By paying for everyone to get a digital set-top-box the government brings forward the time they can turn off analogue transmissions.
Presumably once analogue transmissions can be turned off the government stands to generate substantial income in re-auctioning the recovered radio spectrum.
Apple updates do not have an uninstall feature. Almost every windows update does.
Mac users should be much more wary of updates for that reason alone.
Apple also is a lot less interested in enterprise customers than Microsoft. Enterprise customers are the ones that demand extensive testing and will seriously crack the shits if some funny legacy application that is absolutely critical for their business fails to run following an update.
Apple isn't too fussed by backwards compatability either. So certainly an OS upgrade (10.3 -> 10.4) is expected to break things on OS X. Pre-Vista Microsoft pretty much guaranteed that if it worked on the old version it would work on the new version of Windows.
Perhaps this is part of a campaign to instill fear in the hearts of the "guilty" by first stringing up a few obviously innocent people.
Yep - they love to be in the news - especially in the news where potential pirates hang out. I'm sure they are most pleased with all the free publicity they get on Slashdot!... maybe Taco has defected to the dark side?
Actually eVACS is in active use. It is production quality product with full security review by at least one security group (and anyone can - it is open source).
This open-source system was developed by a number of well known names in the open source community - including - Andrew Tridgell (Samba), Martin Pool (Apache), and Rusty Russell (ip-tables / netfilter).
All elections for the ACT government in Australia are now run using this system. Votes are lodged either at an eVACS terminal or - if lodged on paper ballot sheets - are manually entered into the electronic system for counting. That is - all votes end up in electronic form before counting / preference distribution is done automatically by computer.
There are a couple of factors that meant electronic counting / voting were going to come sooner rather than later in the ACT: the useful base of some well regarded open source leaders + the ACTs difficult Hare-Clark preference distribution scheme (allowing the part of your vote unnecessary to elect your prefered candidate to go on and help elect your next prefered candidate).
+laughing at US politics paragraph+ Obviously the $200,000 cost of development of such an open, accurate, and secure system is clearly not high enough to give US governments' bank rollers the belief they are getting value for money from their political donations! Maybe Halliburton can develop such a system for use in the US for a billion or so?
This open-source system was developed by a number of well known names in the open source community - eg - Andrew Tridgell (Samba), Martin Pool (Apache), and Rusty Russell (ip-tables / netfilter).
This system is in active use. All elections for the ACT government in Australia are now run using this system. Votes are lodged either at an eVACS terminal or - if lodged on paper ballot sheets - are manually entered into the electronic system for counting. That is - all votes end up in electronic form before counting / preference distribution is done automatically by computer.
Obviously the $200,000 cost of development of such an open, accurate, and secure system is clearly not high enough to give US governments' bank rollers the belief they are getting value for money from their political donations! Maybe Halliburton can develop such a system for use in the US for a billion or so?
The key to getting good customer service is for enough people to be willing to walk away from a company that is not providing it.
The other key to getting good customer service is to ensure you are always trying to obtain service at a time you have leverage over the company. In the capatalist system you are stupid to believe you will (or should) get something for nothing (even if you have previously paid for it)!
Warranty and post-sales service is in conflict with the idea of market forces / trade / barter / etc. You want something out of the company - what are they getting out of you (not what they have already got out of you)? When looking to get post-sales service it helps to be a business that can pull $50,000 / year worth of purchases from the supplier if they try to screw you -- or not to have paid for it yet.
If the business can make more money in the short to medium term by screwing the customer or at least pissing them off... then why wouldn't they?!
Taking suppliers to task under consumer protection legislation is a slightly painful process (but something I will always do if it's the only way to ensure I don't get screwed!). It is much better to ensure you have some commercial/financial leverage over them whenever you need something from them (and - while being friendly - ensure that they do realise why they want to help you).
and W2K3 has one absolute killer app - the Volume Copy Shadow service. A service that allows users to recover files that they have accidentally deleted or otherwise stuffed up without admin intervention and without worry about when the last backup was. [and really people - upgrading the users or swearing at stupid users is not a useful answer to the issue of them deleting files they actually need!]
If there is sufficient disk space this service gives the user (without admin intervention) access to every version of a particular file on your fileserver.
This service gives filesystem level support for keeping every copy of a file.
That feature alone to my mind counters any insecurities or required reboots of the MS product. If we didn't need to support a significant number of Macs at work all of our fileservers would be W2K3 (all other servers would remain Linux) at present our fileservers are OS X.
Um - no - cryptographic smartcards, the ones which store a private key for which the server end only knows the public key come in two varieties - one a standard ISO card, or as a USB dongle.
Technology is available now and actively being used by many companies.
Banks haven't picked it up yet because it is too complicated for the average (American) home user. Something like an RSA tag where you simply type something different into the password box each time rather than using the same thing everytime is a simple enough leap for the average knucle-dragger who doesn't have ready access to IT support.
Hmm - Mythbusters - those two guys don't seem like the most intelligent guys on the planet, even though I don't rate stuff from ancient mythology as highly likely I certainly do rate Archimedes as somewhat brighter than these two knuckle-draggers.
Certainly they seem somewhat more interested in making things go bang than any form of scientific rigour. They tell us about their experience in the special effects industry but seem to forget to mention any scientific experience...
Having said that - I quite like the show - but only because I like seeing things go bang. Definitely not because I put any stock in their results.
Indeed, and that is why Australia - even though it is sitting on over 1/3 of the world's known uranium supply - happily sells uranium to other countries but relies on Coal Power for our own electricity needs.
So hey - we can afford to build ridiculous 1KM high towers while we rape all you other shmucks by selling you Uranium.
It's an added benefit, something tall enough to really catch lightning has got to be a good place to research ways to capture some of that energy. Coupled with super capacitors we surely are not that far from being able to capture at least a small percentage of the energy from a lightning strike.
I had always hoped that SecurID would reject a second use of the same number but didn't know for sure - thanks for that. (standard slashdot - make outlandish statement that may or may not be true and someone more intelligent will correct;-)
On the matter of hijacking - that is while not trivial, quite do-able on the switched part of the network. First poison the ARP cache on client and gateway for client-gateway comms to point both to the man-in-the-middle box. All IP traffic between client and gateway then goes through you - use the mangle table in iptables to then reroute these back to their rightful destination. Hijacking would require a little bit of programming.
You don't usually get encrypted passwords when you sniff the datastream - you almost always get clear-text ones. POP3, IMAP, web-proxy being the most common problems.
An unsolicited Kerberos request for some username to the Kerberos server is the best way to get an encrypted password. (You'll be wanting to have Kerberos blocked at the firewall). And yes Kerberos runs on every Windows 2000+ server.
Rather than making the passwords more complex there just needs to be more care taken to protect the hash of the password.
If the only way to test if a password is valid is to use it against a running system, and each running system will only allow one password attempt per second it doesn't matter what your computational power is - you're not getting the password. [and if you're not inside a secure network you should be using a smart-card or at least a certificate anyway].
Kerberos is a definite no-no outside of a secure network. It will send to anyone who asks a little package encrypted with the user's password - so when you decrypt the package you know the user's password.... you can request this little package for ANY user - you just need access to the Kerberos port.
It is taking the education sector some time to be comfortable about the idea that technology may have a place equal to the teacher in the classroom.
Take mobile phones - with the development of predictive text no longer do I read newspaper articles about essays handed up for assesment in SMS shorthand. SMS now teaches kids to spell like no number of spelling bees can.
So parents invest in your child's future - pay their mobile phone bill for them.
US never did care much for the Geneva Convention
on
Robots for No Man's Land
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
The geneva convention requires that a human actually make the decision whether or not to fire upon a target.
Then again, the US war on terror shows that they do not feel bound by such conditions. Holding prisoners indefinitely without trial breaches both this convention and is a breach of Human Rights conventions.
As the third world catches up the US turns and runs back to the dark ages. What strong, selfless political masters the States has.
You're right - we should be talking about the second Mars rover now. After all it is using the same sort of flash memory as the other one - may not be much to say about it tomorrow.
This sort of thing is actually done on a much larger scale than a station wagon in real-life. For some reason Banks and Insurance companies with enormous amounts of data like to move their outsourced data storage facilities from company to company and place to place every so often - usually to cut down on running costs.
The method usually utilised is along the lines of - how much of the data can they do without for 12 hours? Sync the stuff they can't do without between the old and new centres over a leased line. Pack up the other tapes, truck them to the nearest airport, put them striaght onto the charterd jumbo and pray for good weather.
There are two different ways to breach copyright law in Australia:
Directly breaching copyright (copying something which you have not been given the right to copy).
Authorising the breach of copyright (the sharing of copyrighted material which others do not have the right to copy could be regarded as this)
There are no general fair use provisions in Australia. You may use copyrighted material only to the extent that it has been licensed for your use. [There are some specific fair use provisions for software but none for music].
Putting a photocopier on the street is illegal as soon as anyone has used it to breach someone else's copyright if you have not given the user sufficient warning. [note the Uni of NSW photocopier case which largely defined copyright law in Australia - you will find it on AustLII if you are interested].
Not correct - the whole 64kb/s is used for digitalised audio (G.711). Signalling is done out of band.
A T1 line is made up of 23 B channels and 1 D channel. The B channels have G.711 getting pumped down them, The D channel is used for signalling (Q.731 rings a bell).
The most widely used VoIP protocol is H.323. H323 allows negotiation of a compression CoDec. The base (worst) codec which must be supported is G.711 (64kb/s - this is what goes down an ISDN line - this is regarded as lossless digital encoding).
Latency is dealt with by using QoS. I make calls from Australia to Europe through a VoIP carrier at a cost of about 3cents/minute. The round trip delay appears less than 0.2 seconds.
The recommended CoDec is G.723.1 which is 5.3 or 6.3 kb/s (switches dependent on complexity I believe). This CoDec gives speech quality better than a mobile network will give you.
The bandwidth is only required in the direction of speech - when there is silence going the other way the bandwidth drops to near zero (just comfort noise generation and control signals send down the line). Comfort noise generation is done by a funny little algorithm that tells the other end the type of "silence" (static) to produce.
Re:Other Programs...
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I find new.net the nastiest. It installs itself in your TCP/IP stack and if you remove it manually (by deleting it) it breaks your network stack.
At one stage Ad-aware removed the new.net file without correctly uninstalling it (thus breaking your network connection).
New.net is one of the dodgiest companies out there - their site suggests that they sell legitimate domain names - unfortunately they don't sell domain names in real TLDs. Their dodgy bit of software makes domain names with non-real TLDs (which they sell) work.
Slashdot Mirror
By paying for everyone to get a digital set-top-box the government brings forward the time they can turn off analogue transmissions.
Presumably once analogue transmissions can be turned off the government stands to generate substantial income in re-auctioning the recovered radio spectrum.
Apple updates do not have an uninstall feature. Almost every windows update does.
Mac users should be much more wary of updates for that reason alone.
Apple also is a lot less interested in enterprise customers than Microsoft. Enterprise customers are the ones that demand extensive testing and will seriously crack the shits if some funny legacy application that is absolutely critical for their business fails to run following an update.
Apple isn't too fussed by backwards compatability either. So certainly an OS upgrade (10.3 -> 10.4) is expected to break things on OS X. Pre-Vista Microsoft pretty much guaranteed that if it worked on the old version it would work on the new version of Windows.
This open-source system was developed by a number of well known names in the open source community - including - Andrew Tridgell (Samba), Martin Pool (Apache), and Rusty Russell (ip-tables / netfilter).
All elections for the ACT government in Australia are now run using this system. Votes are lodged either at an eVACS terminal or - if lodged on paper ballot sheets - are manually entered into the electronic system for counting. That is - all votes end up in electronic form before counting / preference distribution is done automatically by computer.
more info and source code from the electoral office and the government recommends continued use following a full review after the last election.
There are a couple of factors that meant electronic counting / voting were going to come sooner rather than later in the ACT: the useful base of some well regarded open source leaders + the ACTs difficult Hare-Clark preference distribution scheme (allowing the part of your vote unnecessary to elect your prefered candidate to go on and help elect your next prefered candidate).
+laughing at US politics paragraph+ Obviously the $200,000 cost of development of such an open, accurate, and secure system is clearly not high enough to give US governments' bank rollers the belief they are getting value for money from their political donations! Maybe Halliburton can develop such a system for use in the US for a billion or so?
This open-source system was developed by a number of well known names in the open source community - eg - Andrew Tridgell (Samba), Martin Pool (Apache), and Rusty Russell (ip-tables / netfilter).
This system is in active use. All elections for the ACT government in Australia are now run using this system. Votes are lodged either at an eVACS terminal or - if lodged on paper ballot sheets - are manually entered into the electronic system for counting. That is - all votes end up in electronic form before counting / preference distribution is done automatically by computer.
Obviously the $200,000 cost of development of such an open, accurate, and secure system is clearly not high enough to give US governments' bank rollers the belief they are getting value for money from their political donations! Maybe Halliburton can develop such a system for use in the US for a billion or so?
more info and source code from the electoral office and recommendation for continued use.
Warranty and post-sales service is in conflict with the idea of market forces / trade / barter / etc. You want something out of the company - what are they getting out of you (not what they have already got out of you)? When looking to get post-sales service it helps to be a business that can pull $50,000 / year worth of purchases from the supplier if they try to screw you -- or not to have paid for it yet.
If the business can make more money in the short to medium term by screwing the customer or at least pissing them off ... then why wouldn't they?!
Taking suppliers to task under consumer protection legislation is a slightly painful process (but something I will always do if it's the only way to ensure I don't get screwed!). It is much better to ensure you have some commercial/financial leverage over them whenever you need something from them (and - while being friendly - ensure that they do realise why they want to help you).
If there is sufficient disk space this service gives the user (without admin intervention) access to every version of a particular file on your fileserver.
This service gives filesystem level support for keeping every copy of a file.
That feature alone to my mind counters any insecurities or required reboots of the MS product. If we didn't need to support a significant number of Macs at work all of our fileservers would be W2K3 (all other servers would remain Linux) at present our fileservers are OS X.
Technology is available now and actively being used by many companies.
Banks haven't picked it up yet because it is too complicated for the average (American) home user. Something like an RSA tag where you simply type something different into the password box each time rather than using the same thing everytime is a simple enough leap for the average knucle-dragger who doesn't have ready access to IT support.
Certainly they seem somewhat more interested in making things go bang than any form of scientific rigour. They tell us about their experience in the special effects industry but seem to forget to mention any scientific experience ...
Having said that - I quite like the show - but only because I like seeing things go bang. Definitely not because I put any stock in their results.
So it ends up only somewhat ridiculously expensive.
So hey - we can afford to build ridiculous 1KM high towers while we rape all you other shmucks by selling you Uranium.
It's an added benefit, something tall enough to really catch lightning has got to be a good place to research ways to capture some of that energy. Coupled with super capacitors we surely are not that far from being able to capture at least a small percentage of the energy from a lightning strike.
On the matter of hijacking - that is while not trivial, quite do-able on the switched part of the network. First poison the ARP cache on client and gateway for client-gateway comms to point both to the man-in-the-middle box. All IP traffic between client and gateway then goes through you - use the mangle table in iptables to then reroute these back to their rightful destination. Hijacking would require a little bit of programming.
SecurID is vulnerable to replay within a second or two - and that is a problem if your data-link level is not encrypted.
An unsolicited Kerberos request for some username to the Kerberos server is the best way to get an encrypted password. (You'll be wanting to have Kerberos blocked at the firewall). And yes Kerberos runs on every Windows 2000+ server.
If the only way to test if a password is valid is to use it against a running system, and each running system will only allow one password attempt per second it doesn't matter what your computational power is - you're not getting the password. [and if you're not inside a secure network you should be using a smart-card or at least a certificate anyway].
Kerberos is a definite no-no outside of a secure network. It will send to anyone who asks a little package encrypted with the user's password - so when you decrypt the package you know the user's password. ... you can request this little package for ANY user - you just need access to the Kerberos port.
Take mobile phones - with the development of predictive text no longer do I read newspaper articles about essays handed up for assesment in SMS shorthand. SMS now teaches kids to spell like no number of spelling bees can.
So parents invest in your child's future - pay their mobile phone bill for them.
Then again, the US war on terror shows that they do not feel bound by such conditions. Holding prisoners indefinitely without trial breaches both this convention and is a breach of Human Rights conventions.
As the third world catches up the US turns and runs back to the dark ages. What strong, selfless political masters the States has.
You're right - we should be talking about the second Mars rover now. After all it is using the same sort of flash memory as the other one - may not be much to say about it tomorrow.
The method usually utilised is along the lines of - how much of the data can they do without for 12 hours? Sync the stuff they can't do without between the old and new centres over a leased line. Pack up the other tapes, truck them to the nearest airport, put them striaght onto the charterd jumbo and pray for good weather.
Sorry - my mistake - there are multiple options for signalling on T1 and one of them is in-band signalling.
A T1 line is made up of 23 B channels and 1 D channel. The B channels have G.711 getting pumped down them, The D channel is used for signalling (Q.731 rings a bell).
The most widely used VoIP protocol is H.323. H323 allows negotiation of a compression CoDec. The base (worst) codec which must be supported is G.711 (64kb/s - this is what goes down an ISDN line - this is regarded as lossless digital encoding).
Latency is dealt with by using QoS. I make calls from Australia to Europe through a VoIP carrier at a cost of about 3cents/minute. The round trip delay appears less than 0.2 seconds. The recommended CoDec is G.723.1 which is 5.3 or 6.3 kb/s (switches dependent on complexity I believe). This CoDec gives speech quality better than a mobile network will give you.
The bandwidth is only required in the direction of speech - when there is silence going the other way the bandwidth drops to near zero (just comfort noise generation and control signals send down the line). Comfort noise generation is done by a funny little algorithm that tells the other end the type of "silence" (static) to produce.
At one stage Ad-aware removed the new.net file without correctly uninstalling it (thus breaking your network connection).
New.net is one of the dodgiest companies out there - their site suggests that they sell legitimate domain names - unfortunately they don't sell domain names in real TLDs. Their dodgy bit of software makes domain names with non-real TLDs (which they sell) work.