It strikes me as being very plausible that the laws on the books could be interpreted as making something as simple as turning on a laptop running Windows with a wireless LAN card in the area of somebody else's wireless network a crime, particularly if it is argued that warchalkers are doing this with the specific purpose of determining whether or not it is possible to use a network that doesn't belong to them.
Then why isn't the FBI swooping down and making massive arrests of everyone who does pings of entire class C's at a time? As a network administrator I stopped logging all of those ping scans and port scans a long time ago. It's just a waste of disk space to do so, because there are so many of them, and they happen every day. I had a colleague of mine who would actually call the fucking FBI and/or email them the logs of people portscanning his computers.... they don't give a shit about that. You know why? Because it is completely impossible to take over a computer and/or destroy data just by pinging its ports.
Now pings/port scans are similar to warwalking/driving in that they can be used to identify potential targets for later hacking, and possibly give you information about what type of OS and software it is running based on the services that are listening publicly. But doing this is NOT hacking, and it is only using the packets in the ways they were intended, to see what the person's computer is announcing as publicly available services. Launching a DDOS attack on someone by flooding them with these same types of packets by the millions is NOT using them in the way they were intended to be used, and with the specific intent of disrupting the services provided by the target computer, and so it is illegal. But scanning with one packet at a time is not.
I would argue that warwalking/driving is even LESS invasive than IP scanning, because the scanners are not brute forcing their way thru the address ranges. They are just standing on public property, using their own equipment to see who is broadcasting things through the air TO THEM. As long as all they're doing is noting the fact that they can have network access by standing in a certain spot, they are not doing anything wrong. If they go ahead and put a chalk mark on the wall or sidewalk, you could stretch the imagination to say they were 'vandalizing' every so slightly. But again, the FBI does not handle vandalism cases (except on church property), so the _FBI_ would not be arresting people for warchalking. Which was the point I was trying to make in the original post, although maybe not clearly enough.
Of course in this crazy political atmosphere, all this may be changed with no notice, if some congressman decides to add "warchalking" to a list of suspicious "terrorist acts", and BOOM now it's a federal crime. So of course, as you sort of indicated, anyone who plans on doing this should be paying close attention to national political developments.
Just as, say, buying pills from the suspicious man on the corner to turn over to the authorities as proof of drug dealing or randomly turning handles on doors in a neighborhood to determine whether or not they're locked might be misinterpreted, warchalking too is something that people shouldn't bother with unless they're fully cognizant of how bad it's going to look if they get caught.
That's not a very good example (the buying drugs one). You're using an example of doing something that is CLEARLY illegal, and has been sucessfully arrested for and prosecuted and sentenced MILLIONS of times, to argue that something else which only MIGHT BE misinterpreted as illegal and has NEVER been arrested for, should clearly be considered illegal. (Hope that understandable.) The example of turning handles on doors in a neighborhood is less clear cut, but has anyone in the history of man ever done that though? There ARE people who go to every door in a neighborhood (selling cookies/makeup/Jesus), but they don't ever try the door knob if there's no answer. And there people with criminal intent who would go up and try the doorknob on a house to check for an easy access point, but they typically steal all the shit in the house and then get the hell out of that neighborhood as quickly as possible.
I think the FBI was only making a public announcement about these activities to warn the general (corporate) public about the POSSIBILITY of people entering their networks from the "inside", since most people wouldn't even consider it. Most people are going to understand by now that a computer stuck on the internet on its own is going to get probed, and mostly have someone try to hack it. But it's not that general of knowledge that people outside your building can access your network from within your side of your firewall, if you're using a wireless LAN. They were just using warchalkings as proof-of-concept of the warning they were giving, and the media bastards tried to skew it to sound more ominous, which is of course, what they do. But as you obviously know, the laws are only enforced thru interpretation, so everyone should consult a lawyer before attempting anything more complicated than wiping your ass...
IBM got in trouble for chalking ads, just because its tollerated doesn't make it legal
IBM got in trouble because the marketing company they hired to put these things all over the place told them that the special 'semi-permanent' chalk they used wouldn't blow away in the wind, but would wash away with the first rain storm that came through... the problem was, it didn't. It was there for weeks, and the city (or county, I can't remember) had to pay people to come and clean it up.... just like would have to with spray paint or other non-temporary marking substances. Which means it was considered vandalism and destruction of public property because they had to pay money to fix it.
This is obviously on much more massive scale initiated by a single entity, than a couple dozen individuals drawing a half-circle on a building with regular chalk. And my point was, that even if the city/county where this was done considered it vandalism, it is NOT A FEDERAL offense, so the FBI wouldn't be involved anyway. (Unless it was on a church property... gotta love the wacky hate crime laws).
This article title isn't that misleading, but a couple other ones I read gave that impression moreso. It's all the same bullshit memo from the FBI, but different people tried to skew it into a more interesting story to varying degrees:
There was another one I read before that was even worse, but I can't seem to find it now. You can read the actual letter from the FBI here though: http://www.politechbot.com/p-03884.html.
At least the FBI are warning the companies and not arresting the warchalkers.
Well maybe that's because warchalking isn't ILLEGAL... All they're doing is walking around with a laptop and noting when someone else is broadcasting networking signals in an area. It's against federal law to attack the computers on that network, or misuse their bandwidth to mess with other people's computers, but putting a chalk mark on a wall to signify that the schmucks inside need to tighten their security is probably the least destructive thing they could do to them. It's like publicly announcing a security hole in a Microsoft product, except they do so by taping a notice to the door of Microsoft's front lobby. Sure, it's public so anyone can read it, but the number of people who pass by it is very small (compared to putting this info on a web page like another poster mentioned), and most of those people are are very likely to be the Microsoft employees themselves...
Last time I checked, even in India, that didn't buy much more than a day's worth of fish.
When a very large percentage of your populace is living in abject poverty, you better have bigger plans than just planting a flag on the moon as part of an international pissing contest.
They (Indian gov't) don't NEED to spend that money on feeding their starving masses... they have countless American charity organizations and worldwide religious groups collecting hundreds of millions of dollars each year to feed the poor starving Indian children. (I'm serious, look it up.)
If you were in power in India (and trying to establish a reputation for your nation as major world power), and you had a rapidly growing technology class which was generating a lot of tax money, and foreign organizations were doing most of the work in feeding the starving classes, would you spend what money you had on more food? Nobody's going to be impressed by the fact that there's a little bit more food in the hands of your poorest citizens, not even the poor so much. They're still going to be living in shitholes and picking at their scraps of food off of their dirt floors. The only thing you did by spending your extra hundred million was allow them to have 2 handfuls of food to scrape at instead of one...
No, you'd spend it on tanks and nuclear bombs and launching rockets into outer space. The crying-skeleton-children commercials will help keep your insanely large population growing, and you can keep building more toys in the sand. And while the starving masses are pecking at their food, all billion+ of them can look up and see India's rocket ship blasting off toward the moon... and feel overwhelming pride that their people have made it! They've accomplished an unbelievable feat that previously only the other major superpowers had achieved. That they, in their shitholes, are vastly superior to those damn Paki's in their stupid-non-moon-going-Paki-shitholes...
Think about that the next time you see that picture of Sally Struthers popping on your TV at 2am begging you please help these poor little children... the only way those "poor little Indians" will ever stop being in such crappy conditions is if you stupid sympathetic bastards STOP SENDING THEM FOOD. There are many bright and industrious people in India, and they need to take over the task taking care of their own countrymen as a higher priority than expanding their military/defense budgets. In fact, now that I think about it, there are some other major countries that could consider doing the same...
My Soundblaster Audigy came with recorder software that lets you choose which input you want to record.
Which program is that? (It'll save me some time in looking.) I got the Audigy Platnium and the damn thing comes with 3 or 4 CDs... I haven't even installed everything that came on the 1st CD yet...
I'm not hopeful for the frozen, though. Firstly, between the time you die and the time you're frozen, I strongly suspect that the brain will likely have degraded to the point where most of the critical information in it has been lost. Secondly, I'm doubtful of any cryonics company keeeping its frozen members stored under the required conditions for the century or two they'll be waiting for revival.
Didn't any of you fuckers see Vanilla Sky?? There's so much shit that can go wrong with freezing your head, that odds are something tiny will go wrong and leave you with a fucked up fate far worse than death...
Any remote thoughts of freezing myself when I die got nipped in the bud with that film...
But anyway just try to imagine... what if death is the most horrifying sensation that a human could ever experience. The most traumatic halucinations/pain/whatever. (This isn't an unreasonable assumption, considering it happens when everything your body is malfunctioning to the point of failure. All the alarm bells going off, red alert sirens, all that shit.)
The good part is, that people who experience it, only experience it for a few seconds, and then they cease to exist. And that's the end of it. Now if you go freezing your dumb ass, you have the possibility to experience DEATH, and then "wake up", and have a full memory of the most horrible terror that the living can never know. Add to that the fact the even the smallest little "error" in the freezing/thawing process is likely to cause major mental changes to the way your brain works, and it's unlikely your perception of reality will be anything close to what it is now. And odds are, it won't be modified in a good way.
Imagine being one of the guys who is in charge of handling the newly thawed heads... It would seriously fuck with YOUR head if every person you brought back to life begged you to smash that ice pick into their skull and finish them off... stop the horror please!
Of course, that's just one way of looking at it. You'll probably just awaken in a new paradise, with your head attached to the body of an olympic athlete, to a world where all disease and conflict has been eliminated. A joyful paradise where everyone is happy and lives forever. That's probably what will happen, right?
Son of a BITCH!!! Could you put a disclaimer before posting stuff like that!? Goatses, tubgirls and penises smothered in caca I can barely handle, but the raw... humanity of Tesla is too much. I mean, think of the kids.
Will my kids look like that if I zap my nuts with a Tesla coil? Was there a point to showing us that picture?
WOOF! Guess that socialist health care system might be a better way after all... That's a masterpiece of dental work right there!
Can i PLEASE be first post? I just came home, and saw no posts, so let me be it! Thanks!
Isn't that kinda lame for a First Post?? I've never tried for first post myself, but after reading quite a few of them, it appears that a good First Post involves being very confident, arrogant, and degrading to those other contenders who failed to achieve the desired spot. You don't go telling everyone about how you stumbled into first postness, and you certainly don't go around asking "PLEASE"! You have to spout an (occasionally) clever insult (use of bad puns heavily encouraged) to all the bitches who didn't get first post, and then another little statement pimpin your own skills.
Ladies like confidence, and so do first posters. Another couple weak shows like that is liable to get you an ass kickin in the middle school locker room... (and yes, they DO know who you are...). Please keep this in mind when attempting future First Posts, for your own safety. Thank you and good day.
This case gets perpetuated over and over as a "frivilous" lawsuit, when in fact it was not frivilous at all. People hear the headline "millions for spilled hot coffee" and don't look further than that. According to the Wall Street journal, McDonald's callousness was the issue and even jurors who thought the case was just a tempest in a coffee pot were overwhelmed by the evidence against the Corporation. Here's a great link telling the facts in the hot coffee case...
Well I _have_ read many facts about this case (and the others that have been spawned in its tradition since then), and I think it's absolutely frivolous! Lawyers are paid to be masters of using bullshit facts to win an argument. Let's look at some of these tidbits of "overwhelming evidence" from the link you posted:
No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McDonald's has known for years that they way they serve their coffee is overwhelmingly popular with the consuming public. That's right,
they've done consumer research and found that most of their customers prefer
their coffee at that temperature. And they HAVE KNOWN that in a BILLION instances a year, someone buys a cup of their coffee, handles it properly, and enjoys its taste -- without incident. And then of course there are will be a couple schmucks who can't keep themselves from pouring it over their heads, or down their pants, or
drinking the whole thing in one big gulp and burning their throats. But honestly, if every manufacturer insisted on pandering to the
safety needs of the lowest common denominator, nothing would ever be made. Because with anything more dangerous than a plastic bottle of water, some idiot is going to figure out a way to hurt themselves with it.
No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
This is just the same shit over again. Once a week (every 5.2 days) some marginally functional moron spills hot coffee on themselves, suffers burns, and tries to get some money out of McDonald's. During that same week, McDonald's sells nearly 20 MILLION cups of coffee to people who have no such problems. Now clearly, McDonald's is knowingly endangering the public with their reckless behavior, and should be made to alter their business practices to
accommodate that one-dipshit-out-of-20-million. Come on, you have better odds of winning the lottery in some states than you do of accidentally spilling McD's coffee on yourself and going to the hospital for it. And the payoff for hitting the lotto is a lot better too...
And why the hell should they have to go around consulting experts about the possible negative side effects of not using Coffee for its intended purpose?? Hot Coffee is supposed to be drank slowly. Hot Coffee is not supposed to be poured on your crotch. There are an infinite number of MIS-uses of a product that can cause harm to people or damage to property, and it's ridiculous to claim that manufacturers should launch investigations into all of them. That's like saying "I manufacture ballpoint pens. We should hire an expert in anal probing to find out what negative effects might occur if our customers shove our product up their asses. And some eye doctor experts too, to see how much damage could be caused if they stick them in their eyes. And some physicists and doctors to see what would happen if they climbed up a utility pole and stuck their pen into one of the high-voltage power lines. Etc..."
McDonald's Coffee will always be hot. No amount of whining pussies and their FRIVOLOUS lawsuits are going to change that. As the great Seanbaby put it: "Let me tell you why McDonald's coffee is so hot. Because you have oily children simmering fluid in glass containers for hours at a time. If you lowered the temperature down a few degrees, that's not making coffee -- that's bacteria farming. Something tells me I'd rather wait for my drink to cool down than buy a cup of coffee-flavored cholera."
No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
Yeah, that's what happens when you pour very hot matter onto your skin. It reacts, violently. Try pouring the hot grease out of the frying pan onto your crotch next you're cooking. You'll get those same 3rd degree burns. There's a small leap of logic that has to be comprehended in order to understand this phenomenon. It goes like this:
1. Coffee is ALWAYS served hot.
2. Hot liquids poured/spilled on your skin will cause BURNS.
Now I know not everybody went to college, but even preschoolers are able to learn fairly quickly which things are fun to play with and which things will hurt like hell if you rub them over your body. Anyone who can't grasp this simple two-step logic train, and take appropriate action to avoid spilling said liquid on themselves, deserves to have the gonads-set-on-fire that results. The evolution of species does not occur by forcing the stupidest monkeys to stop sticking their genitals into a lava pit.
Let's see if I can put this another way for people who don't respond well to complicated logical theories...
IT'S COFFEE! IT'S HOT! DON'T PUT IT BETWEEN YOUR LEGS! Do you need to be told to not put lit firecrackers between your legs? Do you need to be told not stick sharp knives in your lap 'just to hold them there'? Would you stick a rattlesnake in a fragile container between your legs to hold it there while you drive it to...
wherever you might be taking a snake? So why would you need to be told to not put boiling water between your legs?
No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
Hey guess what, I've never filed a lawsuit either. And neither have 99% of all the people I've ever met. It's good that she's not a career lawsuit filer,
but if she had been, that would have been pointed out early on, and you wouldn't have seen much jury sympathy. And the fact that she only filed the lawsuit after McDonald's didn't roll over and ask how much to write the check for doesn't mean they were being unreasonable. OF COURSE they didn't agree to compensate her, that's the whole point of filing a lawsuit! To force action on another party when you can't come to an agreement. Exactly how long do you think it would take for a line a mile long to form outside McDonald's headquarters
once word got out that they will hand out money to any schmuck he says he spilled his coffee on himself? They HAVE to say no to that on
principle, lest they turn into a workers comp clearinghouse.
No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
This sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense. Most customers wouldn't think WHAT is possible?? Not possible to turn down the heat? Not possible to post warnings about burns?
Not possible for McDonald's to consider doing these things? Not possible for you
to burn yourself with boiling water? WTF are you saying??
I'm sure this is probably a badly paraphrased version of something that originally sounded like a good argument, but it still sounds stupid. Of course they have no plans to change anything they're doing. They've done the analysis (similar to what I've already said above) and found that it's well worth the risks (of removing
the ability to breed from retarded people) to keep serving their delicious coffee at the temperature that their customers most enjoy. Another non-point shot down. Keep 'em comin!
No. 6: After careful deliberation, the jury found McDonald's was liable because the facts were overwhelmingly against the company. When it came to the punitive damages, the jury found that McDonald's had engaged in willful, reckless, malicious, or wanton conduct, and rendered a punitive damage award of 2.7 million dollars. (The equivalent of just two days of coffee sales, McDonalds Corporation generates revenues in excess of 1.3 million dollars daily from the sale of its coffee, selling 1 billion cups each year.)
I've sat on a civil lawsuit jury before. There are always mounds of documents that they throw at you, knowing full well that you, the jury members, are not going to sift through all of it for your $15 a day jury pay, when you should be at work or taking care of your kids, etc. They know that you will only remember and consider the carefully worded emotionally charged words that they plant in your head specifically to persuade you to buy their argument instead of looking at the situation completely objectively. Is it possible that they could find 12 people who could be convinced that McDonald's is "willfully" serving flaming death in a cup to MILLIONS of people and "maliciously" trying to harm them? Absolutely. There's 700 such candidates that McDonald's has on file already. And out of 12 random people, you're going to have at least 2 people who will side with the "innocent victim" in any situation. And probably at least 1 person who will side against any large corporations because they're "evil". People like that can keep the rest of the group from making a quick dismissal based on the fact that the
plaintiff is a fucking imbecile. And the longer the deliberation drags out, the more likely the "rational" people are to just side with the "sympathy" people at whatever dollar amount just to get the damn thing over with. I've seen it happen, and I'm sure it happens quite regularly, even maybe in this case.
No. 7: On appeal, a judge lowered the award to $480,000, a fact not widely publicized in the media.
That's fine and all. But it doesn't change the fact that this old woman should have been learning how to safely carry dangerous materials instead of feeding the lawyers with this FRIVOLOUS lawsuit.
No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
I agree that pouring hot liquids on your skin WILL harm you. That's why humans have developed an automated muscular reaction when our skin touches something hot. The nerve signal doesn't even travel all the way to your brain and wait for your brain to make a decision about what to do. It gets intercepted half way and your arm (or leg or whatever) automatically jerks away from the source of heat. This reflex movement normally pulls your arm out of the fire, or splashes the coffee you spilled on it all around the room, in less than half a second. For someone to sit there with the hot coffee on themselves for up to SEVEN seconds means either they sat there, watching the coffee burn their bodies and couldn't figure out what to do, or they managed to spill it on themselves in such a way or place that they couldn't get it off of themselves for a (relatively long time). In either case, at best, they showed an extreme lack of planning, and at worst it's only a matter of time before the mental police find them and take them back to their padded rooms and jackets that let them hug themselves ALLLLL DAAAAAAY.
I don't drink coffee anymore, but when I did (and mostly McDonald's coffee at that), I never poured it on my crotch without at least sipping it first to make sure it wasn't too hot. But if some day I did start drinking coffee again, or some other "dangerously hot" beverage, and I do happen to destroy my genitals because of own ignorance, I sure as hell wouldn't publicize the event and record it on public record with a lawsuit. That's just shouting "Hey, I may be physically deformed now, but I'm also admittedly STUPID too!"
I have to agree with this parent...but for a different reason. I am an IT Headhunter.
Then again, the article is posted on a JOB SEARCH WEB SITE... Headhunters don't get paid by people accepting counter-offers, only when people start new jobs. So couldn't someone see just a little reason for bias in this argument?
This innovation will bring about nothing but high speed, heavily armed hover craft racing.
Oh, I don't know. The porn industry always figures out how to utilize some new invention before anybody else. I think you'll see some kind of floating blow-up dolls at PornDEX before your precious pod racers come along...
I usually laugh when reading manuals produced by Asian companies... Although it's more of a sad, desparation kind of laugh, as in "I can't believe this page of words in a language resembling English is my only source of help about this product. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" Then squash beer can on forehead and move on to the Guess & check method.
(Hey it hurts more than you think... cause I don't drink beer. The full cans make it a more meaningful experience...)
Perhaps papers like these should actually focus on the real reason that DOS attacks are so easy. Crappy code. Since when did Eudora or Pegasus start spreading viruses? It's all Outlook Express.
----
They should just rename VB Support HIV, same effect on a computer immune system.
Oh come on now, I think the benefits of being able to embed an Active X control in an email message and have it automatically run when the recipient views it MORE than outweigh the negative consequences... How else would we be able to send cutesy little Flash animated greeting cards to everyone we know??
So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet -- including Yahoo and eBay -- to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive.
Considering NASA's lack of enough public support to prevent funding cuts in its budget, I find it odd that they have resorted to "trolling the internet"... Seems like the would be better off without all those negative mod points.
The Zap2it report comes following a source report that the 82-year-old was in worse shape than previously reported [syfyportal.com]. SyFy Portal, which is a news and rumors site, had been working on confirming the report which stated that doctors did not anticipate a recovery. The We did note in our initial report that details were still in the rumor stage.
Well what are they waiting for?? He's close enough already... stick him in the transporter pattern buffer on diagnostic cycle already and preserve him for later generations!
He may only be an actor, but he knows the only technical principle you need to know on a starship: if something doesn't work right, reverse the polarity.
That'll only get you through until you hit the 24th century... Then you'll have to master the art of "redirecting auxillary power to the main deflector dish to create an inverted tachyon pulse". This method is found to be much more efficient in fixing all problems.
(Was auxillary power EVER used only for backup purposes?? I don't ever remember seeing all the power go out and then little circular lights near the ceiling come on... and somebody say "Well, thank god for the battery backups...)
By using radio-like transmitters and antennas...
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
great idea - so how will the power get to earth? how about a cable....
I first heard about this wacky idea of transmitting electricity via electromagnetic waves a couple years ago, and apparently some other people besides this guy think it's a viable solution as well. I don't remember enough from my physics classes to say authoritatively whether these ideas are feasible or not, but it's a damn cool idea nonetheless.
The orbiting satellites would obviously be much cheaper than moon stations, and could be positioned above a specific point on the globe. This eliminates the need for "global cooperation", since whoever puts the satellites up in orbit would put them above themselves, thus receiving the free energy. The Moon generator idea would require receiving stations all over the planet, and if any one of them failed for any reason, the whole planet would be without power for a few hours. Also the Moon station deal is basically an all or nothing project; you can't be relying on your power source to be unavailable for 12 hours of every day just because you can't run enough cables around the planet to your country. The satellites could be put up one at a time as funds allowed, at a cost of about a half billion $ each, as opposed to the $150billion estimated for the moon project. So obviously the satellite approach is much more likely to be feasible than the moon version. But I still like to see other suggestions in the media as to energy sources other than "we must open up ANWR for drilling"... no matter how wacky they may seem to be today.
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It strikes me as being very plausible that the laws on the books could be interpreted as making something as simple as turning on a laptop running Windows with a wireless LAN card in the area of somebody else's wireless network a crime, particularly if it is argued that warchalkers are doing this with the specific purpose of determining whether or not it is possible to use a network that doesn't belong to them.
Then why isn't the FBI swooping down and making massive arrests of everyone who does pings of entire class C's at a time? As a network administrator I stopped logging all of those ping scans and port scans a long time ago. It's just a waste of disk space to do so, because there are so many of them, and they happen every day. I had a colleague of mine who would actually call the fucking FBI and/or email them the logs of people portscanning his computers.... they don't give a shit about that. You know why? Because it is completely impossible to take over a computer and/or destroy data just by pinging its ports.
Now pings/port scans are similar to warwalking/driving in that they can be used to identify potential targets for later hacking, and possibly give you information about what type of OS and software it is running based on the services that are listening publicly. But doing this is NOT hacking, and it is only using the packets in the ways they were intended, to see what the person's computer is announcing as publicly available services. Launching a DDOS attack on someone by flooding them with these same types of packets by the millions is NOT using them in the way they were intended to be used, and with the specific intent of disrupting the services provided by the target computer, and so it is illegal. But scanning with one packet at a time is not.
I would argue that warwalking/driving is even LESS invasive than IP scanning, because the scanners are not brute forcing their way thru the address ranges. They are just standing on public property, using their own equipment to see who is broadcasting things through the air TO THEM. As long as all they're doing is noting the fact that they can have network access by standing in a certain spot, they are not doing anything wrong. If they go ahead and put a chalk mark on the wall or sidewalk, you could stretch the imagination to say they were 'vandalizing' every so slightly. But again, the FBI does not handle vandalism cases (except on church property), so the _FBI_ would not be arresting people for warchalking. Which was the point I was trying to make in the original post, although maybe not clearly enough.
Of course in this crazy political atmosphere, all this may be changed with no notice, if some congressman decides to add "warchalking" to a list of suspicious "terrorist acts", and BOOM now it's a federal crime. So of course, as you sort of indicated, anyone who plans on doing this should be paying close attention to national political developments.
Just as, say, buying pills from the suspicious man on the corner to turn over to the authorities as proof of drug dealing or randomly turning handles on doors in a neighborhood to determine whether or not they're locked might be misinterpreted, warchalking too is something that people shouldn't bother with unless they're fully cognizant of how bad it's going to look if they get caught.
That's not a very good example (the buying drugs one). You're using an example of doing something that is CLEARLY illegal, and has been sucessfully arrested for and prosecuted and sentenced MILLIONS of times, to argue that something else which only MIGHT BE misinterpreted as illegal and has NEVER been arrested for, should clearly be considered illegal. (Hope that understandable.) The example of turning handles on doors in a neighborhood is less clear cut, but has anyone in the history of man ever done that though? There ARE people who go to every door in a neighborhood (selling cookies/makeup/Jesus), but they don't ever try the door knob if there's no answer. And there people with criminal intent who would go up and try the doorknob on a house to check for an easy access point, but they typically steal all the shit in the house and then get the hell out of that neighborhood as quickly as possible.
I think the FBI was only making a public announcement about these activities to warn the general (corporate) public about the POSSIBILITY of people entering their networks from the "inside", since most people wouldn't even consider it. Most people are going to understand by now that a computer stuck on the internet on its own is going to get probed, and mostly have someone try to hack it. But it's not that general of knowledge that people outside your building can access your network from within your side of your firewall, if you're using a wireless LAN. They were just using warchalkings as proof-of-concept of the warning they were giving, and the media bastards tried to skew it to sound more ominous, which is of course, what they do. But as you obviously know, the laws are only enforced thru interpretation, so everyone should consult a lawyer before attempting anything more complicated than wiping your ass...
IBM got in trouble for chalking ads, just because its tollerated doesn't make it legal
IBM got in trouble because the marketing company they hired to put these things all over the place told them that the special 'semi-permanent' chalk they used wouldn't blow away in the wind, but would wash away with the first rain storm that came through... the problem was, it didn't. It was there for weeks, and the city (or county, I can't remember) had to pay people to come and clean it up.... just like would have to with spray paint or other non-temporary marking substances. Which means it was considered vandalism and destruction of public property because they had to pay money to fix it.
This is obviously on much more massive scale initiated by a single entity, than a couple dozen individuals drawing a half-circle on a building with regular chalk. And my point was, that even if the city/county where this was done considered it vandalism, it is NOT A FEDERAL offense, so the FBI wouldn't be involved anyway. (Unless it was on a church property... gotta love the wacky hate crime laws).
This article title isn't that misleading, but a couple other ones I read gave that impression moreso. It's all the same bullshit memo from the FBI, but different people tried to skew it into a more interesting story to varying degrees:
There was another one I read before that was even worse, but I can't seem to find it now. You can read the actual letter from the FBI here though: http://www.politechbot.com/p-03884.html.
At least the FBI are warning the companies and not arresting the warchalkers.
Well maybe that's because warchalking isn't ILLEGAL... All they're doing is walking around with a laptop and noting when someone else is broadcasting networking signals in an area. It's against federal law to attack the computers on that network, or misuse their bandwidth to mess with other people's computers, but putting a chalk mark on a wall to signify that the schmucks inside need to tighten their security is probably the least destructive thing they could do to them. It's like publicly announcing a security hole in a Microsoft product, except they do so by taping a notice to the door of Microsoft's front lobby. Sure, it's public so anyone can read it, but the number of people who pass by it is very small (compared to putting this info on a web page like another poster mentioned), and most of those people are are very likely to be the Microsoft employees themselves...
When a very large percentage of your populace is living in abject poverty, you better have bigger plans than just planting a flag on the moon as part of an international pissing contest.
They (Indian gov't) don't NEED to spend that money on feeding their starving masses... they have countless American charity organizations and worldwide religious groups collecting hundreds of millions of dollars each year to feed the poor starving Indian children. (I'm serious, look it up.)
If you were in power in India (and trying to establish a reputation for your nation as major world power), and you had a rapidly growing technology class which was generating a lot of tax money, and foreign organizations were doing most of the work in feeding the starving classes, would you spend what money you had on more food? Nobody's going to be impressed by the fact that there's a little bit more food in the hands of your poorest citizens, not even the poor so much. They're still going to be living in shitholes and picking at their scraps of food off of their dirt floors. The only thing you did by spending your extra hundred million was allow them to have 2 handfuls of food to scrape at instead of one...
No, you'd spend it on tanks and nuclear bombs and launching rockets into outer space. The crying-skeleton-children commercials will help keep your insanely large population growing, and you can keep building more toys in the sand. And while the starving masses are pecking at their food, all billion+ of them can look up and see India's rocket ship blasting off toward the moon... and feel overwhelming pride that their people have made it! They've accomplished an unbelievable feat that previously only the other major superpowers had achieved. That they, in their shitholes, are vastly superior to those damn Paki's in their stupid-non-moon-going-Paki-shitholes...
Think about that the next time you see that picture of Sally Struthers popping on your TV at 2am begging you please help these poor little children... the only way those "poor little Indians" will ever stop being in such crappy conditions is if you stupid sympathetic bastards STOP SENDING THEM FOOD. There are many bright and industrious people in India, and they need to take over the task taking care of their own countrymen as a higher priority than expanding their military/defense budgets. In fact, now that I think about it, there are some other major countries that could consider doing the same...
My Soundblaster Audigy came with recorder software that lets you choose which input you want to record.
Which program is that? (It'll save me some time in looking.) I got the Audigy Platnium and the damn thing comes with 3 or 4 CDs... I haven't even installed everything that came on the 1st CD yet...
I'm not hopeful for the frozen, though. Firstly, between the time you die and the time you're frozen, I strongly suspect that the brain will likely have degraded to the point where most of the critical information in it has been lost. Secondly, I'm doubtful of any cryonics company keeeping its frozen members stored under the required conditions for the century or two they'll be waiting for revival.
Didn't any of you fuckers see Vanilla Sky?? There's so much shit that can go wrong with freezing your head, that odds are something tiny will go wrong and leave you with a fucked up fate far worse than death...
Any remote thoughts of freezing myself when I die got nipped in the bud with that film...
But anyway just try to imagine... what if death is the most horrifying sensation that a human could ever experience. The most traumatic halucinations/pain/whatever. (This isn't an unreasonable assumption, considering it happens when everything your body is malfunctioning to the point of failure. All the alarm bells going off, red alert sirens, all that shit.)
The good part is, that people who experience it, only experience it for a few seconds, and then they cease to exist. And that's the end of it. Now if you go freezing your dumb ass, you have the possibility to experience DEATH, and then "wake up", and have a full memory of the most horrible terror that the living can never know. Add to that the fact the even the smallest little "error" in the freezing/thawing process is likely to cause major mental changes to the way your brain works, and it's unlikely your perception of reality will be anything close to what it is now. And odds are, it won't be modified in a good way.
Imagine being one of the guys who is in charge of handling the newly thawed heads... It would seriously fuck with YOUR head if every person you brought back to life begged you to smash that ice pick into their skull and finish them off... stop the horror please!
Of course, that's just one way of looking at it. You'll probably just awaken in a new paradise, with your head attached to the body of an olympic athlete, to a world where all disease and conflict has been eliminated. A joyful paradise where everyone is happy and lives forever. That's probably what will happen, right?
"A paperless office has about as much a chance as a paperless bathroom."
What are you talking about man? Of course we'll have a paperless bathroom one day... we'll all switch over to using the seashells!
Son of a BITCH!!! Could you put a disclaimer before posting stuff like that!? Goatses, tubgirls and penises smothered in caca I can barely handle, but the raw ... humanity of Tesla is too much. I mean, think of the kids.
Will my kids look like that if I zap my nuts with a Tesla coil? Was there a point to showing us that picture?
WOOF! Guess that socialist health care system might be a better way after all... That's a masterpiece of dental work right there!
"If you can determine if a number is prime in polynomial time, you can break RSA in polynomial time."
Awww fuck polynomial time.... I'm still waiting for somebody to determine it in STOP! hammer time...
Doooooooo doo doo doo, doooooooooooooooooooo do - Can't crack this!
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God that was stoopid... sleeeep goooood!
Can i PLEASE be first post? I just came home, and saw no posts, so let me be it! Thanks!
Isn't that kinda lame for a First Post?? I've never tried for first post myself, but after reading quite a few of them, it appears that a good First Post involves being very confident, arrogant, and degrading to those other contenders who failed to achieve the desired spot. You don't go telling everyone about how you stumbled into first postness, and you certainly don't go around asking "PLEASE"! You have to spout an (occasionally) clever insult (use of bad puns heavily encouraged) to all the bitches who didn't get first post, and then another little statement pimpin your own skills.
Ladies like confidence, and so do first posters. Another couple weak shows like that is liable to get you an ass kickin in the middle school locker room... (and yes, they DO know who you are...). Please keep this in mind when attempting future First Posts, for your own safety. Thank you and good day.
This case gets perpetuated over and over as a "frivilous" lawsuit, when in fact it was not frivilous at all. People hear the headline "millions for spilled hot coffee" and don't look further than that. According to the Wall Street journal, McDonald's callousness was the issue and even jurors who thought the case was just a tempest in a coffee pot were overwhelmed by the evidence against the Corporation. Here's a great link telling the facts in the hot coffee case...
Well I _have_ read many facts about this case (and the others that have been spawned in its tradition since then), and I think it's absolutely frivolous! Lawyers are paid to be masters of using bullshit facts to win an argument. Let's look at some of these tidbits of "overwhelming evidence" from the link you posted:
No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McDonald's has known for years that they way they serve their coffee is overwhelmingly popular with the consuming public. That's right, they've done consumer research and found that most of their customers prefer their coffee at that temperature. And they HAVE KNOWN that in a BILLION instances a year, someone buys a cup of their coffee, handles it properly, and enjoys its taste -- without incident. And then of course there are will be a couple schmucks who can't keep themselves from pouring it over their heads, or down their pants, or drinking the whole thing in one big gulp and burning their throats. But honestly, if every manufacturer insisted on pandering to the safety needs of the lowest common denominator, nothing would ever be made. Because with anything more dangerous than a plastic bottle of water, some idiot is going to figure out a way to hurt themselves with it.
No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
This is just the same shit over again. Once a week (every 5.2 days) some marginally functional moron spills hot coffee on themselves, suffers burns, and tries to get some money out of McDonald's. During that same week, McDonald's sells nearly 20 MILLION cups of coffee to people who have no such problems. Now clearly, McDonald's is knowingly endangering the public with their reckless behavior, and should be made to alter their business practices to accommodate that one-dipshit-out-of-20-million. Come on, you have better odds of winning the lottery in some states than you do of accidentally spilling McD's coffee on yourself and going to the hospital for it. And the payoff for hitting the lotto is a lot better too...
And why the hell should they have to go around consulting experts about the possible negative side effects of not using Coffee for its intended purpose?? Hot Coffee is supposed to be drank slowly. Hot Coffee is not supposed to be poured on your crotch. There are an infinite number of MIS-uses of a product that can cause harm to people or damage to property, and it's ridiculous to claim that manufacturers should launch investigations into all of them. That's like saying "I manufacture ballpoint pens. We should hire an expert in anal probing to find out what negative effects might occur if our customers shove our product up their asses. And some eye doctor experts too, to see how much damage could be caused if they stick them in their eyes. And some physicists and doctors to see what would happen if they climbed up a utility pole and stuck their pen into one of the high-voltage power lines. Etc..."
McDonald's Coffee will always be hot. No amount of whining pussies and their FRIVOLOUS lawsuits are going to change that. As the great Seanbaby put it: "Let me tell you why McDonald's coffee is so hot. Because you have oily children simmering fluid in glass containers for hours at a time. If you lowered the temperature down a few degrees, that's not making coffee -- that's bacteria farming. Something tells me I'd rather wait for my drink to cool down than buy a cup of coffee-flavored cholera."
No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
Yeah, that's what happens when you pour very hot matter onto your skin. It reacts, violently. Try pouring the hot grease out of the frying pan onto your crotch next you're cooking. You'll get those same 3rd degree burns. There's a small leap of logic that has to be comprehended in order to understand this phenomenon. It goes like this:
Now I know not everybody went to college, but even preschoolers are able to learn fairly quickly which things are fun to play with and which things will hurt like hell if you rub them over your body. Anyone who can't grasp this simple two-step logic train, and take appropriate action to avoid spilling said liquid on themselves, deserves to have the gonads-set-on-fire that results. The evolution of species does not occur by forcing the stupidest monkeys to stop sticking their genitals into a lava pit.
Let's see if I can put this another way for people who don't respond well to complicated logical theories... IT'S COFFEE! IT'S HOT! DON'T PUT IT BETWEEN YOUR LEGS! Do you need to be told to not put lit firecrackers between your legs? Do you need to be told not stick sharp knives in your lap 'just to hold them there'? Would you stick a rattlesnake in a fragile container between your legs to hold it there while you drive it to... wherever you might be taking a snake? So why would you need to be told to not put boiling water between your legs?
No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
Hey guess what, I've never filed a lawsuit either. And neither have 99% of all the people I've ever met. It's good that she's not a career lawsuit filer, but if she had been, that would have been pointed out early on, and you wouldn't have seen much jury sympathy. And the fact that she only filed the lawsuit after McDonald's didn't roll over and ask how much to write the check for doesn't mean they were being unreasonable. OF COURSE they didn't agree to compensate her, that's the whole point of filing a lawsuit! To force action on another party when you can't come to an agreement. Exactly how long do you think it would take for a line a mile long to form outside McDonald's headquarters once word got out that they will hand out money to any schmuck he says he spilled his coffee on himself? They HAVE to say no to that on principle, lest they turn into a workers comp clearinghouse.
No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
This sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense. Most customers wouldn't think WHAT is possible?? Not possible to turn down the heat? Not possible to post warnings about burns? Not possible for McDonald's to consider doing these things? Not possible for you to burn yourself with boiling water? WTF are you saying??
I'm sure this is probably a badly paraphrased version of something that originally sounded like a good argument, but it still sounds stupid. Of course they have no plans to change anything they're doing. They've done the analysis (similar to what I've already said above) and found that it's well worth the risks (of removing the ability to breed from retarded people) to keep serving their delicious coffee at the temperature that their customers most enjoy. Another non-point shot down. Keep 'em comin!
No. 6: After careful deliberation, the jury found McDonald's was liable because the facts were overwhelmingly against the company. When it came to the punitive damages, the jury found that McDonald's had engaged in willful, reckless, malicious, or wanton conduct, and rendered a punitive damage award of 2.7 million dollars. (The equivalent of just two days of coffee sales, McDonalds Corporation generates revenues in excess of 1.3 million dollars daily from the sale of its coffee, selling 1 billion cups each year.)
I've sat on a civil lawsuit jury before. There are always mounds of documents that they throw at you, knowing full well that you, the jury members, are not going to sift through all of it for your $15 a day jury pay, when you should be at work or taking care of your kids, etc. They know that you will only remember and consider the carefully worded emotionally charged words that they plant in your head specifically to persuade you to buy their argument instead of looking at the situation completely objectively. Is it possible that they could find 12 people who could be convinced that McDonald's is "willfully" serving flaming death in a cup to MILLIONS of people and "maliciously" trying to harm them? Absolutely. There's 700 such candidates that McDonald's has on file already. And out of 12 random people, you're going to have at least 2 people who will side with the "innocent victim" in any situation. And probably at least 1 person who will side against any large corporations because they're "evil". People like that can keep the rest of the group from making a quick dismissal based on the fact that the plaintiff is a fucking imbecile. And the longer the deliberation drags out, the more likely the "rational" people are to just side with the "sympathy" people at whatever dollar amount just to get the damn thing over with. I've seen it happen, and I'm sure it happens quite regularly, even maybe in this case.
No. 7: On appeal, a judge lowered the award to $480,000, a fact not widely publicized in the media.
That's fine and all. But it doesn't change the fact that this old woman should have been learning how to safely carry dangerous materials instead of feeding the lawyers with this FRIVOLOUS lawsuit.
No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
I agree that pouring hot liquids on your skin WILL harm you. That's why humans have developed an automated muscular reaction when our skin touches something hot. The nerve signal doesn't even travel all the way to your brain and wait for your brain to make a decision about what to do. It gets intercepted half way and your arm (or leg or whatever) automatically jerks away from the source of heat. This reflex movement normally pulls your arm out of the fire, or splashes the coffee you spilled on it all around the room, in less than half a second. For someone to sit there with the hot coffee on themselves for up to SEVEN seconds means either they sat there, watching the coffee burn their bodies and couldn't figure out what to do, or they managed to spill it on themselves in such a way or place that they couldn't get it off of themselves for a (relatively long time). In either case, at best, they showed an extreme lack of planning, and at worst it's only a matter of time before the mental police find them and take them back to their padded rooms and jackets that let them hug themselves ALLLLL DAAAAAAY.
I don't drink coffee anymore, but when I did (and mostly McDonald's coffee at that), I never poured it on my crotch without at least sipping it first to make sure it wasn't too hot. But if some day I did start drinking coffee again, or some other "dangerously hot" beverage, and I do happen to destroy my genitals because of own ignorance, I sure as hell wouldn't publicize the event and record it on public record with a lawsuit. That's just shouting "Hey, I may be physically deformed now, but I'm also admittedly STUPID too!"
I have to agree with this parent...but for a different reason. I am an IT Headhunter.
Then again, the article is posted on a JOB SEARCH WEB SITE... Headhunters don't get paid by people accepting counter-offers, only when people start new jobs. So couldn't someone see just a little reason for bias in this argument?
This innovation will bring about nothing but high speed, heavily armed hover craft racing.
Oh, I don't know. The porn industry always figures out how to utilize some new invention before anybody else. I think you'll see some kind of floating blow-up dolls at PornDEX before your precious pod racers come along...
Somebody deserves attribution for that.
Try John Watson or Pavlov...
All this guy did was re-write the story of Watson's experiment, adding a little bit of fruity comments from the "Director".
"Magic Fleece"? Sounds like something a dog and an old bitch would be raving about on an Old Navy commercial...
"New MAGIC FLEECE performance case, only from Old Navy! It's FLEESETASTIC!"
I usually laugh when reading manuals produced by Asian companies... Although it's more of a sad, desparation kind of laugh, as in "I can't believe this page of words in a language resembling English is my only source of help about this product. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" Then squash beer can on forehead and move on to the Guess & check method.
(Hey it hurts more than you think... cause I don't drink beer. The full cans make it a more meaningful experience...)
Perhaps papers like these should actually focus on the real reason that DOS attacks are so easy. Crappy code. Since when did Eudora or Pegasus start spreading viruses? It's all Outlook Express.
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They should just rename VB Support HIV, same effect on a computer immune system.
Oh come on now, I think the benefits of being able to embed an Active X control in an email message and have it automatically run when the recipient views it MORE than outweigh the negative consequences... How else would we be able to send cutesy little Flash animated greeting cards to everyone we know??
Damn right! I've played video games since I could reach the coin-slot on a Pacman machine.
Nahhh... if Pacman had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms munching pills and listening to electronic music. Oh wait...
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=troll
"To patrol (an area) in search for someone or something"
Sounds to me like NASA is trolling...
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=connotation
"The set of associations implied by a word in addition to its literal meaning"
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=tongue-in-che ek &r=3
"Meant or expressed ironically or facetiously"
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=dunce
"A stupid person; a dolt."
(Speaking in definitions is fun, eh?)
So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet -- including Yahoo and eBay -- to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive.
Considering NASA's lack of enough public support to prevent funding cuts in its budget, I find it odd that they have resorted to "trolling the internet"... Seems like the would be better off without all those negative mod points.
Doh!
The Zap2it report comes following a source report that the 82-year-old was in worse shape than previously reported [syfyportal.com]. SyFy Portal, which is a news and rumors site, had been working on confirming the report which stated that doctors did not anticipate a recovery. The We did note in our initial report that details were still in the rumor stage.
Well what are they waiting for?? He's close enough already... stick him in the transporter pattern buffer on diagnostic cycle already and preserve him for later generations!
He may only be an actor, but he knows the only technical principle you need to know on a starship: if something doesn't work right, reverse the polarity.
That'll only get you through until you hit the 24th century... Then you'll have to master the art of "redirecting auxillary power to the main deflector dish to create an inverted tachyon pulse". This method is found to be much more efficient in fixing all problems.
(Was auxillary power EVER used only for backup purposes?? I don't ever remember seeing all the power go out and then little circular lights near the ceiling come on... and somebody say "Well, thank god for the battery backups...)
great idea - so how will the power get to earth? how about a cable....
I first heard about this wacky idea of transmitting electricity via electromagnetic waves a couple years ago, and apparently some other people besides this guy think it's a viable solution as well. I don't remember enough from my physics classes to say authoritatively whether these ideas are feasible or not, but it's a damn cool idea nonetheless.
The orbiting satellites would obviously be much cheaper than moon stations, and could be positioned above a specific point on the globe. This eliminates the need for "global cooperation", since whoever puts the satellites up in orbit would put them above themselves, thus receiving the free energy. The Moon generator idea would require receiving stations all over the planet, and if any one of them failed for any reason, the whole planet would be without power for a few hours. Also the Moon station deal is basically an all or nothing project; you can't be relying on your power source to be unavailable for 12 hours of every day just because you can't run enough cables around the planet to your country. The satellites could be put up one at a time as funds allowed, at a cost of about a half billion $ each, as opposed to the $150billion estimated for the moon project. So obviously the satellite approach is much more likely to be feasible than the moon version. But I still like to see other suggestions in the media as to energy sources other than "we must open up ANWR for drilling"... no matter how wacky they may seem to be today.