I was an early coordinator for the Info-Zip Workgroup (which developed the first "universal" multi-platform PKZIP-compatible open-source public domain zip and unzip utilities).
I've often wondered, once I saw the.zip "compressed archive" capability in Windows appear, where the code came from. I can't believe MS back-engineered and re-invented all that themselves. But I sure don't see any obligatory "Info-Zip" signature in the binaries.
Oh well... at least the capability is there. But a decent company would've given credit where credit was due.
Maybe they _did_ rewrite it all. One never knows. But it sure doesn't seem very likely. You don't make all the money MS has made by doing things the hard way.
I remember a teenage SF story (back in the 50's) that had colonists on Titan. They flew around in cute little jet aircraft; only needed to carry an oxidizer (oxygen), since the atmosphere was methane.
I always thought that interesting; fanciful but interesting.
Just to add a little ancient history in this area:
Long long ago, there was an international Usenet workgroup that formed to create a universal PKZIP-compatible zip compressor / decompressor utility. We were getting tweaks and hacks from all over the place (for different systems and compilers, as well as actual functional improvements and bug corrections). And we were posting not only full source updates, but also the latest and greatest changes as diff files. (Remember them?)
As a result, we couldn't have make a decent diff when someone had changed 3-space indents to 4, or tabified the code, or uppercased all the constant names. So we'd run all the received code through a utility / script that would set "standard" indents, cases, wraparounds, etc. THEN we'd do the diff against the old version.
For a year or so I was the coordinator / moderator, posted the source (to good old SIMTEL.NET), distributed the diffs, etc. And I wrote up the "No Feelthy" rules (e.g., "No Feelthy Tabs") to give everyone a baseline.
As you can see, they've updated it (and even gave me credit, hooray!)... but still kept it pretty simple.
Heh.. funny to re-read all that after all these years. (It has been a VERY long time.) Real Stone Age stuff, I know, but there were some serious limitations back then that people don't even know about today! (Yeah, and we had to walk through 4 feet of snow to school, uphill both ways!)
No way am I going to use a touch screen: the damned thing gets gunged up enough already. And no one will convince me holding my hand out at arms length (or beneath a table, upside down) is going to be more comfortable than a wrist-supported mouse. Or that a touch screen will support four (4) (IV) different click and scrolling devices.
And show me "facial recognition" that will let me spin my WoW character while I look at different parts of the screen.
What's the problem with that? Modern OS, fairly well tested, all the network stuff, etc. And it's pretty fast (well, my Dell is) coming up out of hibernation.
Nice thing about that is, you can actually have the apps you want already loaded!
Talk about a bunch of completely incapable morons... and we're depending on THEM to keep the Internet running?
Sheesh.. I hope it happens every damned day. In fact I hope someone brings the whole damned thing down. Maybe then the Powers That Be (whoever / whatever THAT is) will replace ICANN top to bottom, clean up the entire domain mess, and give us an honest system.
If the coursework / dissertation seems out of line with the student's "normal" performance.. hey, take five minutes (with the work in front of you, not in front of him), and ask him a few questions about it.
How long will it take to determine he doesn't know squat about what he turned in, eh?
When I first started in the independent programming business, I ran into this problem. Horrifically exclusive, hands-binding, "We own everything you do while we even remember your name, forever and ever, amen."
Very bad: some of them would've prevented me from ever programming another line for anyone but them!
So I told them no, and sent them my own reasonable work agreement: that what I did for them, they owned; anything else I did was mine; and it all stopped the day I quit being paid.
Not exactly those words, but that's how it worked.
Every single person and company I sent my return agreement to accepted it. No problem. Screw the lawyers and bean-counters.
Good! The more top people hacked and damaged by hackers, vandals, spyware, viruses, malware, the better. Hell, I oughtta start emailing bombs to he whole Congress!
Because the sooner the FBI and other agencies get active (and we start getting laws with teeth) against these bastiges, the sooner the problem will maybe be addressed.
I'm so sick of cleaning viruses and spyware off PCs (I work in a computer repair shop, and it's easily 50% of our workload), I could puke!
And it's a no-brainer identifying the culprits and miscreants too. Just follow the money, see where the viruses and spyware come from, and where they "phone home" (as most of them do).
Damage must be in the billions (repair costs, time lost, damaged and lost data), yet the Feds do nothing.
Many many years ago a major US company (who should've known better) tried to sell us a copy protection scheme for our new software product. It used fancy 5.25" disk writers (yeah, that dates me) to write a very special sector.. one with a pattern that could NOT be written by a standard floppy drive.
All we had to do was encode a simple test (they gave code samples) in our program (or a loader), to test that specific track and sector. If it failed, it was an original. If it read, it wasn't.
It took me about 15 minutes to write a little hack (assembly language of course) that hooked into the BIOS's disk read routines. If someone accessed that specific track and sector, it would always return a disk error. Bidda boom bidda bing.
I sent the source code and a sample loader (175 bytes long as I recall, TSR loader and all) back to the company, suggesting they should perhaps reconsider their product design.
I have no problem with this at all. No one in the world is supposed to be permitted to sell anything but antique ivory. So why would eBay be exempted from this?
Agreed. The summation is misleading: the search for the Titanic was WELL after the dives and mapping / photography of the two military subs. There was no cover.
Yep, quite near where I live in fact. You can readily see them from the air. Those filled in with soil or sand are still visible because of vegetation color differences (and would be vastly more convenient to excavate if one were interested). Bring along pumps though: the water table is often quite high and, given the flat nature of the land, water is difficult to dispose of.
Oh, and bring money. Nawth Ca'lina can always use more money. Especially from rich curious scientists with fat grants:-)
There are dozens of home-made cantenna designs (the name coming from the originals made from fruit juice cans). Kits. Parts. Everthing.
I think the current world record for stock wireless routers (and some very elaborate antennas, usually huge things salvaged or scrap built) is well over a hundred kilometers.
500 steenking meters is no problem whatsoever.
Google "cantenna", or (as one of the earlier messages said) get one of the commercial directional antennas already on the market. (Hint: it will NOT be a stick-shaped thingie. It'll most likely be parabolic, and probably several feet in diameter. And do NOT put it on top of the house / trailer, since they tend to be lightning magnets.)
All this arguing about what's malware and what's not. We don't get many Vista systems in this shop (mostly much older stuff). But I had one in the other day, totally munged.. good old Smitfraud, looked and acted just like a similar WinXP infection (with which I'm much more accustomed).
Except we couldn't get Vista working at all (past the desktop loading anyway) to even attempt manual or software cleanings. Had to wipe and reinstall from the restore partition. Apparently it was even more vulnerable to Smitfraud damage than WinXP.
I got involved in this area when we wanted to use cheap PCs (actually Apple II's) back in the early 80's at a Fort Bragg command for classified processing and communications. (Instead of the multi-gazillion decades-old junk the vendors were selling us.)
The signal security guys went nuts, impossible, can't do it, too insecure. Our CG said go ahead and do it, prove you can.. and let the NSA guys come and listen.
So we did. No problem with basically stock Apple II's, monitors, state of the art (then) commercial networking, etc. Easy really, with relatively simple shielding (cable and equipment) techniques, worked fine. Also sent digital data (Kermit or XMODEM) via big encrypted analog modems the Army already had in the system, could even feed the analog signal into the big multi-channel systems the Signal Corps was using for voice and teletype.
Also turns out an external Corvus hard drive we were using (!) was a Most Wonderful broadband jammer, totally masking the few signal traces that were still being emitted.
There were other things happening far earlier (60's and 70's) on the intercept side of things, but I'm not sure what's still classified and what's not, so we won't go there:-) But it was surprising how many governments and agencies world-wide used the common IBM Selectric typewriter and its relatives (even in the most sensitive areas).. and how easily it could be monitored (every keystroke!) hundreds of meters away.
Had a lady bring her laptop into our computer repair shop. "I can't get the Internet any more."
After extensive questioning (using very small words), I determined:
Her expensive laptop worked fine.
Her TCP/IP settings, web browser, etc. all worked just fine.
The wireless components and setup worked just fine.
What was NOT working fine was her neighbor's wireless access point. Apparently that fine fellow had either turned it off, lost his own internet connection, encrypted his WAP, or whatever.
She never knew she was using his connection, connecting to his WAP. She thought that, since the stick-on on her laptop said it had wireless and could reach the internet.. that it was a godz-given fact that, anywhere she went, she'd have internet access.
"But it works on campus."
Sigh.. more explanations.
Half an hour of my life, gone. And I don't even want to think about the brain damage.
Not absolutely trivial, but damned near. Given X route segments, design a patrol route that will be relatively random. (E.g., roll a dice at each intersection.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was an early coordinator for the Info-Zip Workgroup (which developed the first "universal" multi-platform PKZIP-compatible open-source public domain zip and unzip utilities).
I've often wondered, once I saw the .zip "compressed archive" capability in Windows appear, where the code came from. I can't believe MS back-engineered and re-invented all that themselves. But I sure don't see any obligatory "Info-Zip" signature in the binaries.
Oh well ... at least the capability is there. But a decent company would've given credit where credit was due.
Maybe they _did_ rewrite it all. One never knows. But it sure doesn't seem very likely. You don't make all the money MS has made by doing things the hard way.
Toad
I remember a teenage SF story (back in the 50's) that had colonists on Titan. They flew around in cute little jet aircraft; only needed to carry an oxidizer (oxygen), since the atmosphere was methane.
I always thought that interesting; fanciful but interesting.
Just to add a little ancient history in this area:
Long long ago, there was an international Usenet workgroup that formed to create a universal PKZIP-compatible zip compressor / decompressor utility. We were getting tweaks and hacks from all over the place (for different systems and compilers, as well as actual functional improvements and bug corrections). And we were posting not only full source updates, but also the latest and greatest changes as diff files. (Remember them?)
As a result, we couldn't have make a decent diff when someone had changed 3-space indents to 4, or tabified the code, or uppercased all the constant names. So we'd run all the received code through a utility / script that would set "standard" indents, cases, wraparounds, etc. THEN we'd do the diff against the old version.
For a year or so I was the coordinator / moderator, posted the source (to good old SIMTEL.NET), distributed the diffs, etc. And I wrote up the "No Feelthy" rules (e.g., "No Feelthy Tabs") to give everyone a baseline.
There's some history here:
http://mit.edu/~mkgray/jik/sipbsrc/src/unzip-5.12/ZipPorts
As you can see, they've updated it (and even gave me credit, hooray!) ... but still kept it pretty simple.
Heh .. funny to re-read all that after all these years. (It has been a VERY long time.) Real Stone Age stuff, I know, but there were some serious limitations back then that people don't even know about today! (Yeah, and we had to walk through 4 feet of snow to school, uphill both ways!)
Yep, those were the days, all right. [kaff][kaff]
David Kirschbaum
Former Info-ZIP Coordinator
No way am I going to use a touch screen: the damned thing gets gunged up enough already. And no one will convince me holding my hand out at arms length (or beneath a table, upside down) is going to be more comfortable than a wrist-supported mouse. Or that a touch screen will support four (4) (IV) different click and scrolling devices.
And show me "facial recognition" that will let me spin my WoW character while I look at different parts of the screen.
Nossir, don't want it, won't have it.
What's the problem with that? Modern OS, fairly well tested, all the network stuff, etc. And it's pretty fast (well, my Dell is) coming up out of hibernation.
Nice thing about that is, you can actually have the apps you want already loaded!
Who here does NOT understand perfectly well how Glider was being used to abuse WoW?
Who here can see ANY use for Glider that is NOT abuse, misuse, a violation of EULA, and a violation of fair play?
Griefers and cheats: two classes I have no use for.
Good riddance, and good for Blizzard.
Don't forget: the Pentagon opened the door when it forbid soldiers from making any comments on blogs without "approval of their commander."
Muzzle free speech, and it snowballs.
Talk about a bunch of completely incapable morons ... and we're depending on THEM to keep the Internet running?
Sheesh .. I hope it happens every damned day. In fact I hope someone brings the whole damned thing down. Maybe then the Powers That Be (whoever / whatever THAT is) will replace ICANN top to bottom, clean up the entire domain mess, and give us an honest system.
If the coursework / dissertation seems out of line with the student's "normal" performance .. hey, take five minutes (with the work in front of you, not in front of him), and ask him a few questions about it.
How long will it take to determine he doesn't know squat about what he turned in, eh?
When I first started in the independent programming business, I ran into this problem. Horrifically exclusive, hands-binding, "We own everything you do while we even remember your name, forever and ever, amen."
Very bad: some of them would've prevented me from ever programming another line for anyone but them!
So I told them no, and sent them my own reasonable work agreement: that what I did for them, they owned; anything else I did was mine; and it all stopped the day I quit being paid.
Not exactly those words, but that's how it worked.
Every single person and company I sent my return agreement to accepted it. No problem. Screw the lawyers and bean-counters.
That being said .. it _is_ more polite than my immediate inclination to hunt him down and shoot him for the dog he is.
...
Just saying
Good! The more top people hacked and damaged by hackers, vandals, spyware, viruses, malware, the better. Hell, I oughtta start emailing bombs to he whole Congress!
Because the sooner the FBI and other agencies get active (and we start getting laws with teeth) against these bastiges, the sooner the problem will maybe be addressed.
I'm so sick of cleaning viruses and spyware off PCs (I work in a computer repair shop, and it's easily 50% of our workload), I could puke!
And it's a no-brainer identifying the culprits and miscreants too. Just follow the money, see where the viruses and spyware come from, and where they "phone home" (as most of them do).
Damage must be in the billions (repair costs, time lost, damaged and lost data), yet the Feds do nothing.
Many many years ago a major US company (who should've known better) tried to sell us a copy protection scheme for our new software product. It used fancy 5.25" disk writers (yeah, that dates me) to write a very special sector .. one with a pattern that could NOT be written by a standard floppy drive.
All we had to do was encode a simple test (they gave code samples) in our program (or a loader), to test that specific track and sector. If it failed, it was an original. If it read, it wasn't.
It took me about 15 minutes to write a little hack (assembly language of course) that hooked into the BIOS's disk read routines. If someone accessed that specific track and sector, it would always return a disk error. Bidda boom bidda bing.
I sent the source code and a sample loader (175 bytes long as I recall, TSR loader and all) back to the company, suggesting they should perhaps reconsider their product design.
Never heard from them again. Silly rabbits.
I have no problem with this at all. No one in the world is supposed to be permitted to sell anything but antique ivory. So why would eBay be exempted from this?
Agreed. The summation is misleading: the search for the Titanic was WELL after the dives and mapping / photography of the two military subs. There was no cover.
Yep, quite near where I live in fact. You can readily see them from the air. Those filled in with soil or sand are still visible because of vegetation color differences (and would be vastly more convenient to excavate if one were interested). Bring along pumps though: the water table is often quite high and, given the flat nature of the land, water is difficult to dispose of.
:-)
Oh, and bring money. Nawth Ca'lina can always use more money. Especially from rich curious scientists with fat grants
You are quite correct.
Sigh .. I guess Shakespeare had it right.
"First we shoot all the lawyers."
Yeah .. but way too negative.
There are dozens of home-made cantenna designs (the name coming from the originals made from fruit juice cans). Kits. Parts. Everthing.
I think the current world record for stock wireless routers (and some very elaborate antennas, usually huge things salvaged or scrap built) is well over a hundred kilometers.
500 steenking meters is no problem whatsoever.
Google "cantenna", or (as one of the earlier messages said) get one of the commercial directional antennas already on the market. (Hint: it will NOT be a stick-shaped thingie. It'll most likely be parabolic, and probably several feet in diameter. And do NOT put it on top of the house / trailer, since they tend to be lightning magnets.)
All this arguing about what's malware and what's not. We don't get many Vista systems in this shop (mostly much older stuff). But I had one in the other day, totally munged .. good old Smitfraud, looked and acted just like a similar WinXP infection (with which I'm much more accustomed).
Except we couldn't get Vista working at all (past the desktop loading anyway) to even attempt manual or software cleanings. Had to wipe and reinstall from the restore partition. Apparently it was even more vulnerable to Smitfraud damage than WinXP.
I got involved in this area when we wanted to use cheap PCs (actually Apple II's) back in the early 80's at a Fort Bragg command for classified processing and communications. (Instead of the multi-gazillion decades-old junk the vendors were selling us.)
.. and let the NSA guys come and listen.
:-) But it was surprising how many governments and agencies world-wide used the common IBM Selectric typewriter and its relatives (even in the most sensitive areas) .. and how easily it could be monitored (every keystroke!) hundreds of meters away.
The signal security guys went nuts, impossible, can't do it, too insecure. Our CG said go ahead and do it, prove you can
So we did. No problem with basically stock Apple II's, monitors, state of the art (then) commercial networking, etc. Easy really, with relatively simple shielding (cable and equipment) techniques, worked fine. Also sent digital data (Kermit or XMODEM) via big encrypted analog modems the Army already had in the system, could even feed the analog signal into the big multi-channel systems the Signal Corps was using for voice and teletype.
Also turns out an external Corvus hard drive we were using (!) was a Most Wonderful broadband jammer, totally masking the few signal traces that were still being emitted.
There were other things happening far earlier (60's and 70's) on the intercept side of things, but I'm not sure what's still classified and what's not, so we won't go there
Had a lady bring her laptop into our computer repair shop. "I can't get the Internet any more."
.. that it was a godz-given fact that, anywhere she went, she'd have internet access.
.. more explanations.
After extensive questioning (using very small words), I determined:
Her expensive laptop worked fine.
Her TCP/IP settings, web browser, etc. all worked just fine.
The wireless components and setup worked just fine.
What was NOT working fine was her neighbor's wireless access point. Apparently that fine fellow had either turned it off, lost his own internet connection, encrypted his WAP, or whatever.
She never knew she was using his connection, connecting to his WAP. She thought that, since the stick-on on her laptop said it had wireless and could reach the internet
"But it works on campus."
Sigh
Half an hour of my life, gone. And I don't even want to think about the brain damage.
Not absolutely trivial, but damned near. Given X route segments, design a patrol route that will be relatively random. (E.g., roll a dice at each intersection.)
Doh.
Oh, poor baby! You've choked your neighbor's throughput down to zip for your own convenience, and now you whine?
... with a nice big fat ISP bill!
Here, let me dry your tears