Anyone want to shed some light on the more profound themes in it? are there any?
The fall of humanity from grace - expulsion from the Garden of Eden. And what the human race is trying to do to get back into the Garden.
Metamorphosis - becoming more than you are. The old saying, "What you are is your gift from God. What you become is your gift to God." However, becoming more than you are requires that the dross of the old die to make room.
There's a large amount of Hebrew mysticism in Eva as well.
But brain damage??? Come on... unless it was wired directly into his central nervous system, or unless some of his gear shocked the hell out of him when it was torn off, I can't see it.
ObDisclaimer: I'm not an online gamer, but a table-top gamer and LARP attendee. Some of the same arguments apply.
I really don't think that it was Everquest that drove this guy over the edge. It was mentioned in the article that he was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, which probably had a lot to do with his suicide. It doesn't say if he was on medication or in therapy just before he killed himself, so without more information I can't speculate as to how big a factor it was. But I do think that EQ was something that he latched onto. It probably became the central facet of his view of reality (the article mentioned as much) and when that anchor was lost (his character was killed).... the rest is history. It didn't drive him over the edge, but it was a factor.
I really don't think that Sony should be sued because he killed himself, though. He was unstable and could just have easily latched onto something else, it just happened to be EQ. The same things were said in the 1980's when reports of D&D gamers killing themselves appeared in the press. They were known to be unstable as well, they just blamed the suicides on the game because it was easier than admitting that said gamers (the word 'kids' can't be used here because a few weren't kids or teens, but adults) had mental problems.
Ye flipping gods.. this has to be one of the most amusing April Fool's stories I've read in ages.
The last bit of the posting is important, though:
Please don't anybody tell the script kiddies that it will uninstall cleanly.
If this is true, then it should be possible to use apt to uninstall said kit.
An idea was kicked around on the Incidents mailing list (I think.. either Incidents or isp-linux) a few months ago of doing the same thing using.rpm packages.
DNA sequences can be translated into musical sequences, yes... Protein Music does this, for example. But could the music be reconverted into a format so that it can be worked with as a genetic sequence? If it were in the form of a MIDI file, then it should be possible, but if someone were to download an.mp3 of genetic information, could it be used as genetic information?
"He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm's most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar tha tputs out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry..."
I can imagine that the first use of robots will be in espionage and other survelliance applications.
Would the surveillance drones in use in Afghanistan right now fall into this caregory? I havn't heard much about them as yet but it seems at first glance that they'd fall into such a category.
Something smells like a motherboard thrown in a campfire here.
The language used in this review is reminiscent of the anarchy t-philes that kids used to write back in the heyday of the BBS scene. For me at least, that in itself is enough to cast doubt upon the review. It comes across as juvenile and written to whet the appetites of fans, and not much else. If it were written in a more erudite manner, I might give it a bit more creedence.
I also wonder exactly how far along Lucarfilm is in the post-production process. Would it be in a sufficiently complete state to watch easily (like the Buckaroo Banzai workprint that's made its rounds for almost twenty years now)? I don't know for certain, it's complete enough to have a trailer. How much more I don't know.
I don't know.. this seems a bit too pat. It's at the right time to cause a fervor, the timing's too neat.
...and he'll soon be getting an interesting nervous-system implant to let a computer control his arm for him...
Didn't Stelarc already do something similiar to this in one of his performance pieces? I seem to recall in Parasite that he used custom-written search engine software to hunt for various images on the web and use them as triggers for muscular stimulation electrodes.
Agreed. Death and Rebirth tends to make a bit more sense than the last two episodes shown on television, or at the very least it's a bit more visually appealing (lots of things happening and lots of hell breaking loose, if you're into that sort of thing).
Manga Video is releasing D&R on 25 June 2002 (so says their website at 1042 EST).
In the opening sequence within the first thirty seconds, there is a receeding line drawing of an angelic form with the masque that some of the shito have on them (a downward-pointing teardrop shape with a pair of circular eyes). It's an old rendition of Samael (I think Hebrew in origin - my grasp of Hebrew is rusty these days).
Somehow, I get the feeling that a depiction of the angel Samael in the opening sequence (or the sephirothic system, for that matter) would cause a great deal of trouble among some of the more knowledgable parents.
Though I do recall hearing rumours that Eva was shown on the west coast on cable television about two or three years ago... never heard for certain one way or the other, though.
No idea of anything comparable elsewhere, i.e.: for linux but the concept is neither new or unheard of.
I've just tried it on my laptop (a Dell Latitude CP (model M233SD)) running Slackware Linux v8.0 (kernel revision 2.4.17). Nothing fancy, no unusual hardware, just a PCMCIA network card. I closed the lid while it was running and the system (presumably) went into suspend mode: The hard drive spun down, the display turned itself off (no glow could be seen around the edges of the lid), the.mp3 stopped playing, and a soft 'tweet!' could be heard from the speaker. Then I started typing this. I just opened the lid back up, and the drive spun back up, the display kicked back on, and after a snapping sound the.mp3 started playing again.
I'm sure an aerospace company like Boeing has pretty tight government / miliarty connections..
If I recall correctly, Boeing is a US government contractor. The terms of these agreements may well include their cooperating in such a situation unconditionally.
Johnny Mnemonic was published in 1981. New Rose Hotel was probably published between 1981 and 1983 (the book doesn't make it clear). Burning Chrome was published before Neuromancer, I think, which would put it before 1984 (Neuromancer's date of publication). That would put Johnny Mnemonic before Tron, but Tron before Burning Chrome (Gibson's first description of cyberspace) and Neuromancer (when he wrote more about the imagery, though the actual descriptions themselves were a little thin).
Source: Burning Chrome, 1987 edition published by Ace.
why don't you just overwrite the file with the same name, just some bogus data.
Near the end of the article, it was mentioned that even if the data can't be recovered through forensic means, the examiner can still tell that something was there, even though the contents are out of context or are junk. That's still incriminating - if it was really was sugar_and_spice.doc, why are the file system blocks endless patterns of 'youcantseemeyoucantseeme'? It's a good reason to call the drive's owner in for questioning...
I don't even pay that much for a year's worth of net.access from my ISP! Has Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive taken over their financial department or something?
... self-contained object you drop into the suspect's house and fetch later.
What happens if the black ops team is caught in the act by the owner of the house/box in question? Try explaining that one.. especially if the suspect calls the local police.
Time to start using the movements of my eyes to signal changes on my computer
What is a variant of the copyrighted media protection technology was used to protect the keystrokes themselves to get around such a hardware device?
What if someone hacked a microprocessor into their keyboard just before the cable which would encryt the data leaving the keyboard before it hit the link, and placed a decrypting processor just behind the keyboard jack on their system, before the motherboard? Anything placed in between the keyboard and the computer, then (like a hardware-based keylogger) would recieve only encrypted information, meaning that either the keyboard itself or the case would have to be compromised to install such a device.
A keyboard could be sealed with epoxy or superglue. A computer's casing could be secured with a sizable padlock (in many cases.. hardware locks are nice things to have). Failing that, case intrusion switches (like some Dell workstations have, I know ours do where I work) or some sort of low-tech intrusion sensor (along the lines of the classic hair in the doorjamb) could be used to detect such an intrusion.
A major problem with recording the encrypted keystrokes is that there's now a very large amount of ciphertext which could then be analysed. And if the keys are always the same (there's no shift, probably not even a salt value of some sort, and transmitting it from the encryptor to the decryptor would require the cable, which is tapped in this scenario... chicken and egg problem).
Also, if someone were to go to these lengths to protect their keystrokes, the black ops team would probably notice these measures and try to disable them, at worst disabling the box entirely, at best removing said countermeasures quietly (if it can be sealed, it can be unsealed quietly given the proper tools/solvents and enough time). Such lengths would also be highly suspicious to said black ops team (paranoia cuts both ways), which could lead to other monitoring techniques being employed.
All in all, it's an interesting challenge to work on; in a sense it would be an arms race, in which the watchers have to become more crafty to get around the watchee's defensive tactics.
One thing I wonder about is whether or not someone being monitored notices the presence of the hardware device on their system.... a new adapter on a keyboard cable would not be difficult to notice at all, and it could then be removed and placed in a creative place (like in a library or a computer store.. I wonder how much They would like to read variations of All Your Stored Keystrokes...)
I think I just made it onto another 'watch this guy' list.....
.Can someone effectively execute a DOS attack by uplinking to the satellite with a powerful signal... thus preventing us from commanding it?
I don't see why not.. as you said, if someone were to find out what frequency you transmit on (though they'd almost have to be within spitting distance of your C&C installation to do so), jamming would be easy. They'd just need to figure out what kind of power you were putting behind the C&C signal and trump it somehow. The exact mechanics of this are beyond me, though..
.How many of you think that you could decipher the structure of the command (given the motivation)?
I'm going to assume that you mean the lexicon of valid commands as well as the options and arguments to said commands here.
Assuming a motivation of "I'm bored..."? Most of Slashdot's readers. All it would take is time to map out which commands are valid and which aren't. Once you've got that, you just need to play with each one to see what it accepts. The major factor (once you've got access to the satellite) is time. If only for the intellectual challenge/bragging rights it would be done given the chance.
In response to your overall question of whether or not it would be worth the time to crack said satellite, I think quite a few people would give it a shot just to see if they could do it, so yes, it would be. The rewards if/when it's all said and done would be knowledge of that satellite's control systems and maybe bragging rights, but sometimes that's all you need to want to do it.
I started consulting for nonprofit organisations when I was about fourteen (I'm now twenty-three).. sweating data into databases at first, then writing a cheesy database system for them in Pascal until they could afford a real database system. Putting together a network for them so they could then dedicate a system as a file server came in my junior year of high school. A few other nonprofits asked me to retrofit some of their systems with slightly better hardware, and then add segments onto their LANs. Now I'm a network admin (part-time college student, full-time admin) for a software house and working on a degree. You can indeed start young and build on those first experiences...
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The fall of humanity from grace - expulsion from the Garden of Eden. And what the human race is trying to do to get back into the Garden.
Metamorphosis - becoming more than you are. The old saying, "What you are is your gift from God. What you become is your gift to God." However, becoming more than you are requires that the dross of the old die to make room.
There's a large amount of Hebrew mysticism in Eva as well.
But brain damage??? Come on... unless it was wired directly into his central nervous system, or unless some of his gear shocked the hell out of him when it was torn off, I can't see it.
I really don't think that it was Everquest that drove this guy over the edge. It was mentioned in the article that he was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, which probably had a lot to do with his suicide. It doesn't say if he was on medication or in therapy just before he killed himself, so without more information I can't speculate as to how big a factor it was. But I do think that EQ was something that he latched onto. It probably became the central facet of his view of reality (the article mentioned as much) and when that anchor was lost (his character was killed).... the rest is history. It didn't drive him over the edge, but it was a factor.
I really don't think that Sony should be sued because he killed himself, though. He was unstable and could just have easily latched onto something else, it just happened to be EQ. The same things were said in the 1980's when reports of D&D gamers killing themselves appeared in the press. They were known to be unstable as well, they just blamed the suicides on the game because it was easier than admitting that said gamers (the word 'kids' can't be used here because a few weren't kids or teens, but adults) had mental problems.
The last bit of the posting is important, though:
Please don't anybody tell the script kiddies that it will uninstall cleanly.
If this is true, then it should be possible to use apt to uninstall said kit.
An idea was kicked around on the Incidents mailing list (I think.. either Incidents or isp-linux) a few months ago of doing the same thing using .rpm packages.
DNA sequences can be translated into musical sequences, yes... Protein Music does this, for example. But could the music be reconverted into a format so that it can be worked with as a genetic sequence? If it were in the form of a MIDI file, then it should be possible, but if someone were to download an .mp3 of genetic information, could it be used as genetic information?
-William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic
Would the surveillance drones in use in Afghanistan right now fall into this caregory? I havn't heard much about them as yet but it seems at first glance that they'd fall into such a category.
...or the broken leg when she infiltrates the Sense/Net complex.
The language used in this review is reminiscent of the anarchy t-philes that kids used to write back in the heyday of the BBS scene. For me at least, that in itself is enough to cast doubt upon the review. It comes across as juvenile and written to whet the appetites of fans, and not much else. If it were written in a more erudite manner, I might give it a bit more creedence.
I also wonder exactly how far along Lucarfilm is in the post-production process. Would it be in a sufficiently complete state to watch easily (like the Buckaroo Banzai workprint that's made its rounds for almost twenty years now)? I don't know for certain, it's complete enough to have a trailer. How much more I don't know.
I don't know.. this seems a bit too pat. It's at the right time to cause a fervor, the timing's too neat.
Didn't Stelarc already do something similiar to this in one of his performance pieces? I seem to recall in Parasite that he used custom-written search engine software to hunt for various images on the web and use them as triggers for muscular stimulation electrodes.
Manga Video is releasing D&R on 25 June 2002 (so says their website at 1042 EST).
In the opening sequence within the first thirty seconds, there is a receeding line drawing of an angelic form with the masque that some of the shito have on them (a downward-pointing teardrop shape with a pair of circular eyes). It's an old rendition of Samael (I think Hebrew in origin - my grasp of Hebrew is rusty these days).
Though I do recall hearing rumours that Eva was shown on the west coast on cable television about two or three years ago... never heard for certain one way or the other, though.
''Then it's not a laser, Riff!!''
Aah.. my glitch. Thanks for the correction.
I've just tried it on my laptop (a Dell Latitude CP (model M233SD)) running Slackware Linux v8.0 (kernel revision 2.4.17). Nothing fancy, no unusual hardware, just a PCMCIA network card. I closed the lid while it was running and the system (presumably) went into suspend mode: The hard drive spun down, the display turned itself off (no glow could be seen around the edges of the lid), the .mp3 stopped playing, and a soft 'tweet!' could be heard from the speaker. Then I started typing this. I just opened the lid back up, and the drive spun back up, the display kicked back on, and after a snapping sound the .mp3 started playing again.
Looks like it worked.
If I recall correctly, Boeing is a US government contractor. The terms of these agreements may well include their cooperating in such a situation unconditionally.
There's a mental image - sitting in the audience watching episode II and the screen suddenly turns bright blue in the middle of a fighter battle...
Source: Burning Chrome, 1987 edition published by Ace.
Near the end of the article, it was mentioned that even if the data can't be recovered through forensic means, the examiner can still tell that something was there, even though the contents are out of context or are junk. That's still incriminating - if it was really was sugar_and_spice.doc, why are the file system blocks endless patterns of 'youcantseemeyoucantseeme'? It's a good reason to call the drive's owner in for questioning...
I don't even pay that much for a year's worth of net.access from my ISP! Has Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive taken over their financial department or something?
What happens if the black ops team is caught in the act by the owner of the house/box in question? Try explaining that one.. especially if the suspect calls the local police.
What is a variant of the copyrighted media protection technology was used to protect the keystrokes themselves to get around such a hardware device?
What if someone hacked a microprocessor into their keyboard just before the cable which would encryt the data leaving the keyboard before it hit the link, and placed a decrypting processor just behind the keyboard jack on their system, before the motherboard? Anything placed in between the keyboard and the computer, then (like a hardware-based keylogger) would recieve only encrypted information, meaning that either the keyboard itself or the case would have to be compromised to install such a device.
A keyboard could be sealed with epoxy or superglue. A computer's casing could be secured with a sizable padlock (in many cases.. hardware locks are nice things to have). Failing that, case intrusion switches (like some Dell workstations have, I know ours do where I work) or some sort of low-tech intrusion sensor (along the lines of the classic hair in the doorjamb) could be used to detect such an intrusion.
A major problem with recording the encrypted keystrokes is that there's now a very large amount of ciphertext which could then be analysed. And if the keys are always the same (there's no shift, probably not even a salt value of some sort, and transmitting it from the encryptor to the decryptor would require the cable, which is tapped in this scenario... chicken and egg problem).
Also, if someone were to go to these lengths to protect their keystrokes, the black ops team would probably notice these measures and try to disable them, at worst disabling the box entirely, at best removing said countermeasures quietly (if it can be sealed, it can be unsealed quietly given the proper tools/solvents and enough time). Such lengths would also be highly suspicious to said black ops team (paranoia cuts both ways), which could lead to other monitoring techniques being employed.
All in all, it's an interesting challenge to work on; in a sense it would be an arms race, in which the watchers have to become more crafty to get around the watchee's defensive tactics.
One thing I wonder about is whether or not someone being monitored notices the presence of the hardware device on their system.... a new adapter on a keyboard cable would not be difficult to notice at all, and it could then be removed and placed in a creative place (like in a library or a computer store.. I wonder how much They would like to read variations of All Your Stored Keystrokes...)
I think I just made it onto another 'watch this guy' list.....
I don't see why not.. as you said, if someone were to find out what frequency you transmit on (though they'd almost have to be within spitting distance of your C&C installation to do so), jamming would be easy. They'd just need to figure out what kind of power you were putting behind the C&C signal and trump it somehow. The exact mechanics of this are beyond me, though..
I'm going to assume that you mean the lexicon of valid commands as well as the options and arguments to said commands here.
Assuming a motivation of "I'm bored..."? Most of Slashdot's readers. All it would take is time to map out which commands are valid and which aren't. Once you've got that, you just need to play with each one to see what it accepts. The major factor (once you've got access to the satellite) is time. If only for the intellectual challenge/bragging rights it would be done given the chance.
In response to your overall question of whether or not it would be worth the time to crack said satellite, I think quite a few people would give it a shot just to see if they could do it, so yes, it would be. The rewards if/when it's all said and done would be knowledge of that satellite's control systems and maybe bragging rights, but sometimes that's all you need to want to do it.
I started consulting for nonprofit organisations when I was about fourteen (I'm now twenty-three).. sweating data into databases at first, then writing a cheesy database system for them in Pascal until they could afford a real database system. Putting together a network for them so they could then dedicate a system as a file server came in my junior year of high school. A few other nonprofits asked me to retrofit some of their systems with slightly better hardware, and then add segments onto their LANs. Now I'm a network admin (part-time college student, full-time admin) for a software house and working on a degree. You can indeed start young and build on those first experiences...