will be Israeli. They've been infiltrating this sort of government program everywhere. At one point an Israeli company was in charge of the wiretapping software for the FBI and other US government agencies - until they got caught selling wiretap info to drug gangs in LA. The FBI threw a fit and now somebody else in charge of CALEA hardware.
Israel is a major supplier of security products to the world - because they decided decades ago that the best way to spy on the world is to be the world's supplier of anti-spying and spying gear. Many, if not most, of the Israeli security companies are funded by and have direct ties to the IDF and the Mossad.
And I download that here on the West Coast about the same time that it's scheduled to show - or even earlier - since somebody back east posted it earlier in the evening.
I'm sort of half and half. I collect mountains of ebooks from alt.binaries.ebooks.technical (currently close to 84GB). I probably have fifty thousand dollars worth of stuff. Ninety nine percent of it I will never read, because who has the time? BUT it's there as a reference,too. If I need to know something in more depth than I can get with a quick Google, I've got my huge library. And I have a reading list of the most important stuff that I do need to read. I also capture tons of Web pages with information about the subjects I'm interested in.
OTOH, I also download a lot of interview videos of various hot babes off the various talk shows (I should point out I don't have a TV or cable although Comcast is in the building). And most of them I haven't listened to more than once, either. I also download tons of babe photos - but there at least the best end up in my wallpaper rotator - and I've had vague notions of setting up my own ad-supported babe blog someday based on that collection (like the world needs another one).
And of course I have a collection of MP3's and music videos, most of which, other than my top fifty or so favorites, I don't listen to at any given time.
All of these are cheap hobbies - except in terms of time. But they also provide entertainment and information. Periodically I do watch or use downloaded stuff - it's just usually a small percentage of what I've downloaded over time.
And since my current system has a max of a terabyte of HD with about 350GB+ free I don't expect to have much more than that for some time to come.
Pure quantity doesn't interest me - quality is important, too. For instance, some people download any crappy photo of their favorite babes. I only collect larger HQ shots and periodically weed out the less quality stuff. That keeps the collection more manageable and the quality up.
HijackThis was a critical tool for anti-spyware work. Every tech who knows anything has it in his anti-spyware toolbox. It was dangerous for end users to use it because it showed everything that was hooked into IE. The usual advice was run it and post the results on the site for others to analyze. Generally I found it not difficult to tell what was the crap to be removed.
The important thing about the site was the forums. If you ran across some spyware that was resistant to the usual utilities like Ad-Aware, you had to go there because somebody would have seen it already, would have investigated it, and probably would have produced customized instructions and scripts that would remove it.
That site was really important for techs doing home user computer support. Home users, unlike most business users, are known to run up to thousands of spyware on their machines. I've personally removed over 1200 spyware from one machine. Usually ninety percent of it is removed in the first couple passes of two of the usual anti-spyware tools. But the rest is usually a bear to remove unless you know exactly where the files and Registry keys are. That's where CastleCops and the other sites come in - they tell you exactly how to get rid of the worst stuff.
CastleCops will be missed. Hopefully someone else will restart it elsewhere.
somebody want to mention what Perens site used to be about? Something OTHER than trolling, I assume was the original intention?
Given that Perens was one of the primary instigators of what I refer to as "Novell trolling", over the Novell/Microsoft deal, I'm not sure he has any business complaining about trolls.
Took about two seconds for the morons to come out
on
openSUSE Launches 11.1
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But then that's usually the case for/.
OpenSUSE is a good Linux distro - one of the top five best, and probably the best. I have 10.3 on my old machine and just installed 11.0 on my new machine. Only complaint I have is now I have to consider whether to upgrade to 11.1. As usual, I'll probably hold off for a couple months to let the bugs get fixed. And I won't touch KDE 4.x until it's at 4.2 at least - too many people complaining about bugs for me to consider using it, although 4.1 is allegedly stable for many people.
Once again, I said when it occurred that Novell's deal with Microsoft was irrelevant for Linux and FOSS in general except to a bunch of FSF psychos and that has proven to be the case. Only lames with no clue continue to bring it up every time Novell is mentioned.
...going to stop coding fucking buffer overflows and assorted other common software flaws? It's fucking 2009. Why is this shit still happening? Even on Linux I get several security bug patches a week.
And now after Windows XP has been out for HOW FUCKING LONG, Microsoft gets to issue TWENTY-EIGHT fucking fixes in one month - and at that, manages to miss one or two more?
Fucking pathetic.
You programmers better go back to school and start figuring out how to write code that doesn't fucking suck!
I once worked on a machine with 40K of core - REAL magnetic cores! - where you had to toggle the machine code - which was in ASCII! - into the machine from a front panel. This was an RCA 301 from back in the '60's that an idiot friend of mine had installed in the late '70's to run his father's department store. The box was THIRTY THOUSAND POUNDS of hardware. The flooring had to be reinforced to hold it. The wiring was a rat's nest. It used nine tape drives and actually had a COBOL compiler that required hours of multipass compilation to compile a program with a couple thousand lines in it.
There was a hard drive that never worked - it held 10MB, the disk was about three feet wide, and it took a 30HP motor to spin it.
Data input was via punch cards, until we got a card-to-tape input device.
What will Obama do with the prisoners? Answer: turn them over to military prisons in the US - where they'll get the exact same treatment they got in Guantanamo.
Or he'll turn them over to the US Bureau of Prisons - where they'll get the exact same treatment they got in Guantanamo - just like US prisoners do.
Where do you think all these brutal methods were developed - in US prisons. Most of the people involved in the Iraq Abu Ghraib abuses were US correctional officers. The Iraqi prison system was developed by correctional officials from states with the worst abuses in the state prison systems.
Microsoft will even pay for the fiber optic cable if the NSA will share the intel with them, so they can rip their customers off even more than they do.
They already let the NSA try to break Vista when it was being developed - meaning that the NSA probably found ten ways to break into Vista machines, then shared seven of them with Microsoft and kept the other three to themselves.
So in other words, this guy is concerned that somebody steals his USB drive, decrypts the passwords in/etc/passwd and/etc/shadow and then does what? Find the key for his encrypted files? Which he conveniently stored on the USB drive and used a weak password so somebody COULD crack it?
Is this guy a member of Al Qaeda or being otherwise actively hunted by the CIA, FBI, DIA, MI6, Interpol, and the Mossad? Or is he a child molester with kiddie porn on his USB drive? The Treasurer of AIG?
What level of paranoia are we talking about here?
Here's the bottom line - if you have that kind of critical sensitive data on a USB drive, you're an idiot, not just a paranoid.
How many cases in this year alone have we seen of people losing critical sensitive data on USB drives?
If you can't afford to lose it or have somebody see it, don't put it there. It's that simple.
"Military intelligence" is a known oxymoron. So is "military security."
Dick Marcinko and his RED CELL SEAL Team proved that years ago. They penetrated US Navy nuclear sub bases, Naval Intelligence HQ, US embassies around the world, Air Force One, and got several SEALS with several pounds of C4 within twenty yards of the President's cottage at Camp David.
There is no such think as "military security". Putting these numbnuts in charge of the Internet would be a disaster.
and get all this today: "all of the passion, intrigue, political backbiting and family conflict in television's first science fiction family saga".
In "Terminator", you've got a half-crazed mother, a rebellious teenager, a scheming uncle from the future - and a female robot who wants to seduce the teenager. Currently, you also have said teenager running around with a girl who happens to be a plant being run by a rogue Resistance fighter from the future who's trying to off the female robot and who's screwing the uncle. Bad news coming down! Somebody's gonna die!
Well, I'm a Linux guy myself, so I understand that. But given the improvement in reliability and productivity, a lot of people see Macs as better than Windows - and it is. Actually I see Mac software as a worse lock-in than Windows software, worse even than the hardware lock-in Macs represent. At least Macs are now using Intel hardware.
Using Final Cut Pro is little better than using Adobe Premiere from the point of view of lock-in - neither one runs on more than one platform. But Final Cut Pro is the better tool for the client based on what it runs on and its abilities, so they're using it.
Presumably she's more comfortable with Windows in terms of QuickBooks, while using the Mac apps for everything else. I don't know what else she might be running that needs Windows, QuickBooks is her main tool.
One of my clients just told me this week that four of their people, who were on my maintenance contract for Windows support, would be shifted to Mac laptops. Two other staff members were shifted earlier, and they are happy with their systems after having had problems with Vista and XP. The staff members who were shifted basically don't do much beyond email and Web work, so they don't really need a lot of Windows software. One of the two earlier shifted staff members is running Parallels on her Mac to deal with QuickBooks. This company will probably shift several more people in the new future.
One of my other clients, which does digital media conversion, has brought in a Mac server-grade system to handle some of their video editing which was bogging down their Windows XP workstations.
So, yes, it's happening. The dam is breaking and people are getting fed up with Windows to the degree that they can afford to (i.e., software lock-in.)
Israel has determined that the best way to spy on the world is to be the country that produces all the spy equipment used by the rest of the world.
They've been involved in developing the CALEA wiretapping equipment used by the FBI - until the FBI shit a brick when they found Israelis selling wiretap info to drug gangs in Los Angeles. Factions of the FBI also have complained that Israeli employees of the companies involved had too much access to the systems. So I believe the Israeli companies were cut out of the loop. However, you also don't know who is involved in what - many US companies deploying this sort of thing, if you look close, have an Israeli on their Board of Directors or executive staff, or are subsidiaries of Israeli companies, or funded by Israeli investment companies.
Many of these Israeli companies in turn are funded by either the Mossad or the Israeli Defense Force under specific programs designed to finance high-tech startups with intelligence or military value. Do a Google on this subject and see for yourself.
This sort of tech would be just what Israel needs to basically spy on every human being going through an airport anywhere in the world. Depending on the software - which you can bloody well bet is NOT open source! - they will be able to identify and track specific people everywhere - whether they are "terrorists" or not.
As for the basic uses for which it is supposed to be designed, this is on a par with lie detection equipment - it's pseudoscience. The number of false positives will head to infinity.
Slashdot Mirror
will be Israeli. They've been infiltrating this sort of government program everywhere. At one point an Israeli company was in charge of the wiretapping software for the FBI and other US government agencies - until they got caught selling wiretap info to drug gangs in LA. The FBI threw a fit and now somebody else in charge of CALEA hardware.
Israel is a major supplier of security products to the world - because they decided decades ago that the best way to spy on the world is to be the world's supplier of anti-spying and spying gear. Many, if not most, of the Israeli security companies are funded by and have direct ties to the IDF and the Mossad.
And I download that here on the West Coast about the same time that it's scheduled to show - or even earlier - since somebody back east posted it earlier in the evening.
Television the way it should be!
I'm getting really tired of Web sites that post articles covering many pages and provide no PDF download or single page view.
No, I'm not buying anything off your ads anyway, so give me the goddamn PDF!
to detect Terminators instead of using dogs...
Call John Connor.
Numbnuts.
for the longest run-on incomprehensible sentence I've ever read here or anywhere else.
Any of you /.'ers actually ever had a class in grammar?
I'm sort of half and half. I collect mountains of ebooks from alt.binaries.ebooks.technical (currently close to 84GB). I probably have fifty thousand dollars worth of stuff. Ninety nine percent of it I will never read, because who has the time? BUT it's there as a reference,too. If I need to know something in more depth than I can get with a quick Google, I've got my huge library. And I have a reading list of the most important stuff that I do need to read. I also capture tons of Web pages with information about the subjects I'm interested in.
OTOH, I also download a lot of interview videos of various hot babes off the various talk shows (I should point out I don't have a TV or cable although Comcast is in the building). And most of them I haven't listened to more than once, either. I also download tons of babe photos - but there at least the best end up in my wallpaper rotator - and I've had vague notions of setting up my own ad-supported babe blog someday based on that collection (like the world needs another one).
And of course I have a collection of MP3's and music videos, most of which, other than my top fifty or so favorites, I don't listen to at any given time.
All of these are cheap hobbies - except in terms of time. But they also provide entertainment and information. Periodically I do watch or use downloaded stuff - it's just usually a small percentage of what I've downloaded over time.
And since my current system has a max of a terabyte of HD with about 350GB+ free I don't expect to have much more than that for some time to come.
Pure quantity doesn't interest me - quality is important, too. For instance, some people download any crappy photo of their favorite babes. I only collect larger HQ shots and periodically weed out the less quality stuff. That keeps the collection more manageable and the quality up.
HijackThis was a critical tool for anti-spyware work. Every tech who knows anything has it in his anti-spyware toolbox. It was dangerous for end users to use it because it showed everything that was hooked into IE. The usual advice was run it and post the results on the site for others to analyze. Generally I found it not difficult to tell what was the crap to be removed.
The important thing about the site was the forums. If you ran across some spyware that was resistant to the usual utilities like Ad-Aware, you had to go there because somebody would have seen it already, would have investigated it, and probably would have produced customized instructions and scripts that would remove it.
That site was really important for techs doing home user computer support. Home users, unlike most business users, are known to run up to thousands of spyware on their machines. I've personally removed over 1200 spyware from one machine. Usually ninety percent of it is removed in the first couple passes of two of the usual anti-spyware tools. But the rest is usually a bear to remove unless you know exactly where the files and Registry keys are. That's where CastleCops and the other sites come in - they tell you exactly how to get rid of the worst stuff.
CastleCops will be missed. Hopefully someone else will restart it elsewhere.
I hear Ballmer is going to marry Jenna Jameson - or maybe just throw chairs at her.
somebody want to mention what Perens site used to be about? Something OTHER than trolling, I assume was the original intention?
Given that Perens was one of the primary instigators of what I refer to as "Novell trolling", over the Novell/Microsoft deal, I'm not sure he has any business complaining about trolls.
But then that's usually the case for /.
OpenSUSE is a good Linux distro - one of the top five best, and probably the best. I have 10.3 on my old machine and just installed 11.0 on my new machine. Only complaint I have is now I have to consider whether to upgrade to 11.1. As usual, I'll probably hold off for a couple months to let the bugs get fixed. And I won't touch KDE 4.x until it's at 4.2 at least - too many people complaining about bugs for me to consider using it, although 4.1 is allegedly stable for many people.
Once again, I said when it occurred that Novell's deal with Microsoft was irrelevant for Linux and FOSS in general except to a bunch of FSF psychos and that has proven to be the case. Only lames with no clue continue to bring it up every time Novell is mentioned.
What the hell just happened to /.'s comment page?
I've got a tiny block to write in!
Is /. fucking around with the interface again or is this another example of Mozilla's piss-ant QA for Firefox 3.0.4 running on openSUSE 11.0?
I see all the asshole programmers on /. decided to moderate this as flamebait, instead of taking the hint.
Read my lips: Your software is shit.
...going to stop coding fucking buffer overflows and assorted other common software flaws? It's fucking 2009. Why is this shit still happening? Even on Linux I get several security bug patches a week.
And now after Windows XP has been out for HOW FUCKING LONG, Microsoft gets to issue TWENTY-EIGHT fucking fixes in one month - and at that, manages to miss one or two more?
Fucking pathetic.
You programmers better go back to school and start figuring out how to write code that doesn't fucking suck!
I once worked on a machine with 40K of core - REAL magnetic cores! - where you had to toggle the machine code - which was in ASCII! - into the machine from a front panel. This was an RCA 301 from back in the '60's that an idiot friend of mine had installed in the late '70's to run his father's department store. The box was THIRTY THOUSAND POUNDS of hardware. The flooring had to be reinforced to hold it. The wiring was a rat's nest. It used nine tape drives and actually had a COBOL compiler that required hours of multipass compilation to compile a program with a couple thousand lines in it.
There was a hard drive that never worked - it held 10MB, the disk was about three feet wide, and it took a 30HP motor to spin it.
Data input was via punch cards, until we got a card-to-tape input device.
My advice: don't try any of this at home.
What will Obama do with the prisoners? Answer: turn them over to military prisons in the US - where they'll get the exact same treatment they got in Guantanamo.
Or he'll turn them over to the US Bureau of Prisons - where they'll get the exact same treatment they got in Guantanamo - just like US prisoners do.
Where do you think all these brutal methods were developed - in US prisons. Most of the people involved in the Iraq Abu Ghraib abuses were US correctional officers. The Iraqi prison system was developed by correctional officials from states with the worst abuses in the state prison systems.
Microsoft will even pay for the fiber optic cable if the NSA will share the intel with them, so they can rip their customers off even more than they do.
They already let the NSA try to break Vista when it was being developed - meaning that the NSA probably found ten ways to break into Vista machines, then shared seven of them with Microsoft and kept the other three to themselves.
If you use Vista, you're wide open to the NSA.
So in other words, this guy is concerned that somebody steals his USB drive, decrypts the passwords in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow and then does what? Find the key for his encrypted files? Which he conveniently stored on the USB drive and used a weak password so somebody COULD crack it?
Is this guy a member of Al Qaeda or being otherwise actively hunted by the CIA, FBI, DIA, MI6, Interpol, and the Mossad? Or is he a child molester with kiddie porn on his USB drive? The Treasurer of AIG?
What level of paranoia are we talking about here?
Here's the bottom line - if you have that kind of critical sensitive data on a USB drive, you're an idiot, not just a paranoid.
How many cases in this year alone have we seen of people losing critical sensitive data on USB drives?
If you can't afford to lose it or have somebody see it, don't put it there. It's that simple.
"Military intelligence" is a known oxymoron. So is "military security."
Dick Marcinko and his RED CELL SEAL Team proved that years ago. They penetrated US Navy nuclear sub bases, Naval Intelligence HQ, US embassies around the world, Air Force One, and got several SEALS with several pounds of C4 within twenty yards of the President's cottage at Camp David.
There is no such think as "military security". Putting these numbnuts in charge of the Internet would be a disaster.
and get all this today: "all of the passion, intrigue, political backbiting and family conflict in television's first science fiction family saga".
In "Terminator", you've got a half-crazed mother, a rebellious teenager, a scheming uncle from the future - and a female robot who wants to seduce the teenager. Currently, you also have said teenager running around with a girl who happens to be a plant being run by a rogue Resistance fighter from the future who's trying to off the female robot and who's screwing the uncle. Bad news coming down! Somebody's gonna die!
Can't beat that for fun.
Well, I'm a Linux guy myself, so I understand that. But given the improvement in reliability and productivity, a lot of people see Macs as better than Windows - and it is. Actually I see Mac software as a worse lock-in than Windows software, worse even than the hardware lock-in Macs represent. At least Macs are now using Intel hardware.
Using Final Cut Pro is little better than using Adobe Premiere from the point of view of lock-in - neither one runs on more than one platform. But Final Cut Pro is the better tool for the client based on what it runs on and its abilities, so they're using it.
Presumably she's more comfortable with Windows in terms of QuickBooks, while using the Mac apps for everything else. I don't know what else she might be running that needs Windows, QuickBooks is her main tool.
No server - they're just using the higher powered Mac for the video editing power for Final Cut Pro.
One of my clients just told me this week that four of their people, who were on my maintenance contract for Windows support, would be shifted to Mac laptops. Two other staff members were shifted earlier, and they are happy with their systems after having had problems with Vista and XP. The staff members who were shifted basically don't do much beyond email and Web work, so they don't really need a lot of Windows software. One of the two earlier shifted staff members is running Parallels on her Mac to deal with QuickBooks. This company will probably shift several more people in the new future.
One of my other clients, which does digital media conversion, has brought in a Mac server-grade system to handle some of their video editing which was bogging down their Windows XP workstations.
So, yes, it's happening. The dam is breaking and people are getting fed up with Windows to the degree that they can afford to (i.e., software lock-in.)
Israel has determined that the best way to spy on the world is to be the country that produces all the spy equipment used by the rest of the world.
They've been involved in developing the CALEA wiretapping equipment used by the FBI - until the FBI shit a brick when they found Israelis selling wiretap info to drug gangs in Los Angeles. Factions of the FBI also have complained that Israeli employees of the companies involved had too much access to the systems. So I believe the Israeli companies were cut out of the loop. However, you also don't know who is involved in what - many US companies deploying this sort of thing, if you look close, have an Israeli on their Board of Directors or executive staff, or are subsidiaries of Israeli companies, or funded by Israeli investment companies.
Many of these Israeli companies in turn are funded by either the Mossad or the Israeli Defense Force under specific programs designed to finance high-tech startups with intelligence or military value. Do a Google on this subject and see for yourself.
This sort of tech would be just what Israel needs to basically spy on every human being going through an airport anywhere in the world. Depending on the software - which you can bloody well bet is NOT open source! - they will be able to identify and track specific people everywhere - whether they are "terrorists" or not.
As for the basic uses for which it is supposed to be designed, this is on a par with lie detection equipment - it's pseudoscience. The number of false positives will head to infinity.
And you thought metal detectors were bad!