Dunno if this is still true, but some time back I read a rant about Microsoft Exchange mail servers where the ranter was bitching about the email being saved in one single file... You have to archive the whole damn thing as one lump, even if it gets to 50Gb. There's no "search the filesystem and just save files added/modified today" feature. And when a user wants a mailbox restored, guess how much has to be restored?? Yep, the whole damn file.
The article isn't specific about what the mail server is, unfortunately, so we don't know if we have reason to blame Microsoft...:)
So any company dealing with state officials should print out each email and "file" it by sending it to the official's office with a note: "Hey y'all, here's that record you want to keep forever. Look after it yourself."
There's an EPA study that links chlorine to cancer too, so bathing in bleach or drinking pool water exposes you to a carcinogen. Same with regular tap water, of course.
You have to weigh the risks, though. Peru took that study to heart and stopped chlorinating their tap water, thereby saving an estimated 180 people out of a population of 18,000,000. The result? 600,000 cases of cholera with 4,000 deaths. It's not limited to Peru, either. The epidemic spread through Latin America and in a 6 year period there were more than 1.3 million cases and over 11,000 deaths.
IMHO, spam would be a great way to broadcast clandesting (including terrorist) information.
IMHO, why would anyone bother using spam?? Just create a web page with the clandestine message buried in the html. Suppose the hypothetical operative had a one-time pad of page edits to watch for - say, a form tag on a given page changing from "method=post" to "method=POST". That change on one page could mean "attack on Tuesday", on another "kill the second person on your list", or on another "run away, your cover has been blown". And more complex instructions could indeed be embedded in images, or split between pages.
The leaders wouldn't even have to host their own web pages - they could use one (or several) of the web communities (FortuneCity, AngelFire, etc) or a blog site like LiveJournal. Or put their own server online just long enough for Google to index and mirror it...
Perhaps more to the point - do the commonly available NAT routers have port-forwarding configured on by default?? If not, then there's nothing for a scanner to find, unless the user goes out of his way to enable a service port.
The two NAT routers I have experience of (Speedstream, Linksys) both had port-forwarding turned off when I first saw them.
Your honor, here are ten e-mails that the same person sent to mailing lists with the same warning, how can I take the warning seriously when the sender doesn't?
I suspect the reply would be something along the lines of:
We're not here to guess the intentions of the sender. We're here to decide if you violated the Terms of Use of this one email, which you did. Guilty as charged! Next case?"
No, it doesn't have to make sense to the mythical "man in the street", just so long as it makes sense to the lawyers...
I can run Windows 3.1 programs written in 1992 on me Windows XP box...
And that right there is a major contributor to Windows instability - making every new update backwards-compatible with previous versions. Granted, Microsoft pretty much *had* to do it so that legacy apps would still work, but they've still fucked themselves over with it.
Wise or not, it looks like those guys won't be flying anywhere anytime soon. According to the artcle, they charged Clark with a single count of interfering with a communications system used for the national defense, which will almost certainly cause him to be tagged as a terrorist...
No, Shatner could just show up as a homeless old drunk living under a bridge, or something... Or as his own great-great-grandfather - after all, the young James T Kirk would the bear a stunningly good family resemblance.:)
Hmmm... He said something like "lighting up balloons full of gas and taking photos of the fireball illuminated by laser". Maybe I just assumed "hologram", or maybe he said it in order to avoiding having to explain "schrilian".
Umm, I think it was something to do with evaluating gasification of coal as an alternative to natural gas. He was working as an industrial chemist for British Gas at the time, but last I heard he was somewhere in Africa doing missionary work. His work may be patented or "trade-secreted" for all I know...
I believe the meat was turned into dog-food. That may not be true in France - I believe I remember being told by a friend that she had seen horse-steak on a French menu. I suppose it *could* have just been a mis-translation, though
Ah, OK. But, judging by the way the original guys were playing with their Giant Fresnel Lens, it might not occur to them to play with lasers at night...
Mmmm, lasers at night - reminds me of a guy I used to know who, for a while, had to work evenings because he was igniting balloons full of gas in the parking lot and taking holograms of the fireballs... Serious research, apparently... I should be so lucky.:)
In this particular case, Mr Brown was saying that 500 times $100 was "close to $1million" when referring to the losses that AST incurred due to potential loss of sales of his Operating Systems book, on the assumption that Linus "stole" Minix and gave it to the world as Linux.
1600 come from search-engine bots
450 come from kids attempting to compromise his apache server with IIS-specific exploits
350 come from a single female grad student who is all aflutter over AST's [micro-kernel] hacking skills.
75 come from accidentally mis-spelling 'whitehouse.gov'
24 come from/. users
1 comes from his mother.
Priceless: having a non-Windows server that can handle the load...
Damn it, I knew this was going to happen the first time I saw that word in a major article.
So, here's a paranoid theory for you - maybe that's exactly why it appeared in the article? To deliberately cause such confusion so that it becomes easier to avoid having hardcopies that can be hand-counted to verify that the electronic vote was honest?
Assuming you have some kind of Unix system handy - pop up a couple of windows. In the first window:
mknod named_pipe p
while true
do
echo "hello world" > named_pipe
echo "message sent"
sleep 1
done
In the second window, enter:
cat named_pipe
You should just get a single "hello world", and in the first window you'll see "message sent" as confirmation that it finished sending. The sleep is important - I just tried it out and without the sleep I was getting "hello world" 241 times... Obviously the "hello world" line could be any program that produces output, and the whole while loop could be rewritten in Perl, PHP, C, etc.
You'll probably want to make the script/program start up when the system boots, otherwise the finger daemon may hang waiting for the.plan pipe to be written to, if someone fingers you while the script isn't running.
Hmmm. That was about 20 years ago, but as I remember it... Among other things, the finger program mainly opens the.plan file for reading, reads the contents, then closes it again. A named pipe is a FIFO that will block a reader (or writer) until something is written (or read).
So, create the named pipe in your home directory:
1) mknod.plan p
Write something to the pipe:
2) echo "something witty goes here" >.plan
in another window, cat the pipe:
3) cat.plan
You'll see that the echo doesn't complete until the pipe is read. The converse is true - the cat won't complete until the echo writes to the pipe.
All you have to do now is set up a script that loops around sending the output of/usr/games/fortune to the.plan file. The finger daemon will happily read it out whenever someone fingers you.
I think part of the attraction of *logs is that other people can comment on what's written, assuming that's enabled, which it would need to be for a project log. The log is a living document built out of contributions from all the members. That would be tricky to do with a.plan file.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not, but I bet he could find them in a standard subroutine library if he needed them.
The article isn't specific about what the mail server is, unfortunately, so we don't know if we have reason to blame Microsoft... :)
So any company dealing with state officials should print out each email and "file" it by sending it to the official's office with a note: "Hey y'all, here's that record you want to keep forever. Look after it yourself."
Just print the damn things out and file them. Anyone who wants to subpoena them had better have a fleet of trucks and hundreds of spare staff...
You have to weigh the risks, though. Peru took that study to heart and stopped chlorinating their tap water, thereby saving an estimated 180 people out of a population of 18,000,000. The result? 600,000 cases of cholera with 4,000 deaths. It's not limited to Peru, either. The epidemic spread through Latin America and in a 6 year period there were more than 1.3 million cases and over 11,000 deaths.
IMHO, why would anyone bother using spam?? Just create a web page with the clandestine message buried in the html. Suppose the hypothetical operative had a one-time pad of page edits to watch for - say, a form tag on a given page changing from "method=post" to "method=POST". That change on one page could mean "attack on Tuesday", on another "kill the second person on your list", or on another "run away, your cover has been blown". And more complex instructions could indeed be embedded in images, or split between pages.
The leaders wouldn't even have to host their own web pages - they could use one (or several) of the web communities (FortuneCity, AngelFire, etc) or a blog site like LiveJournal. Or put their own server online just long enough for Google to index and mirror it...
The two NAT routers I have experience of (Speedstream, Linksys) both had port-forwarding turned off when I first saw them.
I suspect the reply would be something along the lines of:
No, it doesn't have to make sense to the mythical "man in the street", just so long as it makes sense to the lawyers...
And that right there is a major contributor to Windows instability - making every new update backwards-compatible with previous versions. Granted, Microsoft pretty much *had* to do it so that legacy apps would still work, but they've still fucked themselves over with it.
Wise or not, it looks like those guys won't be flying anywhere anytime soon. According to the artcle, they charged Clark with a single count of interfering with a communications system used for the national defense, which will almost certainly cause him to be tagged as a terrorist...
No, Shatner could just show up as a homeless old drunk living under a bridge, or something... Or as his own great-great-grandfather - after all, the young James T Kirk would the bear a stunningly good family resemblance. :)
Snails too. I guess I thought horse-meat was a touch too normal...
Umm, I think it was something to do with evaluating gasification of coal as an alternative to natural gas. He was working as an industrial chemist for British Gas at the time, but last I heard he was somewhere in Africa doing missionary work. His work may be patented or "trade-secreted" for all I know...
I believe the meat was turned into dog-food. That may not be true in France - I believe I remember being told by a friend that she had seen horse-steak on a French menu. I suppose it *could* have just been a mis-translation, though
Isn't that what the recent "male enhancement" ads on TV are all about? If so, it *must* be true - after all, it's on TV!! :)
Mmmm, lasers at night - reminds me of a guy I used to know who, for a while, had to work evenings because he was igniting balloons full of gas in the parking lot and taking holograms of the fireballs... Serious research, apparently... I should be so lucky. :)
And in this particular case, he's exposing Ron Brown as incompetent to write a book on the history of Unix.
In this particular case, Mr Brown was saying that 500 times $100 was "close to $1million" when referring to the losses that AST incurred due to potential loss of sales of his Operating Systems book, on the assumption that Linus "stole" Minix and gave it to the world as Linux.
Priceless: having a non-Windows server that can handle the load...
...as long as you keep a careful eye on the clouds, because if they suddenly disperse, you'll be focussing daylight on your receiver...
So, here's a paranoid theory for you - maybe that's exactly why it appeared in the article? To deliberately cause such confusion so that it becomes easier to avoid having hardcopies that can be hand-counted to verify that the electronic vote was honest?
Preferably somewhere offshore...
mknod named_pipe p
while true
do
echo "hello world" > named_pipe
echo "message sent"
sleep 1
done
In the second window, enter:
cat named_pipe
You should just get a single "hello world", and in the first window you'll see "message sent" as confirmation that it finished sending. The sleep is important - I just tried it out and without the sleep I was getting "hello world" 241 times... Obviously the "hello world" line could be any program that produces output, and the whole while loop could be rewritten in Perl, PHP, C, etc.
You'll probably want to make the script/program start up when the system boots, otherwise the finger daemon may hang waiting for the .plan pipe to be written to, if someone fingers you while the script isn't running.
So, create the named pipe in your home directory:
1) mknod .plan p
Write something to the pipe:
2) echo "something witty goes here" > .plan
in another window, cat the pipe:
3) cat .plan
You'll see that the echo doesn't complete until the pipe is read. The converse is true - the cat won't complete until the echo writes to the pipe.
All you have to do now is set up a script that loops around sending the output of /usr/games/fortune to the .plan file. The finger daemon will happily read it out whenever someone fingers you.
I think part of the attraction of *logs is that other people can comment on what's written, assuming that's enabled, which it would need to be for a project log. The log is a living document built out of contributions from all the members. That would be tricky to do with a .plan file.