All you have to do is ask the governing agencies to stop governing... and the only way to do so, is to stop asking them for help. Help your neighbors and your friends, your family and your acquaintances. Get everyone off the welfare or government enforcement teats, and sooner or later the leviathan will have no justification for its existence.
I'd like to see some of the mainstream "educated" folks willing to give up the bread and circuses, for even a month of their lives. Yeah right.
By the same token, given that some of the older virus hits still work in XP, with minor updates, even though there was an "architecture change", leads me to wonder if a slight modification to such a virus would not make it "vista compatible" ? Hell, Sub7 still works today. That's either a technical feat on the part of the sub7 crowd, or it is a total and dysmal failure of the windows people to keep up with vulns, especially the kind that would be critical if implemented by a hostile individual in a critical IT environment (banking, military, research, hospitals, etc?).
If anything, I recall that MS has a tendency to not even really fix things when their customers are hurting... there's a reason I gave up on IT work. I valued my sanity. That and I don't like lying to customers that their problem is someone else's fault. Its their fault for buying products aimed at the lowest common denominator of user ability and intelligence.
At this point I don't have to worry anymore and use some bullshit excuse like "its those evil virus writers' fault" or "Microsoft will fix it soon"... or "you probably weren't up to date on patches".
The main flaws of Windows, is that they were operating systems marketed to the lowest common denominator in intellect, and fairly high end hardware that was affordable at the time. If it had not been for the gaming and hardware geeks (think the last generation of hardware overclockers, back when dip switches on boards were still common), and for the hard core gamers, I'm willing to believe that the hardware race would never have taken off like it did.
Frankly I may well have forgotten what the attack was called, per se, you may be right and so might that wiki entry you pointed to. All I know is that walking away from windows IT has done wonders for my sanity. Lying to customers as a company policy is definitely not the way I prefer to do business, but working for someone else ends up costing dearly when the company line is "windows is good, and you need it". For office work, windows is a joke. For gaming, sure, its great... but gaming is the only reason I would even consider still using windows. Other than gaming, I have no reason to touch it, not even with a ten foot pole. Your mileage, however, may vary.
And you learned about that part of "fear psychology 101" in some government school, I wager, reading a government sanctioned book. Interesting that you only had ONE approved source of such "facts" and yet you still buy it.
Question I'll pose is... "and government enforcement of policy is done without violence or the threat thereof?" Lets see you not file or pay taxes if you're "liable" and see how long it is before the jack booted storm troopers kick your door in, after shooting your dog and slamming any helpless invalids face first to the ground... "for the storm trooper's safety, of course".
Heh, its okay, if you ever get shafted and notice, your viewpoint will change. That's the beauty of being screwed over by life... eventually you start to notice why... or you don't and keep getting shafted.
I'll bet your assumption couldn't be more wrong. People have no notion of freedom.
They will comply and keep spending. Their house gets foreclosed, they'll keep paying mortgage. Their car loan gets recalled and it gets repossessed, they'll keep making payments. Its amazing to me, the sheer sheep factor I see in men and women today. Boggles my mind how obedient they can be.
Not that I'm "surprised" by any of this. I passed the stage of "plausible surprise factor" some two or three years ago... now I'm just coming to terms with the enormity of it all.
I expect that people will buy "lesser" just like they bought less gasoline when it jacked up over 4 bucks a gallon, while salaries stayed the same. Like they buy less cheap walmart goods, or less "cheap" food and necessities (which have been going up in price like crazy).
Lets get real... the people that will thrive in this coming decade saw the writing on the wall... the rest, are either furniture, or lunch. Fact of life, and one which neither you, nor I, can change.
As for your sig... you ARE aware that neither of the bushes, daddy or sonny are from Texas? They're from Tennessee last I heard. East coast northern socialists. Sure, Republicans are Democrat Lite, or Diet Socialists, but what did you expect, the people get what the people want... and they've learned, since school, to NOT pay attention to what they're told to ignore?
From personal experience, I'm willing to bet 50 bucks that the only businesses that will be hurt, will be the ones that get taxed heavily... and they'll outsource or close, depending on how small they are.
And then the dickheads who liked the tax will go crying to government goons to "stop the evil outsourcing"... and the government will yet tax them even MORE to be able to hire more worthless, unproductive bureaucrats to shuffle papers and "prevent the evil outsourcing".
And who's to blame? Well obviously the small businesses who had to operate on yet a smaller than profitable margin in order to stay competitive with the huge businesses which didn't pay the taxes or weren't subject to them in the first place. Call it the Amazon tax, but realize that it will hit the small online shops... not the big ones. The big ones will not even notice it.
Nothing new. Government creates problems, it never solves them.
You're thinking too short term. I'm thinking past SHTF or the point where the government gives its Beretta a blow job.
Faith in the power of the almighty politicians to "save us" from life itself, is running short. After that, if people have learned to be autonomous and not expect handouts stolen from others, life should get much nicer. Of course, I'm banking on people learning to respect property and to live up to their promises.
Heh... yeah, I know, at least I don't believe in the Easter Bunny anymore:)
Thanks for correcting me. I'm just rehashing what I heard ages ago in my days of fixing windows PCS from user incompetence attacks. PEBKAC type stuff. Well paying and endlessly replenishing source of minor revenue:)
It has been 3 or 4 years since I've done any windows IT. I don't miss it. I may have named the vulnerability incorrectly but the reference I read when I was trying to fix the pcs in question mingled a local hijack of the Winlogon process and the full escalation of even guest level privileges to administrator/SYSTEM rights. the mechanics were described as a "new take on the classic teardrop attack". I didn't bother to research further, since I had little time left to fix things... see, people generally surf porn with IE (any version)... and then wonder why they keep going back to Geek Squad or private IT shops to get their PCS de-trojaned.
"But I thought Trojan was a brand of condoms..." (this was a comment I got from a prominent businessman who kept coming to our shop every two weeks to get his PC fixed, and bitching that it was unreliable. We eventually sat down with him, and explained to him that it was his surfing practices, plus the various shoddily coded browsers and viewers that enabled virus and trojan hits to take his system to performance hell.)
Again I appreciate the rehash, and the corrections. I lose nothing from this.
Actually the last time I ran into it, it was on the Panda Antivirus website when I was researching a trojan, some 3 years or so past, which had a funny tendency to use what the av people referred to as a "new take on the tear drop attack".
So I threw out what I heard, and haven't bothered. I do recall that I found the virus on XP AND Millenium Edition. Of course ME was negligible since its lifespan was probably the same as Vista's will be before MS releases a new and much improved version. (Windows XPNIE New Interface Edition?)
I tried something for kicks, and found that I haven't been able to "activate" any of my legit copies of XP, not my Tech Net edition, not my Action Pack edition, and not my personally owned one. What's up with that... have they been "updating their XP registration software" all day today and yesterday? Or are they screwing with XP owners to force their hand to Vista or Linux?
The original Privilege Escalation attack occurred with trojans hijacking various Microsoft Office or Windows/Internet Explorer processes and using privilege escalation, even from a windows NT/2000/XP "Guest" account if it was available. This was once referred to as a teardrop attack. You can google the rest of the details.
Want to know the funny?
Any process running in windows could do this, regardless of whether the virus was.exe or.com or a.jar.
The culprit? Bad code in Winlogon. Now I'm pretty sure Winlogon wasn't developed by third party developers who didn't "follow Microsoft best code practices".
Perhaps if they had spent less time trying to fuck users into being locked into their software and had actually spent as much time developing good solid software as they spent developing the activation / antipiracy features, people would actually want to PAY for their products just to make sure they stay in business and keep making good products, they wouldn't have people demanding to stay with XP. (Hell until games stopped using OpenGL and went to Direct 3d, I was still using Windows 98 for gaming... once Direct 3d became mandatory for newer games, I went to XP on a laptop and transferred it to my desktop when I switched the laptop to BSD... short of gaming, my gaming rig does little else, spending most of its non gaming time, OFFLINE... which is good for my power bills and AC bills since it outputs more heat than my 24/7 servers next door. Which, is, in itself, quite funny.)
No, I mean like a less centralized internet. Lots of "unofficial" nets, more active and available than BBS', WIFI has worked wonders in my old neighborhood. If everyone's traffic is completely encrypted, it makes the ability of attackers of all colors to interfere, that much less. Of course should your adversaries or snoopy neighbor type individuals take physical action (EMP, raid, burglary, etc) then your enemies, whomever they may be, have just identified themselves by taking open action... at that point, keeping your private life private, by, say, encrypting your purchases and keeping telemarketers out will take a back burner to whoever is directly attacking your communications. Of course such activity will affect the entire neighborhood, and instead of just pissing off one house by having the upstream ISP fuck just that one customer, since the neighborhood is a self organized unit, they fuck with one, they fuck with all.
Two benefits. Hard to send a "national security letter" whether authentic or fake, to your local wifi or wired "CAN" operating neighbor, who knows YOU far better than any goon or social engineering Kevin Mitnick wannabe. Also a good reason to get to know your neighbors. Also a good reason for ALL traffic to be encrypted. Only the proper recipients have an easy time decrypting. And unless the myth of quantum computing solving all the world's ills comes true, don't expect it to aid anyone in cracking your encrypted list of cigar shops, liquor joints and nudie bars. Unless of course, your wife happens to have arrived from the quantum computing mothership, but then you've got other worries... again, data security is good to keep nosy people out. If bad guys decide they want you badly enough, your computer being lost to your enemies is the least of your worries. Your immediate physical safety would be far more of a concern at that time.
As a result, a civilian net that is not operated by centralized units which may be bullied into submission or otherwise intimidated or subverted is of utmost necessity. Printers and pamphleteers of the old world had the right idea with the first ammendment in the USA, but it fell short because nobody realized that people imported from other countries would often bring their government or leader worship with them... the subversion of the "free press" happened long before any of us were born. The internet is just the latest, and the subversion has taken a lot longer for the mere factor, that much like "leading libertarians", taking over the internet is like "herding cats"... or as an old cowboy said... "if you think you run the show, try ordering someone else's dog around."
Same thing here. The organization of the net is very hierarchical at the provider level, but needs not be. FidoNet is cool, but administrators can still be bullied into submission by the local law enforcement, whether a crime is occurring or whether a user is merely targeted for political assassination by the local "authoritah". As we all know, the world's justice systems don't actually subscribe to the "truth in advertising"... unless, of course, your bank account in Zurich is QUITE large and quite full.
People should've been busy building a patchwork off-net, but instead, they're bitching about the best way to involve a third player in everyone's business... a third player, mind you, who will dictate that we have no rights. Recall for a moment that without government, corporations would cease to exist as government protected entities with rights, and would be seen as what they are. Worthless pieces of paper backed by government. Hey, come to think of it, so is paper, government issued money and credit.
Irony everywhere these days.
Anyways, so while you suckers could've been out building the Linux style network for all, you were busy bitching about how the government isn't bailing out the airli... oh, sorry, internet. Well guess what? They will. And then they'll make rules. You give them the right to make rules once, and you've given the keys to the kingdom to them forever. Are you sure that is so wise?
There are so many good ideas out there, onion routing, anonymous news nets, user level encryption that works (mostly works, but the errors are all user based)... and yet we're lacking the ability to communicate? Hell, I think the blame goes to the geeks... "we're still using the old style internet with government and corporate controlled DNS root servers?"
Had it been for the likes of us, as we are today, we'd still be monkeys. Always afraid of change. Imagine the early cave man, learning of fire... the fearful society of today is actually projecting its own fearful nature upon the early man, but I wager, all of our "progress" was due to curiosity, not governmental "protections".
I don't expect change to come from the majority. Majority has always been kicked, dragging and screaming into each tomorrow. As they say, "in all change, 5% or less are doing all the work, the other 95% are furniture."
Until the airlines are bankrupt, we will not see anything new replace them. Until government loses its faithful, we will not see freedom embraced. Either way, these last two generations will damage at least 3 more before the world can be set to freedom... which leads me to believe that the majority will ALWAYS want to be in a chicken coop... it will always fear being free.
No concerns though, I demand nothing of the majority EXCEPT that it stay OUT of my life, and live theirs. How they go about it, is none of my business, or concern.
By the same principle, you're going to excuse "non automobile savvy parents" from being the failures they are because they were too incredibly stupid to teach their kids "don't hitch rides with strangers" (unless of course the kid aces the local IDPA pistol course and packs everywhere she goes, but that's impossible in modern countries, since only free men and women have access to any means of self defense at all. Modern countries discourage non institutionalized methods of self defense, and their denizens obey these discouragements.)
Your point is well taken. My outlook on the locals has changed as well. If it was the me today working for them and getting shafted, you can be assured that logs of all their traffic, activities and video records would've made their way, anonymously, to whoever at the BSA or Microsoft could kick the most ass. But that was then, and my outlook now is far more jaded.
Which, frankly, is why I haven't done government work of any kind since then. I have a soul I am quite fond of, thank you.
Being interrogated by jack booted thugs, be they cops, soldiers, school administrators or Agent Smith (or his many alphabet soup lookalikes), is generally enough to raise any innocent individual's fight or flight response. Which of those two responses it is depends on how much they have left to lose at the time of the interrogation.
What has to be asked is this. How much more will people put up with... and how often will this be used, as the "polygraph" is used now, to merely incriminate nervous individuals in courts where the juries are ignorant of the true fallibility of a polygraph?
Seriously, don't these schmucks have anything better to do? Every week its another half assed invention... its either fear mongering or more fear mongering. Seriously, I've got a running bet with a friend that eventually people will actually get fed up... and that is when I hope to still have a working cam corder, because the video footage will be PRICELESS! A lot of enforcers are gonna have a tough time staying healthy once the food gets expensive, especially once the homeless mobs in the big cities realize that they've nothing left to lose.
By the same token, i've heard some strange news about shanty towns starting to spring up around the borders with Canada... is there any truth to these rumors? I used to think shanty towns were the domain of Lin City in Linux and of course, Africa. Guess things are "evolving" even in America, eh?
Besides, socially well adjusted people are cattle. Look at history. All change is wrought by those who could NOT adjust or eat their bowl of porridge as proscribed by the lords and masters.
And you just said it. Its fear of counter attacks or return violence that keeps violent people in check. Government has rarely successfully done this. If they start fucking with people's genes to try to "adjust" them to "society", I'm going to laugh. Nature will find a way, as it always has, and then, amusingly, the few left with savage (read SURVIVOR) genes, will slaughter the rest of the peons on a whim and steal whatever they please... hmmm, I guess they'd become rulers again.
Hey, doesn't that rhyme with past history, since agricultural sedentary cultures have been around?
Speaking of that... I have a canuck friend who is under the impression that Canada's gun control is "great work" since now "all canucks have to worry about is that crimes are still being commited by only with screw drivers or knives." You know... I wonder if the socialists that praise "gun control" have ever seen how painful and traumatic a stabbing death or just a stabbing wounding can be? Even a hollowpoint that stops in its target, will do a ton of damage but the pain sets in a bit later... knives, on the other hand, can be used even by the uninitiated to inflict FAR more grievous wounds, yet most people are more scared of guns.
Hell, I will make this bet. I take a 1911 (Colt, standard 1991 A1) that I will have tinkered with prior to letting the slashdotter "take it away from me". I will then proceed to see if they can then, with the gun they just "took" from me, hit a man sized target at 21 feet (most driveways in suburbia distances.)
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of anti gun slashdotters will not even know if the safety is on or off, will not know how to line up the sights properly, will not have steady hands, will overcompensate for recoil, and if they get so far as to make the gun able to shoot and take a shot, some may even drop it upon receiving the shock of recoil. I'd be curious to run such a trial...
I ran WoW at 10 fps faster than my windows install (which also was on the faster hard disk controller and hard disk inside my workstation) under cedega. Once cedega died, I had to tweak it for WineX... guess what? 12 fps faster:)
The only one I have trouble with is Half Life 2... the game runs under WineX, but Steam has problems rendering text, so you have to guess which button is which till you get ingame... not the most fun way to do things:(
I hate Steam, and wish there was a way, even under windows, to NOT use it.
I just wiped the Windows box tonight though... I'll have an orphaned copy of Windows XP Professional... *sniffles*
Oh well. Been gaming too much lately anyways.
** To the fellow who pointed to the Playstation 3 wiki... I have mine running apache and vsftpd:) **
** When I can get my Playstation 2 to run Kerberos 4, I'll post a howto on slashdot. I'm not feeling very motivated though.**
Without governments to bail them out when they make bad decisions like lose 100000 SSN's, most of these companies (like big airline for example) would have been defeated by their own unsustainable and shoddy business methodologies.
Consider that in the area I live, I've heard chat of the locals forming their own charter group for airlines. About 100000 locals in an area twice as big as the nearest metropolitan zone (some 30 miles away from the border of the county). People even here, as recently as 2 or 3 weeks ago ridiculed the idea as "only for the rich".
I said that once people get sick of being forced to kiss their ankles for the TSA and other cash infusions that the government made to the shoddy business models of the airlines, that we'd see charters or other BETTER business models rise up to take their place.
It is happening people. It was inevitable. 9/11 was a blessing to the airlines and the big crooked groups that run the government. The world doesn't need them, and as soon as it stops fighting them, or funding them, it can live just fine without need of them. That they'll fight tooth and nail to prevent their own fall into irrelevancy is inevitable... this is the "god that failed" and the faster its believers realize that they created IT, and IT did not create them, they'll know that it was they who delegated power to it, and not it that "permits" them to live or do things.
Government has protected these huge corporations and bailed them out and provided them with support every time they made a financially POOR choice. No everyday Joe has that option. Not that I expect things to change for the vast masses who WILL expect the government to regulate every aspect of life. Expect things to only get more secretive, enforcement to get more brutal, and wrongs and failures of the system to be harder to spot, but far more catastrophic when they occur. This is the nature of this beast, and regulation will not stop it. Government gave Ma Bell the phone network, they didn't have to truly work for it. Then they had to regulate it? The tax payers in every region had a right to decide for themselves, yet they neither exercised nor did anything to enforce their right. The tail wags the dog. The tail has wagged this dog ever since the poor dog decided to grow a tail.
Slashdot Mirror
"Old camp"
Now seriously, why not call it "Our Net (tm)" ?
Our Net might sound damn good... and give the people paying for it a measure or at least a feeling of some sort of stake in this thing.
All you have to do is ask the governing agencies to stop governing... and the only way to do so, is to stop asking them for help. Help your neighbors and your friends, your family and your acquaintances. Get everyone off the welfare or government enforcement teats, and sooner or later the leviathan will have no justification for its existence.
I'd like to see some of the mainstream "educated" folks willing to give up the bread and circuses, for even a month of their lives. Yeah right.
You got me there... well said.
By the same token, given that some of the older virus hits still work in XP, with minor updates, even though there was an "architecture change", leads me to wonder if a slight modification to such a virus would not make it "vista compatible" ? Hell, Sub7 still works today. That's either a technical feat on the part of the sub7 crowd, or it is a total and dysmal failure of the windows people to keep up with vulns, especially the kind that would be critical if implemented by a hostile individual in a critical IT environment (banking, military, research, hospitals, etc?).
If anything, I recall that MS has a tendency to not even really fix things when their customers are hurting... there's a reason I gave up on IT work. I valued my sanity. That and I don't like lying to customers that their problem is someone else's fault. Its their fault for buying products aimed at the lowest common denominator of user ability and intelligence.
At this point I don't have to worry anymore and use some bullshit excuse like "its those evil virus writers' fault" or "Microsoft will fix it soon"... or "you probably weren't up to date on patches".
The main flaws of Windows, is that they were operating systems marketed to the lowest common denominator in intellect, and fairly high end hardware that was affordable at the time. If it had not been for the gaming and hardware geeks (think the last generation of hardware overclockers, back when dip switches on boards were still common), and for the hard core gamers, I'm willing to believe that the hardware race would never have taken off like it did.
Frankly I may well have forgotten what the attack was called, per se, you may be right and so might that wiki entry you pointed to. All I know is that walking away from windows IT has done wonders for my sanity. Lying to customers as a company policy is definitely not the way I prefer to do business, but working for someone else ends up costing dearly when the company line is "windows is good, and you need it". For office work, windows is a joke. For gaming, sure, its great... but gaming is the only reason I would even consider still using windows. Other than gaming, I have no reason to touch it, not even with a ten foot pole. Your mileage, however, may vary.
So you're saying that FDR was a good guy? Ye GODS MAN! Are you nuts? They were all out to rule you, and yet you claim some were better than others?
Wow, I don't know where your moral compass comes from, but it seems to have been forged in the mind smashing complexes known as schools.
Guess anyone who robs Peter to pay Paul will count on the support of Paul. "Thems the breaks I guess."
And you learned about that part of "fear psychology 101" in some government school, I wager, reading a government sanctioned book. Interesting that you only had ONE approved source of such "facts" and yet you still buy it.
Question I'll pose is... "and government enforcement of policy is done without violence or the threat thereof?" Lets see you not file or pay taxes if you're "liable" and see how long it is before the jack booted storm troopers kick your door in, after shooting your dog and slamming any helpless invalids face first to the ground... "for the storm trooper's safety, of course".
Heh, its okay, if you ever get shafted and notice, your viewpoint will change. That's the beauty of being screwed over by life... eventually you start to notice why... or you don't and keep getting shafted.
I'll bet your assumption couldn't be more wrong. People have no notion of freedom.
They will comply and keep spending. Their house gets foreclosed, they'll keep paying mortgage. Their car loan gets recalled and it gets repossessed, they'll keep making payments. Its amazing to me, the sheer sheep factor I see in men and women today. Boggles my mind how obedient they can be.
Not that I'm "surprised" by any of this. I passed the stage of "plausible surprise factor" some two or three years ago... now I'm just coming to terms with the enormity of it all.
I expect that people will buy "lesser" just like they bought less gasoline when it jacked up over 4 bucks a gallon, while salaries stayed the same. Like they buy less cheap walmart goods, or less "cheap" food and necessities (which have been going up in price like crazy).
Lets get real... the people that will thrive in this coming decade saw the writing on the wall... the rest, are either furniture, or lunch. Fact of life, and one which neither you, nor I, can change.
As for your sig... you ARE aware that neither of the bushes, daddy or sonny are from Texas? They're from Tennessee last I heard. East coast northern socialists. Sure, Republicans are Democrat Lite, or Diet Socialists, but what did you expect, the people get what the people want... and they've learned, since school, to NOT pay attention to what they're told to ignore?
From personal experience, I'm willing to bet 50 bucks that the only businesses that will be hurt, will be the ones that get taxed heavily... and they'll outsource or close, depending on how small they are.
And then the dickheads who liked the tax will go crying to government goons to "stop the evil outsourcing"... and the government will yet tax them even MORE to be able to hire more worthless, unproductive bureaucrats to shuffle papers and "prevent the evil outsourcing".
And who's to blame? Well obviously the small businesses who had to operate on yet a smaller than profitable margin in order to stay competitive with the huge businesses which didn't pay the taxes or weren't subject to them in the first place. Call it the Amazon tax, but realize that it will hit the small online shops... not the big ones. The big ones will not even notice it.
Nothing new. Government creates problems, it never solves them.
You're thinking too short term. I'm thinking past SHTF or the point where the government gives its Beretta a blow job.
:)
Faith in the power of the almighty politicians to "save us" from life itself, is running short. After that, if people have learned to be autonomous and not expect handouts stolen from others, life should get much nicer. Of course, I'm banking on people learning to respect property and to live up to their promises.
Heh... yeah, I know, at least I don't believe in the Easter Bunny anymore
Thanks for correcting me. I'm just rehashing what I heard ages ago in my days of fixing windows PCS from user incompetence attacks. PEBKAC type stuff. Well paying and endlessly replenishing source of minor revenue :)
It has been 3 or 4 years since I've done any windows IT. I don't miss it. I may have named the vulnerability incorrectly but the reference I read when I was trying to fix the pcs in question mingled a local hijack of the Winlogon process and the full escalation of even guest level privileges to administrator/SYSTEM rights. the mechanics were described as a "new take on the classic teardrop attack". I didn't bother to research further, since I had little time left to fix things... see, people generally surf porn with IE (any version)... and then wonder why they keep going back to Geek Squad or private IT shops to get their PCS de-trojaned.
"But I thought Trojan was a brand of condoms..." (this was a comment I got from a prominent businessman who kept coming to our shop every two weeks to get his PC fixed, and bitching that it was unreliable. We eventually sat down with him, and explained to him that it was his surfing practices, plus the various shoddily coded browsers and viewers that enabled virus and trojan hits to take his system to performance hell.)
Again I appreciate the rehash, and the corrections. I lose nothing from this.
Actually the last time I ran into it, it was on the Panda Antivirus website when I was researching a trojan, some 3 years or so past, which had a funny tendency to use what the av people referred to as a "new take on the tear drop attack".
So I threw out what I heard, and haven't bothered. I do recall that I found the virus on XP AND Millenium Edition. Of course ME was negligible since its lifespan was probably the same as Vista's will be before MS releases a new and much improved version. (Windows XPNIE New Interface Edition?)
I tried something for kicks, and found that I haven't been able to "activate" any of my legit copies of XP, not my Tech Net edition, not my Action Pack edition, and not my personally owned one. What's up with that... have they been "updating their XP registration software" all day today and yesterday? Or are they screwing with XP owners to force their hand to Vista or Linux?
The original Privilege Escalation attack occurred with trojans hijacking various Microsoft Office or Windows/Internet Explorer processes and using privilege escalation, even from a windows NT/2000/XP "Guest" account if it was available. This was once referred to as a teardrop attack. You can google the rest of the details.
.exe or .com or a .jar.
Want to know the funny?
Any process running in windows could do this, regardless of whether the virus was
The culprit? Bad code in Winlogon. Now I'm pretty sure Winlogon wasn't developed by third party developers who didn't "follow Microsoft best code practices".
Perhaps if they had spent less time trying to fuck users into being locked into their software and had actually spent as much time developing good solid software as they spent developing the activation / antipiracy features, people would actually want to PAY for their products just to make sure they stay in business and keep making good products, they wouldn't have people demanding to stay with XP. (Hell until games stopped using OpenGL and went to Direct 3d, I was still using Windows 98 for gaming... once Direct 3d became mandatory for newer games, I went to XP on a laptop and transferred it to my desktop when I switched the laptop to BSD... short of gaming, my gaming rig does little else, spending most of its non gaming time, OFFLINE... which is good for my power bills and AC bills since it outputs more heat than my 24/7 servers next door. Which, is, in itself, quite funny.)
No, I mean like a less centralized internet. Lots of "unofficial" nets, more active and available than BBS', WIFI has worked wonders in my old neighborhood. If everyone's traffic is completely encrypted, it makes the ability of attackers of all colors to interfere, that much less. Of course should your adversaries or snoopy neighbor type individuals take physical action (EMP, raid, burglary, etc) then your enemies, whomever they may be, have just identified themselves by taking open action... at that point, keeping your private life private, by, say, encrypting your purchases and keeping telemarketers out will take a back burner to whoever is directly attacking your communications. Of course such activity will affect the entire neighborhood, and instead of just pissing off one house by having the upstream ISP fuck just that one customer, since the neighborhood is a self organized unit, they fuck with one, they fuck with all.
Two benefits. Hard to send a "national security letter" whether authentic or fake, to your local wifi or wired "CAN" operating neighbor, who knows YOU far better than any goon or social engineering Kevin Mitnick wannabe. Also a good reason to get to know your neighbors. Also a good reason for ALL traffic to be encrypted. Only the proper recipients have an easy time decrypting. And unless the myth of quantum computing solving all the world's ills comes true, don't expect it to aid anyone in cracking your encrypted list of cigar shops, liquor joints and nudie bars. Unless of course, your wife happens to have arrived from the quantum computing mothership, but then you've got other worries... again, data security is good to keep nosy people out. If bad guys decide they want you badly enough, your computer being lost to your enemies is the least of your worries. Your immediate physical safety would be far more of a concern at that time.
As a result, a civilian net that is not operated by centralized units which may be bullied into submission or otherwise intimidated or subverted is of utmost necessity. Printers and pamphleteers of the old world had the right idea with the first ammendment in the USA, but it fell short because nobody realized that people imported from other countries would often bring their government or leader worship with them... the subversion of the "free press" happened long before any of us were born. The internet is just the latest, and the subversion has taken a lot longer for the mere factor, that much like "leading libertarians", taking over the internet is like "herding cats"... or as an old cowboy said... "if you think you run the show, try ordering someone else's dog around."
Same thing here. The organization of the net is very hierarchical at the provider level, but needs not be. FidoNet is cool, but administrators can still be bullied into submission by the local law enforcement, whether a crime is occurring or whether a user is merely targeted for political assassination by the local "authoritah". As we all know, the world's justice systems don't actually subscribe to the "truth in advertising"... unless, of course, your bank account in Zurich is QUITE large and quite full.
People should've been busy building a patchwork off-net, but instead, they're bitching about the best way to involve a third player in everyone's business... a third player, mind you, who will dictate that we have no rights. Recall for a moment that without government, corporations would cease to exist as government protected entities with rights, and would be seen as what they are. Worthless pieces of paper backed by government. Hey, come to think of it, so is paper, government issued money and credit.
Irony everywhere these days.
Anyways, so while you suckers could've been out building the Linux style network for all, you were busy bitching about how the government isn't bailing out the airli... oh, sorry, internet. Well guess what? They will. And then they'll make rules. You give them the right to make rules once, and you've given the keys to the kingdom to them forever. Are you sure that is so wise?
There are so many good ideas out there, onion routing, anonymous news nets, user level encryption that works (mostly works, but the errors are all user based)... and yet we're lacking the ability to communicate? Hell, I think the blame goes to the geeks... "we're still using the old style internet with government and corporate controlled DNS root servers?"
Need coffee it seems.
kicked, dragging and screaming
should read...
dragged, kicking and screaming.
Afraid of pain, but want evolution?
Had it been for the likes of us, as we are today, we'd still be monkeys. Always afraid of change. Imagine the early cave man, learning of fire... the fearful society of today is actually projecting its own fearful nature upon the early man, but I wager, all of our "progress" was due to curiosity, not governmental "protections".
I don't expect change to come from the majority. Majority has always been kicked, dragging and screaming into each tomorrow. As they say, "in all change, 5% or less are doing all the work, the other 95% are furniture."
Until the airlines are bankrupt, we will not see anything new replace them. Until government loses its faithful, we will not see freedom embraced. Either way, these last two generations will damage at least 3 more before the world can be set to freedom... which leads me to believe that the majority will ALWAYS want to be in a chicken coop... it will always fear being free.
No concerns though, I demand nothing of the majority EXCEPT that it stay OUT of my life, and live theirs. How they go about it, is none of my business, or concern.
By the same principle, you're going to excuse "non automobile savvy parents" from being the failures they are because they were too incredibly stupid to teach their kids "don't hitch rides with strangers" (unless of course the kid aces the local IDPA pistol course and packs everywhere she goes, but that's impossible in modern countries, since only free men and women have access to any means of self defense at all. Modern countries discourage non institutionalized methods of self defense, and their denizens obey these discouragements.)
Your point is well taken. My outlook on the locals has changed as well. If it was the me today working for them and getting shafted, you can be assured that logs of all their traffic, activities and video records would've made their way, anonymously, to whoever at the BSA or Microsoft could kick the most ass. But that was then, and my outlook now is far more jaded.
Which, frankly, is why I haven't done government work of any kind since then. I have a soul I am quite fond of, thank you.
Ahhh, good point. Good point. The olde catch 22 idea, eh?
Being interrogated by jack booted thugs, be they cops, soldiers, school administrators or Agent Smith (or his many alphabet soup lookalikes), is generally enough to raise any innocent individual's fight or flight response. Which of those two responses it is depends on how much they have left to lose at the time of the interrogation.
What has to be asked is this. How much more will people put up with... and how often will this be used, as the "polygraph" is used now, to merely incriminate nervous individuals in courts where the juries are ignorant of the true fallibility of a polygraph?
Seriously, don't these schmucks have anything better to do? Every week its another half assed invention... its either fear mongering or more fear mongering. Seriously, I've got a running bet with a friend that eventually people will actually get fed up... and that is when I hope to still have a working cam corder, because the video footage will be PRICELESS! A lot of enforcers are gonna have a tough time staying healthy once the food gets expensive, especially once the homeless mobs in the big cities realize that they've nothing left to lose.
By the same token, i've heard some strange news about shanty towns starting to spring up around the borders with Canada... is there any truth to these rumors? I used to think shanty towns were the domain of Lin City in Linux and of course, Africa. Guess things are "evolving" even in America, eh?
Now you're getting it.
Besides, socially well adjusted people are cattle. Look at history. All change is wrought by those who could NOT adjust or eat their bowl of porridge as proscribed by the lords and masters.
And you just said it. Its fear of counter attacks or return violence that keeps violent people in check. Government has rarely successfully done this. If they start fucking with people's genes to try to "adjust" them to "society", I'm going to laugh. Nature will find a way, as it always has, and then, amusingly, the few left with savage (read SURVIVOR) genes, will slaughter the rest of the peons on a whim and steal whatever they please... hmmm, I guess they'd become rulers again.
Hey, doesn't that rhyme with past history, since agricultural sedentary cultures have been around?
Speaking of that... I have a canuck friend who is under the impression that Canada's gun control is "great work" since now "all canucks have to worry about is that crimes are still being commited by only with screw drivers or knives." You know... I wonder if the socialists that praise "gun control" have ever seen how painful and traumatic a stabbing death or just a stabbing wounding can be? Even a hollowpoint that stops in its target, will do a ton of damage but the pain sets in a bit later... knives, on the other hand, can be used even by the uninitiated to inflict FAR more grievous wounds, yet most people are more scared of guns.
Hell, I will make this bet. I take a 1911 (Colt, standard 1991 A1) that I will have tinkered with prior to letting the slashdotter "take it away from me". I will then proceed to see if they can then, with the gun they just "took" from me, hit a man sized target at 21 feet (most driveways in suburbia distances.)
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of anti gun slashdotters will not even know if the safety is on or off, will not know how to line up the sights properly, will not have steady hands, will overcompensate for recoil, and if they get so far as to make the gun able to shoot and take a shot, some may even drop it upon receiving the shock of recoil. I'd be curious to run such a trial...
I ran WoW at 10 fps faster than my windows install (which also was on the faster hard disk controller and hard disk inside my workstation) under cedega. Once cedega died, I had to tweak it for WineX... guess what? 12 fps faster :)
:(
:) **
The only one I have trouble with is Half Life 2... the game runs under WineX, but Steam has problems rendering text, so you have to guess which button is which till you get ingame... not the most fun way to do things
I hate Steam, and wish there was a way, even under windows, to NOT use it.
I just wiped the Windows box tonight though... I'll have an orphaned copy of Windows XP Professional... *sniffles*
Oh well. Been gaming too much lately anyways.
** To the fellow who pointed to the Playstation 3 wiki... I have mine running apache and vsftpd
** When I can get my Playstation 2 to run Kerberos 4, I'll post a howto on slashdot. I'm not feeling very motivated though.**
10 000 locals not 100 000 ... typo.
Without governments to bail them out when they make bad decisions like lose 100000 SSN's, most of these companies (like big airline for example) would have been defeated by their own unsustainable and shoddy business methodologies.
Consider that in the area I live, I've heard chat of the locals forming their own charter group for airlines. About 100000 locals in an area twice as big as the nearest metropolitan zone (some 30 miles away from the border of the county). People even here, as recently as 2 or 3 weeks ago ridiculed the idea as "only for the rich".
I said that once people get sick of being forced to kiss their ankles for the TSA and other cash infusions that the government made to the shoddy business models of the airlines, that we'd see charters or other BETTER business models rise up to take their place.
It is happening people. It was inevitable. 9/11 was a blessing to the airlines and the big crooked groups that run the government. The world doesn't need them, and as soon as it stops fighting them, or funding them, it can live just fine without need of them. That they'll fight tooth and nail to prevent their own fall into irrelevancy is inevitable... this is the "god that failed" and the faster its believers realize that they created IT, and IT did not create them, they'll know that it was they who delegated power to it, and not it that "permits" them to live or do things.
Government has protected these huge corporations and bailed them out and provided them with support every time they made a financially POOR choice. No everyday Joe has that option. Not that I expect things to change for the vast masses who WILL expect the government to regulate every aspect of life. Expect things to only get more secretive, enforcement to get more brutal, and wrongs and failures of the system to be harder to spot, but far more catastrophic when they occur. This is the nature of this beast, and regulation will not stop it. Government gave Ma Bell the phone network, they didn't have to truly work for it. Then they had to regulate it? The tax payers in every region had a right to decide for themselves, yet they neither exercised nor did anything to enforce their right. The tail wags the dog. The tail has wagged this dog ever since the poor dog decided to grow a tail.
Not being afraid of death does not mean that I have to stop the life I am enjoying right now and let some schmuck ruin my ride.