"Trust"? The entire internet was designed on trust and we pay the price for it every second of the day. Sure, it worked fine in the beginning when everyone could be trusted.
You want to propose a system based on trust knowing nothing anywhere can be trusted? If we could trust spammers, we wouldn't have a problem.
Trust relationships in the electronic world are difficult, bordering on impossible. Trust relationships in the physical world are also difficult and often fail. Friendship, marrage, and employement are all trust relationships. Friends betray each other. Spouses cheat. Employers screw over their employees. And employees steal from their employers.
That's what the laws are supposed to support. The problem is, very few sue and even fewer ever pay. The only provable solution is death. (The dead do not send spam. [Lexx pun intended])
an idea that forces the spamming computer to use up resources is fine
Except, of course, that the spammer's computer does next to nothing in the process of sending millions of emails. I'm on a 64k ISDN line and I can send email to 100k people in a matter of minutes. 100% of the work in sending the email is done by some one else's computer. That is what makes spam such a fucking problem. It doesn't cost the sender anything, but cost the rest of the world a great deal.
Well over 50$ in parts. The encoder itself is over 100$ in quantity. Add in the cost of the memory it uses, the RF modulator, and various support components (including a faster processor to deal with 2x the traffic) and the cost will exceed 150$ in parts. The tivo already has over 300$ in parts in there. TiVo, Inc. is very cost conscious.
Indeed! I've not seen the insides yet, but I'm guessing the USB chipset is "free" as part of a PCI bridge. In any case, a USB chip is much cheaper than a firewire chip. I'd still rather have firewire for attaching hard drives for archival of recorded shows. USB is too slow for that.
Ethernet is expensive. Wireless ethernet is very expensive and one hell of a pain to manage in a tivo. Sure, *we* know how to deal with it, but the average couch potato doesn't.
There's nothing stopping people from doing that already with the dialup connection. The problem is putting the guide data in the format tivo needs. Trust me, it's more work than it's worth.
They updated to a modern kernel? Really? They've been using that spooged up 2.1.24(?) for ever. It'll be interesting to see how much trouble the tivo has with the VM in 2.4 -- tivo did a lot of magic to their kernel.
Re:Why not write a few viruses for Linux?
on
Linux Virus Alert
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· Score: 1
That's a popular misconception. Breaking into a computer is still breaking into a computer. Altering the contents of said computer is still altering the contents. Both are illegal (in may countries.) And both are enforced. I'd have to dig to point out urls for any specific cases.
A lot of people have discussed the "benefical" virus. All of them have walked away from the idea because they'd still be legally accountable for computer crimes.
Re:Unix Worms - what have they done lately?
on
Linux Virus Alert
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· Score: 1
You failed to point out the more widespread BIND worm.
And exactly how does infecting a Solaris host "deface IIS sites"? IIS is a Microsoft product.
Cisco's LRE is a LAN technology. This doesn't have one rat fart to do with any part of the last mile. It works over existing Cat1-3 (phone) premise wiring for distances of up to 5000ft. This is not a replacement for Cable Modems, DSL, or ougie boards. And no, it does not "blow DSL out of the water." If you are within 5000ft of a CO, you can get very good DSL rates over ONE (30AWG) pair (not the 4pairs that comprise CatX cables.)
This is technology for multi-tenate units like apartment buildings, hotels, offices, malls, etc. The article spells this out in perfectly plain engligh:
Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users.
You will not see this being run through the public telephone grid.
There actually is an IEEE standards body for "Ethernet in the Last Mile" -- I don't know the number for it off hand. And companies are designing hardware to provide 10M ethernet connections with further reach than SDSL. And this is last mile technology. (I'm too far from the CO in any case.)
"IDE" drives (not ATA or ATAPI, read: ancient) would mostly selfdestruct if low-level formated by one of those ancient BIOSes. That's one reason that's not a BIOS setup option anymore.
At any rate, yes, you can indeed, execute a true field low-level format on IDE, ATA, and ATAPI drives. You may need specialized software to do it, however. (OnTrac Disk Manager used to have this capability for a very large number of drives, but they no longer sell that version.) If you actually have the need to reinit an IDE drive, you might as well buy a new one -- the error requiring the reinit _will_ come back.
and how many of those dishes are easily re-aimed? I've not seen very many aimable dishes around. There are tons of fixed position dishes (including the really big one at Microspace -- ala Musak.) However, those things are rather difficult to move.
You need to be a hell of a lot more than "resonablly accurate". Unlike missiles, it doesn't have a precision guidance system to take it to it's target. There's too much delay from the ground station to make very many corrections once they start getting close. This all assumes there is enough fuel to change orbits.
ICBMs have autonomous guidance systems to ensure they reach the intended target with zero assistance (from people who may be dead already.)
And the shuttle(s) have been hit by space junk numerous times. It worries NASA to see bits of "dust" going 2/3's the way through a window. They funded research at several universities (NCSU was one) to improve their tracking capabilities.
The point is, moving a commercial sat would certainly get attention -- tracked or not. The people using that bird are going to notice it not answering or transmitting data back. And a sat-sat collision is extremely unlikely -- space is "really big". It's not like we have junk parked in space like a freeway at rush hour.
As any crypto expert will tell you, brute force attacks are the absolute worst way to defeat encryption. It's far easier to steal the key or torture it out of someone. Even Hollywood gets this point right -- go watch Sneakers (ignore the device they're after.)
And just as in War Games, someone can screw up and leave a modem line unsecured. Of course, Hollywood was very generous in War Games -- access to core.mil hardware is hardly as simple as a phone call.
Now days, everyone logs almost everything, so even if you do get in, they know where to send the black helicoptors.
But packet scanning usually requires a search warrant...
Excuse me while I climb back in my chair. That's very funny.
How many hackers or script idiots have ever been arested and charged for illegal wire taps? Aside from Mitnik, who actually did perform wire taps, I know of NONE. How many ISPs have been charged for their agressive proxies (web on port 80 and smtp on port 25)? NONE. Mindspring has done this for many years. (pissing off lots of people, but they've never had any legal problems because of it.)
You hand the cashier the "bogus" discount card and then proceed to pay with your own credit card?
I find it ironic how much people complain about their personal privacy when they don't even realize how easy it is to track a great deal of things. Nor do people realize how long this has been possible.
You have to use the Windows manager because it's the only thing that knows what goes in the "data struct". A quick sniff of the SNMP traffic will fix that tho.
Looking at the MIB, it looks like the application is likely putting the radio in "test mode" to set the output power. So the question becomes, does the new mega-power setting stay once the SNMP manager is killed or the AP power cycled?
1> Part-time counts as "years of part-time experience". Claiming them as anything else is over stating the truth.
2> I left out the word "perminant". If you are not in school (i.e. during the summer), there's plenty of time to hold a temporary full-time job. As for your math, what hours do you expect this slave to work/eat/sleep/shit/...? 8am-3pm is school. 7am-8am is breakfast and all that jazz. Let's say 4pm to 8pm is work (20hr/wk) and 8pm-7am is homework and sleep (you can sleep when your homework is done.) To get in the 40hr/wk for a full-time job would require 20hrs on the weekend (10 per day?) We have child labor laws to prevent this kind of slavery.
Basically, time cannot be banked. If you allocate 4hr/day for homework and only need 1hr today, you don't get 3 more hours next week when you need it. Either you didn't go to college or slept through the time management portion of orientation.
3> I didn't say it was. I did say it is a very handy excuse.
4> Actually, that's true for any employee. Child labor laws may require more frequent breaks, however.
So, exactly how were my comments cocky and/or arrogant there oh mighty Anonymous Coward? All we have to go on are the ramblings from someone who thinks everyone hates him because he's a teenager -- possibly an over reaction? Well, that might be true. Of course, he could also be the biggest asshole on the planet; the odds are against it, tho'. It's more likely he is so disliked not because of his age but because of his behavior (read: arrogance) -- "I know 10x that of those twice my age" type shit. Or even the "see, I told you that wouldn't work" shtick.
You cannot hold a perminant, full-time, W-2 position until you are old enough to enter into a legally binding contract -- 18 in the USoA. You can hold a temporary, full-time job or a long term, part-time job. Child labor laws exist for a reason.
Working for daddy is not a job -- it's an allowance. If the only experience you have is years of part-time work at daddy's office, then don't waste my time. Go ask daddy for a job and stay the hell out of my office. In every case of paternal employment I've ever witnesses, a job is created for the child -- there's no job opening, no interviews, NOTHING. That's the Interpath hiring mode -- hire them and then ask them what they want to do (and where are the hundreds of people Interpath used to employ?) And it's not a realistic "real world" work environment... no one ever openly criticizes the boss's child; they act very cautiously around them.
"Hey, I've been admin'ing servers part-time for 10 years, but have 0 years of experience!"
Correct. You have 10 years experience as a part-time admin. Saying "10 years experience" would indicate 10 years of (near) continuous, full-time employment. While not a complete lie, it is certainly overstating the truth. Either your work history on your resume will bear this out or you will look like an idiot when you are called on it during the interview. Call me evil but I love trapping people in the "fluffiness" of their resume. (And I've been interviewing people at my various places of employment for years now (7 years; 1996 to present); the practice didn't make any sense in '96 -- sysadmin interviewing web content types, but "have resume, will ask questions.")
... or nothing at all. NC is a "no cause" state. You can be fired for no reason at all.
In this case, it would be rather easy to claim age descrimination, but I'm not either party's legal council so I only have the ramblings of a 19yo "punk" to go on.
That being said, his employer may have very legitimate reasons for wanting the can his ass. It has been my experience that such young people do not have the "years of experience" and the "wisdom that comes with age". The combination leads to cockiness and arrogance. It takes a number of years to come to terms with the stupidity in the world. Sorry kid, you haven't even seen the stupidity yet.
For example, he is claiming 5 years of experience which would mean he started working -- full-time -- at the age of 15. (bull shit) There are federal laws limiting the working environment and hours of minors. He could not legally hold a full-time job as a sysadmin until his 18th birthday (which is two years ago.) Even then, very, very few places would hire him without a diploma -- which he did not likely have until some months after his 18th birthday unless he dropped out @ 16 and got a GED. At any rate, I doubt he has anything approaching a college degree, so the evil corporation has a very simple reason to boot him out.
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That's a load of crap. Spammers do not "target" their shit. They may say they do, but it's a lie.
"Trust"? The entire internet was designed on trust and we pay the price for it every second of the day. Sure, it worked fine in the beginning when everyone could be trusted.
You want to propose a system based on trust knowing nothing anywhere can be trusted? If we could trust spammers, we wouldn't have a problem.
Trust relationships in the electronic world are difficult, bordering on impossible. Trust relationships in the physical world are also difficult and often fail. Friendship, marrage, and employement are all trust relationships. Friends betray each other. Spouses cheat. Employers screw over their employees. And employees steal from their employers.
Trust is a very dangerous thing.
- bottom line: Make the spammer pay
That's what the laws are supposed to support. The problem is, very few sue and even fewer ever pay. The only provable solution is death. (The dead do not send spam. [Lexx pun intended])- an idea that forces the spamming computer to use up resources is fine
Except, of course, that the spammer's computer does next to nothing in the process of sending millions of emails. I'm on a 64k ISDN line and I can send email to 100k people in a matter of minutes. 100% of the work in sending the email is done by some one else's computer. That is what makes spam such a fucking problem. It doesn't cost the sender anything, but cost the rest of the world a great deal.Where are you finding DVD-R's for 3$?
- there are 802.11b USB adapters
Name one that works under Linux. I've yet to find one that's supported. And getting the specs from the vendor(s) is a slow and fruitless effort.Well over 50$ in parts. The encoder itself is over 100$ in quantity. Add in the cost of the memory it uses, the RF modulator, and various support components (including a faster processor to deal with 2x the traffic) and the cost will exceed 150$ in parts. The tivo already has over 300$ in parts in there. TiVo, Inc. is very cost conscious.
Indeed! I've not seen the insides yet, but I'm guessing the USB chipset is "free" as part of a PCI bridge. In any case, a USB chip is much cheaper than a firewire chip. I'd still rather have firewire for attaching hard drives for archival of recorded shows. USB is too slow for that.
Ethernet is expensive. Wireless ethernet is very expensive and one hell of a pain to manage in a tivo. Sure, *we* know how to deal with it, but the average couch potato doesn't.
There's nothing stopping people from doing that already with the dialup connection. The problem is putting the guide data in the format tivo needs. Trust me, it's more work than it's worth.
You forgot to mention all the p0rn it's recording (on it's own and at your request.)
They updated to a modern kernel? Really? They've been using that spooged up 2.1.24(?) for ever. It'll be interesting to see how much trouble the tivo has with the VM in 2.4 -- tivo did a lot of magic to their kernel.
That's a popular misconception. Breaking into a computer is still breaking into a computer. Altering the contents of said computer is still altering the contents. Both are illegal (in may countries.) And both are enforced. I'd have to dig to point out urls for any specific cases.
A lot of people have discussed the "benefical" virus. All of them have walked away from the idea because they'd still be legally accountable for computer crimes.
You failed to point out the more widespread BIND worm.
And exactly how does infecting a Solaris host "deface IIS sites"? IIS is a Microsoft product.
Cisco's LRE is a LAN technology. This doesn't have one rat fart to do with any part of the last mile. It works over existing Cat1-3 (phone) premise wiring for distances of up to 5000ft. This is not a replacement for Cable Modems, DSL, or ougie boards. And no, it does not "blow DSL out of the water." If you are within 5000ft of a CO, you can get very good DSL rates over ONE (30AWG) pair (not the 4pairs that comprise CatX cables.)
This is technology for multi-tenate units like apartment buildings, hotels, offices, malls, etc. The article spells this out in perfectly plain engligh:
- Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users.
You will not see this being run through the public telephone grid.There actually is an IEEE standards body for "Ethernet in the Last Mile" -- I don't know the number for it off hand. And companies are designing hardware to provide 10M ethernet connections with further reach than SDSL. And this is last mile technology. (I'm too far from the CO in any case.)
"IDE" drives (not ATA or ATAPI, read: ancient) would mostly selfdestruct if low-level formated by one of those ancient BIOSes. That's one reason that's not a BIOS setup option anymore.
At any rate, yes, you can indeed, execute a true field low-level format on IDE, ATA, and ATAPI drives. You may need specialized software to do it, however. (OnTrac Disk Manager used to have this capability for a very large number of drives, but they no longer sell that version.) If you actually have the need to reinit an IDE drive, you might as well buy a new one -- the error requiring the reinit _will_ come back.
and how many of those dishes are easily re-aimed? I've not seen very many aimable dishes around. There are tons of fixed position dishes (including the really big one at Microspace -- ala Musak.) However, those things are rather difficult to move.
You need to be a hell of a lot more than "resonablly accurate". Unlike missiles, it doesn't have a precision guidance system to take it to it's target. There's too much delay from the ground station to make very many corrections once they start getting close. This all assumes there is enough fuel to change orbits.
ICBMs have autonomous guidance systems to ensure they reach the intended target with zero assistance (from people who may be dead already.)
And the shuttle(s) have been hit by space junk numerous times. It worries NASA to see bits of "dust" going 2/3's the way through a window. They funded research at several universities (NCSU was one) to improve their tracking capabilities.
The point is, moving a commercial sat would certainly get attention -- tracked or not. The people using that bird are going to notice it not answering or transmitting data back. And a sat-sat collision is extremely unlikely -- space is "really big". It's not like we have junk parked in space like a freeway at rush hour.
As any crypto expert will tell you, brute force attacks are the absolute worst way to defeat encryption. It's far easier to steal the key or torture it out of someone. Even Hollywood gets this point right -- go watch Sneakers (ignore the device they're after.)
And just as in War Games, someone can screw up and leave a modem line unsecured. Of course, Hollywood was very generous in War Games -- access to core .mil hardware is hardly as simple as a phone call.
Now days, everyone logs almost everything, so even if you do get in, they know where to send the black helicoptors.
- But packet scanning usually requires a search warrant...
Excuse me while I climb back in my chair. That's very funny.How many hackers or script idiots have ever been arested and charged for illegal wire taps? Aside from Mitnik, who actually did perform wire taps, I know of NONE. How many ISPs have been charged for their agressive proxies (web on port 80 and smtp on port 25)? NONE. Mindspring has done this for many years. (pissing off lots of people, but they've never had any legal problems because of it.)
You hand the cashier the "bogus" discount card and then proceed to pay with your own credit card?
I find it ironic how much people complain about their personal privacy when they don't even realize how easy it is to track a great deal of things. Nor do people realize how long this has been possible.
You have to use the Windows manager because it's the only thing that knows what goes in the "data struct". A quick sniff of the SNMP traffic will fix that tho.
Looking at the MIB, it looks like the application is likely putting the radio in "test mode" to set the output power. So the question becomes, does the new mega-power setting stay once the SNMP manager is killed or the AP power cycled?
1> Part-time counts as "years of part-time experience". Claiming them as anything else is over stating the truth.
2> I left out the word "perminant". If you are not in school (i.e. during the summer), there's plenty of time to hold a temporary full-time job. As for your math, what hours do you expect this slave to work/eat/sleep/shit/...? 8am-3pm is school. 7am-8am is breakfast and all that jazz. Let's say 4pm to 8pm is work (20hr/wk) and 8pm-7am is homework and sleep (you can sleep when your homework is done.) To get in the 40hr/wk for a full-time job would require 20hrs on the weekend (10 per day?) We have child labor laws to prevent this kind of slavery.
Basically, time cannot be banked. If you allocate 4hr/day for homework and only need 1hr today, you don't get 3 more hours next week when you need it. Either you didn't go to college or slept through the time management portion of orientation.
3> I didn't say it was. I did say it is a very handy excuse.
4> Actually, that's true for any employee. Child labor laws may require more frequent breaks, however.
So, exactly how were my comments cocky and/or arrogant there oh mighty Anonymous Coward? All we have to go on are the ramblings from someone who thinks everyone hates him because he's a teenager -- possibly an over reaction? Well, that might be true. Of course, he could also be the biggest asshole on the planet; the odds are against it, tho'. It's more likely he is so disliked not because of his age but because of his behavior (read: arrogance) -- "I know 10x that of those twice my age" type shit. Or even the "see, I told you that wouldn't work" shtick.
You cannot hold a perminant, full-time, W-2 position until you are old enough to enter into a legally binding contract -- 18 in the USoA. You can hold a temporary, full-time job or a long term, part-time job. Child labor laws exist for a reason.
Working for daddy is not a job -- it's an allowance. If the only experience you have is years of part-time work at daddy's office, then don't waste my time. Go ask daddy for a job and stay the hell out of my office. In every case of paternal employment I've ever witnesses, a job is created for the child -- there's no job opening, no interviews, NOTHING. That's the Interpath hiring mode -- hire them and then ask them what they want to do (and where are the hundreds of people Interpath used to employ?) And it's not a realistic "real world" work environment... no one ever openly criticizes the boss's child; they act very cautiously around them.
- "Hey, I've been admin'ing servers part-time for 10 years, but have 0 years of experience!"
Correct. You have 10 years experience as a part-time admin. Saying "10 years experience" would indicate 10 years of (near) continuous, full-time employment. While not a complete lie, it is certainly overstating the truth. Either your work history on your resume will bear this out or you will look like an idiot when you are called on it during the interview. Call me evil but I love trapping people in the "fluffiness" of their resume. (And I've been interviewing people at my various places of employment for years now (7 years; 1996 to present); the practice didn't make any sense in '96 -- sysadmin interviewing web content types, but "have resume, will ask questions.")... or nothing at all. NC is a "no cause" state. You can be fired for no reason at all.
In this case, it would be rather easy to claim age descrimination, but I'm not either party's legal council so I only have the ramblings of a 19yo "punk" to go on.
That being said, his employer may have very legitimate reasons for wanting the can his ass. It has been my experience that such young people do not have the "years of experience" and the "wisdom that comes with age". The combination leads to cockiness and arrogance. It takes a number of years to come to terms with the stupidity in the world. Sorry kid, you haven't even seen the stupidity yet.
For example, he is claiming 5 years of experience which would mean he started working -- full-time -- at the age of 15. (bull shit) There are federal laws limiting the working environment and hours of minors. He could not legally hold a full-time job as a sysadmin until his 18th birthday (which is two years ago.) Even then, very, very few places would hire him without a diploma -- which he did not likely have until some months after his 18th birthday unless he dropped out @ 16 and got a GED. At any rate, I doubt he has anything approaching a college degree, so the evil corporation has a very simple reason to boot him out.