Just find out where the checks are going and arrest him!
I'm afraid it's not that easy, CmdrTaco. Firstly, you are assuming that the money is going to someone associated with the virus writer. However, from what I understand, there are three types of people who write viruses:
The Attention Getter: This person wants the hype, the name, and the infamy to achieve some sort of status in the cracker or skr1pt k1dd13 community. They don't do it for the money, they just want to be 1337.
The Student: They do it for the study of viruses. They do it to learn. Sometimes it is legit, such as the programmers of anti-virus software, and sometimes it is a hacker (note the distinction I use here) who wishes to understand the why and how of a particular exploit. But we can rule out this type of writer because while they are sometimes in it for the money, they never want to actually cause harm, they want to learn, and their creations are rarely unleashed.
The Causehead: These people write the virus because they feel it will advance their cause. Be it governmental, corporate, or Greenpeace, they have their reasons. They also do not do it for the money.
But take a virus that makes money, such as Benjamin. Well, who says it has to go to the virus-writer. It could very well be a script that sets up the funds to go to any account, anywhere. If the writer was a cause-head, the money could very well be going to Save The Wales or some such to benefit that cause. Or even to a totally unsuspecting list of random accounts, to take away money from the corporations that have to pay for the advertising.
But let us assume that the money is going to the author of Benjamin for a moment. There is also unfortunately the issue of money laundering, offshore accounts, vapor operations, and rerouting of transfers that can make finding out where the money goes all but impossible if someone is clever enough to do it.
Assuming that someone is keeping the money for themselves, there are a variety of ways that it could be done. As referenced by Carl Sifakis...
Method 1 Typical Drug Dealer Method
1) Get a million dollars ( how you do this is you own business.)
2) Fly to the Grand Cayman Islands and take your million with you.
3) Some banks in that area sell legitimate off-the-shelf corporations.
(These are shell corporations or holding companies. Some even come complete
with a board of directors. Buy one of these corporations from the bank.
4) Open an account in one of those banks under the corporation's
name and deposit the remainder of your money.
5) Enjoy the islands, get some sun and then go home.
6) When you arrive at home, "borrow" $100,000 from the
corporation in the islands by wire transfer. (As sneaky as this sounds,
it is totally legal.)
7) Open a restaurant with a bar.
8) At the end of each month, take proceeds from whatever criminal
thing you've got going on the side and deposit it in the bank as the take
from the bar. It is a good idea to to over report how well you restaurant/bar
is doing but not to get to greedy. The Internal Revenue Service takes a
dim view of a pizza parlor that purports to do several hundred thousand
dollars a month in revenue. If you don't get greedy you won't get investigated.
They just don't have the manpower. It is also a good idea to plow some
of the proceeds into the legitimate corporation too. If the company does
well on its own it can expand and offer more laundering potential.
9) Your criminal money is now clean as a whistle. Pay taxes on it.
Method 2 The Loanback Method
1) A New Jersey gambler has half a million dollars in profits salted
away in a numbered Swiss bank account. He buys a string of car washes(
another great way to over report potential sales) for $1 million financing
it with 50,000 grand down and $450,000 with a legitimate first mortgage.
2) He "borrows" the other half million from his Swiss
bank.
3) Since he is borrowing his own money and repaying it as if it
too is a legitimate loan that means he has interest charges. This charade
allows him to pay himself the interest and deduct that same interest from
his taxes, thus bringing the money back into the country.
4) Once he has paid of his loan to himself he may relend it to himself.
Method 3 The Money Broker Shuffle Problem
Mr A is Columbian drug lord. He has a million dollars sitting in
New York badly in need of deodorization. Mr B is a legitimate Columbian
businessman who wants to buy a million dollars worth of U.S. computers
but his government wants 21 cents for every dollar he buys with his pesos.
Solution: They hire a money broker who for a nominal fee will solve
the problem.
1) The million dollars is smurfed or smuggled overland to an account
in a Mexican bank. ("smurfing" is process of wire transfer of
money in tiny chunks less than 10,000 dollars. This is effort intensive
but necessary. Billions of dollars are wire tranfered everyday but only
transactions larger than 10 grand are documented by banking institutions.
Transactions smaller than this are fully covered under banking insurance.
Thus larger transactions are carefully tracked in case something goes wrong.
Law enforment also does not possess the manpower to check all these transactions
and never will. This is an every damn minute,24 hour a day phenomenon.)
2) The broker writes a check for U.S. 1 million at a correspondent
bank in New York City and gives it to XYZ computers.
3) XYZ computers ships Mr B. his machines from its Panamanian free
zone warehouse
4) Mr B gives the money broker a million dollars worth of pesos.
5) Pesos become sqeaky clean pocket change of Mr A. Annual loss
of revenue to Columbian government: 6-8 billion dollars.
Method 4 The Omnibus Account Method
Swiss banks (and others I'm sure) maintain what is known as "omnibus
accounts" at American brokerage houses. This make it easy for mafiosi
to purchase American blue chip stock anonymously. Naturally, if they make
a profit they pay no capital gains taxes on it because there are no records
in the U.S. tying them to the stock purchases and the Swiss banks are bound
by their laws not to reveal the names of their investors. This enables
them not only to make money but to manipulate the market by buying large
blocks of stock through the banks and then exercising their proxies, enabling
them to determine who will be on the board of directors and who will be
C.E.O.
In Short, if this person has half a brain, then just "seeing where the checks are going" will not reveal the culprit.
The Libra
Eagles may soar, but a weasel never gets sucked into a jet engine.
I should begin this by saying I am by no means an expert in anything relating to this, though I am both a history and photography buff and was fairly fascinated with the complications involved in the moon-landing photos.
Yes, the photos are slightly suspicious, but with a bit of working knowledge of photography as well as physics, plus a bit of actual research, even the most suspect photos are quite easily explained. Most "Moon Hoax" theories are rehashes of what someone else has said. The accusers of the hoaxes, however, are either ignorant of some common schoolbook facts, or are ignoring them in favor of the attention a good Conspiracy Theory can bring them.
However, there are a number of things to consider. With the help of Robert A. Braeunig's insights, I will address them now.
THE POOR-QUALITY VIDEO: The Apollo 11 television camera was a black-and-white, slow-scan TV with a scan rate of 10 frames-per-second at 320 lines-per-frame. In order to broadcast the images to the world, the pictures had to first be converted to the commercial TV standards. In the US, this was the EIA standard of 60 frames-per-second at 525 lines-per-frame. The pictures were displayed on a 10-inch black-and-white monitor and a vidicon camera was pointed at the screen and the pictures were scanned at the EIA standard. What does all this mean in layman's terms? That the videos were shot in adverse conditions under poor resolution and framerate, then had to pass through multiple layers of conversion before being aired. This is keeping in mind that the automatic lighting and focus compensation we take for granted in cameras nowadays was not in use, if in fact it was around at all.
PHOTOS TOO WELL-LIT: Some claim the photos have to be fakes because objects in the shade of something else should appear totally black in a lack of atmosphere (because of a lack of light diffusion). This would be true if there were only one source of light, namely the flash from the camera. However, one forgets about reflected sunlight from the Earth. The Earth is a significant light source. If we factor in size and reflectivity, the Earth casts about 70 times as much light on the Moon as the Moon does on the Earth. This may or may not be sufficient for what is found in the photos, but then one must remember that the released photos are not dropoffs at a photomat. They have been cropped, dodged, and in some cases, perhaps layered. This would be standard practice in even a high-school level photography class. At the NASA level, they most likely had all sorts of image-enhancing techniques. As for objects near the ground (such as feet or rocks) one must consider that the higher in elevation, the less the spread of a shadow on the moon . At an elevation of five feet, a one-foot wide shadow subtends an angle of around only 11 degrees, or only 6% of the distance from horizon to horizon. At two inches above the ground, a shadow will subtend an angle of somewhere around 150 degrees, or nearly 80% of the surface.
WHO TOOK THE PICTURE OF NEIL FIRST SETTING FOOT ON THE MOON?: The TV camera was stowed in an instrument pallet in the LM descent stage. When Armstrong was at the top of the ladder, he pulled a lanyard to swing open the pallet, which was hinged at the bottom. The TV camera, which was attached to it, also swung down. Buzz Aldrin then switched on the camera from the LM cabin. The camera was pointing at the ladder of the LM so that TV pictures of Armstrong's initial steps on the Moon could be relayed to the world. The camera was later removed from its mounting and placed on a tripod some 30 feet from the LM, where it was left unattended to cover the remainder of the moonwalk.
THE CROSSHAIR PROBLEM:In some of the photos, the crosshair "disappears" behind an object, making it look like the crosshairs were faked. But upon closer examination the crosshairs disappear when crossing a brightly lit white object. What's happening here is the intense light reflecting off the white surface is bleeding in around the crosshair and saturating the film; thus, obliterating the crosshair. This phenomenon is commonplace and is in no way evidence of fraud.
THE "FLUTTERING FLAG":It is readily apparent that all the video showing a fluttering flag is one in which an astronaut is grasping the flagpole. He is obviously twisting or jostling the pole, which is making the flag move. In fact, in some video the motion of the flag is unlike anything we would see on Earth. In an atmosphere the motion of the flag would quickly dampen out due to air resistance. In some of the Apollo video we see the twisting motion of the pole resulting in a violent flapping motion in the flag with little dampening effect. Additionally, if the flag was not fully extended, there would be wrinkles and such that could concievably be perceived as wave-motion. However, there is much video footage in which these rippled flags can be seen and, in all cases, they are motionless.
I hope this clears up a few things. If anyone has any more ideas on how it was impossible for us to have gone to the moon, I'll be happy to address them. I limited this post to photographs so as to stay within the thread.
The Libra
"And I lift my glass to the awful truth / which you can't reveal to the years of youth / except to say it isn't worth a damn..." -Leonard Cohen, Closing Time
Also close the loopholes for boxcutters, automobiles, beer, baseball bats, and other objects that can cause death and destruction.
Okay, both of you raise very good points (assuming that Anne_Nonymous was being sarcastic. I believe what it comes down to is the amount of dangerous use an item is designed for.
For instance, a plastic spoon could in theory be used as a weapon of mass destruction and genocide... but it's design, intent, and 99.99% most common use is for eating. A gun, however, is designed to throw a bit of metal (or porcelain, etc) at a very high velocity towards a target. For the responsible gun users, this means target practice, competitions, or hunting, and the very rare instance of absolute self-defense. But ultimately, the point of a gun (and target practice/shooting competitions) is to kill or learn to kill, while the point of a box-cutter is to open boxes, an automobile is designed for transportation, and a plastic spoon is designed for eating.
Okay, it seems silly to point all that out... because it's all fairly bluntly obvious, right? Right. Well... that's where books get tricky... Books are either knowledge or entertainment, or both. If it's knowledge, the purpose of the book is to inform...to teach... Still with me? Yes, it's still fairly obvious... I'm getting to the point.
Now take a book that teaches you how to make explosives out of common household materials. How to murder. Take your pick of crimes. I'm not talking about Fight Club, whose purpose was entertainment and philosophy, but rather a step-by-step manual that tells you exactly how you could get away with murdering your entire neighborhood and get away with it.
The knowledge gleaned from books like that can be deadlier than any pistol or shotgun will ever be. Now before the flames happen, please understand I am neither condemning these books, the good use they can be put towards, or the First or Fourth Amendment.
What I am saying is, that if we are going to accept that we have a wait and background check on gun purchases, then a "red-flags" list of very certain books is understandable in my eyes. Not all, or even most books. But specifically, manuals whose purpose is to teach you how to make weapons of mass destruction. And before it gets mentioned, I am not even talking about Martial Arts manuals, or books on Chemistry... I am talking about a book where the knowledge contained within is an effective manual on creating mass destruction.
Which is more dangerous? A madman with a gun, or a madman with the sudden knowledge of how to destroy a skyscraper easily.
Am I exagerating? I refer you to September 11th, where several madmen, trained from manuals on mass destruction, took out two skyscrapers and pegged the Pentagon.
Am I ignoring the "fact" that "anyone could figure out how to make the stuff"? I refer you to Harris and Klebold from Columbine High School, who prepared for months, and "knew" how to make a propane bomb that would have killed hundreds of students had it worked properly. Had they the proper knowledge, their intended plan was to continue on after blowing up the high school, and then hijack a jet, and crash it into a building in New York City.
What was the key difference between these two parties? One had the right training, the right manuals, the right knowledge. The others did not.
Now, I ask you to reconsider the prospect of "red-flags" on certain books.
The Libra
"...but the stars we could reach, were just starfish on the beach..." -Seasons in the Sun
There really is no need for that tone. You are correct, it is no one's job to provide me with research. The point is well taken. I'll look into it.
But, back on Topic... My post was in regards to those forced to use the Microsoft environments, and the loss of Netscape Plugins has not appeared to affect us in the least since 5.5 SP2 came out. So more to the point, if you don't need Netscape Plugins, then IE 5.5 SP2 (plus the critical updates) will allow you to continue browsing without being forced to download something you don't want to.
...that is, until someone finds another leak in it... but that is the way of any program or security system.
-The Libra
"Evil never sleeps and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should." - Good Omens
Honestly, I couldn't tell you. I personally never could stand Netscape, but I'm not dissing it either. If IE 5.5 sp2 does break Netscape Plugins, and you can give me a reference, I have a few friends that could really use the info.
Would you mind, terribly, elaborating on what it breaks, how, and if recent "Critical Updates" from MS work to fix this? (We have a WebMonkey that uses both IE and Netscape, which is why I ask)
The Libra
"Reality is only a crutch for people who cannot handle drugs." - Lily Tomlin
Well, for those of us who are forced to deal with an Micro$oft environment, there is some good news. Remember Nimda? It operated in a similar way when it was spread through web-pages, by forcing a download. Internet Explorer had a weakness that allowed this to happen. Now, however, they have the fix in IE 5.5 SP2... might also want to get whatever critical updates there are from the Window$ update site. So if you have that, and the patch for Nimda you shouldn't be forced to do anything. Cancel should always be allowed.
And honestly, people, if you set yourself to automatically accept downloads, you're just asking for a trojan.
Now that you know the defense, let's talk about the offense. Some very respectable Hackers have already created programs designed to kill browser popups. Might I suggest as a new challenge for these ingenius few that a program be created that you can simply set an auto-cancel after a program asks you once to download it (like Gator)?
For those of us without that level of programming ability, I recommend giving these companies that do this a flood of email complaints, expressing just how much we detest the all-time low they have reached. Since so many of us are in the IT or helpdesk field, we're in a unique position in that people believe what we say. If Gator persists in these forced-downloads, then start letting every single one of your customers know that Gator stands a chance of royally screwing up their operating system and compromising their security. If they ask for specifics, look for any bug whatsoever that has been reported, or that you can find in the program, and exploit it like a cheap tabloid. If it crashed one persons system and made them reboot, then it -always- crashes systems... etc.
Of course, I myself would never result to any illegal means, but legal strongarm tactics are very effective when done in mass-quantity. If enough of us get together on this, and enough sand is thrown by enough people, advertisers will eventually get the hint.
Now who's with me?
-The Libra
"Maybe Lisa's right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil's got a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers." - Homer Simpson
I read it... okay, well, here's a brief explaination of both, as far as my uneducated mind can assess them. Please excuse the spelling, as they didn't teach us grammar or spelling in the GT classes...
QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY: Uses the Heinsberg Uncertainty Principle to create cyphers that are more or less random. Somehow light patterns were involved, using filters that polarize the light, then repolarize it... about this time I lost interest. Not because it wasn't a great article, it just got a bit deeper that I care to read about right now.
Biomorphic Sequence Generator: Uses patterns of colony-growth to create hundreds of thousands of algorithmns, each one growing and shrinking like a colony of bacteria. Sort of similar to the old DOS-based "Life" game, where you create bacterial colonies and then see whether they thrive or die, or create neat recurrent patterns.
How exactly do these two types of cryptology start off from that to becoming a cypher that can be read by the needed parties, but not by others is far beyond me... and is probably a secret anyway.
The Libra
"We're heading deep into the center of the Earth where a race of mole-people are working 24 hours a day to debug the latest version of Internet Explorer" - Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
Sounds like an interesting cryptography technique, and I'd be really curious to see how Quantum Cryptography compares to Biomorphic Sequence Generators such as the Bodacion.
If the reader just blinked at that question, there's an article that explains it somewhat.
"If the IT department thinks it's clunky and convoluted, then everyone else won't think about it at all."
Oh, I wouldn't be too certain on that. I'm in the IT department in our office and despite the fact that MS Word is about a million times better than Corel Word Perfect, people still insist on using it. Forget that Corel's tech support only knows how to say "Reinstall it". That their web based support is a joke (their search engine can't find even simple searches like "word" and "corel", and there is no support tree). That Word Perfect version 9 took 4 freakin' service packs before it was even partially functional for a real office, (and the 4th one you have to -buy- from the company), that the WP9US.WPT file corrupts itself on a bloody whim, and renaming it (unlike the normal.dot file) rarely fixes the problem, and that it follows almost no standard interfact conventions...
It's a real piece of dung software... clunky, convoluted, and as much as I hate to give Microsoft more beans than they already have, Word is a far superior office program... yet the legal department is hellbent on using Corel Word Perfect, despite the fact we in the IT department have told them that there is almost no support for Word Perfect, that it's inferior... despite having CrossWords even, to convert the documents.
...why doesn't anyone listen to the IT department?
The Libra
"...that's what life is, a series of down-endings."
I hope you're wrong too, Godots... considering I've been pumping money into their stock since it fell to 12 points. I have a feeling it will rise again, however... If nothing else, Microsoft will take notice of the possibilities, buy them out, and then I can at least benefit from the takeover.
Okay, well, we can all wax poetic about why it isn't going to work, why it's not safe for the eyes, why it's too bulky, limits the field of vision too much, has a really dumb name, and so on and so forth. But I invite some of the more open-minded of you to think about the long term prospects on the Nomad, as well as the reality as opposed to kibbitzing.
A company has brought us the first generation of the computerized overlay within field-of-vision that we see in movies. This gives me a real shiver of anticipation. Now before I address the future, I will address the present complaints.
1.) "The Name" - Yes, it's a dumb name. So what? If I name a bar of gold "Wheezey" it's still a bar of gold.
2.) "The Laser in the Eye" - Kibbitz all you wish, this product is already on the market, has already been approved, and tested over and over. The U.S. Army is already one of the users of the same type of scanning technology used in the Nomad. And since it's been in testing for over a year, I have not seen a single report of eye damage, or accidents. I do not say this is impossible, but I think that for a company to propose such a radical interface such as a laser in the eye, they are going to be 5,000x more careful than when Jack & The Box first got all that bad press about e. coli. This is not some cheap disposable pocket laser you buy at K-Mart... this is a several thousand dollar piece of industrial hardware.
3.) "Limiting field of vision" - Well, from what I've seen on the web site, it doesn't obscure much of the vision at all, except perhaps peripheral vision on the covered eye. Those who wear glasses would not notice any difference. Additionally, it should be mentioned that the -point- of this whole technology is to be able to continue getting needed information while not having to look away from what you are doing, such as working on an engine, flying, driving a tractor, etc... Or, that if you do have to look away, you can keep an overlay of what's in front of you.
4.) "It's too bulky" - Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the first public generation of this type of technology, and it effectively takes up less space on the face than a pair of goggles (except of course the military variety which takes up as much as a pair of flight goggles does). We live in a very spoiled world, where microminiaturization has hit such a scale that we can carry an entire office's worth of computer abilities in a cellphone smaller than a man's hand. None of these things started off like this. The first cellphones were about half as big as a cinderblock. To get any kind of decent printing, you had to have a plotter as big as a cardtable. Now you can get a printer that is far faster, with better resolution, limited only in width by the paper you use. Considering how little space it takes up now, I can only expect that it will take up no more room than your average telemarketing-sales phone mouthpiece within 5 years. Or perhaps it will simply be a pair of William Gibson-style mirrorshades.
Now to the future...
What I'm seeing in a lot of these posts is "This looks like it has really cool potential. I'd like to see what it does in the future." and "It's too expensive to buy right now."
I invite you to think outside the box, which in a group of intellectuals such as this, shouldn't be difficult. Instead of thinking about the Nomad itself, think about how to get rich off of what it will become.
Remember how we all said "Damn, if only I'd had bought some Microsoft stock way back when?"
Well this is "way back when" and the company is Microvision. Except the window on "Way Back When" is probably between 6 months and 5 years.
The Libra
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid it's not that easy, CmdrTaco. Firstly, you are assuming that the money is going to someone associated with the virus writer. However, from what I understand, there are three types of people who write viruses:
But let us assume that the money is going to the author of Benjamin for a moment. There is also unfortunately the issue of money laundering, offshore accounts, vapor operations, and rerouting of transfers that can make finding out where the money goes all but impossible if someone is clever enough to do it.
Assuming that someone is keeping the money for themselves, there are a variety of ways that it could be done. As referenced by Carl Sifakis...
Method 1 Typical Drug Dealer Method
Method 2 The Loanback Method
Method 3 The Money Broker Shuffle Problem
Mr A is Columbian drug lord. He has a million dollars sitting in New York badly in need of deodorization. Mr B is a legitimate Columbian businessman who wants to buy a million dollars worth of U.S. computers but his government wants 21 cents for every dollar he buys with his pesos.
Solution: They hire a money broker who for a nominal fee will solve the problem.
Method 4 The Omnibus Account Method
Swiss banks (and others I'm sure) maintain what is known as "omnibus accounts" at American brokerage houses. This make it easy for mafiosi to purchase American blue chip stock anonymously. Naturally, if they make a profit they pay no capital gains taxes on it because there are no records in the U.S. tying them to the stock purchases and the Swiss banks are bound by their laws not to reveal the names of their investors. This enables them not only to make money but to manipulate the market by buying large blocks of stock through the banks and then exercising their proxies, enabling them to determine who will be on the board of directors and who will be C.E.O.
In Short, if this person has half a brain, then just "seeing where the checks are going" will not reveal the culprit.
The Libra Eagles may soar, but a weasel never gets sucked into a jet engine.
Yes, the photos are slightly suspicious, but with a bit of working knowledge of photography as well as physics, plus a bit of actual research, even the most suspect photos are quite easily explained. Most "Moon Hoax" theories are rehashes of what someone else has said. The accusers of the hoaxes, however, are either ignorant of some common schoolbook facts, or are ignoring them in favor of the attention a good Conspiracy Theory can bring them.
However, there are a number of things to consider. With the help of Robert A. Braeunig's insights, I will address them now.
I hope this clears up a few things. If anyone has any more ideas on how it was impossible for us to have gone to the moon, I'll be happy to address them. I limited this post to photographs so as to stay within the thread.
The Libra
"And I lift my glass to the awful truth / which you can't reveal to the years of youth / except to say it isn't worth a damn..." -Leonard Cohen, Closing Time
Also close the loopholes for boxcutters, automobiles, beer, baseball bats, and other objects that can cause death and destruction.
Okay, both of you raise very good points (assuming that Anne_Nonymous was being sarcastic. I believe what it comes down to is the amount of dangerous use an item is designed for.
For instance, a plastic spoon could in theory be used as a weapon of mass destruction and genocide... but it's design, intent, and 99.99% most common use is for eating. A gun, however, is designed to throw a bit of metal (or porcelain, etc) at a very high velocity towards a target. For the responsible gun users, this means target practice, competitions, or hunting, and the very rare instance of absolute self-defense. But ultimately, the point of a gun (and target practice/shooting competitions) is to kill or learn to kill, while the point of a box-cutter is to open boxes, an automobile is designed for transportation, and a plastic spoon is designed for eating.
Okay, it seems silly to point all that out... because it's all fairly bluntly obvious, right? Right. Well... that's where books get tricky... Books are either knowledge or entertainment, or both. If it's knowledge, the purpose of the book is to inform...to teach... Still with me? Yes, it's still fairly obvious... I'm getting to the point.
Now take a book that teaches you how to make explosives out of common household materials. How to murder. Take your pick of crimes. I'm not talking about Fight Club, whose purpose was entertainment and philosophy, but rather a step-by-step manual that tells you exactly how you could get away with murdering your entire neighborhood and get away with it.
The knowledge gleaned from books like that can be deadlier than any pistol or shotgun will ever be. Now before the flames happen, please understand I am neither condemning these books, the good use they can be put towards, or the First or Fourth Amendment.
What I am saying is, that if we are going to accept that we have a wait and background check on gun purchases, then a "red-flags" list of very certain books is understandable in my eyes. Not all, or even most books. But specifically, manuals whose purpose is to teach you how to make weapons of mass destruction. And before it gets mentioned, I am not even talking about Martial Arts manuals, or books on Chemistry... I am talking about a book where the knowledge contained within is an effective manual on creating mass destruction.
Which is more dangerous? A madman with a gun, or a madman with the sudden knowledge of how to destroy a skyscraper easily.
Am I exagerating? I refer you to September 11th, where several madmen, trained from manuals on mass destruction, took out two skyscrapers and pegged the Pentagon.
Am I ignoring the "fact" that "anyone could figure out how to make the stuff"? I refer you to Harris and Klebold from Columbine High School, who prepared for months, and "knew" how to make a propane bomb that would have killed hundreds of students had it worked properly. Had they the proper knowledge, their intended plan was to continue on after blowing up the high school, and then hijack a jet, and crash it into a building in New York City.
What was the key difference between these two parties? One had the right training, the right manuals, the right knowledge. The others did not.
Now, I ask you to reconsider the prospect of "red-flags" on certain books.
The Libra
"...but the stars we could reach, were just starfish on the beach..." -Seasons in the Sun
There really is no need for that tone. You are correct, it is no one's job to provide me with research. The point is well taken. I'll look into it.
...that is, until someone finds another leak in it... but that is the way of any program or security system.
But, back on Topic... My post was in regards to those forced to use the Microsoft environments, and the loss of Netscape Plugins has not appeared to affect us in the least since 5.5 SP2 came out. So more to the point, if you don't need Netscape Plugins, then IE 5.5 SP2 (plus the critical updates) will allow you to continue browsing without being forced to download something you don't want to.
-The Libra
"Evil never sleeps and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should." - Good Omens
Honestly, I couldn't tell you. I personally never could stand Netscape, but I'm not dissing it either. If IE 5.5 sp2 does break Netscape Plugins, and you can give me a reference, I have a few friends that could really use the info.
Would you mind, terribly, elaborating on what it breaks, how, and if recent "Critical Updates" from MS work to fix this? (We have a WebMonkey that uses both IE and Netscape, which is why I ask)
The Libra
"Reality is only a crutch for people who cannot handle drugs." - Lily Tomlin
Well, for those of us who are forced to deal with an Micro$oft environment, there is some good news. Remember Nimda? It operated in a similar way when it was spread through web-pages, by forcing a download. Internet Explorer had a weakness that allowed this to happen. Now, however, they have the fix in IE 5.5 SP2... might also want to get whatever critical updates there are from the Window$ update site. So if you have that, and the patch for Nimda you shouldn't be forced to do anything. Cancel should always be allowed.
And honestly, people, if you set yourself to automatically accept downloads, you're just asking for a trojan.
Now that you know the defense, let's talk about the offense. Some very respectable Hackers have already created programs designed to kill browser popups. Might I suggest as a new challenge for these ingenius few that a program be created that you can simply set an auto-cancel after a program asks you once to download it (like Gator)?
For those of us without that level of programming ability, I recommend giving these companies that do this a flood of email complaints, expressing just how much we detest the all-time low they have reached. Since so many of us are in the IT or helpdesk field, we're in a unique position in that people believe what we say. If Gator persists in these forced-downloads, then start letting every single one of your customers know that Gator stands a chance of royally screwing up their operating system and compromising their security. If they ask for specifics, look for any bug whatsoever that has been reported, or that you can find in the program, and exploit it like a cheap tabloid. If it crashed one persons system and made them reboot, then it -always- crashes systems... etc.
Of course, I myself would never result to any illegal means, but legal strongarm tactics are very effective when done in mass-quantity. If enough of us get together on this, and enough sand is thrown by enough people, advertisers will eventually get the hint.
Now who's with me?
-The Libra
"Maybe Lisa's right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil's got a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers." - Homer Simpson
I read it... okay, well, here's a brief explaination of both, as far as my uneducated mind can assess them. Please excuse the spelling, as they didn't teach us grammar or spelling in the GT classes...
QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY: Uses the Heinsberg Uncertainty Principle to create cyphers that are more or less random. Somehow light patterns were involved, using filters that polarize the light, then repolarize it... about this time I lost interest. Not because it wasn't a great article, it just got a bit deeper that I care to read about right now.
Biomorphic Sequence Generator: Uses patterns of colony-growth to create hundreds of thousands of algorithmns, each one growing and shrinking like a colony of bacteria. Sort of similar to the old DOS-based "Life" game, where you create bacterial colonies and then see whether they thrive or die, or create neat recurrent patterns.
How exactly do these two types of cryptology start off from that to becoming a cypher that can be read by the needed parties, but not by others is far beyond me... and is probably a secret anyway.
The Libra
"We're heading deep into the center of the Earth where a race of mole-people are working 24 hours a day to debug the latest version of Internet Explorer" - Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
Sounds like an interesting cryptography technique, and I'd be really curious to see how Quantum Cryptography compares to Biomorphic Sequence Generators such as the Bodacion.
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If the reader just blinked at that question, there's an article that explains it somewhat.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/zinescene/cst-fin-
The Libra
"I am Homer of Borg. Prepare to be...Oooo! Donuts!"
"If the IT department thinks it's clunky and convoluted, then everyone else won't think about it at all."
...why doesn't anyone listen to the IT department?
Oh, I wouldn't be too certain on that. I'm in the IT department in our office and despite the fact that MS Word is about a million times better than Corel Word Perfect, people still insist on using it. Forget that Corel's tech support only knows how to say "Reinstall it". That their web based support is a joke (their search engine can't find even simple searches like "word" and "corel", and there is no support tree). That Word Perfect version 9 took 4 freakin' service packs before it was even partially functional for a real office, (and the 4th one you have to -buy- from the company), that the WP9US.WPT file corrupts itself on a bloody whim, and renaming it (unlike the normal.dot file) rarely fixes the problem, and that it follows almost no standard interfact conventions...
It's a real piece of dung software... clunky, convoluted, and as much as I hate to give Microsoft more beans than they already have, Word is a far superior office program... yet the legal department is hellbent on using Corel Word Perfect, despite the fact we in the IT department have told them that there is almost no support for Word Perfect, that it's inferior... despite having CrossWords even, to convert the documents.
The Libra
"...that's what life is, a series of down-endings."
I hope you're wrong too, Godots... considering I've been pumping money into their stock since it fell to 12 points. I have a feeling it will rise again, however... If nothing else, Microsoft will take notice of the possibilities, buy them out, and then I can at least benefit from the takeover.
Okay, well, we can all wax poetic about why it isn't going to work, why it's not safe for the eyes, why it's too bulky, limits the field of vision too much, has a really dumb name, and so on and so forth. But I invite some of the more open-minded of you to think about the long term prospects on the Nomad, as well as the reality as opposed to kibbitzing.
A company has brought us the first generation of the computerized overlay within field-of-vision that we see in movies. This gives me a real shiver of anticipation. Now before I address the future, I will address the present complaints.
1.) "The Name" - Yes, it's a dumb name. So what? If I name a bar of gold "Wheezey" it's still a bar of gold.
2.) "The Laser in the Eye" - Kibbitz all you wish, this product is already on the market, has already been approved, and tested over and over. The U.S. Army is already one of the users of the same type of scanning technology used in the Nomad. And since it's been in testing for over a year, I have not seen a single report of eye damage, or accidents. I do not say this is impossible, but I think that for a company to propose such a radical interface such as a laser in the eye, they are going to be 5,000x more careful than when Jack & The Box first got all that bad press about e. coli. This is not some cheap disposable pocket laser you buy at K-Mart... this is a several thousand dollar piece of industrial hardware.
3.) "Limiting field of vision" - Well, from what I've seen on the web site, it doesn't obscure much of the vision at all, except perhaps peripheral vision on the covered eye. Those who wear glasses would not notice any difference. Additionally, it should be mentioned that the -point- of this whole technology is to be able to continue getting needed information while not having to look away from what you are doing, such as working on an engine, flying, driving a tractor, etc... Or, that if you do have to look away, you can keep an overlay of what's in front of you.
4.) "It's too bulky" - Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the first public generation of this type of technology, and it effectively takes up less space on the face than a pair of goggles (except of course the military variety which takes up as much as a pair of flight goggles does). We live in a very spoiled world, where microminiaturization has hit such a scale that we can carry an entire office's worth of computer abilities in a cellphone smaller than a man's hand. None of these things started off like this. The first cellphones were about half as big as a cinderblock. To get any kind of decent printing, you had to have a plotter as big as a cardtable. Now you can get a printer that is far faster, with better resolution, limited only in width by the paper you use. Considering how little space it takes up now, I can only expect that it will take up no more room than your average telemarketing-sales phone mouthpiece within 5 years. Or perhaps it will simply be a pair of William Gibson-style mirrorshades.
Now to the future...
What I'm seeing in a lot of these posts is "This looks like it has really cool potential. I'd like to see what it does in the future." and "It's too expensive to buy right now."
I invite you to think outside the box, which in a group of intellectuals such as this, shouldn't be difficult. Instead of thinking about the Nomad itself, think about how to get rich off of what it will become.
Remember how we all said "Damn, if only I'd had bought some Microsoft stock way back when?"
Well this is "way back when" and the company is Microvision. Except the window on "Way Back When" is probably between 6 months and 5 years. The Libra