I call it progress. But it's not a win. Considering I today saw an invitation to have Google track my browsing history, I don't think we're even on the right track. Until search engines take proactive steps to prevent collection of individually-identifiable data, it won't be a win.
The fact is, we see something we don't like, we complain, and we induce a reactionary response. Reactionary responses are always deficient; They either reach too far or not far enough, and they're always after-the-fact.
He's scanning 65k machines via his botnet, IP scanning via botnet shouldn't be difficult; nmap is GPL'd, any botnet maker might steal the code and include it in their bot.
running password checkers in just over 8 minutes. I imagine the box running VNC wasn't password-protected. Or he might have installed VNC himself, if the box was running vulnerable software. Either is possible.
And he checks the IP addresses of all connected machines and can find whether they are military bases or not, 'cause he's got a list of military IP addresses ? You can have that list, too. Just google for "IANA IP allocation list", or some such. The list of IP allocations isn't a secret.
Would not that be, at the bottom line, trading based on the products rather than companies? It wouldn't be "trading" at all. It would be investing in a company.
Trading is what you get when your investments are based on stock certificates. A stock certificate has no inherent value except as a contract between you and the company that issued your stock. However, when most people talk about investing in stock, they want to purchase the stock in the hopes that they can sell it later, at a higher price.
That wasn't the original purpose of stock, and in at least two major recessions I can think of, the stock market served as a positive feedback loop that made recessions worse.
Comments as well as stories... On that note, theres a feature that creeps into my spec list every time I think about writing forum software: The lack of structural distinction between stories and comments. I always wanted to be able to take a comment and treat it as a story.
On Slashdot, individual comments often spawn a vast tree of comments not particularly related to the story. In circumstances like these, the comment could be recasted as a story in a comment-sourced category. (Call it the Sidebar category.)
Stuff like that never really needs to be 'rejected' since it could theoretically be a good story tomorrow. Or next wednesday. But other stories are very time sensitive and 24 hours later are a waste of time (Shuttle Launches etc). It's hard coming up with a clean solution to all of this.
I still don't have a good answer. Or just yesterday. I seem to recall a one-line article, and a one line editorial summary welcoming us to the slow August news cycle.
When I prioritize tasks, I have to gauge them on two axes: "time-critical" and "important." Items high on both scales get done first. While I wouldn't necessarily suggest adding a second metric to the generic firehose, it might make sense for editors (or trusted users) sorting through the Firehose to give the stories a "Rainy day value" rating.
When you guys are looking for stories to post, you would read off of a list pre-sorted by a metric consisting of weights on the Slashnews quotient (net user vote) and the Rainy Day rating. So when news is particularly slow, the editor could crank up the Rainy Day weight. Bingo! There's a cool hardware hack someone wrote about three months ago that never got posted.
Alternatively, if a significant fraction of Slashdot users' automated settings were taken into account, Slashdot might become more appropriately focused.
* He scanned 65,000 machines in about "8 minutes" by "tying together other people's machines" using a 56k dial up connection
* During a hacking escapade he chatted to an engineer who "saw" him, via WordPad
* His connection was so slow he wrote a clever program that "turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering". Juddering ?! What kind of display was he using, a slide projector ?
* He couldn't save any of the pictures he downloaded but despite the "juddering" low resolution "It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made" and what with the slow connection, when he got cut off "I saw the guy's hand move across." C'mon, this guy is an utter joke, none of the above is plausible. If any of these claims were anywhere near true then he is a script kiddy at best. Mentally unstable more like. The first item sounds like a botnet. I've (legally) done the second item, over VNC. The third item sounds plausible if he turns the VNC bit depth way, way down. And, yes, the outcome would behave very much like a slide projector on a dial-up connection.
As for the fourth item, I don't know why he didn't think to take a screenshot of his VNC window; That would have given him something to save. And I don't know what he was referring to by some guy's hand moving.
All in all, it sounds like he used a botnet to find a PC running unprotected VNC, and connected to it with compression turned way up, and color depth turned way down. At some point, some poor guy noticed his computer acting up on his own, and chatted with the cracker by opening up a text editor and taking turns typing. All of this is very plausible.
The more I hear about stock trading, the more I wonder if it should be outlawed. Why shouldn't I be able to invest in a company (And I don't mean buying some of its shares from someone else.) and expect to make a return based on dividends, not based on selling my investment to someone else?
It seems like a lot of capitalism's problems (stock market crashes, the debt-trading problems coming up) stem from buying and selling contracts. I can buy a stock certificate (a contract for dividends and voting rights) in the secondary market. I can buy a company who has a fat contract with someone else. Hell, I could even buy your mortgage in the secondary market, if I had enough money.
But is there some reason to think that companies will stop advertising on the web? Because today's Web will eventually be supplanted in purpose and popularity with something newer, making it a less valuable target? The Internet is going to get crowded and overregulated; Political and scientific discourse will eventually have to find another medium. Business will lag behind, but it'll eventually follow.
Have you ever seen a Slashdotting? My site was posted on Sunday morning, and Google Analytics tells me I had about 20,000 pageviews in the first full hour of exposure. (I forget the exact max number I saw, but the server load average exceeded 150; If you have a shared hosting account whose idiot admins run PHP as CGI, just hope you don't get Slashdotted.)
I don't know what a site gets for ad revenue, but 20,000 impressions are bound to get more than a few clicks.
I was going to suggest this. Come up with a tiny piezoelectric generator (Say, 1"x1", with a built-in rectifier) one could order in lots of 1000. The component's positive lead would be a metal plate on top, and the negative lead would be a metal plate on bottom.
For your floor, lay down an insulator first, then a conductive sheet of aluminum. Now lay down your generators, and lay down another conductive sheet of aluminum on top. Your floor is now a vibration-powered generator.
A chem class would be more illustrative. Your nitroglycerin does undergo a chemical reaction. Specifically, it decomposes, forming gases. Barring an opposing force, a gas will always expand. Nitroglycerin gets its oomph from how quickly it decomposes into gaseous chemicals. (I'm too lazy to look up the actual decomposition.)
Its someones fucking job and they got killed at the workplace. You CAN prevent that. You can't prevent an individual incident unless you counter the factors that will cause that incident.
You can't prevent a class of incidents from occurring. You can make them rare, compared to previous statistics, but you can't prevent them outright. And at some point, you have to realize that there is a balance between risk and reward, and that human nature is to always treat the current level of risk as unacceptable.
There's a big difference between accepting death as a natural result of an activity, and measuring the progress of that activity in terms of death. When one goes to war, one expects to lose soldiers. That doesn't mean that whoever lost the most soldiers has necessarily won.
Hindsight is 20/20. From this initial report, it sounds like this particular incident was a result of known factors, and thus avoidable. The Challenger and Columbia incidents were the result of factors which, while known, were under-appreciated. The Challenger factors were managerial, while the Columbia factors were the result of engineering.
There's also the matter of economics. It's simply not economically possible to guard against every threat. If it were, then someone on this planet would be nigh-immortal.
Apples and oranges. (And the dietitians would be talking about heads of lettuce...)
Different factors affect the parallel vs serial debate in different fields. In storage attachment, things like capacitive coupling tilted the balance in favor of SATA. In processing, things like component cost tilt the balance in favor of parallel processing.
The only thing the two fields have in common is that their major limitations arise from signal frequency. Problems associated with signal frequency (specifically, capacitive coupling) made improving PATA more difficult than creating SATA. Problems associated with signal frequency (specifically, current leakage and, subsequently, heat generation) has made increasing the speed of parallel systems easier to achieve than equivalently increasing the speed of single-processor systems.
The only thing frequency has to do with dietitians is how often they get ulcers. And I bet they'd have problems, too, if you increased that frequency.
It was called the conch. When I was president of my college's computer club, people would occasionally start talking over each other. Once or twice, I shouted, "I've got the conch!"... Though with less symbolism.:-)
It can be a fun way to see if anyone in a group has read Lord of the Flies.
My prediction: They'll attempt to build consumer-grade products using their enterprise technology. Because it won't be a perfect fit, you'll get quirks in the consumer-grade products. The consumer-grade division will make demands on the engineers behind the enterprise technology, to get a better-fitting product. The changes to the enterprise technologies will inadvertently cause problems in those technologies fitting in with their enterprise customers.
Long story short, Cisco's enterprise products will lose market share to their competitors, and Cisco will do one of three things: 1) They'll pull out of the consumer market and focus on their enterprise customers. 2) They'll work to keep their enterprise and consumer product divisions separate, even if it means duplication of effort. 3) They'll do neither, decrease in value, and get bought up by an equity firm to be sold off for parts.
Well, for $950, you could get a PCI bus expander. I have to wonder if there are other smaller, cheaper models out there. But being connected at 24Kb/s, I'm not inclined to look any further.
There ya go. Pretty easy, once you get through the blasted lameness filter. I'd use lorem ipsum, but I don't Slashdotters would appreciate it much. So far, in the time it's taken me to get this past the lameness filter, your post went from a "2 Funny" to a "3 Funny". I wonder how many other people are attempting to craft a response as well. Let's see if using 'l's will get me past the "Too many junk characters" filter. Yup. Now I see that Slashdot doesn't support <pre>, and <tt> is broken. How about <ecode<? Nope. Gotta find something for those spaces. Ah! How about alternating periods and asterisks for a dark background? Ah! Too many junk characters again. Let's alternate the asterisks with spaces. Nope...Replacing the asterisks with zeros works, but now you can't really see the hand. Ah, heck. Let's make a 0/1 bitmap. That's funny...it added a space in the middle of one of the (short!) lines. Let's append spaces to each line...Didn't work. Ah hell, now your post is at "4 Funny". I'll leave both hands up.
Long story short, don't bother with the ascii art.
Funny mods don't grant karma, but any negative mod subsequently applied takes karma away. What's worse, a sufficient number of negative mods gets your IP temp banned for a few days.
Last summer, I was automatically and temporarily banned for writing a comment that got fifteen "+1" mods (mostly Funny...that was the intent) and 13 to 15 -1 mods in the span of an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
I call it progress. But it's not a win. Considering I today saw an invitation to have Google track my browsing history, I don't think we're even on the right track. Until search engines take proactive steps to prevent collection of individually-identifiable data, it won't be a win.
The fact is, we see something we don't like, we complain, and we induce a reactionary response. Reactionary responses are always deficient; They either reach too far or not far enough, and they're always after-the-fact.
Ah. My impression was that the slownewsday tag was being applied by Slashdot users who liked to whine about news relevance. That always irritated me.
It never occurred to me that editors were the ones applying that tag.
Trading is what you get when your investments are based on stock certificates. A stock certificate has no inherent value except as a contract between you and the company that issued your stock. However, when most people talk about investing in stock, they want to purchase the stock in the hopes that they can sell it later, at a higher price.
That wasn't the original purpose of stock, and in at least two major recessions I can think of, the stock market served as a positive feedback loop that made recessions worse.
On Slashdot, individual comments often spawn a vast tree of comments not particularly related to the story. In circumstances like these, the comment could be recasted as a story in a comment-sourced category. (Call it the Sidebar category.)
I still don't have a good answer. Or just yesterday. I seem to recall a one-line article, and a one line editorial summary welcoming us to the slow August news cycle.
When I prioritize tasks, I have to gauge them on two axes: "time-critical" and "important." Items high on both scales get done first. While I wouldn't necessarily suggest adding a second metric to the generic firehose, it might make sense for editors (or trusted users) sorting through the Firehose to give the stories a "Rainy day value" rating.
When you guys are looking for stories to post, you would read off of a list pre-sorted by a metric consisting of weights on the Slashnews quotient (net user vote) and the Rainy Day rating. So when news is particularly slow, the editor could crank up the Rainy Day weight. Bingo! There's a cool hardware hack someone wrote about three months ago that never got posted.
Alternatively, if a significant fraction of Slashdot users' automated settings were taken into account, Slashdot might become more appropriately focused.
* During a hacking escapade he chatted to an engineer who "saw" him, via WordPad
* His connection was so slow he wrote a clever program that "turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering". Juddering ?! What kind of display was he using, a slide projector ?
* He couldn't save any of the pictures he downloaded but despite the "juddering" low resolution "It was a picture of something
that definitely wasn't man-made" and what with the slow connection, when he got cut off "I saw the guy's hand move across."
C'mon, this guy is an utter joke, none of the above is plausible. If any of these claims were anywhere near true then he is a script kiddy at best. Mentally unstable more like. The first item sounds like a botnet. I've (legally) done the second item, over VNC. The third item sounds plausible if he turns the VNC bit depth way, way down. And, yes, the outcome would behave very much like a slide projector on a dial-up connection.
As for the fourth item, I don't know why he didn't think to take a screenshot of his VNC window; That would have given him something to save. And I don't know what he was referring to by some guy's hand moving.
All in all, it sounds like he used a botnet to find a PC running unprotected VNC, and connected to it with compression turned way up, and color depth turned way down. At some point, some poor guy noticed his computer acting up on his own, and chatted with the cracker by opening up a text editor and taking turns typing. All of this is very plausible.
The more I hear about stock trading, the more I wonder if it should be outlawed. Why shouldn't I be able to invest in a company (And I don't mean buying some of its shares from someone else.) and expect to make a return based on dividends, not based on selling my investment to someone else?
It seems like a lot of capitalism's problems (stock market crashes, the debt-trading problems coming up) stem from buying and selling contracts. I can buy a stock certificate (a contract for dividends and voting rights) in the secondary market. I can buy a company who has a fat contract with someone else. Hell, I could even buy your mortgage in the secondary market, if I had enough money.
It feels ridiculous.
Have you ever seen a Slashdotting? My site was posted on Sunday morning, and Google Analytics tells me I had about 20,000 pageviews in the first full hour of exposure. (I forget the exact max number I saw, but the server load average exceeded 150; If you have a shared hosting account whose idiot admins run PHP as CGI, just hope you don't get Slashdotted.)
I don't know what a site gets for ad revenue, but 20,000 impressions are bound to get more than a few clicks.
I was going to suggest this. Come up with a tiny piezoelectric generator (Say, 1"x1", with a built-in rectifier) one could order in lots of 1000. The component's positive lead would be a metal plate on top, and the negative lead would be a metal plate on bottom.
For your floor, lay down an insulator first, then a conductive sheet of aluminum. Now lay down your generators, and lay down another conductive sheet of aluminum on top. Your floor is now a vibration-powered generator.
And everyone's going to wonder why you're sitting there, squirming in your chair...
What, you thought it didn't exist?
A chem class would be more illustrative. Your nitroglycerin does undergo a chemical reaction. Specifically, it decomposes, forming gases. Barring an opposing force, a gas will always expand. Nitroglycerin gets its oomph from how quickly it decomposes into gaseous chemicals. (I'm too lazy to look up the actual decomposition.)
You can't prevent a class of incidents from occurring. You can make them rare, compared to previous statistics, but you can't prevent them outright. And at some point, you have to realize that there is a balance between risk and reward, and that human nature is to always treat the current level of risk as unacceptable.
I wish more people would realize that.
There's a big difference between accepting death as a natural result of an activity, and measuring the progress of that activity in terms of death. When one goes to war, one expects to lose soldiers. That doesn't mean that whoever lost the most soldiers has necessarily won.
Hindsight is 20/20. From this initial report, it sounds like this particular incident was a result of known factors, and thus avoidable. The Challenger and Columbia incidents were the result of factors which, while known, were under-appreciated. The Challenger factors were managerial, while the Columbia factors were the result of engineering.
There's also the matter of economics. It's simply not economically possible to guard against every threat. If it were, then someone on this planet would be nigh-immortal.
Forget Beowulf.
Can you imagine a RAMTorrent over this?
Apples and oranges. (And the dietitians would be talking about heads of lettuce...)
Different factors affect the parallel vs serial debate in different fields. In storage attachment, things like capacitive coupling tilted the balance in favor of SATA. In processing, things like component cost tilt the balance in favor of parallel processing.
The only thing the two fields have in common is that their major limitations arise from signal frequency. Problems associated with signal frequency (specifically, capacitive coupling) made improving PATA more difficult than creating SATA. Problems associated with signal frequency (specifically, current leakage and, subsequently, heat generation) has made increasing the speed of parallel systems easier to achieve than equivalently increasing the speed of single-processor systems.
The only thing frequency has to do with dietitians is how often they get ulcers. And I bet they'd have problems, too, if you increased that frequency.
It was called the conch. When I was president of my college's computer club, people would occasionally start talking over each other. Once or twice, I shouted, "I've got the conch!" ... Though with less symbolism. :-)
It can be a fun way to see if anyone in a group has read Lord of the Flies.
My prediction: They'll attempt to build consumer-grade products using their enterprise technology. Because it won't be a perfect fit, you'll get quirks in the consumer-grade products. The consumer-grade division will make demands on the engineers behind the enterprise technology, to get a better-fitting product. The changes to the enterprise technologies will inadvertently cause problems in those technologies fitting in with their enterprise customers.
Long story short, Cisco's enterprise products will lose market share to their competitors, and Cisco will do one of three things: 1) They'll pull out of the consumer market and focus on their enterprise customers. 2) They'll work to keep their enterprise and consumer product divisions separate, even if it means duplication of effort. 3) They'll do neither, decrease in value, and get bought up by an equity firm to be sold off for parts.
Well, for $950, you could get a PCI bus expander. I have to wonder if there are other smaller, cheaper models out there. But being connected at 24Kb/s, I'm not inclined to look any further.
Long story short, don't bother with the ascii art.
Funny mods don't grant karma, but any negative mod subsequently applied takes karma away. What's worse, a sufficient number of negative mods gets your IP temp banned for a few days.
Last summer, I was automatically and temporarily banned for writing a comment that got fifteen "+1" mods (mostly Funny...that was the intent) and 13 to 15 -1 mods in the span of an hour.
No...West Michigan.