Unless you had a long, long time to plan such a move in advance it is extremely unlikely that you can do this well enough to beat a forensic investigator.
You have two basic paths open to you: Either a surgical strike against the incriminating files or emulating a normal usage history sans music from scratch. You can't just wipe and reinstall because it's an obviously unnatural usage pattern.
Unless you're paranoid like me, you're probably not using ext2fs; Those spiffy new journaling filesystems also mean that there's no gaurantee that 'shred' overwriting britney.mp3 50 times will result in the drive head physically setting the same locations to garbage 50 times. This practically gaurantees that a surgical strike will fail. To make it worse, modern OSes and programs of all flavors leave metadata, logdata and temp files floating around all over the place. Unless you pay overwhelming attention to detail, you're going to miss some.playlist or incriminating log entry somewhere. In addition, as others have pointed out, all filesystems (including my beloved ext2) maintain low-level metadata - ctime, atime, etc - which would require extremely careful manipulation at the lowest levels to remove the proof that you changed and/or deleted key log files.
It's not impossible in principle, but it would be incredibly difficult to do successfully - the odds of you finding and sterilizing absolutely every file your media player and p2p have ever touched in even the most tangential way are not good. The only standard is perfection and if your ploy is anything less the courts will crucify you for destruction of evidence.
A small additional line of defence might be gained by spreading a great deal of legal music (e.g. Rhyme Torrents) around everywhere where the illegal stuff was, with the intention of perhaps adding just enough noise to obscure a signal that you missed.
The alternative is to fabricate a normal use history from whole cloth; This will likely be even more difficult, as the surgical strike leaves the other 99% of the drive and its normal, not-suspicious usage history untouched. Even if you import your documents back from a backup using something like --preserve-ctime, you will have to recreate the metadata and temp stuff left by the apps which use and create them or what you did will be obvious. Trying to recreate the metadata from scratch is straight out; An AI capable of doing that for you would most likely pass the Turing Test. That leaves copying the old metadata over while scrubbing it of incriminating data, in which case you might as well have just gone with option #1 anyway.
What can they do if you simply happen to have a large and very powerful degaussing loop in your bedroom doorframe that most unfortunately wipes the drive (and everyone's wallet) as they walk out with it?
Finding places to put a few hundred people from one prison versus America's five decade military, economic and social entanglement in the Middle East: Bullshit equivocation is bullshit.
Isn't there something illegal about using one's public office to favor special interest groups in exchange for future favors, monetary or otherwise?
We are currently in the early years of what will later be recognized as the pivotal fight of the entire Information Age, and not 3 months into his administration Obama has completely sold us out. 5 lawyers from a single industry do not get appointed to the Department of Justice by chance, no matter what their qualifications. In a sane world, there would be an uproar over such obvious improprieties. But the corporate media knows when its obsequience is being bought and has seen to it that word of this crime gets zero airtime whatsoever. Any delusional netroots who still think Obama is on their side are in for more brain-exploding cognitive dissonance when he chooses yet another copyright maximalist for "Copyright Czar."
Take solace in the fact that while we may have been sold down the river and the likely duration of the fight significantly extended, we will win eventually. The overwhelming majority of youth have no respect for copyright as currently practiced and this shows no sign of changing. No matter what technical or legal measures they take, the MAFIAA have already lost the social fight and their ultimate demise is gauranteed.
Sammy's shoulders hunched down. "They've avoided the killing disasters. They haven't had the war plagues or nuclear war. The governance is still flexible and responsive. There are just the Lord-be-damned technical problems."
"They are technical symptoms, Sammy, of problems I'm sure the governance understands very well." And can't do a thing about. He remembered back to the cynicism of Gunnar Larson. In a way this conversation was rumbling down the same dead-end street. But Pham Nuwen had had a lifetime to think of solutions. "The flexibility of the governance is its life and its death. They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space but they are also a choke point...."
But we knew -- I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."
Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx of Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad intervention, still -- "In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threads, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.
-- Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In The Sky.
Always we hear that something should be privatized because private industry is more efficient. Yet never does anyone stop to ask whether efficiency is the only concern.
Thus rather than having a reserve in transmission capacity on our electric grid, since deregulation we simply eat farther and farther into former safety margins. Rather than spend the time to set up proper local mirrors of systems, hospital networks collapse when their Internet connection breaks. It's reasoned that the time-integrated cost of safety margins exceeds the price to be paid when failures they would have prevented occurs.
And so far, they're mostly right. We have a little more latitude for technical failures on Earth than the fictional inhabitants of Namqem. But eventually, as we hop and skip blithely into privatization of core systems, we're going to pay a horrible price for it. It's sad how many innocent lives it's going to take, but no one listened to those calling for improved maritime safety until Titanic sank either.
... Because the good guys at the "company" are now going out and maliciously attacking core internet infrastructure with the company's blessing? Because it's increasingly evident that the 'good guys' were bad all along?
You got the insane guy who put us into a tailspin and damaged half the engines out of the cockpit, Obama! Thanks!
<Comedic 'incomprehensible voice on phone'>
I don't care if you're pulling up, it's been entire seconds. Why the fuck aren't we in straight level flight yet? And when are you gonna get your lazy ass in here and fix the hole in the side of the plane like you promised?
<Scream, gunshots from phone>
Don't give me any of that "one of them survived and tried to kill us all" shit! I want everything done right now!
<The engine whine changes ominously and the floor tilts. A figure is seen flying by outside wearing a parachute, apparently flipping the bird at the passengers>
The Iraqi insurgients fight an occupying force... that's about as far as the similarities with the Wolverines go. Just to start:
The Wolverines aren't fanatics who snuck in from Canada, they're a bunch of unfortunate teenagers unwillingly pulled into the war.
The Wolverines don't bomb the church and markets in Calumet with the express intention of mass murder.
The Wolverines risk their own lives to save civilians rather than use them as human shields.
And if you want to compare the US to the Soviets, show me where we do this:
Irrigation systems, crucial to agriculture in Afghanistan's arid climate, were destroyed by aerial bombing and strafing by Soviet or government forces. In the worst year of the war, 1985, well over half of all the farmers who remained in Afghanistan had their fields bombed, and over one quarter had their irrigation systems destroyed and their livestock shot by Soviet or government troops, according to a survey conducted by Swedish relief experts
If you look past the obvious rah-rah patriotism, the message in Red Dawn is "This horror is what the Soviets do everywhere they occupy. Don't let it happen here." So please don't insult real or imagined freedom fighters by comparing them to religious fanatic terrorists (and yes, there is a difference as outlined above).
If you've ever played BZflag online you know all about this. There's zero sanity checks anywhere. While every player's computer is expected to run the shots/tanks physics engine AND render the display in real time, I've asked about server sanity checks and found that they'd be a major burden.
So cheaters fly around invincibly doing whatever they want. About half an hour later, the rest of the players finally begin to finish putting 2+2 together, but they never goddamn vote to ban cheaters despite everyone agreeing.
Bit of a shame, because it's a good engine to build off of...
Yep. Blast energy and difficulty of deployment scale with yield, blast radius scales with the cube root of yield. Ergo, it's much smarter to use 8 or 9 bombs with 1/10 the yield than one giant one.
Allow me to clarify: Which resulted in zero directly attributable deaths but none the less may have been a factor in a few later reported cancers. In any condition, the lasting effects of TMI are for all purposes zero compared to the harm caused by fossil fuel burning.
How many people get sick and die every single year due to the emissions of coal plants?
How much radiation do we all absorb every single year due to the TONS of uranium and thorium oxide particles released by burning coal?
The modern environmentalist movement is the epitome of intolerant idealism. Fossil fuels are a horrible and destructive source of power and they really are slowly poisoning the planet and everyone agrees about this. But then why the hell won't you let us get away from them? We try to build new hydroelectric dams, and we hear about how the lake will destroy the local ecosystem. We try to build wind farms, but Ted Kennedy sues because they'll get in the way of his view and they kill birds. We try to build solar plants in the middle of the Mojave desert, and the Sierra Club protests. We try to ramp up solar cell production, even, and protestors are demonstrating because of the chemicals used in silicon processing. We try to build nuclear power plants, but despite one western incident (which resulted in at most almost no casualties) happening in fifty full years, a safety record probably unmatched by any other industry in history, you refuse. We try to build a repository to get rid of the waste, and Harry Reid stops it. I have not a single doubt in my mind that when the first commercial fusion plant opens, you will be protesting because some of its components will eventually become radioactive and need to be disposed of.
You demand that we engineers and scientists come up with a better alternative, then kick us in our faces every time because nothing is perfect. Nothing we ever come up with is ever going to be good enough, is it? Not even a magic-based reactor that poofs free electric out of nowhere! Well, welcome to real life. Enjoy your stay - America now burns more coal than ever because we aren't deploying the one presently-viable alternative (nuclear) that we have.
Clearly these people are hiding something. After all, why else would they be afraid? If they're not hiding something, there's no reason to be worried about being watched, is there? I suspect they're harboring a pedo... If you don't support the investigation, you support children being raped.
Sarcasm, I'm constantly shocked by how utterly cavalier young people are with their information online.
Some of you people and your one-dimensional obsessions... Can you say "non sequitor?" Those things are bad but they have no connection to jobs in academia or job availability generally.
The international community does something incredibly stupid and for once you're happy with the USA's general willingness to thumb its nose at the UN (As opposed to normally facepalming over it). Any law like this in the US would spectacularly crash+burn in the Supreme Court.
The UN is a great idea, but until someone steps up to send their troops into harm's way to stop injustices, it's a toothless debating society. No one particularly cares to send their men to die for someone else, so it never happens. A UN military might help, but do you really want people like Mugabe or Ahmadinejad having a say in what it does?
Woa woa woa, hang on, you're saying... they won't invade?. I won't be able to run up into the mountains with a small group of friends and fight the communist occupiers? There goes any hope for excitement after school starts in the fall.
Disclaimer: I know the movie is a fantasy, but if you're an American and don't connect with those kids at least a little you're probably a commie yourself.
Spammers now hire the desperately poor and pay them to solve CAPTCHAs. Defeating that will involve either improving economic conditions in poor areas so that people won't be willing to do so any more, or writing a system more intelligent than humans.
One of these is difficult, the other will result in the Singularity. I'm hip with either.
You have two choices: You can most assuredly be raped in the ass without lube on a regular basis, or you can be screwed over every now and then. The majority voted to only get screwed every now and then.
That being said, Obama is going to regret this next time he needs to get out the vote.
The difference between USD and monopoly money is just a matter of confidence.
Yes, it is. The USD has the full faith and backing of the most powerful government in the world, which in turn has the backing of a third of the world's entire GDP. Even in the worst of times, the people running it's printing presses are at least nominally sane.
1. Zenith
2. Cancel shows target audience love
3. Flail in search of new ones; Fail
4. Try to rebrand yourself to reach a wider audience (YOU ARE HERE)
5. Wider audience doesn't care, core audience leaves
6. Decline
Same thing that happened to Nickelodeon at the end of the 90s... You cancel SG: Atlantis but keep wrestling, generic monster movies and bullshit psychic stuff? WTF are you guys thinking? The only hope for American geeks now is that Star Trek XI succeeds and opens the gateway to a new ST series, since it's now gone from 'clear' to 'official' that the SciFi channel is no longer about SciFi and won't be creating any more of it in the near future. Maybe they can pick up where Enterprise left off, since it was a good show once they finished 9/11 In Space and got back to being Star Trek.
It took you 3 days to tell your package manager to install the binary blob? I've heard of hunt-n-peck keyboarding, but damn... just ask someone next time.
Not really suprising. I disagree in some sense, but it's not suprising. We've discovered close to (but as the article demonstrates not quite) everything we can discover at the energy levels the Tevatron can generate - Needs bigger particle gun. And if the new one at CERN doesn't help, the next new one will have to be bigger than earth:/
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you had a long, long time to plan such a move in advance it is extremely unlikely that you can do this well enough to beat a forensic investigator.
.playlist or incriminating log entry somewhere. In addition, as others have pointed out, all filesystems (including my beloved ext2) maintain low-level metadata - ctime, atime, etc - which would require extremely careful manipulation at the lowest levels to remove the proof that you changed and/or deleted key log files.
You have two basic paths open to you: Either a surgical strike against the incriminating files or emulating a normal usage history sans music from scratch. You can't just wipe and reinstall because it's an obviously unnatural usage pattern.
Unless you're paranoid like me, you're probably not using ext2fs; Those spiffy new journaling filesystems also mean that there's no gaurantee that 'shred' overwriting britney.mp3 50 times will result in the drive head physically setting the same locations to garbage 50 times. This practically gaurantees that a surgical strike will fail. To make it worse, modern OSes and programs of all flavors leave metadata, logdata and temp files floating around all over the place. Unless you pay overwhelming attention to detail, you're going to miss some
It's not impossible in principle, but it would be incredibly difficult to do successfully - the odds of you finding and sterilizing absolutely every file your media player and p2p have ever touched in even the most tangential way are not good. The only standard is perfection and if your ploy is anything less the courts will crucify you for destruction of evidence.
A small additional line of defence might be gained by spreading a great deal of legal music (e.g. Rhyme Torrents) around everywhere where the illegal stuff was, with the intention of perhaps adding just enough noise to obscure a signal that you missed.
The alternative is to fabricate a normal use history from whole cloth; This will likely be even more difficult, as the surgical strike leaves the other 99% of the drive and its normal, not-suspicious usage history untouched. Even if you import your documents back from a backup using something like --preserve-ctime, you will have to recreate the metadata and temp stuff left by the apps which use and create them or what you did will be obvious. Trying to recreate the metadata from scratch is straight out; An AI capable of doing that for you would most likely pass the Turing Test. That leaves copying the old metadata over while scrubbing it of incriminating data, in which case you might as well have just gone with option #1 anyway.
What can they do if you simply happen to have a large and very powerful degaussing loop in your bedroom doorframe that most unfortunately wipes the drive (and everyone's wallet) as they walk out with it?
How many more content-mafia lawyers does he need to appoint to the DoJ before everyone here can admit that you've been sold down the river?
If you believe in freedom on the Internet, Obama is your enemy. Get used to it.
Finding places to put a few hundred people from one prison versus America's five decade military, economic and social entanglement in the Middle East: Bullshit equivocation is bullshit.
Isn't there something illegal about using one's public office to favor special interest groups in exchange for future favors, monetary or otherwise?
We are currently in the early years of what will later be recognized as the pivotal fight of the entire Information Age, and not 3 months into his administration Obama has completely sold us out. 5 lawyers from a single industry do not get appointed to the Department of Justice by chance, no matter what their qualifications. In a sane world, there would be an uproar over such obvious improprieties. But the corporate media knows when its obsequience is being bought and has seen to it that word of this crime gets zero airtime whatsoever. Any delusional netroots who still think Obama is on their side are in for more brain-exploding cognitive dissonance when he chooses yet another copyright maximalist for "Copyright Czar."
Take solace in the fact that while we may have been sold down the river and the likely duration of the fight significantly extended, we will win eventually. The overwhelming majority of youth have no respect for copyright as currently practiced and this shows no sign of changing. No matter what technical or legal measures they take, the MAFIAA have already lost the social fight and their ultimate demise is gauranteed.
-- Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In The Sky.
Always we hear that something should be privatized because private industry is more efficient. Yet never does anyone stop to ask whether efficiency is the only concern.
Thus rather than having a reserve in transmission capacity on our electric grid, since deregulation we simply eat farther and farther into former safety margins. Rather than spend the time to set up proper local mirrors of systems, hospital networks collapse when their Internet connection breaks. It's reasoned that the time-integrated cost of safety margins exceeds the price to be paid when failures they would have prevented occurs.
And so far, they're mostly right. We have a little more latitude for technical failures on Earth than the fictional inhabitants of Namqem. But eventually, as we hop and skip blithely into privatization of core systems, we're going to pay a horrible price for it. It's sad how many innocent lives it's going to take, but no one listened to those calling for improved maritime safety until Titanic sank either.
... Because the good guys at the "company" are now going out and maliciously attacking core internet infrastructure with the company's blessing? Because it's increasingly evident that the 'good guys' were bad all along?
You got the insane guy who put us into a tailspin and damaged half the engines out of the cockpit, Obama! Thanks!
<Comedic 'incomprehensible voice on phone'>
I don't care if you're pulling up, it's been entire seconds. Why the fuck aren't we in straight level flight yet? And when are you gonna get your lazy ass in here and fix the hole in the side of the plane like you promised?
<Scream, gunshots from phone>
Don't give me any of that "one of them survived and tried to kill us all" shit! I want everything done right now!
<The engine whine changes ominously and the floor tilts. A figure is seen flying by outside wearing a parachute, apparently flipping the bird at the passengers>
The Wolverines aren't fanatics who snuck in from Canada, they're a bunch of unfortunate teenagers unwillingly pulled into the war.
The Wolverines don't bomb the church and markets in Calumet with the express intention of mass murder.
The Wolverines risk their own lives to save civilians rather than use them as human shields.
And if you want to compare the US to the Soviets, show me where we do this:
If you look past the obvious rah-rah patriotism, the message in Red Dawn is "This horror is what the Soviets do everywhere they occupy. Don't let it happen here." So please don't insult real or imagined freedom fighters by comparing them to religious fanatic terrorists (and yes, there is a difference as outlined above).
If you've ever played BZflag online you know all about this. There's zero sanity checks anywhere. While every player's computer is expected to run the shots/tanks physics engine AND render the display in real time, I've asked about server sanity checks and found that they'd be a major burden.
So cheaters fly around invincibly doing whatever they want. About half an hour later, the rest of the players finally begin to finish putting 2+2 together, but they never goddamn vote to ban cheaters despite everyone agreeing.
Bit of a shame, because it's a good engine to build off of...
Yep. Blast energy and difficulty of deployment scale with yield, blast radius scales with the cube root of yield. Ergo, it's much smarter to use 8 or 9 bombs with 1/10 the yield than one giant one.
Allow me to clarify: Which resulted in zero directly attributable deaths but none the less may have been a factor in a few later reported cancers. In any condition, the lasting effects of TMI are for all purposes zero compared to the harm caused by fossil fuel burning.
How many people get sick and die every single year due to the emissions of coal plants?
How much radiation do we all absorb every single year due to the TONS of uranium and thorium oxide particles released by burning coal?
The modern environmentalist movement is the epitome of intolerant idealism. Fossil fuels are a horrible and destructive source of power and they really are slowly poisoning the planet and everyone agrees about this. But then why the hell won't you let us get away from them? We try to build new hydroelectric dams, and we hear about how the lake will destroy the local ecosystem. We try to build wind farms, but Ted Kennedy sues because they'll get in the way of his view and they kill birds. We try to build solar plants in the middle of the Mojave desert, and the Sierra Club protests. We try to ramp up solar cell production, even, and protestors are demonstrating because of the chemicals used in silicon processing. We try to build nuclear power plants, but despite one western incident (which resulted in at most almost no casualties) happening in fifty full years, a safety record probably unmatched by any other industry in history, you refuse. We try to build a repository to get rid of the waste, and Harry Reid stops it. I have not a single doubt in my mind that when the first commercial fusion plant opens, you will be protesting because some of its components will eventually become radioactive and need to be disposed of.
You demand that we engineers and scientists come up with a better alternative, then kick us in our faces every time because nothing is perfect. Nothing we ever come up with is ever going to be good enough, is it? Not even a magic-based reactor that poofs free electric out of nowhere! Well, welcome to real life. Enjoy your stay - America now burns more coal than ever because we aren't deploying the one presently-viable alternative (nuclear) that we have.
I don't think you have a way to silence him.
Enjoy your Streisand Effect.
Clearly these people are hiding something. After all, why else would they be afraid? If they're not hiding something, there's no reason to be worried about being watched, is there? I suspect they're harboring a pedo... If you don't support the investigation, you support children being raped.
Sarcasm, I'm constantly shocked by how utterly cavalier young people are with their information online.
Some of you people and your one-dimensional obsessions... Can you say "non sequitor?" Those things are bad but they have no connection to jobs in academia or job availability generally.
If you outlaw things you believe are wrong, how are you any different than the hatemongers?
The international community does something incredibly stupid and for once you're happy with the USA's general willingness to thumb its nose at the UN (As opposed to normally facepalming over it). Any law like this in the US would spectacularly crash+burn in the Supreme Court.
The UN is a great idea, but until someone steps up to send their troops into harm's way to stop injustices, it's a toothless debating society. No one particularly cares to send their men to die for someone else, so it never happens. A UN military might help, but do you really want people like Mugabe or Ahmadinejad having a say in what it does?
Woa woa woa, hang on, you're saying... they won't invade?. I won't be able to run up into the mountains with a small group of friends and fight the communist occupiers? There goes any hope for excitement after school starts in the fall.
Disclaimer: I know the movie is a fantasy, but if you're an American and don't connect with those kids at least a little you're probably a commie yourself.
Spammers now hire the desperately poor and pay them to solve CAPTCHAs. Defeating that will involve either improving economic conditions in poor areas so that people won't be willing to do so any more, or writing a system more intelligent than humans.
One of these is difficult, the other will result in the Singularity. I'm hip with either.
You have two choices: You can most assuredly be raped in the ass without lube on a regular basis, or you can be screwed over every now and then. The majority voted to only get screwed every now and then.
That being said, Obama is going to regret this next time he needs to get out the vote.
Yes, it is. The USD has the full faith and backing of the most powerful government in the world, which in turn has the backing of a third of the world's entire GDP. Even in the worst of times, the people running it's printing presses are at least nominally sane.
1. Zenith
2. Cancel shows target audience love
3. Flail in search of new ones; Fail
4. Try to rebrand yourself to reach a wider audience (YOU ARE HERE)
5. Wider audience doesn't care, core audience leaves
6. Decline
Same thing that happened to Nickelodeon at the end of the 90s... You cancel SG: Atlantis but keep wrestling, generic monster movies and bullshit psychic stuff? WTF are you guys thinking? The only hope for American geeks now is that Star Trek XI succeeds and opens the gateway to a new ST series, since it's now gone from 'clear' to 'official' that the SciFi channel is no longer about SciFi and won't be creating any more of it in the near future. Maybe they can pick up where Enterprise left off, since it was a good show once they finished 9/11 In Space and got back to being Star Trek.
That's the point, Obama is openly favoring the Copyright Gestapo
If he doesn't at the very least moderate his actions he's going to be in for an unpleasant suprise when it's netroots-get-out-the-vote time in 2010.
It took you 3 days to tell your package manager to install the binary blob? I've heard of hunt-n-peck keyboarding, but damn... just ask someone next time.
Not really suprising. I disagree in some sense, but it's not suprising. We've discovered close to (but as the article demonstrates not quite) everything we can discover at the energy levels the Tevatron can generate - Needs bigger particle gun. And if the new one at CERN doesn't help, the next new one will have to be bigger than earth :/