On another note, I personally *am* plagued by this IE being super slow thing. And unlike some, I've looked into it logically: it happens 99.9% of the time if a javascript launches a new window, or if a link is Targeted.
I disable javascript, so i wouldn't know anything about that, but occaisionally trying to open a targeted link will freeze the browser window I tried to open the link from; opening a new browser instance and trying to follow the link will freeze that one too. I have to find the broken browser instance that's 'blocking' them and terminate it before the others will resume working.
that and the 'reload from dns error page waits forever' thing...
Quantum Mechanics is more than the kind of Physics that allows engineers to make locomotives. Its even more than what allowed us to land on the moon. As a warmer, we get nukes and the mighty computer. This physics promises us glimpses of the time the Universe was born, the quantum computer, time travel, teleportation, and many other things we have'nt imagined yet.
Naah, once we get SDI working and perfect Genetics, it's just Future Tech 1, Future Tech 2... for as long as we keep bothering with science spending.
This view is why it became so difficult to shift the cultural worldview from flat-earth to round-earth and from earth-centric to sun-centric to a whole universe of star systems.
I'm not talking about science here, I'm talking about legislation. You don't need a law decreeing what orbits around what.
If you marginalize the unpopular views, you often stunt the growth of a society.
I'm also not talking about society either, I'm talking about the day-to-day business of passing laws. A law with 10% support is not going to pass, and congress only has so much time in a year. The supporters of the law would do better to spend their time trying to get more supportive legislators elected.
Sure, if a party and its candidates hold unpopular stances, they'll need to work to gain support, but that must be done by sharing facts and ideas, not by producing brand-building TV commercials.
Exactly, that's how it should be, but having representation in Congress is the result of that effort, not the beginning. When a party (or more likely in the US, a faction within a party)becomes popular enough to get it's agenda passed, it will have a nontrivial number of backers in congress. This happens all the time.
Giving the Communists and the Greens and the Libertarians and the Snake-Handler party five seats each in the legislature isn't going to help that, it's just going to get in the way.
The two party system is a way to ensure the illusion of diversity while making sure bribery is as easy as (American) pie
The point of the American system isn't diversity, it's consensus. Fringe ideas are generally useless in a democratic government (if it's only going to get 10% of the vote, why even debate it?), so they're intentionally marginalized.
I doubt it's much easier to bribe two large parties than a dozen small ones, since you mostly bribe individual legislators anyway, over which the parties have limited control--probably less control the bigger the party.
Given the current state of politics in the U.S. there is very little hope for campaign finance reform laws that will outlaw the shameless "donations" both parties so heavily rely on.
I think the problem is more a lack of useful ideas as to how to fix the current system, Campaign Finance Reform laws get passed all the time, but it's not exactly easy to draw a line that will stop donating for influence but still allow people to endorse candidates they like.
Until P2P can implement DRM, it's shark food to the MPAA and RIAA attorneys.
For companies, or individuals trying to make money with P2P (directly, indirect profit like selling hardware and bandwidth seems to be going well), sure.
For the rest of us, who cares? Lawyers don't scare me...
No problem, since real files work and get voted up while fakes get voted down. Before you know it, the files and IP ranges get negative trust metrics.
Negative trust doesn't work in an anonymous world; you can just get another identifier with a clean record.
You can also pretend to be a bunch of people and ballot-stuff to mess with the records.
I don't know if there's a solution...
-- Benjamin Coates
Re:Windows XP will not copy the registry file.
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 2
You should be able to use the "System Restore" thingy to backup the registry or restore it. It stores the backups in \System Volume Information:
(give yourself access to it, you'll need to be in Administrators) C:\>cacls "\System Volume Information"/E/G Administrators:F processed dir: C:\System Volume Information
(the directory will be called _restore{some guid}\RP(count), pick the highest RP* directory for the most recent snapshot) C:\>dir "\System Volume Information\_restore{some guid}\RP93\snapshot"
Volume in drive C has no label. [... snipped for lameness filter...] 12/05/2002 08:51 PM 17,580,032 _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE [... etc...]
16 File(s) 26,210,230 bytes
These files should be accessable copies of the registry and the registry files for each user.
You can access entire physical drives or volumes under windows through the windows api, (you open "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0" or "\\.\C:" or the like), so making a partition copy program that runs under windows shouldn't be too hard, I don't know if there's one available somewhere...
-- Benjamin Coates
Re: "Direction Microsoft is Going"
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 2
Which files in particular can't you copy? Can you not access the data, or does the file not work when written to the target system?
I think I've asked this before the last time this article got posted, but since there still doesn't appear to be an open-source windows personal firewall, does anyone know what API these programs normally use to get in on network packets in windows? Or is it a dummy network driver or a replacement winsock dll or what?
CEOs are making out like bandits, but the people being screwed over by this are the investors, not the employees. If the CEO was paid a reasonable salary, the money wouldn't magically appear in the worker's paychecks--workers are paid what they're willing to work for, and not a penny more.
I don't know why investors put up all their money being spent on these "rock star" executives, maybe they even have a good reason, but my guess is some sort of backscratching between the employees of institutional investors and the execs that profit while their companies fail.
Short of vacations, almost all of the driving I do is within 25 miles of where I live. (like my old job, any of my friends close enough to visit in person, about any store or restaurant I need). There's gas stations every couple of blocks, too, although I don't know how many of them have two-stroke oil available.
This should be the goal of the Linux evangelists; that easy to install and enough of a Windows workalike that ordinary users don't notice/care when someone does that.
Or, you could just use your compiler of choice to make a promptless data-erasing/formatting/whatever program and call it reallyfunnyanimation.exe and put it up on your website. Your point being?
At least according to Google, The only source anybody lists for that quote is Peter McWilliam's book "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consentual Crimes in Our Free Country". The online edition (it's in a yellow box, find for "vatican") atribbutes it to "THE VATICAN", with no details about who exactly said it or when, and the book doesn't appear to have any footnotes.
This also suggests the simple way that the RIAA/MPAA will kill freenet. They will create their own nodes and flood the network with files. I posted a message to the freenet mailing list about how they could counter this and nobody responded back to it.
That doesn't work unless the attacker has substantially more network resources than the entire freenet network, and not necessarily even then. It's a less useful attack than just DoSing every Freenet node at the IP level.
The basic design of Freenet makes it impossible to control signal to noise.
Not really, the signal:noise function for dropping content when nodes are full is popularity; for finding content it is link-following, just like the www.
It's not done yet. The NAT issue that people make so much of (which shouldn't keep you from using freenet, it just keeps you from contributing to the network capacity. If you can't use freenet at work, you have some other problem.) is quite solvable, but none of the several solutions have been implemented yet. Getting it working well for people with fully functional internet connections has to be finished first.
Between Freenet's unfinshed state and the fact that it hasn't had anywhere near enough use to have any confidence about its anonymity protections, it's not exactly surprising that freenet isn't a hotbed of dangerous revolutionary activity, is it? I see a few things in TFE that I would probably be at least a hassle to get published conventionally.
I doubt I qualify as a 'Freenetista', but I've never heard of your site until now...
But that sword cuts both ways. It'd be easy for an anonymous whistle-blower to publish confidential information for noble purposes, but it'd also be impossible to verify the authenticity of that information. In a Freenet world, I could construct a detailed and damning fiction about SunnyElLoco and publish it anonymously, and it would have exactly the same credibility as everything else. Freenet would make it impossible to separate the truth from the lies.
Why does knowing someone's name give you any useful information about what they're trying to say? It's not like I personally know almost anyone who publishes anything. You tell truth from lies by applying critical thinking, looking for internal and external inconsistencies in the text, considering opposing works... Legal names are virtually worthless as a measure of truth.
To trivialize the example, imagine a Slashdot where every poster was an Anonymous Coward. How could you separate the truth from the bullshit? The signal-to-noise ratio would plummet.
Like slashdot, most of what's on Freenet is pseudo-anonymous, where an author has an identity they can use to link their various uploads. Also like slashdot, I don't have any useful information about the real-world identity of any of the participants unless they tell me.
Well, the first paragraph you quoted is plainly false. A search warrant was requested and denied in the Moussaui (sp.?) case. Had it been granted, it could have prevented 911. And of course there is the roving wiretap issue.
Rowley (the FBI whistleblower) and the other agents handling the Moussaoui case wanted to get a search warrant, but the Washington FBI people refused to ask a judge--Even though they had more than enough evidence to get one, under the pre-PATRIOT rules. The problem, once again, was incompetence at the upper levels of the FBI, not a lack of power.
Then again, I doubt the FBI would have been able to prevent the attacks, even with the information they could have gotten from the Moussaoui case.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like our culture. Is this what the artists intended when they created these works?
It is a statue of Liberty, not a statue of Respect for History.
(imagines a giant copper statue of an elderly librarian with coke-bottle glasses, sitting behind a desk with a 'sssh!' gesture)
--
Benjamin Coates
On another note, I personally *am* plagued by this IE being super slow thing. And unlike some, I've looked into it logically: it happens 99.9% of the time if a javascript launches a new window, or if a link is Targeted.
I disable javascript, so i wouldn't know anything about that, but occaisionally trying to open a targeted link will freeze the browser window I tried to open the link from; opening a new browser instance and trying to follow the link will freeze that one too. I have to find the broken browser instance that's 'blocking' them and terminate it before the others will resume working.
that and the 'reload from dns error page waits forever' thing...
--
Benjamin Coates
Yeah, it's me. Where are you now?
ianal, but US law probably applies to a US spacecraft the same way it applies on a US ship on the high seas.
--
Benjamin Coates
Quantum Mechanics is more than the kind of Physics that allows engineers to make locomotives. Its even more than what allowed us to land on the moon. As a warmer, we get nukes and the mighty computer. This physics promises us glimpses of the time the Universe was born, the quantum computer, time travel, teleportation, and many other things we have'nt imagined yet.
Naah, once we get SDI working and perfect Genetics, it's just Future Tech 1, Future Tech 2... for as long as we keep bothering with science spending.
--
Benjamin Coates
This view is why it became so difficult to shift the cultural worldview from flat-earth to round-earth and from earth-centric to sun-centric to a whole universe of star systems.
I'm not talking about science here, I'm talking about legislation. You don't need a law decreeing what orbits around what.
If you marginalize the unpopular views, you often stunt the growth of a society.
I'm also not talking about society either, I'm talking about the day-to-day business of passing laws. A law with 10% support is not going to pass, and congress only has so much time in a year. The supporters of the law would do better to spend their time trying to get more supportive legislators elected.
Sure, if a party and its candidates hold unpopular stances, they'll need to work to gain support, but that must be done by sharing facts and ideas, not by producing brand-building TV commercials.
Exactly, that's how it should be, but having representation in Congress is the result of that effort, not the beginning. When a party (or more likely in the US, a faction within a party)becomes popular enough to get it's agenda passed, it will have a nontrivial number of backers in congress. This happens all the time.
Giving the Communists and the Greens and the Libertarians and the Snake-Handler party five seats each in the legislature isn't going to help that, it's just going to get in the way.
--
Benjamin Coates
The two party system is a way to ensure the illusion of diversity while making sure bribery is as easy as (American) pie
The point of the American system isn't diversity, it's consensus. Fringe ideas are generally useless in a democratic government (if it's only going to get 10% of the vote, why even debate it?), so they're intentionally marginalized.
I doubt it's much easier to bribe two large parties than a dozen small ones, since you mostly bribe individual legislators anyway, over which the parties have limited control--probably less control the bigger the party.
Given the current state of politics in the U.S. there is very little hope for campaign finance reform laws that will outlaw the shameless "donations" both parties so heavily rely on.
I think the problem is more a lack of useful ideas as to how to fix the current system, Campaign Finance Reform laws get passed all the time, but it's not exactly easy to draw a line that will stop donating for influence but still allow people to endorse candidates they like.
--
Benjamin Coates
Until P2P can implement DRM, it's shark food to the MPAA and RIAA attorneys.
For companies, or individuals trying to make money with P2P (directly, indirect profit like selling hardware and bandwidth seems to be going well), sure.
For the rest of us, who cares? Lawyers don't scare me...
--
Benjamin Coates
No problem, since real files work and get voted up while fakes get voted down. Before you know it, the files and IP ranges get negative trust metrics.
Negative trust doesn't work in an anonymous world; you can just get another identifier with a clean record.
You can also pretend to be a bunch of people and ballot-stuff to mess with the records.
I don't know if there's a solution...
--
Benjamin Coates
You should be able to use the "System Restore" thingy to backup the registry or restore it. It stores the backups in \System Volume Information:
/E /G Administrators:F
...] ...]
(give yourself access to it, you'll need to be in Administrators)
C:\>cacls "\System Volume Information"
processed dir: C:\System Volume Information
(the directory will be called _restore{some guid}\RP(count), pick the highest RP* directory for the most recent snapshot)
C:\>dir "\System Volume Information\_restore{some guid}\RP93\snapshot"
Volume in drive C has no label.
[... snipped for lameness filter
12/05/2002 08:51 PM 17,580,032 _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE
[... etc
16 File(s) 26,210,230 bytes
These files should be accessable copies of the registry and the registry files for each user.
You can access entire physical drives or volumes under windows through the windows api, (you open "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0" or "\\.\C:" or the like), so making a partition copy program that runs under windows shouldn't be too hard, I don't know if there's one available somewhere...
--
Benjamin Coates
Which files in particular can't you copy? Can you not access the data, or does the file not work when written to the target system?
--
Benjamin Coates
I think I've asked this before the last time this article got posted, but since there still doesn't appear to be an open-source windows personal firewall, does anyone know what API these programs normally use to get in on network packets in windows? Or is it a dummy network driver or a replacement winsock dll or what?
--
Benjamin Coates
So what's so great about Europe?
I'm sorry, but CEO's are making out like bandits.
CEOs are making out like bandits, but the people being screwed over by this are the investors, not the employees. If the CEO was paid a reasonable salary, the money wouldn't magically appear in the worker's paychecks--workers are paid what they're willing to work for, and not a penny more.
I don't know why investors put up all their money being spent on these "rock star" executives, maybe they even have a good reason, but my guess is some sort of backscratching between the employees of institutional investors and the execs that profit while their companies fail.
--
Benjamin Coates
Short of vacations, almost all of the driving I do is within 25 miles of where I live. (like my old job, any of my friends close enough to visit in person, about any store or restaurant I need). There's gas stations every couple of blocks, too, although I don't know how many of them have two-stroke oil available.
--
Benjamin Coates
This should be the goal of the Linux evangelists; that easy to install and enough of a Windows workalike that ordinary users don't notice/care when someone does that.
--
Benjamin Coates
Has anyone (presumably using windows) been able to actually make this thing work? How promiscuous of a setup do you need?
It doesn't work on my unpatched XP/IE6 machine either.
--
Benjamin Coates
Or, you could just use your compiler of choice to make a promptless data-erasing/formatting/whatever program and call it reallyfunnyanimation.exe and put it up on your website. Your point being?
--
Benjamin Coates
Oh, sure, HP'll do the scanning for cheap, but wait until they get the bill for the ink cartridges...
--
Benjamin Coates
At least according to Google, The only source anybody lists for that quote is Peter McWilliam's book "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consentual Crimes in Our Free Country". The online edition (it's in a yellow box, find for "vatican") atribbutes it to "THE VATICAN", with no details about who exactly said it or when, and the book doesn't appear to have any footnotes.
--
Benjamin Coates
This also suggests the simple way that the RIAA/MPAA will kill freenet. They will create their own nodes and flood the network with files. I posted a message to the freenet mailing list about how they could counter this and nobody responded back to it.
That doesn't work unless the attacker has substantially more network resources than the entire freenet network, and not necessarily even then. It's a less useful attack than just DoSing every Freenet node at the IP level.
The basic design of Freenet makes it impossible to control signal to noise.
Not really, the signal:noise function for dropping content when nodes are full is popularity; for finding content it is link-following, just like the www.
--
Benjamin Coates
It's not done yet. The NAT issue that people make so much of (which shouldn't keep you from using freenet, it just keeps you from contributing to the network capacity. If you can't use freenet at work, you have some other problem.) is quite solvable, but none of the several solutions have been implemented yet. Getting it working well for people with fully functional internet connections has to be finished first.
Between Freenet's unfinshed state and the fact that it hasn't had anywhere near enough use to have any confidence about its anonymity protections, it's not exactly surprising that freenet isn't a hotbed of dangerous revolutionary activity, is it? I see a few things in TFE that I would probably be at least a hassle to get published conventionally.
I doubt I qualify as a 'Freenetista', but I've never heard of your site until now...
--
Benjamin Coates
But that sword cuts both ways. It'd be easy for an anonymous whistle-blower to publish confidential information for noble purposes, but it'd also be impossible to verify the authenticity of that information. In a Freenet world, I could construct a detailed and damning fiction about SunnyElLoco and publish it anonymously, and it would have exactly the same credibility as everything else. Freenet would make it impossible to separate the truth from the lies.
Why does knowing someone's name give you any useful information about what they're trying to say? It's not like I personally know almost anyone who publishes anything. You tell truth from lies by applying critical thinking, looking for internal and external inconsistencies in the text, considering opposing works... Legal names are virtually worthless as a measure of truth.
To trivialize the example, imagine a Slashdot where every poster was an Anonymous Coward. How could you separate the truth from the bullshit? The signal-to-noise ratio would plummet.
Like slashdot, most of what's on Freenet is pseudo-anonymous, where an author has an identity they can use to link their various uploads. Also like slashdot, I don't have any useful information about the real-world identity of any of the participants unless they tell me.
--
Benjamin Coates
Well, the first paragraph you quoted is plainly false. A search warrant was requested and denied in the Moussaui (sp.?) case. Had it been granted, it could have prevented 911. And of course there is the roving wiretap issue.
Rowley (the FBI whistleblower) and the other agents handling the Moussaoui case wanted to get a search warrant, but the Washington FBI people refused to ask a judge--Even though they had more than enough evidence to get one, under the pre-PATRIOT rules. The problem, once again, was incompetence at the upper levels of the FBI, not a lack of power.
Then again, I doubt the FBI would have been able to prevent the attacks, even with the information they could have gotten from the Moussaoui case.
--
Benjamin Coates
Why would it matter? Is there even a law against illegal aliens owning guns?
I don't even think there are gun records that could be realistically checked for that.
--
Benjamin Coates