And led to laws against photographing "public officials in the performance of their duty" to try to head off further such incidents.
Are you sure about this? Can you identify such a law? Has a court ruled such a law constitutional?
Not absolutely sure. But a friend of mine was recently collecting information on discriminatory arbitrary denial of CCW permits by police in CA (in violation of both state law and a recent court ruling).
I suggested videotaping the statements and actions of the officers during the person's contact, to head off he-said-she-said arguments in court later. The person in question said that such a law had been recently passed and as a result both video and audio taping were right out.
Given that they were ALREADY fighting ONE constitutional issue there seemed little to be gained by burning resources (and risking jail and the derailment of the main point of the operation) by opening a second front.
This has the potential to have a major impact on politics and law enforcement. It combines two pieces, and puts a tool once reserved to the establishment media in the hands of the general population.
Two pieces of background:
Item 1: The microwave-linked minicam (where the picture was on people's screens before the billyclub finished smashing the lens) made a MAJOR change in news reporting. No longer could a corrupt administration use its police or troops to block coverage of an event by siezing or destroying the camera that had recorded it.
(This first hit - big time - during the protests->police riot->general rioting associated with the Democratic Convention of 1968. The live images of the police brutalizing the protesters and reporters couldn't be blocked by camera-smashing. This turned the general population in mass from a "silent majority" going along with the war to a radicalized population appalled by the government's treatment of the anti-war protesters. It had a major effect on the presidential election and the ending of the Vietnam (un)War.)
Item 2: The amateur videocam footage of the Rodney King beating - taken from nearby - created a simlar outrage against the police involved. (And led to laws against photographing "public officials in the performance of their duty" to try to head off further such incidents. B-( ) But personal videocams and still cameras still suffer from the pre-minicam issue: Destroying or confiscating the camera prevents the distribution of the image. So while such photography has some potential to expose official misconduct, it is still limited.
A personal camera with a WiFi link can dump the image up a hotspot and across the net or to a nearby (and not easily discoverable) digital recording device. Now the image can no longer be suppressed.
Imagine a hundred thousand people armed with such cameras, feeding images to, say, The Drudge Report, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Move On dot Org, politics.slashdot.org, and the rest of the political blogosphere.
In the next crisis this could be a significant step in the rise of the net as a news source and its replacement of the establishment media.
One amounts to putting a charged particle source (beta or alpha) close to, on, within, or sandwitched between one or more large diode junctions (read "solar cell") and using the cascade of electron-hole pairs created by the charged particles for power just like the ones created by absorbing solar photons.
This hack has been around since at least the '60s. (I always wondered why TI didn't put one in the tritium can of their tritium-dial watch.)
The other is a piezoelectric "tuning fork" cantelever with a radioactive source on it, making it "ring" and generate power from recoil. (I've never seen that one before.)
the only thing you have to worry about are rednecks who think it's funny to melt down the batteries and mix them with paint for glow-in-the-dark wallpaper.
What do you have against rural workers of white or mixed white/indian/miscelaneous descent that you insist on characterizing them as stupid?
One last time you innumerate morons: resolution improved quality and does not affect size.
Unfortunately, on the X window system it DOES affect size, since the display is specified in pixels rather than screen area. Finer pixel spacing means a smaller image and attempting to tweak that is not pretty.
That was the most significant advantage of NeWS over X.
In Missouri, the republicans are asking for lists of voters that have requested absentee ballots. Here's one story.
I bet what they're really after is checking whether the voters are real.
The motor-voter law makes it trivial to create an army of phantom voters:
- Go to the DMV (or any of several other government offices) and ask for a few boxes of registration forms "for a voter registration drive". (Yeah, right!)
- Fill them out for imaginary voters at suitable maildrop addresses.
- If the registration form lets you request permanent absentee status, do so. Otherwise request it, or an absentee ballot for this election, when the voter information form comes in the mail.
- Vote your thousands of phantoms any way you want.
But by getting the lists - especially the late entries - and calling them up to "educate voters on how to vote absentee" the party can kill two birds with one stone:
- Impress real voters with how nice they are (possibly giving them a more favorable opinion of the party) and help them get their vote in.
- Detect if a massive fraud is being committed if, for instance, a bunch of absentee voters turn out to be all at a bunch of nonexistant set of apartments in a single-family residence or a storefront office, or using the same post office box and giving empty lots for their residence addresses.
Democrats don't like it? Then they can do the same thing to check whether the Republicans are creating thin-air voters, too. B-)
At the current rate of non-progress, IPv6 will never reach critical mass. IPv6 needs a jumpstart.
IPv6 is getting its jumpstart. From the upcoming mobile IP vendors. They want IPv6 for tracking their phones/modems (for which they can't buy enough IPv4 address space to be confident of not hitting a wall). So they have made it a checkbox on equipment acquisition (i.e. you don't sell 'em a router unless it has IPv6 - period).
Since they're talking equipment purchase totaling into the billions this is NOT something the equipment vendors are ignoring.
Once there's a bunch of endpoints out there that can only be reached by IPv6 (or NAT/tunnel servers bridging to it) there will be a lot of pressure to migrate the rest of the net.
This could lead to incredibly high storage density [cat seek time joke deleted]"
But seriously: Did you notice some of the other related experiments from the same group, listed at the bottom?
One struck me: The inclusion of a single ferromagnetic impurity atom in a semiconductor, with its magnetization state producing a srong and extremely localized effect on the electronic properties of the semiconductor.
This might lead to a RAM where the storage element is a transistor with a single magnetic atom embedded in the "gate" region, turning it on or off depending on the spin of the single magnetizing electron.
Extremely tiny. Extremely fast to read (probably a ballistic-transport FET). Extremely fast to write (electron spin flips REALLY fast). Extremely low power (1/2000 electron volt needed to flip the spin).
And that's not even the most impressive thing in the list.
The IBM research has taken over from bell labs as being one of the best research labs around. It is such a shame bell labs went from being amazing to depressing but that is a different story.
Doubly so since it didn't have to happen.
Bell Labs was originally intended to be a boondoggle, since part of the deal for Bell's original monopoly was that they could set phone rates to make a particular profit (6%?) on every dollar they spent on building the phone system, including research. So they set up a R&D arm that was mandated to spend as much money as possible on research with some vuage connection to telephony, in the expectation of being able to make 6 cents on every dollar spent.
It was a "failure" from the first year: They were PROFITABLE, earning/saving more money from using and licensing the results of the research than they spent on doing it. On the average, basic research pays off big-time (even if you can't tell in advance what any particular project might produce). Example: The transistor.
Unfortunately, after the dissolution of the monopoly, the successor to Bell Labs became infected with the "Harvard Business School" style of short-term milking: Cut R&D (which costs money now and pays off later), creating a temporary boost in the profit figures followed by a collapse. Declare that you're a genius, cash out and move on to the next sucker company, leaving your successors to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.
Fortunately, IBM has learned both of these lessons of Bell Labs, big-time (as well as the Labs' UNIX lesson of how {essentially} giving away source code leads to lots of business for computer companies) and has become a worthy successor.
This is why gold metalazation (initially believed to be nearly ideal due to the difficulty of oxidizing gold) was abandoned near the start of the integrated circuit era, after the effect was discovered when the "purple plague" wiped out most of the high-tech devices - mostly discrete components in military electronics - that used it.
Just looke it up, and it appears I've been confused about the purple plague. Actually it's not electromigration of gold into silicon, but an effect of ultrasonically bonding gold wires to aluminum metalization. This forms several alloys between the gold and the aluminum (one of them purple) and their differential diffusion leads to voids and eventuall failure of the bond.
You know, I've never seen an explanation of why they went to copper interconnects and not silver. Silver is a better conductor, and the material cost doesn't seem significant.
While I don't KNOW, I can speculate:
1) Silver oxidizes (tarnishes) very easily. Silver oxide is NOT such a great conductor. Given the extremely small size of the interconnects, this could lead to chips with EXTREMELY short service lives - like minutes. (Aluminum - copper's predecessor - oxidizes, too, but the oxide has about the same atomic spacing as the metal and is very hard {saphire}, producing a protective armor that stops further oxidization. Copper oxidizes very slowly unless strongly heated.)
2) Even if they could somehow passivate the silver conductors, there's still the question of whether the silver atoms would "electromigrate" into the chip, driven by the electric fields. This is why gold metalazation (initially believed to be nearly ideal due to the difficulty of oxidizing gold) was abandoned near the start of the integrated circuit era, after the effect was discovered when the "purple plague" wiped out most of the high-tech devices - mostly discrete components in military electronics - that used it.
Once again, Microsoft gives the source of one of its major components to the foreign intelligence and information warfare departments of 30 foreign governments, including several whose interests are at odds with the US.
Tinfoil hat? THINK about it. What department in the US has the talent and infrastructure to examine software for security problems, and is charged with, among other things, protecting the US information infrastructure? (drumroll...) The NSA!
They had to SIGN AN AGREEMENT? Since WHEN do the spooks play by the rules? (Remember when the CIA stole that little company's banking application, hotwired it with spyware, undersold it into all the major banks in the world, used the backdoor to trace dictators' (and who knows who else's) funds, and used soverign immunity to kill the suit from the original author?)
Is it just a coincidence that, soon after the source code for the OS was given to the same groups we began to experience a series of worms installing spam forwarders, and keyboard loggers collecting account data for phishing scams, apparently run by the Russian mob (composed mainly of former members of the Red Army)?
Seems to me that Microsoft is just ASKING for a charge of treason, come the next major world conflict.
My immediate reaction was that this was a stupid and deliberate attempt to be shocking or "extreme", dreamt up by some moron in the marketing department at MTV.
I'm prepared to accept the "OOPS!" explanation.
Janet's breast was a tad droopy. (Not bad at all, especially for someone her age, but not fully self-supporting either.)
If the flash had been deliberate, it would have been trivial to design the costume (which WAS custom) to provide the small amount of support required to show it off to best advantage.
Given the extreme attention Janet pays to her appearance (in order both to give her fans a good show and keep her carreer on track), deliberately showing off her breast without that tiny bit of support seems out of character.
Great! Graduate Phi Beta Cappa (summa cum laude, too), run some AI centers and also have excessive experience in Code copyright infringement cases!
And while you're at it:
Be THE consulting expert in THE case where the legal rule defining what constitutes copyright-infringing copying of, or derivation from, a computer program and how to detect it by comparision, are ORIGINGALLY DEFINED and made into legal precedent.
Oops. Too late. You'll need a time machine, too.
(Looks like, when they were "bringing in the big guns", IBM brought in the biggest gun there is.)
That's rubbish. I'd have thrown the barometer off the top of the building, timed it going down, and worked out the height from s~4.9t^2.
And a number of other methods, many involving the destruction of the barometer.
For instance: (With a mercury barometer) take out the meter stick. Level the barometer. Measure its height and its shadow. Measure the building's shadow.
Hang it on a rope, swing as a pendulum, time the oscilations.
(Hang it on a rope, haul it back up, measure the rope. B-) )
I recall working out a dozen or so for a variant of that joke and I'm sure I didn't get them all. (Most of them were more accurate than measuring the pressure, too.)
Read the part on the events of May 17th 2004. This has got to be the coolest troubleshooting situation I've ever heard of.
It would be more impressive if they'd gotten the engine started before the batteries cooled off too much and everything ran down.
But they did get qutie a bit done (installed observability and confirmed the failure mechanism) before the station went dead until spring. Too bad it was too broke to fix in the time available.
Its pretty obvious that Microsoft wants to preserve their right to sue, but I'm surprised that the deal with sun provides an exception. If the two agree that there is a real prospect of Microsoft winning a suit over OpenOffice.org, I would think that Sun would want to be protected and would have held out until Microsoft agreed.
I dunno...
90% of one BILLION dollars is a lot to play chicken over.
If the terms are essentially "This agreement doesn't cover Open Office but does cover everything else" I can easily see Sun (which is a bit strapped for cash) putting Open Office off to another day.
They would only break into a car if it had a bunch of NRA or hunting stickers on it. NRA stickers meant that there was a really good chance that there was a gun somewhere in the car thus making it worth the effort to actually break in.
I take it you lived in a state where concealed and open carry were effectively banned - so your "friends" could count on the guy being disarmed if he happened to come back to his car while they were burgling it.
Aside from the IIS bug, wtf would a DMZ matter? Seriously, we're talking about a worm that spreads via freaking network shares. What are you thinking...that each Windows machine live in its own DMZ? Or maybe you're just talking out of your ass...
Servers on the DMZ provide services to the rest of the net, and thus are hosts that can be attacked through vulnerabilities in their service-providing protocols. This made such servers the likely points of compromise. Putting them on a DMZ that is isolated from the corporate LAN kept such compromises from sniffing the LAN - where inside-the-firewall desktop machines would be exchnging valuable data without further layers of protection. Exploits of compromised servers (and the use of a DMZ to isolate them) have been a problem (and solution) for a LONG time.
Note the past tense.
Attacks on workstations behind the firewalls by email viruses (i.e. trojan-horse attachments to emails including a self-remailing action) have also been with us for a while. Potentially these could (and occasionally did) install keyboard sniffers. But a LAN sniffer payload does not seem to have been common. Perhaps this is because LAN sniffer payloads would typically be directed at a particular target, and so be attached to NON-replicating trojan email directed toward users on the target LAN.
Very recently, worms (propagating software modules that do NOT require human interaction to spread) graduated from a theoretical possibilty to a common scourge. And they have even more recently been adopted by profit-making criminal enterprises - first spammers, then other scammers (such as phishers). So there is plenty of money available to engineer them for more function.
Some recent worms have included keyboard sniffers and filters to reduce the data, detecting and extracting the items of interest (i.e. account numbers and passwords of users of major banking institutions). This represents a breakthrough: Data reduction on the compromised machine, to limit the traffic on the collection sites to a pre-screened pithy dribble.
At that point, general distribution of LAN packet sniffers in worm payloads (rather than directed infection as non-reproducing trojans) becomes a practical matter. The sniffer can use the infected machine to sort out the traffic of interest, rather than flooding the collector with junk (just as the viral keyboard sniffers with filtering can).
But it also becomes desirable to do LAN rather than keyboard sniffing - because with LAN sniffing the traffic of NON-compromised machines can also be sniffed. A Windows machine on a corporate LAN or a personal LAN behind a firewall+NAT appliance becomes a threat to the traffic of Macs, Linux boxes, BSD boxes, and other tougher targets.
So the appearance of a LAN-sniffing worm shortly after the worm explosion and the appearance of keyboard-sniffing, data-reducing viruses is right on the expected evolutionary timetable.
As for having "each Windows machine live in its own DMZ", putting all the windows machines on another DMZ separated from the other internal servers might be a good idea about now.
Further, some of the security solutions currently being deployed amount to monitoring the Windows machines' (or their individual applications') behavior to identify infection, and cutting off the machines (or killing the affected applications) if they appear compromised. This may not amount to putting each one on its own DMZ, but it's getting closer.
And the use of switches, rather than hubs, to connect the machines in a *-base-T LAN, amounts to EXACTLY "each machine [on] its own DMZ", at least as far as sniffing unicast LAN traffic is concerned. It doesn't block active probing - but that's what those other solutions I mentioned are about.
... a new worm installs a network sniffer... it kind of makes me wonder why it took this long.
What's new about that?
Network sniffers installed on compromised machines is the ENTIRE REASON DMZs were invented - so the network sniffer can only sniff the DMZ, not the LAN behind the second packet-filtering router/bridge.
DMZs have been standard practice for over a decade. If there's anything new about this, it's just that it's the first time a worm in the wild has been identified as installing a sniffer.
But that's hardly surprising. The explosion of professionally-engineered worms is quite recent, as is consumer-level deployment of multi-machine LANs behind firewall+NAT appliances. (I'd expect packet-sniffing cracks aimed at businesses to be more targeted rather than worm-style scatterguns, if only to reduce their chances of discovery.) Seems to me the time became ripe JUST NOW for general deployment of a sniffer-installing Microsoft-exploiting worm.
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And led to laws against photographing "public officials in the performance of their duty" to try to head off further such incidents.
Are you sure about this? Can you identify such a law? Has a court ruled such a law constitutional?
Not absolutely sure. But a friend of mine was recently collecting information on discriminatory arbitrary denial of CCW permits by police in CA (in violation of both state law and a recent court ruling).
I suggested videotaping the statements and actions of the officers during the person's contact, to head off he-said-she-said arguments in court later. The person in question said that such a law had been recently passed and as a result both video and audio taping were right out.
Given that they were ALREADY fighting ONE constitutional issue there seemed little to be gained by burning resources (and risking jail and the derailment of the main point of the operation) by opening a second front.
This has the potential to have a major impact on politics and law enforcement. It combines two pieces, and puts a tool once reserved to the establishment media in the hands of the general population.
Two pieces of background:
Item 1: The microwave-linked minicam (where the picture was on people's screens before the billyclub finished smashing the lens) made a MAJOR change in news reporting. No longer could a corrupt administration use its police or troops to block coverage of an event by siezing or destroying the camera that had recorded it.
(This first hit - big time - during the protests->police riot->general rioting associated with the Democratic Convention of 1968. The live images of the police brutalizing the protesters and reporters couldn't be blocked by camera-smashing. This turned the general population in mass from a "silent majority" going along with the war to a radicalized population appalled by the government's treatment of the anti-war protesters. It had a major effect on the presidential election and the ending of the Vietnam (un)War.)
Item 2: The amateur videocam footage of the Rodney King beating - taken from nearby - created a simlar outrage against the police involved. (And led to laws against photographing "public officials in the performance of their duty" to try to head off further such incidents. B-( ) But personal videocams and still cameras still suffer from the pre-minicam issue: Destroying or confiscating the camera prevents the distribution of the image. So while such photography has some potential to expose official misconduct, it is still limited.
A personal camera with a WiFi link can dump the image up a hotspot and across the net or to a nearby (and not easily discoverable) digital recording device. Now the image can no longer be suppressed.
Imagine a hundred thousand people armed with such cameras, feeding images to, say, The Drudge Report, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Move On dot Org, politics.slashdot.org, and the rest of the political blogosphere.
In the next crisis this could be a significant step in the rise of the net as a news source and its replacement of the establishment media.
They described two "new" inventions.
One amounts to putting a charged particle source (beta or alpha) close to, on, within, or sandwitched between one or more large diode junctions (read "solar cell") and using the cascade of electron-hole pairs created by the charged particles for power just like the ones created by absorbing solar photons.
This hack has been around since at least the '60s. (I always wondered why TI didn't put one in the tritium can of their tritium-dial watch.)
The other is a piezoelectric "tuning fork" cantelever with a radioactive source on it, making it "ring" and generate power from recoil. (I've never seen that one before.)
the only thing you have to worry about are rednecks who think it's funny to melt down the batteries and mix them with paint for glow-in-the-dark wallpaper.
What do you have against rural workers of white or mixed white/indian/miscelaneous descent that you insist on characterizing them as stupid?
Simpsons episodes? I though that the accepted unit of measurement for storage devices was "libraries of congress"?
Thanks to the DMCA you can't put the Library of Congress on a digital medium any more.
One last time you innumerate morons: resolution improved quality and does not affect size.
Unfortunately, on the X window system it DOES affect size, since the display is specified in pixels rather than screen area. Finer pixel spacing means a smaller image and attempting to tweak that is not pretty.
That was the most significant advantage of NeWS over X.
In Missouri, the republicans are asking for lists of voters that have requested absentee ballots. Here's one story.
I bet what they're really after is checking whether the voters are real.
The motor-voter law makes it trivial to create an army of phantom voters:
- Go to the DMV (or any of several other government offices) and ask for a few boxes of registration forms "for a voter registration drive". (Yeah, right!)
- Fill them out for imaginary voters at suitable maildrop addresses.
- If the registration form lets you request permanent absentee status, do so. Otherwise request it, or an absentee ballot for this election, when the voter information form comes in the mail.
- Vote your thousands of phantoms any way you want.
But by getting the lists - especially the late entries - and calling them up to "educate voters on how to vote absentee" the party can kill two birds with one stone:
- Impress real voters with how nice they are (possibly giving them a more favorable opinion of the party) and help them get their vote in.
- Detect if a massive fraud is being committed if, for instance, a bunch of absentee voters turn out to be all at a bunch of nonexistant set of apartments in a single-family residence or a storefront office, or using the same post office box and giving empty lots for their residence addresses.
Democrats don't like it? Then they can do the same thing to check whether the Republicans are creating thin-air voters, too. B-)
Well, it said it all when I typed it in the Subject window before posting. B-)
I guess the "Slash" part of Slashdot is still working fine.
Subject line says it all.
At the current rate of non-progress, IPv6 will never reach critical mass. IPv6 needs a jumpstart.
IPv6 is getting its jumpstart. From the upcoming mobile IP vendors. They want IPv6 for tracking their phones/modems (for which they can't buy enough IPv4 address space to be confident of not hitting a wall). So they have made it a checkbox on equipment acquisition (i.e. you don't sell 'em a router unless it has IPv6 - period).
Since they're talking equipment purchase totaling into the billions this is NOT something the equipment vendors are ignoring.
Once there's a bunch of endpoints out there that can only be reached by IPv6 (or NAT/tunnel servers bridging to it) there will be a lot of pressure to migrate the rest of the net.
This could lead to incredibly high storage density [cat seek time joke deleted]"
But seriously: Did you notice some of the other related experiments from the same group, listed at the bottom?
One struck me: The inclusion of a single ferromagnetic impurity atom in a semiconductor, with its magnetization state producing a srong and extremely localized effect on the electronic properties of the semiconductor.
This might lead to a RAM where the storage element is a transistor with a single magnetic atom embedded in the "gate" region, turning it on or off depending on the spin of the single magnetizing electron.
Extremely tiny. Extremely fast to read (probably a ballistic-transport FET). Extremely fast to write (electron spin flips REALLY fast). Extremely low power (1/2000 electron volt needed to flip the spin).
And that's not even the most impressive thing in the list.
The IBM research has taken over from bell labs as being one of the best research labs around. It is such a shame bell labs went from being amazing to depressing but that is a different story.
Doubly so since it didn't have to happen.
Bell Labs was originally intended to be a boondoggle, since part of the deal for Bell's original monopoly was that they could set phone rates to make a particular profit (6%?) on every dollar they spent on building the phone system, including research. So they set up a R&D arm that was mandated to spend as much money as possible on research with some vuage connection to telephony, in the expectation of being able to make 6 cents on every dollar spent.
It was a "failure" from the first year: They were PROFITABLE, earning/saving more money from using and licensing the results of the research than they spent on doing it. On the average, basic research pays off big-time (even if you can't tell in advance what any particular project might produce). Example: The transistor.
Unfortunately, after the dissolution of the monopoly, the successor to Bell Labs became infected with the "Harvard Business School" style of short-term milking: Cut R&D (which costs money now and pays off later), creating a temporary boost in the profit figures followed by a collapse. Declare that you're a genius, cash out and move on to the next sucker company, leaving your successors to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.
Fortunately, IBM has learned both of these lessons of Bell Labs, big-time (as well as the Labs' UNIX lesson of how {essentially} giving away source code leads to lots of business for computer companies) and has become a worthy successor.
This is why gold metalazation (initially believed to be nearly ideal due to the difficulty of oxidizing gold) was abandoned near the start of the integrated circuit era, after the effect was discovered when the "purple plague" wiped out most of the high-tech devices - mostly discrete components in military electronics - that used it.
Just looke it up, and it appears I've been confused about the purple plague. Actually it's not electromigration of gold into silicon, but an effect of ultrasonically bonding gold wires to aluminum metalization. This forms several alloys between the gold and the aluminum (one of them purple) and their differential diffusion leads to voids and eventuall failure of the bond.
You know, I've never seen an explanation of why they went to copper interconnects and not silver. Silver is a better conductor, and the material cost doesn't seem significant.
While I don't KNOW, I can speculate:
1) Silver oxidizes (tarnishes) very easily. Silver oxide is NOT such a great conductor. Given the extremely small size of the interconnects, this could lead to chips with EXTREMELY short service lives - like minutes. (Aluminum - copper's predecessor - oxidizes, too, but the oxide has about the same atomic spacing as the metal and is very hard {saphire}, producing a protective armor that stops further oxidization. Copper oxidizes very slowly unless strongly heated.)
2) Even if they could somehow passivate the silver conductors, there's still the question of whether the silver atoms would "electromigrate" into the chip, driven by the electric fields. This is why gold metalazation (initially believed to be nearly ideal due to the difficulty of oxidizing gold) was abandoned near the start of the integrated circuit era, after the effect was discovered when the "purple plague" wiped out most of the high-tech devices - mostly discrete components in military electronics - that used it.
Once again, Microsoft gives the source of one of its major components to the foreign intelligence and information warfare departments of 30 foreign governments, including several whose interests are at odds with the US.
...) The NSA!
Tinfoil hat? THINK about it. What department in the US has the talent and infrastructure to examine software for security problems, and is charged with, among other things, protecting the US information infrastructure? (drumroll
They had to SIGN AN AGREEMENT? Since WHEN do the spooks play by the rules? (Remember when the CIA stole that little company's banking application, hotwired it with spyware, undersold it into all the major banks in the world, used the backdoor to trace dictators' (and who knows who else's) funds, and used soverign immunity to kill the suit from the original author?)
Is it just a coincidence that, soon after the source code for the OS was given to the same groups we began to experience a series of worms installing spam forwarders, and keyboard loggers collecting account data for phishing scams, apparently run by the Russian mob (composed mainly of former members of the Red Army)?
Seems to me that Microsoft is just ASKING for a charge of treason, come the next major world conflict.
My immediate reaction was that this was a stupid and deliberate attempt to be shocking or "extreme", dreamt up by some moron in the marketing department at MTV.
I'm prepared to accept the "OOPS!" explanation.
Janet's breast was a tad droopy. (Not bad at all, especially for someone her age, but not fully self-supporting either.)
If the flash had been deliberate, it would have been trivial to design the costume (which WAS custom) to provide the small amount of support required to show it off to best advantage.
Given the extreme attention Janet pays to her appearance (in order both to give her fans a good show and keep her carreer on track), deliberately showing off her breast without that tiny bit of support seems out of character.
Great! Graduate Phi Beta Cappa (summa cum laude, too), run some AI centers and also have excessive experience in Code copyright infringement cases!
And while you're at it:
Be THE consulting expert in THE case where the legal rule defining what constitutes copyright-infringing copying of, or derivation from, a computer program and how to detect it by comparision, are ORIGINGALLY DEFINED and made into legal precedent.
Oops. Too late. You'll need a time machine, too.
(Looks like, when they were "bringing in the big guns", IBM brought in the biggest gun there is.)
What we really need to do is figgure out how to make it so that spam isn't profitable. Ever.
That's easy.
Shut off email.
That's rubbish. I'd have thrown the barometer off the top of the building, timed it going down, and worked out the height from s~4.9t^2.
And a number of other methods, many involving the destruction of the barometer.
For instance: (With a mercury barometer) take out the meter stick. Level the barometer. Measure its height and its shadow. Measure the building's shadow.
Hang it on a rope, swing as a pendulum, time the oscilations.
(Hang it on a rope, haul it back up, measure the rope. B-) )
I recall working out a dozen or so for a variant of that joke and I'm sure I didn't get them all. (Most of them were more accurate than measuring the pressure, too.)
Read the part on the events of May 17th 2004. This has got to be the coolest troubleshooting situation I've ever heard of.
It would be more impressive if they'd gotten the engine started before the batteries cooled off too much and everything ran down.
But they did get qutie a bit done (installed observability and confirmed the failure mechanism) before the station went dead until spring. Too bad it was too broke to fix in the time available.
Its pretty obvious that Microsoft wants to preserve their right to sue, but I'm surprised that the deal with sun provides an exception. If the two agree that there is a real prospect of Microsoft winning a suit over OpenOffice.org, I would think that Sun would want to be protected and would have held out until Microsoft agreed.
I dunno...
90% of one BILLION dollars is a lot to play chicken over.
If the terms are essentially "This agreement doesn't cover Open Office but does cover everything else" I can easily see Sun (which is a bit strapped for cash) putting Open Office off to another day.
They would only break into a car if it had a bunch of NRA or hunting stickers on it. NRA stickers meant that there was a really good chance that there was a gun somewhere in the car thus making it worth the effort to actually break in.
I take it you lived in a state where concealed and open carry were effectively banned - so your "friends" could count on the guy being disarmed if he happened to come back to his car while they were burgling it.
Aside from the IIS bug, wtf would a DMZ matter? Seriously, we're talking about a worm that spreads via freaking network shares. What are you thinking...that each Windows machine live in its own DMZ? Or maybe you're just talking out of your ass...
Servers on the DMZ provide services to the rest of the net, and thus are hosts that can be attacked through vulnerabilities in their service-providing protocols. This made such servers the likely points of compromise. Putting them on a DMZ that is isolated from the corporate LAN kept such compromises from sniffing the LAN - where inside-the-firewall desktop machines would be exchnging valuable data without further layers of protection. Exploits of compromised servers (and the use of a DMZ to isolate them) have been a problem (and solution) for a LONG time.
Note the past tense.
Attacks on workstations behind the firewalls by email viruses (i.e. trojan-horse attachments to emails including a self-remailing action) have also been with us for a while. Potentially these could (and occasionally did) install keyboard sniffers. But a LAN sniffer payload does not seem to have been common. Perhaps this is because LAN sniffer payloads would typically be directed at a particular target, and so be attached to NON-replicating trojan email directed toward users on the target LAN.
Very recently, worms (propagating software modules that do NOT require human interaction to spread) graduated from a theoretical possibilty to a common scourge. And they have even more recently been adopted by profit-making criminal enterprises - first spammers, then other scammers (such as phishers). So there is plenty of money available to engineer them for more function.
Some recent worms have included keyboard sniffers and filters to reduce the data, detecting and extracting the items of interest (i.e. account numbers and passwords of users of major banking institutions). This represents a breakthrough: Data reduction on the compromised machine, to limit the traffic on the collection sites to a pre-screened pithy dribble.
At that point, general distribution of LAN packet sniffers in worm payloads (rather than directed infection as non-reproducing trojans) becomes a practical matter. The sniffer can use the infected machine to sort out the traffic of interest, rather than flooding the collector with junk (just as the viral keyboard sniffers with filtering can).
But it also becomes desirable to do LAN rather than keyboard sniffing - because with LAN sniffing the traffic of NON-compromised machines can also be sniffed. A Windows machine on a corporate LAN or a personal LAN behind a firewall+NAT appliance becomes a threat to the traffic of Macs, Linux boxes, BSD boxes, and other tougher targets.
So the appearance of a LAN-sniffing worm shortly after the worm explosion and the appearance of keyboard-sniffing, data-reducing viruses is right on the expected evolutionary timetable.
As for having "each Windows machine live in its own DMZ", putting all the windows machines on another DMZ separated from the other internal servers might be a good idea about now.
Further, some of the security solutions currently being deployed amount to monitoring the Windows machines' (or their individual applications') behavior to identify infection, and cutting off the machines (or killing the affected applications) if they appear compromised. This may not amount to putting each one on its own DMZ, but it's getting closer.
And the use of switches, rather than hubs, to connect the machines in a *-base-T LAN, amounts to EXACTLY "each machine [on] its own DMZ", at least as far as sniffing unicast LAN traffic is concerned. It doesn't block active probing - but that's what those other solutions I mentioned are about.
... a new worm installs a network sniffer ... it kind of makes me wonder why it took this long.
What's new about that?
Network sniffers installed on compromised machines is the ENTIRE REASON DMZs were invented - so the network sniffer can only sniff the DMZ, not the LAN behind the second packet-filtering router/bridge.
DMZs have been standard practice for over a decade. If there's anything new about this, it's just that it's the first time a worm in the wild has been identified as installing a sniffer.
But that's hardly surprising. The explosion of professionally-engineered worms is quite recent, as is consumer-level deployment of multi-machine LANs behind firewall+NAT appliances. (I'd expect packet-sniffing cracks aimed at businesses to be more targeted rather than worm-style scatterguns, if only to reduce their chances of discovery.) Seems to me the time became ripe JUST NOW for general deployment of a sniffer-installing Microsoft-exploiting worm.
I don't suppose your wife has a single, good-lookin' sister with a bass boat by chance, does she? 8-)
Just a brother (who's an e-room nurse and mountain rescue). Probably not what you're looking for.
Sorry. You'll just have to find and/or develop your own. (Took me over 40 years to find mine. But you only have to get it right once.)