valuable information, but it's more fun to "catch" hackers in your "honeypot". About the only good thing that could ever come out of The Honeypot Project is previously unknown attack methods. For example, if someone got root using some local exploit no-one had seen before we could reverse engineer the script they used and fix the bug. But this has never happened. Why? Cause no-one who has zero day exploits goes around using them on random machines. They use their zero day exploits to attack specific machines for a specific purpose, because they know that every time they use the exploit the run the risk of it being discovered.
The number of variables in this study are not even remotely controlled. There are no sensible conclusions you can draw from this, except that an unpatched systems are susceptible to attack and that there are still people out there who are attacking susceptible systems. For all we know an increase in the cost of beef in Tokyo is encouraging the russian mafia to hire more hackers to fake livestock reports and therefore there's less hackers available to attack the useless machines involved in these tests.
Way to be an ignorant jerk.
The show contains british gits swearing and ranting about open source.
Maybe, just maybe this isn't part of the great SCO/MS conspiracy and you're just confused cause you don't have half the article cause you don't read the news site it is posted on and you don't follow this author's work?
It's a follow on from another article. If you havn't read the other article then it makes no sense to read this article. The only reason why the brain dead Slashdot editors posted it is because the brain dead OSNews.com had it. I'm sure neither Eugenia over at OSNews, nor timothy here on Slashdot read anything more than the title of the article. Not even knowing what VR4 was refering to they posted it.
It's a technical comparison between the Solaris and Linux kernels. He's not interested in your opinions of which makes a better embedded operating system for a toaster oven.
yeah, and off is spelt with 2 Fs, damn it!
isn't it obvious? The Bible said so!
We were happy the group 29a picked up our principles and stuck by them. There were other virus groups that didn't. I'm reminded of the short lived Immortal Riot. They didn't write very interesting viruses, but they wrote some nasty stuff and they encouraged people to spread their viruses and wrote destructive payloads. The result? No-one actually read their magazine, they just downloaded it to get a virus to infect their enemy's computer with. With no-one actually reading their magazine the virus authors got nothing out of it, so they all quit.
sounds great. Really. And with the right tools people like my brother, who can't code to save their lives, but really like to customize everything they can, would be able to make all sorts of cool apps.
you're kiding right? We get bombarded with Microsoft ads here, and they're always feel good 'we helped this child learn to read' crap.
It also helps to use a dictionary written in the last 20 years. Here's a link for ya: first genetic evidence uncovered of how major changes in body shapes occured during early animal evolution. Of course, no matter how much evidence is collected, and no matter how much research is done, the creationists will never admit their fantasy is wrong. Even if we layed down a giant phenological map of how every creature on earth day was evolved from a single source, the creationists would point to the species that have since gone extinct as reason why the "theory" is incorrect.
Phenology. Try updating your arguments to an era were we can actually read the genetic code.
Well that's obvious, anything that involves God (who is by definition not invalidatable) can not be scientific theory.
So Phenology is the study of what? Maybe back before we could sequence DNA and observe the difference between two different species at a genetic level you could make these kinds of arguments, but today there is no question.
If you want proof that a single cell creature can evolve, we can do that experiment in a day. If you want proof that one species is descended from another we can look at DNA similarities. Of course, the alternative explaination (it's like that cause God made it that way) can explain anything, so there's really no point discussing the matter with someone who is willing to resort to that.
They're taught in Catholic schools, I'll start printing em up eh?
Umm no. Not all theory is scientific theory.