A decade ago when I was doing the whole military intelligence thing, the answer was no, it was just the source code. Maybe someone had the tool chain, but this is not particularly relevant or interesting since distribution was forbidden anyway, even internally. The 'concept' has nothing to do with internal verification and security inside the 'air-gap' - there is no failure at all - access to the source was certainly used for 'bug hunting' - just that it was perhaps not for the reasons you have assumed in your post above.:-)
In most parts of the world the telco's tend to microwave all their cell towers back to the exchange. It's cheaper to do it this way.
With a small investment (a couple of hundred $USD) on Ebay for some receive gear, modems, and data capture cards, your average enthusiast has absolutely no need for decryption of GSM. The only point encryption takes place is between the phone and the tower. The microwave links are not encrypted and are virtually always conveyed using E1 / T1 transmissions - maybe sometimes replace the 1 with a bigger number in congested areas.
The only hard part is picking out your target, but this is hard anyway, even if you can manage decryption while the call is still in progress. (Frequency hopping and sheer number of users) Also at the trunk level, the out of band signaling (SS7) doesn't tell you where the phone call actually is (which timeslot), so you'll have to either record everything and go through it manually, or use some kind of fudged analysis to guess based on activity in the SS7 and what you see in the trunk. Or... You might just be voyeuristic, in it just for the gossip / phone sex / ambulance chasing / whatever, so none of the above matters.
There is plenty of intelligence sharing across borders these days. Some of it has cooperation at either end, some of it does not. Also the willingness to share depends entirely on the reward for sharing - money, politics, blackmail, good will, etc.
Those hops you're making through distant lands, in all probability there are logs on either side of the machine that can be massaged together to form a nice little picture of the next and previous hops. It might take a while, but if you communicate with your old life, chances are good that you'll get found if there is a big desire to find you.
That said, you can remain illusive for life as well, but you have to sever every single tie to your old life and start anew. The only person you can ever hope to trust enough is yourself in that regard. Sure you might have accomplices willing to buy throw away cell phones and such, but every extra brain in the mix is one that can give you up.
If you want to be sipping the German beer because you pissed off a village chief somewhere, then you have to give up the old life and maybe only ever speak of it on your death bed.
It's purely about the money. If google can shove their own locked down free laptop in your face and advertise directly at you, the short story is that they get to keep more advertiser cash for themselves. In simple terms, they don't want to endlessly pay people to host adverts for them.
Keeping their cake and eating it too, one free laptop at a time.
If your profile is completely private to me, but not to someone in my friends list - and you happen to tag a common friend for both of us in one of your own galleries, then that'll show up on my wall - I click on the picture and get full access to that particular gallery. (Maybe there's an option to stop it doing that, but I currently see it happening every day)
Profiles aren't really private anyway, if you know the full link to a particular image then you can view it regardless of user settings. Where to get such links? All over the place. Proxy, cache, etc.
There are untold numbers of us in this guys position. Asking slashdot is a damn good start at finding a new methodology. Everyone has an opinion, some of them quite intelligent, a few might even work. It's ok for the fortune 500 cube dwellers to jump on the phone and call in a long standing contractor to 'handle it' - the rest of us have to slog through the marketdroid crap and translate the latest buzzword infestations to human speak - then just hope we don't screw it up or waste money.
So far the best suggestions appear to be to figure out how critical things are first (which will shape the hardware requirements), budget second. All the while this is encompassed by the usual core job functions that still need to get done.
So rather than point out the redundant, how about using your fingers to provide a potential solution.
What's actually "fucking stupid" in my useless opinion are a set of services and black lists that alone soak up a metric shit ton of RAM with a nice chunk of performance sapping on the side - all of which accomplish exactly what a fairly simple set of rules in a tiny little plugin can do without any noticeable slow down.
I'll take my tiny little no fuss ad-block plus extension and ignore everything else because, really, it don't matter squat, it's not affected. Mail clients? I have a server that strips out the junk. What other applications might benefit from running DNS or an enormous host file locally? Let alone proxies, firewalls, and the other stuff you mention - my little $30 dollar wifi/router can take care of all that.
I was working for a secret shady 3 letter agency way back in the late 90's when the phrase SELinux first hit the internal message boards. My understanding at the time was that its purpose was simply to supply a secure (tamper proof) OS for 'in the field' use - at least that was what it was billed as doing by the few suits that knew anything at all about it. Naturally it evolved from there, I was rather surprised it left the confines of the NSA. A very (very) small handful of people were involved in its creation - an obscure project that more or less sprang from nowhere - while they were working on it there was a huge push from on high to move everything over to Win NT. It was an interesting time.
I guess reading comprehension is troublesome for some.
He wrote Pussy once. Kurt deleted it. Exactly once more he wrote the word Pussy. Then Mr The Kurt decided on revenge.
Crapflood = a metric fuck ton of the annoying shit, not the word pussy posted exactly twice.
And given the question, any sane admin would have giggled like a school girl for a couple of milliseconds and then quietly deleted it. A half decent admin would tweak a couple of lines of code in the back end - a half a minute job - to prevent such words from being posted again.
Why the hell do I have to 'opt out' of everything after the deed is done? Why not cut the corporate drone some slack and simply ask the question of the administrator during package installation - "Do you want to enable this stupid? Yes / No?"
Driving is a strange thing. I'm Australian, the vast majority of drivers indicate their intentions well in advance, also using the horn is rare. All in all it's a pretty decent experience, though many Australians would probably disagree, so to that I say take a trip overseas.
I now live in the Philippines. (For work, not the hot chicky babes) My daily ride in Manila is a Honda CBR400RR - I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually USED my turn indicators, I'm on my third set of air horns.
You have to be far more alert in the Philippines, but really I'm not sure which country is the more dangerous place to be on the road, both have their good and bad aspects.
I have a few friends teaching English in Taiwan. The government does not provide working permits for 'English teachers', it's an illegal profession, good money though - expect to have to do a runner or hide out about every other month or so as the government sends out their surprise inspection teams. Sometimes more often, schools will routinely file reports on competing schools in their area.
Primary ATC radars haven't changed too much in the last 30 years. Same old pulse and stagger patterns. Perhaps surprising, they are actually pretty crappy without a boat load of computer processing prior to any dots being drawn on the PPI. SSR (Secondary surveillance radar) is perhaps in need of a name change, the good old transponder is often what the controllers are looking at, without this they more or less just wait for an alarm to signal that the computer has spotted something in the primary clutter that might be an aircraft, or a cloud, or nothing.
Software has evolved in leaps and bounds, I think this is where the biggest failures are occurring, the hardware is fairly well understood and quite solid these days - or it is if you can keep the electricity turned on and flowing.
About the only dramatic changes have come in terms of surface movement and close field sensors. Some of these are now good enough to pick out and alert on single birds flying across the airfield, errant quadrupeds sneaking around in the grass, or those damned kids climbing the fence to play on the ILS antenna structure again.
Radar was my 'thing' in the military. It turns me on:-)
Self signing wont give you TCB or AllFiles though:-) If you want to do anything at all more complex than "hello world" then you require a developer certificate. If you want to actually sell your application to the masses, well, good luck with that, it'll take a few months and quite a few dollars.
What good is going 'open' if I can't recompile the firmware for my N series phone?
Symbian is modestly cheap per handset, but Nokia phones are not normally cheap at all. Their flagship stuff is normally around the 800 mark (Euro, Pound, USD, doesn't matter) Sony Ericsson tend to have offerings with about the same feature set for a few hundred less.
The parent is far from stupid as you put it - quite the opposite actually. You stick daemonshield or one of a hundred similar log monitors on your server and the job is done, you can even tweak them to watch for slow brute force attacks. What is actually laughable is the admin going to such extreme measures to secure some backwater server that requires umpteen minutes of dicking around whenever you move to a new remote machine just to log in. And then ignoring it because you think it is so damn impregnable.
This fool littered highway, where is it exactly? I've been doing this crap near on 20 years now and I've never had root lost.
Because a speed record is based on average speed, not top speed. Not just in one direction either, they have to turn around and repeat it going roughly back the way they came.
Or how about it's a deal if every existing patent world wide is ruled null and void first. After that, if you can find any vague reference to what you want to patent on the internet, then you can't patent it at all. It has to be truly unique, or you compete in the market just like everyone else.
I'd be almost positive those calls are not originating from the US.
I'm Australian, I live in the Philippines. Everyone here speaks with a US accent from birth (when they speak English anyway, or is that American?). There are quite a multitude of call centers throughout the country that are devoted entirely to spamming various parts of the world. They are fully legal, earn the local economy quite a big chunk of profit so there is no government incentive to get rid of them. The locals don't just spam via telephone, there are also forum spammers for hire, along with any other method you can think of to get your message 'out there'. If there is money to be made, someone here will do it.
Oddly enough there are virtually no telemarketing calls to annoy us locally, no junk mail in the letterbox, and very little domestic spam through email.
Last time I checked wikipedia was just a website. It's not like anyone at all on the planet is restricted from grabbing a copy of mediawiki to go roll out their own encyclopedic revolution with their own rules. If the regulations get too arduous, people will jump ship.
Slashdot Mirror
A decade ago when I was doing the whole military intelligence thing, the answer was no, it was just the source code. Maybe someone had the tool chain, but this is not particularly relevant or interesting since distribution was forbidden anyway, even internally. The 'concept' has nothing to do with internal verification and security inside the 'air-gap' - there is no failure at all - access to the source was certainly used for 'bug hunting' - just that it was perhaps not for the reasons you have assumed in your post above. :-)
As it turns out, my name shows up a long list of entries for a physicist with PhD's and stuff, so I'm good :-)
One word big fella: Exposé - you don't need to keep track of anything.
In most parts of the world the telco's tend to microwave all their cell towers back to the exchange. It's cheaper to do it this way.
With a small investment (a couple of hundred $USD) on Ebay for some receive gear, modems, and data capture cards, your average enthusiast has absolutely no need for decryption of GSM. The only point encryption takes place is between the phone and the tower. The microwave links are not encrypted and are virtually always conveyed using E1 / T1 transmissions - maybe sometimes replace the 1 with a bigger number in congested areas.
The only hard part is picking out your target, but this is hard anyway, even if you can manage decryption while the call is still in progress. (Frequency hopping and sheer number of users) Also at the trunk level, the out of band signaling (SS7) doesn't tell you where the phone call actually is (which timeslot), so you'll have to either record everything and go through it manually, or use some kind of fudged analysis to guess based on activity in the SS7 and what you see in the trunk. Or... You might just be voyeuristic, in it just for the gossip / phone sex / ambulance chasing / whatever, so none of the above matters.
There is plenty of intelligence sharing across borders these days. Some of it has cooperation at either end, some of it does not. Also the willingness to share depends entirely on the reward for sharing - money, politics, blackmail, good will, etc.
Those hops you're making through distant lands, in all probability there are logs on either side of the machine that can be massaged together to form a nice little picture of the next and previous hops. It might take a while, but if you communicate with your old life, chances are good that you'll get found if there is a big desire to find you.
That said, you can remain illusive for life as well, but you have to sever every single tie to your old life and start anew. The only person you can ever hope to trust enough is yourself in that regard. Sure you might have accomplices willing to buy throw away cell phones and such, but every extra brain in the mix is one that can give you up.
If you want to be sipping the German beer because you pissed off a village chief somewhere, then you have to give up the old life and maybe only ever speak of it on your death bed.
It's purely about the money. If google can shove their own locked down free laptop in your face and advertise directly at you, the short story is that they get to keep more advertiser cash for themselves. In simple terms, they don't want to endlessly pay people to host adverts for them.
Keeping their cake and eating it too, one free laptop at a time.
Just to expand on the tag a photo thing...
If your profile is completely private to me, but not to someone in my friends list - and you happen to tag a common friend for both of us in one of your own galleries, then that'll show up on my wall - I click on the picture and get full access to that particular gallery. (Maybe there's an option to stop it doing that, but I currently see it happening every day)
Profiles aren't really private anyway, if you know the full link to a particular image then you can view it regardless of user settings. Where to get such links? All over the place. Proxy, cache, etc.
The reasonable defense is a simple enclosure with a door - line the enclosure and door with tempest. Each voter closes the door while they vote.
Encrypted link back to head office, jobs done.
That's a little harsh don't you think?
There are untold numbers of us in this guys position. Asking slashdot is a damn good start at finding a new methodology. Everyone has an opinion, some of them quite intelligent, a few might even work. It's ok for the fortune 500 cube dwellers to jump on the phone and call in a long standing contractor to 'handle it' - the rest of us have to slog through the marketdroid crap and translate the latest buzzword infestations to human speak - then just hope we don't screw it up or waste money.
So far the best suggestions appear to be to figure out how critical things are first (which will shape the hardware requirements), budget second. All the while this is encompassed by the usual core job functions that still need to get done.
So rather than point out the redundant, how about using your fingers to provide a potential solution.
A slightly opposing point of view.
What's actually "fucking stupid" in my useless opinion are a set of services and black lists that alone soak up a metric shit ton of RAM with a nice chunk of performance sapping on the side - all of which accomplish exactly what a fairly simple set of rules in a tiny little plugin can do without any noticeable slow down.
I'll take my tiny little no fuss ad-block plus extension and ignore everything else because, really, it don't matter squat, it's not affected. Mail clients? I have a server that strips out the junk. What other applications might benefit from running DNS or an enormous host file locally? Let alone proxies, firewalls, and the other stuff you mention - my little $30 dollar wifi/router can take care of all that.
I didn't say it was a back door good sir. :-)
I was working for a secret shady 3 letter agency way back in the late 90's when the phrase SELinux first hit the internal message boards. My understanding at the time was that its purpose was simply to supply a secure (tamper proof) OS for 'in the field' use - at least that was what it was billed as doing by the few suits that knew anything at all about it. Naturally it evolved from there, I was rather surprised it left the confines of the NSA. A very (very) small handful of people were involved in its creation - an obscure project that more or less sprang from nowhere - while they were working on it there was a huge push from on high to move everything over to Win NT. It was an interesting time.
I guess reading comprehension is troublesome for some.
He wrote Pussy once. Kurt deleted it. Exactly once more he wrote the word Pussy. Then Mr The Kurt decided on revenge.
Crapflood = a metric fuck ton of the annoying shit, not the word pussy posted exactly twice.
And given the question, any sane admin would have giggled like a school girl for a couple of milliseconds and then quietly deleted it. A half decent admin would tweak a couple of lines of code in the back end - a half a minute job - to prevent such words from being posted again.
Why the hell do I have to 'opt out' of everything after the deed is done? Why not cut the corporate drone some slack and simply ask the question of the administrator during package installation - "Do you want to enable this stupid? Yes / No?"
Driving is a strange thing. I'm Australian, the vast majority of drivers indicate their intentions well in advance, also using the horn is rare. All in all it's a pretty decent experience, though many Australians would probably disagree, so to that I say take a trip overseas.
I now live in the Philippines. (For work, not the hot chicky babes) My daily ride in Manila is a Honda CBR400RR - I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually USED my turn indicators, I'm on my third set of air horns.
You have to be far more alert in the Philippines, but really I'm not sure which country is the more dangerous place to be on the road, both have their good and bad aspects.
I have a few friends teaching English in Taiwan. The government does not provide working permits for 'English teachers', it's an illegal profession, good money though - expect to have to do a runner or hide out about every other month or so as the government sends out their surprise inspection teams. Sometimes more often, schools will routinely file reports on competing schools in their area.
Primary ATC radars haven't changed too much in the last 30 years. Same old pulse and stagger patterns. Perhaps surprising, they are actually pretty crappy without a boat load of computer processing prior to any dots being drawn on the PPI. SSR (Secondary surveillance radar) is perhaps in need of a name change, the good old transponder is often what the controllers are looking at, without this they more or less just wait for an alarm to signal that the computer has spotted something in the primary clutter that might be an aircraft, or a cloud, or nothing.
Software has evolved in leaps and bounds, I think this is where the biggest failures are occurring, the hardware is fairly well understood and quite solid these days - or it is if you can keep the electricity turned on and flowing.
About the only dramatic changes have come in terms of surface movement and close field sensors. Some of these are now good enough to pick out and alert on single birds flying across the airfield, errant quadrupeds sneaking around in the grass, or those damned kids climbing the fence to play on the ILS antenna structure again.
Radar was my 'thing' in the military. It turns me on :-)
Commercial traffic might have this, plenty of private jets that are capable of occupying the same space don't.
Either way, when you have a hundred odd lives in the back end of the can, then the pilots are rightfully held to a far higher level of accountability.
I can ignore my cell phone while driving, can you?
Self signing wont give you TCB or AllFiles though :-) If you want to do anything at all more complex than "hello world" then you require a developer certificate. If you want to actually sell your application to the masses, well, good luck with that, it'll take a few months and quite a few dollars.
What good is going 'open' if I can't recompile the firmware for my N series phone?
Symbian is modestly cheap per handset, but Nokia phones are not normally cheap at all. Their flagship stuff is normally around the 800 mark (Euro, Pound, USD, doesn't matter) Sony Ericsson tend to have offerings with about the same feature set for a few hundred less.
The parent is far from stupid as you put it - quite the opposite actually. You stick daemonshield or one of a hundred similar log monitors on your server and the job is done, you can even tweak them to watch for slow brute force attacks. What is actually laughable is the admin going to such extreme measures to secure some backwater server that requires umpteen minutes of dicking around whenever you move to a new remote machine just to log in. And then ignoring it because you think it is so damn impregnable.
This fool littered highway, where is it exactly? I've been doing this crap near on 20 years now and I've never had root lost.
How quaint, having to pay more to show less.
I guess it's the same as an ISP charging more money to remove the port blocks from SMTP and HTTP.
Because a speed record is based on average speed, not top speed. Not just in one direction either, they have to turn around and repeat it going roughly back the way they came.
Or how about it's a deal if every existing patent world wide is ruled null and void first. After that, if you can find any vague reference to what you want to patent on the internet, then you can't patent it at all. It has to be truly unique, or you compete in the market just like everyone else.
I'd be almost positive those calls are not originating from the US.
I'm Australian, I live in the Philippines. Everyone here speaks with a US accent from birth (when they speak English anyway, or is that American?). There are quite a multitude of call centers throughout the country that are devoted entirely to spamming various parts of the world. They are fully legal, earn the local economy quite a big chunk of profit so there is no government incentive to get rid of them. The locals don't just spam via telephone, there are also forum spammers for hire, along with any other method you can think of to get your message 'out there'. If there is money to be made, someone here will do it.
Oddly enough there are virtually no telemarketing calls to annoy us locally, no junk mail in the letterbox, and very little domestic spam through email.
Last time I checked wikipedia was just a website. It's not like anyone at all on the planet is restricted from grabbing a copy of mediawiki to go roll out their own encyclopedic revolution with their own rules. If the regulations get too arduous, people will jump ship.