> > which will allow parents to keep track of their cell phone-carrying children
> >
We are all NSA's children...
What the government taketh away, the government also giveth. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
When the federal government drops a $100M unfunded liability in your lap to set up a citizen tracking system, you've gotta recoup your expenses somehow.
Lobbyists: Reaming out the last scrapes of pulp from the lemon since at least a generation before 9/11.
Walk into the doctor's office wherever you are, just walk in, say "Doc --
you can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant" -- and walk out.
You know, if one Slashdotter, just one Slashdotter does it, they may think
he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two Slashdotters do it -- in harmony -- they may think that they're
both TROLLIN' and they won't take either of them.
And if THREE Slashdotters do it! Can you imagine three Slashdotters walkin'
in, singin' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaurant" and walkin' out? They might think
it's a HACKER CONSPIRACY.
And can you imagine FIFTY Slashdotters a day? I said FIFTY Slashdotters
a day -- walkin' in, singin ' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaruant" and walkin'
out? Friends, they may think it's a movement, and that's what it is.
The Cyberdyne Systems T-800 Model 101 Trans-Humanist Movement!
And all you gotta do to join it is to mod me (+1, Funny) the next time the
mod points come 'round on the thread view. With feelin'.
You can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant (or be an Alice!)
You can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant
Magnets, implants, and MRI,
And then across the room you'll watch your finger fly,
Oh, you can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne restaurant...
> "Video and PC games are a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. So why don't they get the attention of movies or TV?"
Your Senator or Congressman can hardly be blamed for preferring to snort his cocaine from 'twixt Titney's Spears than the alternative of seeing a can of Jolt Cola poured over the manb00bs of a software developer.
Let's face it.
RIAA and MPAA lobbyists really do have more to offer their represenatives than software industry lobbyists do.
> Maybe they should think about taking "Life and Death" stuff off the internet, a back-hoe could take out a large part of the net for a day or two. If emergency response people are relying on vonage or skype for critical communications, that is a serious problem.
In a real life-or-death emergency when the phones are down, all you really need is couple of feet of fiber and a shovel. Use the shovel to bury the fiber, and when the backhoe driver shows up, you can ask him to drive you to the hospital.
> >
Won't work, they'll tap you at the first hop (the cable company's router) if they have to.
> > Nahh they'll just throw you in jail on suspicion of being a terrorist, and a judge will claim contempt until you give them the encryption keys.
"Settle down, you two. This isn't 'either/or' thing!" - Your Government
> What? Microsoft can't write a simple packetfilter for windows98? I'm quite sure others have.
Funny part is that the exploit isn't as critical as it sounds.
From TFBulletin, "An attacker would need to convince a user to visit a Web site that could force a connection to a remote file server." It also looks like the way to make the exploit work would require Javashit and/or ActiveX being enabled on the victim's machine, and the web browser in question being IE. Filtering TCP port 139 is listed as a workaround.
In other words, it's like most other exploits: It requires the user to do Something Stupid first. A Win9x user running Firefox, and doing so from behind a firewall, can rest easy.
> I use Windows 95 OSR2 on several boxes at home, and nasties don't happen. Why? Because OSR2 doesn't support many of the infection vectors present in newer Win32 flavors. It's too old.
"It's too old", by the way, doesn't mean "Nobody bothers to find infection vectors for it", it means "they were never implemented."
Other than the TCP/NetBIOS stuff (that never, to the best of my knowledge, had a remote exploit that let anyone take control of the box), a box running 98SE runs no services. No uPNP exploit. No DCOM/RPC. No Messenger. No nothing. For all intents and purposes, it's already firewalled when you plug it into the wall.
Warning: Rant coming on.
I'd go so far to say that 98SE out of the box, plus Mozilla, is more secure than XP ever was. After a user actually runs the malware, it's a draw. 9x has no security model, and the XP box wins in theory: an OS that supports privileged/nonprivileged users is at least capable of defending against user stupidity. But in practice, the 2K/XP malware uses privilege escalation bugs to turn XP's security model something effectively identical to 9x's: "None at all."
9x is also IMHO more recoverable than XP; replacing a borked.DLL for an updated (or downgraded, because some idiot installer overwrote it).DLL is easy when you've got a "talk-to-the-bare-metal" DOS prompt and there's no OS in the way telling you you can't overwrite the file. DRM? What DRM? You can't do DRM when you've got no security model. 9x doesn't phone home. 9x doesn't care - doesn't know - if you make a drive image (ah, a DOS prompt again!) of your boot partition, burn it onto a CD, and file it away until the user hoses something badly enough that it can't be recovered.
Sure, the OS was a fancy DOS shell that sucked balls compared to any real OS if you were trying to develop software on it, but it made a damn good single-user home/gaming platform. If it weren't for the 137GB drive (not partition, drive) size limit and the 512MB RAM size limit, I'd run it today as my gaming rig.
OK. Rant over.
I suspect that the real reason the Mozilla team is dropping support for 9x is because the OS sucks balls, and the ball-sucking makes it not fun to develop software on it. It's got nothing to do with security. Because the OS that runs no services, doesn't get 0wn3d.
> Change 'Snow' to 'Cure' >
Change crack addicts into suffering diseased community members >
Change drug king-ping to entrepreneurial pharmacist aiding humanity's fight against the sickness.
You forgot one thing:
And in keeping with our snowy theme, change "hot coffee" to "frappucino".
> But probably not. The truth of the matter is that there will be a 100 petabyte flashdrive that people hand around that has ALL of music on it and the issue will be moot.
"Real Americans don't use backups, they just email a disk image to their grandmothers and let NSA handle the archiving!" - with apologies to Linus
The ESRB ratings system was our last, best hope for freedom of speech. It failed. But in the year of the Terra war it became something greater: our last, best hope... for anything worth playing. The year is 2006. The place: GDC '06.
(It was the year of Jack Thompson. It was the year of elections. The year we brought back the booth babes that were ours. It was the year of sequels. The year of great justice. The year of suckage. And the year of pwnage. It was a new age. It was the end of Madden sequels. It was the year everything changed. The year is 2007: the place, E3 '07.)
> In a few years I imagine she'll ask "Daddy... who's Captain Copyright?" and I'll say "Sweetie, he's like God." She'll reply "What do you mean, Daddy, all knowing, all powerful and something to be in awe of?" "No dear," I'll reply, "a make-believe thing people in power use against the masses to keep them scared."
Close, but no cigar.
"Captain Copyright? I remember that site! It was where a bunch of Farkers and SA Forum Goons downloaded a huge library of source images for the funniest set Photoshop parodies ever!"
In Post-9/11 America, do not attempt to host a CounterStrike server on laptop and use WiFi to see if anyone's interested in a little ad-hoc FPS action.
> Nobody has actually placed microchips in immigrants - VeriChip Corporation chairman Scott Silverman proposed it
You do realize that if you're an illegal immigrant, and want to convince your employer that you're an American, all you have to do is to dig the chip out
The only way for any RFID-implant-based system to work in the face of this trivial exploit is to require that all employees, citizens included, be chipped.
> Nobody has even proposed placing microchips in felons
Althoug this will be proposed in the next phase of the implementation, but as I've outlined above, it's not strictly necessary to get to the desired endpoint of all Americans (presumably with exceptions for Congressmen, Senators, State and Local officials, and top-ranked bureaucrats) being chipped.
> He is also wary of hiring "young men without a wife or a girlfriend or a dog or parents. They are at risk because they can get so immersed in their job that it drives them crazy. We don't want the type who read e-mails on their way to brush their teeth. They need a life."
I can understand existing without a wife or girlfriend. (This is Slashdot.)
But without parents? The last young bachelor who claimed to be the product of parthenogenesis wound up nailed to a tree.
These days, that's bad for business. Can you imagine trying to explain it to his HMO three days later?
> > I have absolutely no problem at all with 100% public surveillance, as long as all of the video feeds are available to any person at any time, and not just Big Brother.
> > When the entire populace is asked to police themselves, you end up with people writing anonymous letters to denounce their neighbours to the gestapo.
In the system described here, there's a log of what target the citizen was looking at when he or she pressed the "fire" button.
Because Big Brother knows who clicked the button (phoned the 1-800 number, which has never been anonymous), and he knows what they were looking at ("Citizen with phone number NNN-NNN-NNNN reported 3 targets on camera XXX at timestamp YYYY"), he will very rapidly figure out which of his sources are providing valid leads, and which of his sources are attempting to monkeywrench the works.
Because Big Brother doesn't like to be sent on wild goose chases, this is a self-correcting problem: reporters who add too much noise to the signal will self-identify themselves as high-value targets.
Slashdot Mirror
Epic Mounts, Part 1 and Part 2.
>
> We are all NSA's children...
What the government taketh away, the government also giveth. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
When the federal government drops a $100M unfunded liability in your lap to set up a citizen tracking system, you've gotta recoup your expenses somehow.
Lobbyists: Reaming out the last scrapes of pulp from the lemon since at least a generation before 9/11.
This missed opportunity to employ 3D web browsing technology has been brought to you by...
Breasts!
Walk into the doctor's office wherever you are, just walk in, say "Doc -- you can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant" -- and walk out.
You know, if one Slashdotter, just one Slashdotter does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two Slashdotters do it -- in harmony -- they may think that they're both TROLLIN' and they won't take either of them.
And if THREE Slashdotters do it! Can you imagine three Slashdotters walkin' in, singin' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaurant" and walkin' out? They might think it's a HACKER CONSPIRACY.
And can you imagine FIFTY Slashdotters a day? I said FIFTY Slashdotters a day -- walkin' in, singin ' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaruant" and walkin' out? Friends, they may think it's a movement, and that's what it is.
The Cyberdyne Systems T-800 Model 101 Trans-Humanist Movement!
And all you gotta do to join it is to mod me (+1, Funny) the next time the mod points come 'round on the thread view. With feelin'.
Your Senator or Congressman can hardly be blamed for preferring to snort his cocaine from 'twixt Titney's Spears than the alternative of seeing a can of Jolt Cola poured over the manb00bs of a software developer.
Let's face it. RIAA and MPAA lobbyists really do have more to offer their represenatives than software industry lobbyists do.
In a real life-or-death emergency when the phones are down, all you really need is couple of feet of fiber and a shovel. Use the shovel to bury the fiber, and when the backhoe driver shows up, you can ask him to drive you to the hospital.
>
> Nahh they'll just throw you in jail on suspicion of being a terrorist, and a judge will claim contempt until you give them the encryption keys.
"Settle down, you two. This isn't 'either/or' thing!"
- Your Government
Somewhere, the Goatse Guy is quietly weeping... muttering to himself "what a waste... what a waste"...
Funny part is that the exploit isn't as critical as it sounds.
From TFBulletin, "An attacker would need to convince a user to visit a Web site that could force a connection to a remote file server." It also looks like the way to make the exploit work would require Javashit and/or ActiveX being enabled on the victim's machine, and the web browser in question being IE. Filtering TCP port 139 is listed as a workaround.
In other words, it's like most other exploits: It requires the user to do Something Stupid first. A Win9x user running Firefox, and doing so from behind a firewall, can rest easy.
Yup. Althought in this case, isn't the animal in question is more like a patent wiisel than a troll?
And MSN search vomits chairs at Google search.
"It's too old", by the way, doesn't mean "Nobody bothers to find infection vectors for it", it means "they were never implemented."
Other than the TCP/NetBIOS stuff (that never, to the best of my knowledge, had a remote exploit that let anyone take control of the box), a box running 98SE runs no services. No uPNP exploit. No DCOM/RPC. No Messenger. No nothing. For all intents and purposes, it's already firewalled when you plug it into the wall.
Warning: Rant coming on.
I'd go so far to say that 98SE out of the box, plus Mozilla, is more secure than XP ever was. After a user actually runs the malware, it's a draw. 9x has no security model, and the XP box wins in theory: an OS that supports privileged/nonprivileged users is at least capable of defending against user stupidity. But in practice, the 2K/XP malware uses privilege escalation bugs to turn XP's security model something effectively identical to 9x's: "None at all."
9x is also IMHO more recoverable than XP; replacing a borked .DLL for an updated (or downgraded, because some idiot installer overwrote it) .DLL is easy when you've got a "talk-to-the-bare-metal" DOS prompt and there's no OS in the way telling you you can't overwrite the file. DRM? What DRM? You can't do DRM when you've got no security model. 9x doesn't phone home. 9x doesn't care - doesn't know - if you make a drive image (ah, a DOS prompt again!) of your boot partition, burn it onto a CD, and file it away until the user hoses something badly enough that it can't be recovered.
Sure, the OS was a fancy DOS shell that sucked balls compared to any real OS if you were trying to develop software on it, but it made a damn good single-user home/gaming platform. If it weren't for the 137GB drive (not partition, drive) size limit and the 512MB RAM size limit, I'd run it today as my gaming rig.
OK. Rant over.
I suspect that the real reason the Mozilla team is dropping support for 9x is because the OS sucks balls, and the ball-sucking makes it not fun to develop software on it. It's got nothing to do with security. Because the OS that runs no services, doesn't get 0wn3d.
No, that's Government. (Wait, there's a difference?)
> Change crack addicts into suffering diseased community members
> Change drug king-ping to entrepreneurial pharmacist aiding humanity's fight against the sickness.
You forgot one thing:
And in keeping with our snowy theme, change "hot coffee" to "frappucino".
"Real Americans don't use backups, they just email a disk image to their grandmothers and let NSA handle the archiving!"
- with apologies to Linus
"Yeah. About those dad-gum bloggers that got me fired. Well, Ms. Couric, we'll just see who's colon really deserves the anchor chair!"
- Dan Rather
Acme! The only Batman outfit worn by bats!
(It was the year of Jack Thompson. It was the year of elections. The year we brought back the booth babes that were ours. It was the year of sequels. The year of great justice. The year of suckage. And the year of pwnage. It was a new age. It was the end of Madden sequels. It was the year everything changed. The year is 2007: the place, E3 '07.)
Close, but no cigar.
"Captain Copyright? I remember that site! It was where a bunch of Farkers and SA Forum Goons downloaded a huge library of source images for the funniest set Photoshop parodies ever!"
In Post-9/11 America, do not attempt to host a CounterStrike server on laptop and use WiFi to see if anyone's interested in a little ad-hoc FPS action.
Remember, Remember, the Seventh November,
Congress, Corruption and Rot.
I see no reason Dempublican treason,
Should ever be forgot.
You do realize that if you're an illegal immigrant, and want to convince your employer that you're an American, all you have to do is to dig the chip out
The only way for any RFID-implant-based system to work in the face of this trivial exploit is to require that all employees, citizens included, be chipped.
> Nobody has even proposed placing microchips in felons
Althoug this will be proposed in the next phase of the implementation, but as I've outlined above, it's not strictly necessary to get to the desired endpoint of all Americans (presumably with exceptions for Congressmen, Senators, State and Local officials, and top-ranked bureaucrats) being chipped.
I can understand existing without a wife or girlfriend. (This is Slashdot.)
But without parents? The last young bachelor who claimed to be the product of parthenogenesis wound up nailed to a tree.
These days, that's bad for business. Can you imagine trying to explain it to his HMO three days later?
Why. If they're doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide.
>
> When the entire populace is asked to police themselves, you end up with people writing anonymous letters to denounce their neighbours to the gestapo.
In the system described here, there's a log of what target the citizen was looking at when he or she pressed the "fire" button.
Because Big Brother knows who clicked the button (phoned the 1-800 number, which has never been anonymous), and he knows what they were looking at ("Citizen with phone number NNN-NNN-NNNN reported 3 targets on camera XXX at timestamp YYYY"), he will very rapidly figure out which of his sources are providing valid leads, and which of his sources are attempting to monkeywrench the works.
Because Big Brother doesn't like to be sent on wild goose chases, this is a self-correcting problem: reporters who add too much noise to the signal will self-identify themselves as high-value targets.