It's hard to talk economics regarding space at the moment. With the Concode, there were many existing competing alternatives, and air travel is much closer to a commidty than space travel is.
Wheras with space vehicles... if someone wants to get something into space or do something in space, they have anywhere from zero to two options. Also, we don't yet know how economical space travel will eventually become because we haven't had as much time to develop it. And in the meantime, we have mainly government funding, meaning economics don't matter as much. When we get to the point where many different companies have been producing space craft for 40 years, then simple economics will definitely be the main criteria in weeding out new ideas.
Actually, the best way I've found for googling porn is to look on the TGPs for a website you like, and then just search for site:blahblah.com (eg. with no actual search term so it returns ALL public TGP pages from that site). No matter how esoteric your tastes are, it's a good way to find a ton of pictures that fits them (since apparently porn websites that are more specialized tend to make more money).
Some sites have a surprising amount of porn publicly available for advertising purposes. Not all, but some do. And you wouldn't otherwise be able to find all of it without writing your own meta-TGP engine. Thank goodness for google!
Re:protection money...
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The gambling sites are in a legal grey area, in that often what they're doing would be illegal in the countries of the participants, but the organization is outside the jurisdiction of the united states/europe/whatever. So in that sense, the extorters may also be working in a legal grey area where they won't see much investigation or pressure from the western world to stop their extortion.
And now we have CDs that fit in your wallet and can do much much more. Except the one in my wallet keeps breaking.:( Is it that I need to lose weight, or is there some other trick?
Well, I believe there can be air between the device and the power transmitter with the current product... it just might be that the air gap is something on the order of 1mm.
Yeah, current wireless power sucks in that we can mostly on conceive of it being transmitted via magnet or microwave, both having big detractions (eg. vs hard drives, or human skin). If they could figure out how to cheaply/precisely/safely aim laser beams at a window on each device, that would be better, but that sounds far fetched and still not optimal.
cheaper cheaper cheaper: I throw away all perhipheral cables
create a wireless power standard, and I finally throw away all external cables!
Re:Who Said It'll Attack SCO? & A FUDworm?
on
More MyDoom Gloom
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Okay, let's go over some of the facts:
The idea that the payload is inert comes from a single post on the internet by some random guy, and is now being quoted all over slashdot without anyone checking or verifying. It may turn out to be true, but either you should personally verify it, or at least wait for ONE other person to verify it before you start conspiracy theories.
You can look at the worm yourself and verify that it contains references to www.sco.com. Combine this with the fact that the worm is fairly small and is UPX compressed, you can conclude that the worm author took up space with the reference for a reason, either to create conspiracy theories (which would be unprecedented for a worm/virus I believe) or it's actually to DDOS a website (happens all the time with worms/viruses).
The partial dissassembly that people have posted so far indicates that the worm does use the www.sco.com address while creating a thread, opening a socket, and send some data.
So please, Please, PLEASE, would slashdot posters and moderators stop with the conspiracy theory stuff until someone posts a full disassembly on the internet, and lots of people verify that the analysis is correct. Until then, trying to come up with flamboyant conspiracy theories isn't going to do anything.
This is not Another Big Lie. An HTTP request header with www.sco.com is clearly contained in every Novarg worm anyone has gotten. It's semi-easy to verify.
Grab a copy of the worm from your mailbox. I don't know what to do if you think there's a conspiracy about how that copy got to your mailbox, but if you have hundreds sitting there, I believe at least the first version released all had the same MD5sum, so check with your neighbors or whatever. At some point conclude you have an "in the wild" version of the virus.
Get the zip from the email and uncompress it. Sometimes it's called text.exe, sometimes others, but let's just call it text.exe.
Download UPX. Run "upx -d text.exe" (the worm was upx-compressed to save some additional space, as you can tell by running strings on the original version and seeing "upx" show up at the front)
In unix, run "strings text.exe | perl -ple 'y/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/' | less"
What do you see? This:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.sco.com
www.sco.com
So an HTTP GET request that's hardcoded to sco.com is now distributed across millions of machines.
I think it's clear that there's SOME funny business targetting sco there. Look at the disassembly so far, there's code attached to it to that does SOMETHING. Who knows, the code might never be called or whatever (which would be pretty odd for a 32k worm that's been compressed multiple times), but even at this point, it's still reasonable to conclude that SCO is threatened, regardless of what the PR department says.
Further analysis of the worm has shown that it's only designed to DDOS sco.com between February 1st and February 12th. Note that Netcraft has logged sporadic problems on SCO's connection, presumably due to individual computers having their clocks set incorrectly.
But as Perens said... it's not a good thing that the worm still has a good chance of knocking SCO.com down for a while.
Well, it's in the form of a standard email message, so if you can figure out how to send that to yourself as a raw email or as an attachment or something, if you do it correctly, your mail client will do all the decoding for you.
Otherwise, download base64.exe, download mydoom, open up mydoom in wordpad, delete everything before the "UEsDBAoAAAAAAFuhOj" and everything after the "AAQABAIAAAABwWAAAAAA=" at the bottom (eg. just keep the main chunk of random text, removing everything else including the blank lines before and after), and run
base64 -d -i mydoom -o mydoom.zip
which should get you mydoom.zip, which when unpacked will get you "body.txt(lots of spaces).scr" which is the worm executable.
Unless they 1) worked for MS, or 2) worked for SCO, or (what you were hinting at) 3) was also a Linux hacker.
It WAS obviously written by a linux hacker, the.exe is only 32k long, but does a fair number of things. Okay, it's not a pinacle of viruses (eg. like like SQLSlammer that was small enough to be sent in a single UDP packet), but it required at least some C/asm and windows library skill. Whereas half of the linux hackers wouldn't know what to do with a compiled language if they were stuck on a deserted island with one.
Well, it allegedly opens a backdoor on port 3127, so I'd think you'd either want to not run it at all, or make sure you will be able to keep your firewall up until such time that you verify the virus is completely removed from your system.
This isn't a virus that exploits any holes in windows, it's a worm that exploits holes in user's heads. Users have to either download an exe from kazaa and run it, or open up a strange email, unpack the zip file (named message.zip/message.htm(tons of spaces)exe, text.zip/text.exe, and other names), and run the exe inside. Given that the worm is spreading so quickly, this means that people's stupidity once again surpasses our wildest expectations.
It's $32. With a link in case people have trouble remembering which crazy statements are made up by hecklers and which SCO actually meant to be semi-seriously uttered.
The discussion isn't about artistic merit. It's entirely possible for future films to be completely devoid of artistic merit, yet still make enough profit to be able to complete the series to Ep 9.
As nice as it would be that the profit motive would be enough to force Lucas to not pump out a couple more bad movies, I don't really see how that'd be the case. The profit motive is what encourages endless spin-offs of the same old crap in some cases. Unless George Lucas's circumstances are special or something (he insists on spending absurd amounts of money on production no matter what), it will be just as easy for him to continue putting out bad movies as it is for anyone else.
It didn't do THAT badly, did it? Wikipedia notes that it was the first time in the series that a Star Wars movie wasn't the highest-grossing of the year. It may have been a let down for Lucas and perhaps not worthy of spending so much money on production of future films, but it was still a commercial success, no?
I may be perhaps a little negative lately, I'm sorry if that's the case. I don't think I asked that anyone be modded down. Certainly different people have different opinion of why posts are good and variety is a good thing. Just that... well, it was a one-line comment simply noting the existance of a tool that's been fairly well known on slashdot for several years, adding nothing else, and am trying to understand if there's more to apt-on-redhat than is initially apparent.
Why do posts keep getting moderated up for this? It's been available forever, has been posted in many Slashdot stories and posts. Is this actually a great feature that tons of people use, or is it something RedHat users just feel a need to exclaim that they're no longer lacking? How many times do I have to respond "The people putting the packages together matter more than the final interface used to install the packages."?
Does anyone know how to search for "apt" and "red hat" in posts? (I don't see an "AND" feature in slashdot's searches) It'd be nice to show people exactly how repititious this discussion has become.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple: most people will likely block all anonymous email.
To be able to compete against companies who have oceans of cash?
Wheras with space vehicles... if someone wants to get something into space or do something in space, they have anywhere from zero to two options. Also, we don't yet know how economical space travel will eventually become because we haven't had as much time to develop it. And in the meantime, we have mainly government funding, meaning economics don't matter as much. When we get to the point where many different companies have been producing space craft for 40 years, then simple economics will definitely be the main criteria in weeding out new ideas.
Some sites have a surprising amount of porn publicly available for advertising purposes. Not all, but some do. And you wouldn't otherwise be able to find all of it without writing your own meta-TGP engine. Thank goodness for google!
The gambling sites are in a legal grey area, in that often what they're doing would be illegal in the countries of the participants, but the organization is outside the jurisdiction of the united states/europe/whatever. So in that sense, the extorters may also be working in a legal grey area where they won't see much investigation or pressure from the western world to stop their extortion.
And now we have CDs that fit in your wallet and can do much much more. Except the one in my wallet keeps breaking. :( Is it that I need to lose weight, or is there some other trick?
Yeah, current wireless power sucks in that we can mostly on conceive of it being transmitted via magnet or microwave, both having big detractions (eg. vs hard drives, or human skin). If they could figure out how to cheaply/precisely/safely aim laser beams at a window on each device, that would be better, but that sounds far fetched and still not optimal.
create a wireless power standard, and I finally throw away all external cables!
- The idea that the payload is inert comes from a single post on the internet by some random guy, and is now being quoted all over slashdot without anyone checking or verifying. It may turn out to be true, but either you should personally verify it, or at least wait for ONE other person to verify it before you start conspiracy theories.
- Norton Antivirus believes the payload to be an active DDOS against www.sco.com. So does F-Secure. So does McAfee.
- You can look at the worm yourself and verify that it contains references to www.sco.com. Combine this with the fact that the worm is fairly small and is UPX compressed, you can conclude that the worm author took up space with the reference for a reason, either to create conspiracy theories (which would be unprecedented for a worm/virus I believe) or it's actually to DDOS a website (happens all the time with worms/viruses).
- The partial dissassembly that people have posted so far indicates that the worm does use the www.sco.com address while creating a thread, opening a socket, and send some data.
So please, Please, PLEASE, would slashdot posters and moderators stop with the conspiracy theory stuff until someone posts a full disassembly on the internet, and lots of people verify that the analysis is correct. Until then, trying to come up with flamboyant conspiracy theories isn't going to do anything.- Grab a copy of the worm from your mailbox. I don't know what to do if you think there's a conspiracy about how that copy got to your mailbox, but if you have hundreds sitting there, I believe at least the first version released all had the same MD5sum, so check with your neighbors or whatever. At some point conclude you have an "in the wild" version of the virus.
- Get the zip from the email and uncompress it. Sometimes it's called text.exe, sometimes others, but let's just call it text.exe.
- Download UPX. Run "upx -d text.exe" (the worm was upx-compressed to save some additional space, as you can tell by running strings on the original version and seeing "upx" show up at the front)
- In unix, run "strings text.exe | perl -ple 'y/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/' | less"
- What do you see? This:
So an HTTP GET request that's hardcoded to sco.com is now distributed across millions of machines.GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.sco.com
www.sco.com
I think it's clear that there's SOME funny business targetting sco there. Look at the disassembly so far, there's code attached to it to that does SOMETHING. Who knows, the code might never be called or whatever (which would be pretty odd for a 32k worm that's been compressed multiple times), but even at this point, it's still reasonable to conclude that SCO is threatened, regardless of what the PR department says.
But as Perens said... it's not a good thing that the worm still has a good chance of knocking SCO.com down for a while.
Otherwise, download base64.exe, download mydoom, open up mydoom in wordpad, delete everything before the "UEsDBAoAAAAAAFuhOj" and everything after the "AAQABAIAAAABwWAAAAAA=" at the bottom (eg. just keep the main chunk of random text, removing everything else including the blank lines before and after), and run
- base64 -d -i mydoom -o mydoom.zip
which should get you mydoom.zip, which when unpacked will get you "body.txt(lots of spaces).scr" which is the worm executable.Ahh. Yes, I've read it, I just forgot. Nope, not a lisp hacker. Just that, since birth, I've always had a slight lisp when I type.
Or at the very least, filter any exe that's been UPX-compressed (eg. guaranteed to be a virus).
The executable is still available in the link listed at the top of the story (eg. it isn't slashdotted at all, no need to bittorrent it).
(when will slashdot catch up with the times and make comments be editable afterwards?)
It WAS obviously written by a linux hacker, the .exe is only 32k long, but does a fair number of things. Okay, it's not a pinacle of viruses (eg. like like SQLSlammer that was small enough to be sent in a single UDP packet), but it required at least some C/asm and windows library skill. Whereas half of the linux hackers wouldn't know what to do with a compiled language if they were stuck on a deserted island with one.
Well, it allegedly opens a backdoor on port 3127, so I'd think you'd either want to not run it at all, or make sure you will be able to keep your firewall up until such time that you verify the virus is completely removed from your system.
This isn't a virus that exploits any holes in windows, it's a worm that exploits holes in user's heads. Users have to either download an exe from kazaa and run it, or open up a strange email, unpack the zip file (named message.zip/message.htm(tons of spaces)exe, text.zip/text.exe, and other names), and run the exe inside. Given that the worm is spreading so quickly, this means that people's stupidity once again surpasses our wildest expectations.
It's $32. With a link in case people have trouble remembering which crazy statements are made up by hecklers and which SCO actually meant to be semi-seriously uttered.
As nice as it would be that the profit motive would be enough to force Lucas to not pump out a couple more bad movies, I don't really see how that'd be the case. The profit motive is what encourages endless spin-offs of the same old crap in some cases. Unless George Lucas's circumstances are special or something (he insists on spending absurd amounts of money on production no matter what), it will be just as easy for him to continue putting out bad movies as it is for anyone else.
It didn't do THAT badly, did it? Wikipedia notes that it was the first time in the series that a Star Wars movie wasn't the highest-grossing of the year. It may have been a let down for Lucas and perhaps not worthy of spending so much money on production of future films, but it was still a commercial success, no?
- Besides, there's not much stopping Spammers from just buying the processing resources they need.
Or simply stealing it, much as they do now with bandwidth and IP addresses, via worms that take over cable modem connections.Also, if I am a troll, it should be pretty easy to find egregious posts either in my recent posting history or google's longer archive of my posts (188 stories posted to so far). Feel free to browse, I think it's clear I'm not a troll.
Does anyone know how to search for "apt" and "red hat" in posts? (I don't see an "AND" feature in slashdot's searches) It'd be nice to show people exactly how repititious this discussion has become.