I hereby pledge that if I am ever summoned for jury duty because somebody physcially LARTed a spammer to death, I will argue that it was justifiable homicide.
As has been said before by others: I'm not trying to sound like a cold-hearted bastard, but I am a cold-hearted bastard, so that's just the way it comes out sounding.
Am I the only one who remembers the sysadmin who hooked the output of ping(1) into a text-to-speech program, turned his speakers up to full, and started pinging a machine at the other end of the building?
"PING... PING... PING..." on each successfully returned packet.
He then started wandering the halls, tweaking cables. When he bumped a cable and the noise stopped coming from his office, he knew he had found the fault.:-)
The DoD uses the same techniques as any other organization who values privacy. If you're hitting a port for protocol foo on a machine that isn't dedicated to protocol foo, then that will earn you an IP block at the router level. The block lasts for quite a while (months, not minutes) and is then often dropped, unless you keep trying.
Another poster comments "how much of an "attack" is it to scan to see if FTP is open?"
If you're looking at the public FTP server, it isn't an attack; that's what the server is there for.
But if you're outside the firewalls, looking for FTP on a machine inside the firewalls that isn't advertised for FTP, that's what's called "recon," and will earn you an IP block, automatically.
Offering to help document a project is one of the best thing you can do. Correcting comments, or writing a small web page (basic HTML takes about as much effort and intelligence as personal hygiene), even if that web page won't be viewed over the web but shipped as local documentation instead -- it's all helpful.
And, in the process of reading the code or observing the behavior or seeing what bug reports come in, you'll learn a huge amount about the project, and probably discover bugs at the same time. (Nothing gets outdated faster than code comments.)
Keep in mind that documentation doesn't always have to be for the end user. You could just start keeping some notes, and offer them as docs for developers for that project. Those can easily be of more use than docs for the end user, because it makes joining the project easier for future newbies like yourself.
As somebody who writes such documentation, lemme tell ya, it's a good way to get involved in coding. (Now I have no time to write documentation...)
It really drives me nuts to see people screaming about how hot the "new" 64-bit Itanium is. Like it's never been done before.
The Alpha processors have been 64-bit for a long time already. I went through college thinking 64-bit was perfectly standard because we were using an Alpha. Then I graduated a few years back and found that the rest of the world was still stuck at 32 bits, waiting breathlessly for the Itanium.
I've been running 64-bit apps under a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit chip for quite a while (recent Solaris on a V9 UltraSPARC cpu).
anyone had started working on a successor to C++ yet?
One well-known person in the C++ community was asked to speculate on what the next ISO C++ Standard would include (this was about a year after the standard had been released). He answered, "I love speculation. Work on [the next library] will start in March, 2012,
shortly after the new ISO C++ 2011 was adopted. It will support 256
bit integer types, and a new library header <voicerecognition>."
There have been plenty of direct "successors" to C++ in the last decade. None have caught on.
"long long long"
If you have hardware to support 128-bit stuff, then the system headers will have a datatype already. Personally, I think exponents are the way to go: "long^6 foo;" for a one-kilobit signed integer.
However, we'd like to thank you for the
Oxford English Dictionary. It's an interesting collection, considering
that over 10,000 of the words in the original edition were submitted by a
crazy American civil-war veteran called Dr. William Charles Minor.
I highly recommend the book entitled, The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and The Oxford English Dictionary. Dr. Minor was truly wacko, and it makes fascinating reading.
Also don't forget that J.R.R. Tolkien was one of those who worked in the Scriptorium, editing the Mother Of All Dictionaries together. (No, Tolkien is not the Professor referred to in the title.)
Finally anime newbies like myself can see what all the fuss is about!
It's about "get a whole lot of caffeine if you plan on watching it at the end of a work day." The first time I watched Akira at a friend's party, the exposition scenes kept putting me to sleep. Literally.
Not to diss the movie or anything; I just wasn't ready for that much sitting still and staying alert simultaneously.
I still have a copy of the IOCCC entry which consisted of an ASCII-art circle drawn inside main().
The program calculated an approximation of pi by figuring out the surface area of its own source code. The bigger the circle, the more accurate the approximation.
I think even the Jargon File mentions that one as an example of true obfuscation. The Perl entries are just... sophmoric.
It reminds me of some kid trying to use rules designed to govern/suppress him or her against the authority figures who created them in the first place.
Isn't that the essence of the GPL? Using copyright law to defeat a part of copyright law which we/they/FSF/GNU/RMS doesn't like?
Then you write...
I'm sorry, but the rules are written for the benefit of those who create them and will be revised when they are found lacking in this regard.
I agree completely. Wonder what that means for the GPL...
and the writing has a light touch which makes it extremely readable both as a desk reference and as bedtime reading.
You know, as a sysadmin, I usually don't have time to sleep. And when I do have time, I usually don't need to read anything to help me get to sleep. And when I do need to read, the last thing I want is more stuff to do with my job! I'm in home and in bed to get away from lusers! Not to think about them some more!
For the humor-impaired: this posting has been a joke. Thank you.
BTW - that link was nice (like most Straight Dope columns), but didn't have anything to do with the internet. Try again?
Hey, if there are two Victoria's Secret / Super Bowl incidents, and he doesn't distinguish between them, then I'm free to infer whatever I want.:-) He shouldn't assume that I surf lingerie shops while watching football...
Still, this is interesting to read. This is the first I've heard of the web site crash. (Gah, I hate it when/. authors simply assume that their readers know about every little server downtime. Misunderstandings like this are what results. Ah well.)
You'd be right if you weren't wrong
on
Death March
·
· Score: 2
You make it sound like he wrote all of these books last week. They all sound ridiculously silly now, in retrospect, but not then.
When he wrote Decline, it was mostly accurate at the time.
When he wrote Rise, it was mostly accurate for its time.
Okay, I'll give you the Y2K one. That was looney.
And recall that Death March was written in 1997. Some things have changed since then (buzzwords), some things haven't (fucking idiots getting instantly promoted). Keep that in mind when you read it.
The comments he makes on triage are especially apt.
The subflavor of Solaris called "Trusted Solaris" will do this, I believe. The amount of hooks in the T.S. kernel is amazing. You can configure individual files to simply not be there when certain users read the directory listings. (I don't mean they get a "permission denied" or somthing; I mean the file just isn't there.
Even without running Trusted Solaris, normal Solaris has auditing mechanisms that you can turn on to do this. I don't think you can specify which files are to be audited at different levels. You can watch specific users at different levels, but I don't think you can restrict it to the file level. (And if you don't, the amount of auditing log message traffic becomes overwhelming.)
Good lord you're paranoid!!! Seek professional help!
You've never heard of just throwing out an idea to see what discussion it generates? I don't believe I ever stated that "this is what I firmly believe."
It's just an idea, people. If you can't handle the thought of discussing strange and wacky concepts, you need to read some other website.
Consider. Free project GNUFoo comes out which competes with Microsoft Active FUBAR 2000. If it looks popular, M$ can just state that "there's a possibility that our proprietary source code influenced this design," and instantly GNUFoo is dropped like a hot potato.
Now, there's none of M$'s code in GNUFoo, but the FSF and the GNUFoo programmers now have to prove that, because in the Real World you are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and even then you're still guilty of looking guilty.
And in the years that it takes to satisfy the courts that GNUFoo is guilty of nothing but competing against The Man, the project will slowly grind to a halt. By the time GNUFoo is cleared of wrongdoing, M$ will have released their next project, and GNUFoo will be useless because it's so outdated.
Pick up a decent, non-idiosyncratic translation of some of the writings of the first century A.D. in southern Europe. They're full of references to (for example) the fall of Babylon, but what they're actually talking about is the fall of the Roman Empire.
(Recall that Rome was good at oppressing people, and that the nation of Babylon had died a long time earlier.)
Religious and political tracts have done this for a long time. We do it today: every/. reader knows which corporation I mean when I say Evil Empire, although in the mid-80's it was a different corporation, one with a three-letter acronym.
In your O and a bunch of others' as well! A huge advantage of the TeX family over the Office family is that arbitrary programs[*] can create valid TeX input, without actually having TeX. My reporting scripts can emit LaTeX on systems that don't have LaTeX, and then email the file to systems that do. Machines with half a meg of RAM can still originate beautiful text. Plus all the other obvious advantages.
[*] Okay, maybe not all arbitrary programs. Only those which can output text.:-)
They have the method, and they have the opportunity...
The thing to look for in this "sudden" change of face is his motive. Whom was he trying to please when he tried to get the people to distrust the government? And now who his paying his campaign funds to get him to get us to trust the same government?
Folks, the members of Congress don't give a rat's ass one way or the other. You need to look for who is calling their shots and paying their bills if you want to see the true specific motives.
...but your email can and will. Your post is hardly a refutation. The point being made is that misusing company resources is wrong; not that you have no right to privacy at work. What you say is completely irrelevent.
Who cares? After about 200 MHz, speed stopped mattering much
No kidding. Our RAM crawls along at a tenth the speed of the CPU. If two boxes do a fetch from memory, and they stall for the same length of time while waiting on that request, then it doesn't matter if I have the 233 megahertz CPU and J.Random Jones has the 50 terahertz CPU.
I'm a software guy. All you hardware guys: make you a deal. You work on bus speed and faster RAM, leave the CPU alone, and I'll work on better compiler optimizations to schedule the instructions such that the stall time is less. Together we will bring world peace, or at least speed up Mozilla.
What we really need is the option to vote for "none of the above," on our ballots.
That would be most cool, although I think (on a first pass) that I would give that up if I had the option to use my vote as a "for" or an "against," my choice.
I don't care for a single one of the candidates. It doesn't matter who wins, we still lose. But I would like to avoid losing to a couple people in particular, because they represent the worst-case outcome. So I wish I could vote against Bush or Gore. (Adjust the Constitution's voting rules and cutoffs as appropriate.)
Slashdot Mirror
I hereby pledge that if I am ever summoned for jury duty because somebody physcially LARTed a spammer to death, I will argue that it was justifiable homicide.
As has been said before by others: I'm not trying to sound like a cold-hearted bastard, but I am a cold-hearted bastard, so that's just the way it comes out sounding.
Am I the only one who remembers the sysadmin who hooked the output of ping(1) into a text-to-speech program, turned his speakers up to full, and started pinging a machine at the other end of the building?
"PING... PING... PING..." on each successfully returned packet.
He then started wandering the halls, tweaking cables. When he bumped a cable and the noise stopped coming from his office, he knew he had found the fault. :-)
This alone will make me see the movie. Cool.
The DoD uses the same techniques as any other organization who values privacy. If you're hitting a port for protocol foo on a machine that isn't dedicated to protocol foo, then that will earn you an IP block at the router level. The block lasts for quite a while (months, not minutes) and is then often dropped, unless you keep trying.
If you're looking at the public FTP server, it isn't an attack; that's what the server is there for.
But if you're outside the firewalls, looking for FTP on a machine inside the firewalls that isn't advertised for FTP, that's what's called "recon," and will earn you an IP block, automatically.
Offering to help document a project is one of the best thing you can do. Correcting comments, or writing a small web page (basic HTML takes about as much effort and intelligence as personal hygiene), even if that web page won't be viewed over the web but shipped as local documentation instead -- it's all helpful.
And, in the process of reading the code or observing the behavior or seeing what bug reports come in, you'll learn a huge amount about the project, and probably discover bugs at the same time. (Nothing gets outdated faster than code comments.)
Keep in mind that documentation doesn't always have to be for the end user. You could just start keeping some notes, and offer them as docs for developers for that project. Those can easily be of more use than docs for the end user, because it makes joining the project easier for future newbies like yourself.
As somebody who writes such documentation, lemme tell ya, it's a good way to get involved in coding. (Now I have no time to write documentation...)
It really drives me nuts to see people screaming about how hot the "new" 64-bit Itanium is. Like it's never been done before.
The Alpha processors have been 64-bit for a long time already. I went through college thinking 64-bit was perfectly standard because we were using an Alpha. Then I graduated a few years back and found that the rest of the world was still stuck at 32 bits, waiting breathlessly for the Itanium.
I've been running 64-bit apps under a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit chip for quite a while (recent Solaris on a V9 UltraSPARC cpu).
One well-known person in the C++ community was asked to speculate on what the next ISO C++ Standard would include (this was about a year after the standard had been released). He answered, "I love speculation. Work on [the next library] will start in March, 2012, shortly after the new ISO C++ 2011 was adopted. It will support 256 bit integer types, and a new library header <voicerecognition>."
There have been plenty of direct "successors" to C++ in the last decade. None have caught on.
If you have hardware to support 128-bit stuff, then the system headers will have a datatype already. Personally, I think exponents are the way to go: "long^6 foo;" for a one-kilobit signed integer.
I highly recommend the book entitled, The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and The Oxford English Dictionary. Dr. Minor was truly wacko, and it makes fascinating reading.
Also don't forget that J.R.R. Tolkien was one of those who worked in the Scriptorium, editing the Mother Of All Dictionaries together. (No, Tolkien is not the Professor referred to in the title.)
Finally anime newbies like myself can see what all the fuss is about!
It's about "get a whole lot of caffeine if you plan on watching it at the end of a work day." The first time I watched Akira at a friend's party, the exposition scenes kept putting me to sleep. Literally.
Not to diss the movie or anything; I just wasn't ready for that much sitting still and staying alert simultaneously.
I still have a copy of the IOCCC entry which consisted of an ASCII-art circle drawn inside main().
The program calculated an approximation of pi by figuring out the surface area of its own source code. The bigger the circle, the more accurate the approximation.
I think even the Jargon File mentions that one as an example of true obfuscation. The Perl entries are just... sophmoric.
...how many
Isn't that the essence of the GPL? Using copyright law to defeat a part of copyright law which we/they/FSF/GNU/RMS doesn't like?
Then you write...
I agree completely. Wonder what that means for the GPL...
You know, as a sysadmin, I usually don't have time to sleep. And when I do have time, I usually don't need to read anything to help me get to sleep. And when I do need to read, the last thing I want is more stuff to do with my job! I'm in home and in bed to get away from lusers! Not to think about them some more!
For the humor-impaired: this posting has been a joke. Thank you.
BTW - that link was nice (like most Straight Dope columns), but didn't have anything to do with the internet. Try again?
Hey, if there are two Victoria's Secret / Super Bowl incidents, and he doesn't distinguish between them, then I'm free to infer whatever I want. :-) He shouldn't assume that I surf lingerie shops while watching football...
Still, this is interesting to read. This is the first I've heard of the web site crash. (Gah, I hate it when /. authors simply assume that their readers know about every little server downtime. Misunderstandings like this are what results. Ah well.)
You make it sound like he wrote all of these books last week. They all sound ridiculously silly now, in retrospect, but not then.
When he wrote Decline, it was mostly accurate at the time.
When he wrote Rise, it was mostly accurate for its time.
Okay, I'll give you the Y2K one. That was looney.
And recall that Death March was written in 1997. Some things have changed since then (buzzwords), some things haven't (fucking idiots getting instantly promoted). Keep that in mind when you read it.
The comments he makes on triage are especially apt.
The subflavor of Solaris called "Trusted Solaris" will do this, I believe. The amount of hooks in the T.S. kernel is amazing. You can configure individual files to simply not be there when certain users read the directory listings. (I don't mean they get a "permission denied" or somthing; I mean the file just isn't there.
Even without running Trusted Solaris, normal Solaris has auditing mechanisms that you can turn on to do this. I don't think you can specify which files are to be audited at different levels. You can watch specific users at different levels, but I don't think you can restrict it to the file level. (And if you don't, the amount of auditing log message traffic becomes overwhelming.)
Good lord you're paranoid!!! Seek professional help!
You've never heard of just throwing out an idea to see what discussion it generates? I don't believe I ever stated that "this is what I firmly believe."
It's just an idea, people. If you can't handle the thought of discussing strange and wacky concepts, you need to read some other website.
But I never claimed that MS did this on purpose.
I'm just presenting one possible way in which they can recover their "losses" (real or perceived).
...just to be on the "safe" side.
Consider. Free project GNUFoo comes out which competes with Microsoft Active FUBAR 2000. If it looks popular, M$ can just state that "there's a possibility that our proprietary source code influenced this design," and instantly GNUFoo is dropped like a hot potato.
Now, there's none of M$'s code in GNUFoo, but the FSF and the GNUFoo programmers now have to prove that, because in the Real World you are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and even then you're still guilty of looking guilty.
And in the years that it takes to satisfy the courts that GNUFoo is guilty of nothing but competing against The Man, the project will slowly grind to a halt. By the time GNUFoo is cleared of wrongdoing, M$ will have released their next project, and GNUFoo will be useless because it's so outdated.
Use metaphors.
Pick up a decent, non-idiosyncratic translation of some of the writings of the first century A.D. in southern Europe. They're full of references to (for example) the fall of Babylon, but what they're actually talking about is the fall of the Roman Empire.
(Recall that Rome was good at oppressing people, and that the nation of Babylon had died a long time earlier.)
Religious and political tracts have done this for a long time. We do it today: every /. reader knows which corporation I mean when I say Evil Empire, although in the mid-80's it was a different corporation, one with a three-letter acronym.
Encrypt the text, but also encrypt the meaning.
Word 2000 still has nothing on LaTeX, IMO.
In your O and a bunch of others' as well! A huge advantage of the TeX family over the Office family is that arbitrary programs[*] can create valid TeX input, without actually having TeX. My reporting scripts can emit LaTeX on systems that don't have LaTeX, and then email the file to systems that do. Machines with half a meg of RAM can still originate beautiful text. Plus all the other obvious advantages.
[*] Okay, maybe not all arbitrary programs. Only those which can output text. :-)
They have the method, and they have the opportunity...
The thing to look for in this "sudden" change of face is his motive. Whom was he trying to please when he tried to get the people to distrust the government? And now who his paying his campaign funds to get him to get us to trust the same government?
Folks, the members of Congress don't give a rat's ass one way or the other. You need to look for who is calling their shots and paying their bills if you want to see the true specific motives.
...but your email can and will. Your post is hardly a refutation. The point being made is that misusing company resources is wrong; not that you have no right to privacy at work. What you say is completely irrelevent.
No kidding. Our RAM crawls along at a tenth the speed of the CPU. If two boxes do a fetch from memory, and they stall for the same length of time while waiting on that request, then it doesn't matter if I have the 233 megahertz CPU and J.Random Jones has the 50 terahertz CPU.
I'm a software guy. All you hardware guys: make you a deal. You work on bus speed and faster RAM, leave the CPU alone, and I'll work on better compiler optimizations to schedule the instructions such that the stall time is less. Together we will bring world peace, or at least speed up Mozilla.
That would be most cool, although I think (on a first pass) that I would give that up if I had the option to use my vote as a "for" or an "against," my choice.
I don't care for a single one of the candidates. It doesn't matter who wins, we still lose. But I would like to avoid losing to a couple people in particular, because they represent the worst-case outcome. So I wish I could vote against Bush or Gore. (Adjust the Constitution's voting rules and cutoffs as appropriate.)