Stranger in a strange land - It should be compulsory reading for all bigots...
Q.
Always request holidays BEFORE you quit.
on
How Were You Fired?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
After a few years keeping an astonishingly crap company afloat (for little money and less respect), I decided I had had enough. I selected my replacement from the underlings and set about training him up so that I could leave with a clear conscience (I hate having ethics - it complicates issues remarkably).
Once my replacement was adequately trained I applied for my holidays to begin the following week. On friday afternoon I handed them my resignation and walked out the door (to cries of "you can't do this to us!").
Funnily enough, one of the other employee tried to emulate my technique but did it the wrong way around (hand in resignation, then request holidays for the remaining notifivation period). Strangely they didn't grant her holiday request.:)
Of course I still had to serve them documents explaining what laws they were in breach of when they tried to screw me out of the sick pay/time-in-leiu and the penalties if I had to sic the government on them. Very typical of the scams they played.
Their response to my leaving was to fire half of the remaining staff... I felt bad about that for some time. They also demoted one of their most loyal employees to cover the gap (or at least ensure the directors wouldn't be bothered by customers) and he was so shocked that they would repay him in this way that he quit, taking about half of the companies servers with him (they were his).
Ironically the replacement I trained and I have remained good friends and our kids play together most weeks. He has just resigned from the same company with the difference that they had not let him hire/train a replacement.
Oh and they have just released an enormous update to their software. They are soooo fucked....
I love my current job and the people I work with. They respect me and I respect them. It's amazing what a difference it makes.
Just wait a few years and humility will be yours for the taking.:)
You are implying that it is a direct consequence of your own actions that lead to your unemployment. Unfortunately the real world isn't that nice: Companies go bust, Projects are killed, and decisions are made by those least qualified to make them.
Yes, I was desperate enough to work for less than McDonalds junior wages, programming stock management systems on oracle for a national WAN, purely so I could finish my degree... but that was when I was a single uni student without a responsibility in the world.
As for shareware, just ask some of the shareware companies out there how they are going...
You're correct on which defcon, but I'd like to remind you that mudge and *hobbit* stood up there together. I was saddened to see how quickly mudge compromised his principles for cash. I have nothing but respect for *hobbit*, who has retained his.
You may be right here. The copy I found referenced Hobbit only as the author, hence my assumption.
It was more than just a bit of internal discontent. I'd say it was a basic separation into two camps; the old school hackers, and the group that felt it would be good to take advantage of the notoriety, and cash in. The original Back Orifice product was written by cult of the dead cow, and only ran on windows 95/98. It was a (soon to be) member of the l0pht that rewrote it to work on win NT. L0phtcrack was not the only thing interesting that came out of that group. Wish I'd made a mirror of the old site. There was plenty of MS bashing.
I always wondered what happened... I was too busy at the time to stay in the scene and by time I was snooping around again things had already fragmented. As the other reply says a mirror is available.
Yeah, I was perfectly aware that Weld Pond == Chris Wysopal. The comment was expressing my sadness at just how much he's changed. Thanks for the link to the Register, I'd forgotten that article. That grouping never came off, BTW, but there's still the pay early version of CERT that doesn't much make me happy.
Yeah I know that you are aware that Chris is Weld. I just felt it was a bit confusing for newbies with the mixed real names and monikers.:)
I know how you feel about CERT. My advice would be to get a sympathetic ear in an intelligence agency.... easier said than done however.
Ensure it is USB2.0 and you will have more than enough speed and up to 1GB (last I looked) available per stick.
They don't suffer from the rewrite limitations of the CF cards.
The only difficulty I have had was creating a system that adequately secured the USB stick, as it was not meant to be portable/stealable like my usual USB key. In the end I mounted it internally using an additional internal USB port and a hacked cable mount.
I can't say that I am not horrified by this shortcut (optimisation - it's a matter of perspective I guess). I have not developed any X games, but I had assumed that Microsoft would be smart enough to recognise the fact that one of the greatest selling powers of the PS2 was its (mostly) backwards compatability.
Your games are now basically incompatible with the X2 unless the emulation layer adequately supports the timing resolution hack or the equivalent of the Turbo boxes processor speed switch...
It's a sad state of affairs, but not surprising. It's been a long time since the "CIFS is caca" paper,
CIFS=Common Internet File System. This is a reference to the security flaws highlighted by Hobbit (from memory it was defcon 5, back in 1997) in the microsoft SMB (windows networking) products. A copy is still available from here.
and I lost respect for the l0pht back when *hobbit* was edged out. Mudge became "Dr. Mudge" (as if), and they all started running after the limelight. Sad, really. The Hacker News Network is long gone, and mudge is Pieter. It sucks for Dan, but it's just more of the same for the rest of us.
L0pht Heavy Industries (creaters of the L0phtcrack suite Pwdump that allowed brute force cracking of windows NT user/passes) went though a period of internal discontent. I cannot provide any details on this. Basically the author seems to be trying to highlight the corporate yes-men culture that has permeated this sector and presumably led to this dismissal for speaking the obvious but unapproved "truth".
It takes a lot of nerve for Chris Wysopal to issue his little statement. Weld Pond would never have said something like that. Man, it's been a long path from BO2K to appeasing Microsoft. What a long, strange trip it's been. Sigh.
I have to admit this part has me stumped. I assume he means that Chris Wysopal of @stake would answer differently to Weld Pond of Lopht. Since they are one and the same person I assume he means to highlight the change over time in Chris's opinions/loyalties... not really surprising in the context of articles like this (para. headed Who's Who).
It has indeed been a long and strange trip... no end in sight yet.
You forgot that he is also the humourless intellectual pygmy who legislated that no porn can be hosted from australia - hence other countried get the profits...
This doesn't actually change anything for the public except to ensure that absolutely all of the revenue generated by these sites is directed offshore... nice one...
Thats why I modded my heuristics to be ip/port anomoly based and take days/weeks (he says vaguely) to time out unless under heavy load. So you need a botnet to scan me effectively.
I update after almost every new nmap function, or at least when I manage to poke a hole.
Next week we discover that healthcare workers keys are infected, then pens, then wallets/purses, then healthcare workers...
Well lets see here, send all the sick to one place, get the same subset of the population to treat them all and wierdly enough you get concentrations in infections (including all these wonderful antibiotic resistant/immune strains we are breeding with our idiotic farming and medical practices... but that's another rant for another day). Especially in and around those brave enough to be on the frontline as it were.
If you aren't sick, stay the hell away from hospitals or you will be.
My partner actually went to high school there, but the one time I went there (her school mate was getting married about 5 years ago) I got chickenpox from the brides kid brother... damn buffets...
I didn't get chickenpox like you presumably had as a kid. I was 22, and I got chickenpox so bad that I was covered inside and out.
After a few days getting rapidly worse, I ended up "drifting off" one evening over dinner while babbling incoherently, so my partner and friends thought they probably better get me to a hospital.
Apparently my lungs were so covered with pox there wasn't a lot left to breathe with. The oxygen kept me alive while the steroids kicked in.
The wierdest part of the whole affair was that it was known to be a very virulent strain of chicken pox and there was a large number of kids with it in the hospital, so I ended up in the Oncology (cancer) ward strangely enough. So I'm delerious, in a room made for death, and all nurses and visitors had to wear large yellow "duck" masks on their faces and sit on seats way over the other side of the room. Kinda makes you clutch at the straws of your sanity...
Apart from that Gympies lovely... oh no it's not, it's a shithole. The 17 pubs in the main street have a cumulative IQ of 23. Which is 3 higher than the number of teeth...
Okay so it's a bit offtopic... but I did live on a macadamia farm near the Queensland border for a while.:)
I still suspect that it was the auto-update of the googlebar that forced me into a new install.
I ended up with a bug such that if IE (fully patched 6) loaded a website that contained the text "javascript" (even as part of a link) it would crash. If you typed javascript into the googlebar, it crashed. If you typed javascript into the address bar, it crashed.
All in all, I got very good at finding sites that ONLY refer to ECMA script and never mention javascript...
No proof of course, but I notice I still haven't installed the google bar after several months...
Q.
Bit of a simplistic article...
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The best example I can think of for comprehension failure with jumbled text is with ordered interdependant phonemes. For instance - "eau", or "ough".
Turhgoh = Through
A topic that does not seem to have had much coverage in this article is the actual iconic visual recognition that our brains appear to use in word recognition.
Obviously each word approximates a patterned rectangle (serif fonts emphasize this further) with occasional outliers (ie. t, y, l, and any other letters that protrude above or below the base rectangle).
People with poor eyesight rely on this fuzzy but fast recognition frequently. In fact there is a classic psych experiment based around displaying a word that iconically is very similar to another word, while simultaneously presenting a context that implies the second word, and asking the subject to record the word. The subject mis-records the word roughly 90% of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Q.
Once my replacement was adequately trained I applied for my holidays to begin the following week. On friday afternoon I handed them my resignation and walked out the door (to cries of "you can't do this to us!").
Funnily enough, one of the other employee tried to emulate my technique but did it the wrong way around (hand in resignation, then request holidays for the remaining notifivation period). Strangely they didn't grant her holiday request. :)
Of course I still had to serve them documents explaining what laws they were in breach of when they tried to screw me out of the sick pay/time-in-leiu and the penalties if I had to sic the government on them. Very typical of the scams they played.
Their response to my leaving was to fire half of the remaining staff... I felt bad about that for some time. They also demoted one of their most loyal employees to cover the gap (or at least ensure the directors wouldn't be bothered by customers) and he was so shocked that they would repay him in this way that he quit, taking about half of the companies servers with him (they were his).
Ironically the replacement I trained and I have remained good friends and our kids play together most weeks. He has just resigned from the same company with the difference that they had not let him hire/train a replacement.
Oh and they have just released an enormous update to their software. They are soooo fucked....
I love my current job and the people I work with. They respect me and I respect them. It's amazing what a difference it makes.
Q.
Seriously though, my upgrade cycle is dictated far more by games than anything else. Despite the fact that I rarely have time to play them...
Q.
Q.
Just wait a few years and humility will be yours for the taking. :)
You are implying that it is a direct consequence of your own actions that lead to your unemployment. Unfortunately the real world isn't that nice: Companies go bust, Projects are killed, and decisions are made by those least qualified to make them.
Yes, I was desperate enough to work for less than McDonalds junior wages, programming stock management systems on oracle for a national WAN, purely so I could finish my degree... but that was when I was a single uni student without a responsibility in the world.
As for shareware, just ask some of the shareware companies out there how they are going...
Q.
Q.
You may be right here. The copy I found referenced Hobbit only as the author, hence my assumption.
It was more than just a bit of internal discontent. I'd say it was a basic separation into two camps; the old school hackers, and the group that felt it would be good to take advantage of the notoriety, and cash in. The original Back Orifice product was written by cult of the dead cow, and only ran on windows 95/98. It was a (soon to be) member of the l0pht that rewrote it to work on win NT. L0phtcrack was not the only thing interesting that came out of that group. Wish I'd made a mirror of the old site. There was plenty of MS bashing.
I always wondered what happened... I was too busy at the time to stay in the scene and by time I was snooping around again things had already fragmented. As the other reply says a mirror is available.
Yeah, I was perfectly aware that Weld Pond == Chris Wysopal. The comment was expressing my sadness at just how much he's changed. Thanks for the link to the Register, I'd forgotten that article. That grouping never came off, BTW, but there's still the pay early version of CERT that doesn't much make me happy.
Yeah I know that you are aware that Chris is Weld. I just felt it was a bit confusing for newbies with the mixed real names and monikers. :)
I know how you feel about CERT. My advice would be to get a sympathetic ear in an intelligence agency.... easier said than done however.
Q.
Ensure it is USB2.0 and you will have more than enough speed and up to 1GB (last I looked) available per stick.
They don't suffer from the rewrite limitations of the CF cards.
The only difficulty I have had was creating a system that adequately secured the USB stick, as it was not meant to be portable/stealable like my usual USB key. In the end I mounted it internally using an additional internal USB port and a hacked cable mount.
Q.
Just what we need. :)
Q.
I can't say that I am not horrified by this shortcut (optimisation - it's a matter of perspective I guess). I have not developed any X games, but I had assumed that Microsoft would be smart enough to recognise the fact that one of the greatest selling powers of the PS2 was its (mostly) backwards compatability.
Your games are now basically incompatible with the X2 unless the emulation layer adequately supports the timing resolution hack or the equivalent of the Turbo boxes processor speed switch...
Just a thought...
Q.
CIFS=Common Internet File System. This is a reference to the security flaws highlighted by Hobbit (from memory it was defcon 5, back in 1997) in the microsoft SMB (windows networking) products. A copy is still available from here.
and I lost respect for the l0pht back when *hobbit* was edged out. Mudge became "Dr. Mudge" (as if), and they all started running after the limelight. Sad, really. The Hacker News Network is long gone, and mudge is Pieter. It sucks for Dan, but it's just more of the same for the rest of us.
L0pht Heavy Industries (creaters of the L0phtcrack suite Pwdump that allowed brute force cracking of windows NT user/passes) went though a period of internal discontent. I cannot provide any details on this. Basically the author seems to be trying to highlight the corporate yes-men culture that has permeated this sector and presumably led to this dismissal for speaking the obvious but unapproved "truth".
It takes a lot of nerve for Chris Wysopal to issue his little statement. Weld Pond would never have said something like that. Man, it's been a long path from BO2K to appeasing Microsoft. What a long, strange trip it's been. Sigh.
I have to admit this part has me stumped. I assume he means that Chris Wysopal of @stake would answer differently to Weld Pond of Lopht. Since they are one and the same person I assume he means to highlight the change over time in Chris's opinions/loyalties... not really surprising in the context of articles like this (para. headed Who's Who).
It has indeed been a long and strange trip... no end in sight yet.
Q.
I posted a commentary on this article and it's inadequacies the first time round... see here
Q.
This doesn't actually change anything for the public except to ensure that absolutely all of the revenue generated by these sites is directed offshore... nice one...
Q.
Do you see the word "paraphrase"? Do you understand the old joke I am referring too? Do not assume others are as stupid as yourself...
For people who get my comedic reference (including the intentional mis-spelling) - I hope they are mildly amused.
You I couldn't care less about, 'tard. Oh and only nine were permanents, the other two were consultants - "Do you see the mis-match here?"
Q. the TrollDoll
NASA = Need Another Nine Advisors?
Q.
Well in Oz we have a 10% Goods and Services Tax (GST) - so technically you would have to give 10% to the government too.
Q.
When I heard about it, it was "room sized". I believe they were aiming for briefcase size, and that was a few years back now.
No idea on the range.
Q.
I update after almost every new nmap function, or at least when I manage to poke a hole.
Keeps the kiddies out...
Q.
A few well placed speaker magnets and you have converted an expensive ad to installation art.
Q.
Well lets see here, send all the sick to one place, get the same subset of the population to treat them all and wierdly enough you get concentrations in infections (including all these wonderful antibiotic resistant/immune strains we are breeding with our idiotic farming and medical practices... but that's another rant for another day). Especially in and around those brave enough to be on the frontline as it were.
If you aren't sick, stay the hell away from hospitals or you will be.
Q.
My partner actually went to high school there, but the one time I went there (her school mate was getting married about 5 years ago) I got chickenpox from the brides kid brother... damn buffets...
I didn't get chickenpox like you presumably had as a kid. I was 22, and I got chickenpox so bad that I was covered inside and out.
After a few days getting rapidly worse, I ended up "drifting off" one evening over dinner while babbling incoherently, so my partner and friends thought they probably better get me to a hospital.
Apparently my lungs were so covered with pox there wasn't a lot left to breathe with. The oxygen kept me alive while the steroids kicked in.
The wierdest part of the whole affair was that it was known to be a very virulent strain of chicken pox and there was a large number of kids with it in the hospital, so I ended up in the Oncology (cancer) ward strangely enough. So I'm delerious, in a room made for death, and all nurses and visitors had to wear large yellow "duck" masks on their faces and sit on seats way over the other side of the room. Kinda makes you clutch at the straws of your sanity...
Apart from that Gympies lovely... oh no it's not, it's a shithole. The 17 pubs in the main street have a cumulative IQ of 23. Which is 3 higher than the number of teeth...
Okay so it's a bit offtopic... but I did live on a macadamia farm near the Queensland border for a while. :)
Q.
Spoil sport... :)
I put a timed block on all ips that port scan me persistantly, I doubt the heuristics will even change. Once it's a distributed scan I'm screwed...
Certainly be useful for the internal audits though.
Q.
Never the less, how about this one?
Tgurohh teh lnoikog gsals
Q.
I ended up with a bug such that if IE (fully patched 6) loaded a website that contained the text "javascript" (even as part of a link) it would crash. If you typed javascript into the googlebar, it crashed. If you typed javascript into the address bar, it crashed.
All in all, I got very good at finding sites that ONLY refer to ECMA script and never mention javascript...
No proof of course, but I notice I still haven't installed the google bar after several months...
Q.
Turhgoh = Through
A topic that does not seem to have had much coverage in this article is the actual iconic visual recognition that our brains appear to use in word recognition.
Obviously each word approximates a patterned rectangle (serif fonts emphasize this further) with occasional outliers (ie. t, y, l, and any other letters that protrude above or below the base rectangle).
People with poor eyesight rely on this fuzzy but fast recognition frequently. In fact there is a classic psych experiment based around displaying a word that iconically is very similar to another word, while simultaneously presenting a context that implies the second word, and asking the subject to record the word. The subject mis-records the word roughly 90% of the time.
Q.