an American publication writing to an American audience
I just read TFA. It was published in Nature. A British science journal. And it says:
A survey of 39 North American tree species over an area spanning 50 of latitude has shown that plants protect one of their most important functions photosynthesis by maintaining average leaf temperatures at around 21 C, regardless of the weather.
the site is a live mirror of Wikipedia. So, they are using Wikipedia's content, through Wikipedia's servers, and then serving ads and spam on top of them. These get nuked by the Wikimedia server administrators quickly.
Well, as I write, it has been nuked: All e-wikipedia.net links display their frame and the Wikipedia content has been replaced by:
Leech (computing)
Access denied: remote loader detected.
This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.
If your hacked US governement computer is being remote controlled by a PC in China which is itself being remote controlled by a PC in England, which is itself being remote controlled by a PC in Mexico which is accepting IRC commands from a channel where they are being put there by a PC in Canada, which is remote controlled by a PC in Cuba. All of these links will be SSL of course.
And if you have control of all these computers in other countries, why the hell would you use them to put illegal, unencrypted files on to the laptop of a government employee in the US? And good luck getting more than a few bytes a second through such a chain.
The question is not if it's possible, the question is WHY would anyone do that? Just use the PC in China if you have control of that.
Anyway, there was no suggestion (except here) that the files were being stored or served from the laptop (a laptop connected intermittently by wifi wouldn't be my choice as a server). People love to construct elaborate conspiracy theories. Most likely the files were simply left in the browser cache as a side effect of some penny-ante scheme that sent the PC around a bunch of websites and simulated clicks on banners.
No what they want to do is render the laws unenforceable by distributing it as widely as possible. Similar to how we cannot stop spammers because theres just too much of it.
Again, has this ever happened? How do you know this? And it doesn't seem a very clever strategy. Governments would not throw their hands up and say "Go for it!", they'd introduce (even more) draconian and privacy-invading laws and have a free ride from a public disgusted by kiddie porn.
But to give you the benefit of a doubt, it's true that actual child molestors don't want the evidence spread all over the net, but whats that have to do with distribution?
Because as TFA shows, merely unwittingly possessing alleged kiddie porn is enough to get you summarily fired, investigated and have you become a social pariah even if you escape prison.
In this case the hacker who controls the pedophile botnet now has the power to scan through the list of IP addresses and report certain individuals to the cops
Proof this has happned, ever? Proof that a "pedophile botnet" exists?
Pedophiles don't want MASS distribution of their porn. Thay want to share it with a small (perhaps a few hundred users at most) group. They have no interest in using spammer tools to spread the proof of their highly illegal activities over millions of PCs. It would be asking for trouble, and achieve nothing.
Don't you see what could happen here or am I the only one who sees this?
any website using Geo-IP information (and yes Google, I'm talking to you!) gets it wrong. It's really a case of people trying to make their software too clever.
I live in Hong Kong, and my IP matches that. But I don't read Chinese. Many websites thoughtfully redirect me to a Chinese language site, and have NO FUCKING WAY to override their language choice. Google.com is automatically converted to Google.com.hk. Assholes. If I wanted Google.com.hk I WOULD HAVE TYPED IT MYSELF. Yes, I know, now, how to fix that on my PC, but Google still does that whenever I use it from someone else's PC.
And it was always good for a laugh to see the Adult Friend Finder ads, with buxom corn-fed blondes spreading their legs under the heading "Girls in Hong Kong want to meet you for sex".
The problem is has to do with what Thomas Kuhn wrote about in "The Structure of Scientific Revolution". DARPA relies on a filtering mechanism that employs academics. Academics are not open to new ideas that may upset their world view. New Einsteins would do just that, disrupt their world view.
Even if that were true, DARPA isn't tasked with "creating new world views". It's supposed to be pretty cutting edge, but still applied science and technology. And I don't think Einstein ever contributed much directly to the Manhattan Project, though of course he got the issue some attention by writing a letter to FDR.
You have a much higher opinion of the FBI than is warranted.
Maybe you could get away with it a few times. The risk and penalties are so extreme I wouldn't chance it for no reason (and there is no rational reason for doing so). Depositing evidence on a government computer is pretty foolish, no matter how incompetent you believe the FBI are.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least that this could be in use for kiddie porn distribution.
It wouldn't surprise me. It would ASTONISH me that someone possessing images that could send them to jail for years would randomly distribute them, UNENCRYPTED to a GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE'S LAPTOP.
The Internet is awash with Hollywood movies. Sure kids might stash copies of Indy 4 on any random server they can find. Will the FBI raise an eyebrow? Do that with kiddie porn, expect to be in custody by the end of the day.
If I wanted to distribute stuff that could get me in jail for years, I think I would find $5 per month to have my own server space in China, say, alongside the spammers.
If the intersection of child porn distributors and malware authors is larger than 0, the malware author may have written the malware to distribute the child porn. Or to keep it in circulation to gain later access to it, etc.
That would really be insanely stupid considering the hysteria kiddie porn provokes. If he wanted to just store it, encrypt it and it's 100% safe. Stash it in a folder on a innocent DVDR; etc, etc. Anyone capable of creating malware certainly knows how to do this, and not risk having a FBI team break down his door next week.
I think the guys who do trade kiddie porn would be extremely paranoid and cautious.The dumb ones would have been caught by now. The idea that these guys are snickering while sending illegal porn to innocent people is as silly as those characterisations of terrorists as "they hate us because we're free". I believe the guy in this case was likely innocent, I think he was just collateral damage from some pay-per-click scam. The porn in his cache was just a side effect of sending his browser around in the background to earn a few cents.
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that?
From reading TFA, it seems seems they weren't "hidden", but just not displayed. There were a bunch of programs that continuously surfed sites in the background, in the process leaving the incriminating images in the cache. Possibly some malware that earns money per click on given websites. If you've ever surfed porn, you know that you can get a flood of popups from "affiliate" sites. It's like spam, to earn the spammer a tiny fraction of a cent per person spammed they'll cheerfully use all your resources and make your life hell.
And we have no idea if it really was "kiddie porn". Lots of porn sites advertise "barely legal", "schoolgirl", and YOUNG!!! and have skinny girls in pigtails with teddy bears, but the small print all says they're over 18 (sure they could lie, but some are American or European based and would he raided in a moment if they were really displaying kiddie porn).
Our way is to use an open, well specified format that we can simply write automated conversion tools for.
See any differences in efficiency there?
Yes. "Your way" is useless.
The question was about 20-YEAR-OLD LEGACY DOCUMENTS. Not what we should do NOW when creating new ones.
And obviously for 5000 documents I would use a macro, batch, etc. It is and was possible to write "automated conversion tools" using 1980s software, you know.
Actually, many "obsolete formats" are very well supported, if not an ISO standard. I use WordPerfect 5.1 preferably, as it was the giant of the age, every competitor had to be able to read and write that format. Failing that, Microsoft RTF. Usually works, but some features can be flaky.
Yes, OF COURSE people should use documented open formats.
And you should floss at least once a day.
Which is why some people are trying to put an end to that with ODF and it's all well and good to use ASCII but aside from creating readme files and personal notes, that's not enough these days.
Obviously. I design books. I do pretty elaborate layouts when necessary.
The thing is, a lot -- I'd guess over 90%-- of documents created could easily and even preferably be done in plain text. I do all my email like that, for a start, and filter incoming email to plain text. It reduces storage by about 80% on formatted text, is easy to search and I can view it in the font of my choice. Most people don't have a clue about layout -- which is fine, but they insist on doing it anyway.
Yeah because people and companies want to have to pay someone else to convert their documents or install numerous operating systems in emulation to print a document. That's so much easier than having one format that everything supports.
And what colour pony do you want?
The problem is legacy documents. No amount of lecturing people about what they should have done, if indeed anyone who created them is still around 20 years later, will do any good. Obviously, if people paid attention, they would not repeat this mistake. But obviously, most documents are still being created in ever-more convoluted proprietary formats. So this WILL get worse.
Personally, I use plain ASCII for as much as possible.
And when the floppies/CDs/ISOs containing the old software has succumbed to bit rot?
As Linus said: "Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it".
Which is a way of saying that you can find just aboutanythingon the Internet. (From a moral, if perhaps not technically legal, point of view, you have the "bitrotted" originals and these are "backups".)
Yea, but should we have to pay *you* or someone like you for every instance of a document that can not be read?
An ad-hoc solution for a specific document is not a solution for the over all problem.
Of course $10 is ad hoc. We can negotiate for 10 million. Generally you have a lot of documents in a similar format. Might take a few hours, or at most days, to work out a method, then they can all be done en masse. Or with a little bit more work, create a custom app to convert transparently on demand. In any case, it's not a "crisis". It's a quite trivial procedure. One good thing is that 1980s documents didn't usually have any deliberate DRM. When people in decades to come try to convert current media with weird features specifically designed to prevent "unauthorised" access, that's when it'll be expensive.
Require radio stations sign a contract or they don't get the free CD. No free CD means their competitor (for those that actually have one) gets to play music they can't.
Record companies bribe DJs to play their music. (Have you heard of payola?) The boot is on the other foot.
I'm sure in the future they will modify their labels to require the return of promo materials.
No they won't. Radio stations would not accept them if they had that hassle and had to track and return them. The music companies only want to harass the resellers, not the original recipients. People have been reselling such promos for about 100 years, no one cared before and no one, except perhaps a few rabid lawyers, cares now.
The is a current crisis in both the public and private sector about digital documents from the 80s not being accessible because the document format is no longer supported and and there are no readers for them.
Crisis? Give me $10 and I'll convert any "digital document from the 80s" you throw at me.
I've been doing DTP for 20 years. All the tools I used back in the 80s still work. (Clunky, based on DOS or Win 3.1, or Mac OS 7, but they still work without too much hassle. Adobe File Utilities for instace.) These can convert, sometimes via intemediate formats, to formats like RTF and thus to anything, or just printed to Postscript and distilled to PDF.
Has to look 100% exactly as the original? Install the old software, print, scan.
Anything that ran on a PC-XT can still run on a Pentium. Any old OS can run in emulation.
A while ago I had to convert a database from a proprietary Chinese DOS format to Excel in Unicode. Took a couple of hours to find and work out how to install the old software, then it was just a few clicks to export and convert it.
The court will likely end up weighing the cost of invading people's privacy against the benefit of stopping child porn at the border. Given that the technique has already proven effective (they caught the guy), guess which one the courts will side with.
But of course there ISN'T any benefit. There are many other ways of transmitting images from one country to another, securely, aside from putting them on a laptop hard disk and carrying it on a plane. Obviously this does nothing to protect the innocent citizens of the country the perve is entering. Sure, you caught a guy with naughty, perhaps even illegal, images. So what? That does not justify random fishing expedition searches. The same argument would allow the police to have the power to enter any office or home and examine anyone's computer, when no doubt they'd find all kinds of illegal things.
for example, once OEM is installed on a computer it is actually illegal to ever install it on another computer again, even if the computer is broken beyond repair.
No, it is not. There is no law against that. (That's what "illegal" means.) Possibly it violates the terms of a EULA the original purchaser may or may not be bound by. (In many countries such a EULA would not legal.) But regardless, it can have no force on a subsequent purchaser.
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I just read TFA. It was published in Nature. A British science journal. And it says :
Evidently, you don't have a passport. In the rest of the world, Fahrenheit is about as commonly used as the cubit.
Well, as I write, it has been nuked: All e-wikipedia.net links display their frame and the Wikipedia content has been replaced by:
Leech (computing)
Access denied: remote loader detected.
This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.
And if you have control of all these computers in other countries, why the hell would you use them to put illegal, unencrypted files on to the laptop of a government employee in the US? And good luck getting more than a few bytes a second through such a chain.
The question is not if it's possible, the question is WHY would anyone do that? Just use the PC in China if you have control of that.
Anyway, there was no suggestion (except here) that the files were being stored or served from the laptop (a laptop connected intermittently by wifi wouldn't be my choice as a server). People love to construct elaborate conspiracy theories. Most likely the files were simply left in the browser cache as a side effect of some penny-ante scheme that sent the PC around a bunch of websites and simulated clicks on banners.
Again, has this ever happened? How do you know this? And it doesn't seem a very clever strategy. Governments would not throw their hands up and say "Go for it!", they'd introduce (even more) draconian and privacy-invading laws and have a free ride from a public disgusted by kiddie porn.
But to give you the benefit of a doubt, it's true that actual child molestors don't want the evidence spread all over the net, but whats that have to do with distribution?
Because as TFA shows, merely unwittingly possessing alleged kiddie porn is enough to get you summarily fired, investigated and have you become a social pariah even if you escape prison.
Proof this has happned, ever? Proof that a "pedophile botnet" exists?
Pedophiles don't want MASS distribution of their porn. Thay want to share it with a small (perhaps a few hundred users at most) group. They have no interest in using spammer tools to spread the proof of their highly illegal activities over millions of PCs. It would be asking for trouble, and achieve nothing.
Don't you see what could happen here or am I the only one who sees this?
Yes, you're the only one.
I live in Hong Kong, and my IP matches that. But I don't read Chinese. Many websites thoughtfully redirect me to a Chinese language site, and have NO FUCKING WAY to override their language choice. Google.com is automatically converted to Google.com.hk. Assholes. If I wanted Google.com.hk I WOULD HAVE TYPED IT MYSELF. Yes, I know, now, how to fix that on my PC, but Google still does that whenever I use it from someone else's PC.
And it was always good for a laugh to see the Adult Friend Finder ads, with buxom corn-fed blondes spreading their legs under the heading "Girls in Hong Kong want to meet you for sex".
Even if that were true, DARPA isn't tasked with "creating new world views". It's supposed to be pretty cutting edge, but still applied science and technology. And I don't think Einstein ever contributed much directly to the Manhattan Project, though of course he got the issue some attention by writing a letter to FDR.
Maybe you could get away with it a few times. The risk and penalties are so extreme I wouldn't chance it for no reason (and there is no rational reason for doing so). Depositing evidence on a government computer is pretty foolish, no matter how incompetent you believe the FBI are.
It wouldn't surprise me. It would ASTONISH me that someone possessing images that could send them to jail for years would randomly distribute them, UNENCRYPTED to a GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE'S LAPTOP.
The Internet is awash with Hollywood movies. Sure kids might stash copies of Indy 4 on any random server they can find. Will the FBI raise an eyebrow? Do that with kiddie porn, expect to be in custody by the end of the day.
If I wanted to distribute stuff that could get me in jail for years, I think I would find $5 per month to have my own server space in China, say, alongside the spammers.
That would really be insanely stupid considering the hysteria kiddie porn provokes. If he wanted to just store it, encrypt it and it's 100% safe. Stash it in a folder on a innocent DVDR; etc, etc. Anyone capable of creating malware certainly knows how to do this, and not risk having a FBI team break down his door next week.
I think the guys who do trade kiddie porn would be extremely paranoid and cautious.The dumb ones would have been caught by now. The idea that these guys are snickering while sending illegal porn to innocent people is as silly as those characterisations of terrorists as "they hate us because we're free". I believe the guy in this case was likely innocent, I think he was just collateral damage from some pay-per-click scam. The porn in his cache was just a side effect of sending his browser around in the background to earn a few cents.
From reading TFA, it seems seems they weren't "hidden", but just not displayed. There were a bunch of programs that continuously surfed sites in the background, in the process leaving the incriminating images in the cache. Possibly some malware that earns money per click on given websites. If you've ever surfed porn, you know that you can get a flood of popups from "affiliate" sites. It's like spam, to earn the spammer a tiny fraction of a cent per person spammed they'll cheerfully use all your resources and make your life hell.
And we have no idea if it really was "kiddie porn". Lots of porn sites advertise "barely legal", "schoolgirl", and YOUNG!!! and have skinny girls in pigtails with teddy bears, but the small print all says they're over 18 (sure they could lie, but some are American or European based and would he raided in a moment if they were really displaying kiddie porn).
It is breach of contract -- if you signed one. It is not illegal per se.
In almost the entire of North America and western Europe, you are indeed bound to the EULA.
Never tested in court, as far as I know.
I know what Microsoft says. Fortunately, their desires are not law.
See any differences in efficiency there?
Yes. "Your way" is useless.
The question was about 20-YEAR-OLD LEGACY DOCUMENTS. Not what we should do NOW when creating new ones.
And obviously for 5000 documents I would use a macro, batch, etc. It is and was possible to write "automated conversion tools" using 1980s software, you know.
Actually, many "obsolete formats" are very well supported, if not an ISO standard. I use WordPerfect 5.1 preferably, as it was the giant of the age, every competitor had to be able to read and write that format. Failing that, Microsoft RTF. Usually works, but some features can be flaky.
Yes, OF COURSE people should use documented open formats.
And you should floss at least once a day.
Obviously. I design books. I do pretty elaborate layouts when necessary.
The thing is, a lot -- I'd guess over 90%-- of documents created could easily and even preferably be done in plain text. I do all my email like that, for a start, and filter incoming email to plain text. It reduces storage by about 80% on formatted text, is easy to search and I can view it in the font of my choice. Most people don't have a clue about layout -- which is fine, but they insist on doing it anyway.
And what colour pony do you want?
The problem is legacy documents. No amount of lecturing people about what they should have done, if indeed anyone who created them is still around 20 years later, will do any good. Obviously, if people paid attention, they would not repeat this mistake. But obviously, most documents are still being created in ever-more convoluted proprietary formats. So this WILL get worse.
Personally, I use plain ASCII for as much as possible.
As Linus said: "Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it".
Which is a way of saying that you can find just about anything on the Internet. (From a moral, if perhaps not technically legal, point of view, you have the "bitrotted" originals and these are "backups".)
Sweet, I take you have an Amstrad 3" disk drive then.
That's a piece of hardware. Not a document. But I'd refer you to someone like http://www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/ just as a courtesy.
Of course $10 is ad hoc. We can negotiate for 10 million. Generally you have a lot of documents in a similar format. Might take a few hours, or at most days, to work out a method, then they can all be done en masse. Or with a little bit more work, create a custom app to convert transparently on demand. In any case, it's not a "crisis". It's a quite trivial procedure. One good thing is that 1980s documents didn't usually have any deliberate DRM. When people in decades to come try to convert current media with weird features specifically designed to prevent "unauthorised" access, that's when it'll be expensive.
Record companies bribe DJs to play their music. (Have you heard of payola?) The boot is on the other foot.
No they won't. Radio stations would not accept them if they had that hassle and had to track and return them. The music companies only want to harass the resellers, not the original recipients. People have been reselling such promos for about 100 years, no one cared before and no one, except perhaps a few rabid lawyers, cares now.
Crisis? Give me $10 and I'll convert any "digital document from the 80s" you throw at me.
I've been doing DTP for 20 years. All the tools I used back in the 80s still work. (Clunky, based on DOS or Win 3.1, or Mac OS 7, but they still work without too much hassle. Adobe File Utilities for instace.) These can convert, sometimes via intemediate formats, to formats like RTF and thus to anything, or just printed to Postscript and distilled to PDF.
Has to look 100% exactly as the original? Install the old software, print, scan. Anything that ran on a PC-XT can still run on a Pentium. Any old OS can run in emulation.
A while ago I had to convert a database from a proprietary Chinese DOS format to Excel in Unicode. Took a couple of hours to find and work out how to install the old software, then it was just a few clicks to export and convert it.
But of course there ISN'T any benefit. There are many other ways of transmitting images from one country to another, securely, aside from putting them on a laptop hard disk and carrying it on a plane. Obviously this does nothing to protect the innocent citizens of the country the perve is entering. Sure, you caught a guy with naughty, perhaps even illegal, images. So what? That does not justify random fishing expedition searches. The same argument would allow the police to have the power to enter any office or home and examine anyone's computer, when no doubt they'd find all kinds of illegal things.
No, it is not. There is no law against that. (That's what "illegal" means.) Possibly it violates the terms of a EULA the original purchaser may or may not be bound by. (In many countries such a EULA would not legal.) But regardless, it can have no force on a subsequent purchaser.
That's Seal King. I've got a box of them....