Please add to your host files: 127.0.0.1 www.nice8.org 127.0.0.1 www.we168.org
You bastard! I did and that unsavory host at 127.0.0.1 (isn't the 127.x range like the dark back-alleys of the Intertubes?) infected me with a nasty trojan, probably because it has like a million gajigabytes of completely illegal, pirated contents on it!! A veritable pirate hive, that! I hold you pesonally responsible for directing us, pure, innocent Slashdotters to it!
Ahahahahahahah.
Hahhahahahahaha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I can't take this anymore. You are completely fucking insane.
Well, one sure sign of derangement is to respond with maniacal laughter and accusations of insanity towards all sane people around the patient (it is called "projection"), usually triggered when one's deeply cherished lunatic notions are exposed for all to see and all crazy "arguments" have fallen flat... more frequently then not followed by flailing arms and uncontrollable drooling. Fortunately your drool cannot be transmitted over the Internet, which is one of the Internet's great features. I would recommend getting help, but since large percentage of the moneys allocated for medical services are now in Iraq, you probably won't get any.
See a specialist. Although I do not think an Optometrist will suffice.
People decide two things are morally equal and will go to any lengths to maintain the moral equivalence between them. They will distort and invent facts to maintain their delusion.
Wait, now you are down to mere two things? What happened to the "whole world"?!
All your conclusions are invalidated by your desire to believe that everyone is morally equal.
Oh, that did not last very long, back to "everyone" again!
And here we go again.
I will bring up that rather inconvenient historical fact as many times as you wish.
It's obvious that you don't know enough about the subject.
You do seriously expect this kindergarten "I know more then you but I am not telling! You lose!" crap to fly, don't you?
You are a complete fruitcake if you think O'Reilly is effectively controlling the world.
Get a dictionary. Influence does not equal "control".
Impossible to explain to someone like you.
Impossible to explain, period. To anyone. That is the problem with lunacies.
No matter what anyone tells you, you'll simply continue to believe that all religions are equally evil, because you are a fanatic.
No, I simply have empirical evidence to that effect, mostly consisting of great heaps of bodies. Do you have evidence proving otherwise?
In what bizarre parallel dimension did any of this occur?
You are laughably unfamiliar with the medieval European history.
The Iraq campaign has nothing to do with religion.
Who am I to believe, you or my lying eyes and ears?
More evidence of your delusional ignorance.
Very well, name the major differences, focus on punishments for disbelief or refusal to follow the tenets of your respective lunacies, as practiced by both historically.
The differences between the Western world and the Islamic world are inconsequential? Yeah, ok.
Betwen their respective religious lunacies, why, yes. Also, I do not see much difference between a secular Muslim nation like Jordan and say, Spain. You did notice the epmhasis on "secular", did you? That is an euphemism for "sanity", in both cases. Before being secular, Spain was, well, Inquisitory.
Where did I say anything about massacres? Try to keep it together.
You claimed us "worse" then the religious lunatics. Massacres are one obvious yardstick to measure by...
It's probably not something that people are consciously doing, but they're doing it.
No it is you who are desperately seeking some sympthoms of a non-existant condition. As I pointed out already, observing two or more people being morally despicable (based on patently obvious empirical evidence) does not magically lead to a determination that the whole world and all actions of people in it are somehow morally equivalent, which is what you are desperately attempting to insinuate.
You're in denial of facts or you're not perceptive enough, because moral equivalence games are played by people all the time.
No, it is you who is attempting to dismiss the obvious via claiming that a wholly made up "condition" somehow disqualifies these plain to see facts because they do not fit your pre-conceived notions. Thus eveyone but you is "playing" sophisticated and subtle games, which only you, naturally, can see.
Virtually any discussion involving Islam will inevitably cause someone to say "but Christianity is just as bad."
All religions are irrational lunacy, as one can easily demonstarte by merely examining their tenets. Christianity is not particulatly distinguished in this regard, nor is Islam, with the exception of the fact that the followers of Christianity account for the lion share of the bulk of mass murder and warfare in recorded history.
As I said, it has nothing to do with religion.
As I explained, it quite does. Try to keep up.
What? I am arguing against moral equivalency, not for it.
No, you are arguing that any comparison between religious lunacies must by definiton inevietably result in a claim of "moral equivalency" of the entire Universe, or some such ridiculous nonsense.
Then you don't know anything about the subject. Firearms and explosives are the most trivial tools at their disposal.
Yes I did forget the magic lamps with Genies in them and the flying carpets. How could have I?!
They are not that influential or important. You are simply making shit up to support your moral equivalence theory.
They have large audiences, they are spewing their demagougery every day for many years now. The effects are cumulative.
It means that according to the theory of moral equivalence, Christians are just as bad as Muslims (which isn't true).
How so? Do explain. Demonstrate the clear moral superiority of one wacky delusional religion over the other and justify barbaric acts of one band of believers in an invisible-man-in-the-sky commanding them to maim and murder, over the other.
Fun but little known fact: the Crusades were a response against Muslim aggression.
The "aggression" having been defined as the dirty Muslim "beasts" taking over the "holy land" via sexual reproduction.
They were also limited in scope and length
Last of them still undergoing on, in Iraq, at least according to some Christianists on TV.
unlike Jihad which is a state of perpetual warfare against infidels.
You are far too alike each other for your liking.
You seem completely ignorant about the history and nature of Islam.
Not at all. It is a violent, irrational lunacy. Just as Christianity is. The hair-splitting differences between these lunacies are inconsequential.
Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with religion.
Of course it does. Much of the demagougery justifying the invasion would not have taken hold if it were not disseminated via megachurches and the like. The blind hatred against all the Muslims (not just the "jihadis") has Christianist and Zionist ovetones. You can pretend all you like, but the truth is plain to see, even without some of your own zealots who are proudly telling this to anyone who will listen. This does not obscure the fact that the war had also other aims, priority of which ranked higher on the war planners' agenda. But one aim does not necessarily preclude the other. The war was orchestrated by a coalition of interests, some of them Christianist and Zionist.
It seems I was completely dead on about your moral equivalence beliefs.
There is no such thing as "moral equivalence". If you got two vile individuals accosting you for your money, this does not mean that all people are morally equivalent. It only means that you are dealing with two muggers, who for all practical purposes are equivalent. But the whole world is not composed of muggers, or religious lunatics.
You're willing to make up any kind of crazy shit.
So far all the made up crazy shit is yours exclusively.
Fanatical atheists like you are just as obnoxious, stupid and hysterical as religious extremists, if not moreso.
Yes, we started many a religious massacre, moreso then any of the religious lunatics, did we not?
But I guess it's another manifestation of the theory of universal moral equivalence.
No such theory exists except in your sick head.
Yes, surely the US government went to Afghanistan and Iraq for religious, racist and xenophobic reasons.
They went into Afghanistan ostensibly to get Osama Bin Ladin, who you might have noticed is still sending out videos complete with a fancy studio setup in 2007. In the process they murdered vast numbers of locals, forged corrupt alliances with local warlords and installed a puppet president whose authority still does not extend beyond Kabul and will fall as soon as the last NATO soldier leaves the country.
They went to Iraq on based on a whole long list of fabricated pretenses, following which the Vice Roy Bremer immediately proceeded to parcel out whatever he could of Iraq to his American cronies, a process which still continues with the attempted ram-rodding of the final insult to Iraqis, the oil "sharing" law which allots most of Iraq's oil to US associated oil conglomerates. The reasons were profit, desire to dominate the region on behalf of Israel, the religious belief in divine supremacy and superiority of USA and Israel over all other nations, hubris from which an idea that the USA can do no wrong flowed, despite of being warned repeatedly that the supposed mission is not achievable within the given parameters.
After all, Jihad is motivated by religion, racism and xenophobia, so obviously everyone else is now motivated by the same things.
This is a logical fallacy. There is no cause-and-effect link between Jihadis being a bunch of pig-headed religious imbeciles and the Western Aristocracy being greedy and the Western public being complacent and ignorant and the Christianist and Zionist charlatans working their own demagougery on them to their own ends. These things occur independently from each other, although they do occur in parallel.
If you think O'Reilly, Coulter and Malkin (what is she even doing on this list?) are just as dangerous as the global Jihad,
I have plain as day, empirical evidence to prove it: the "global jihad" is equipped with AK-47s, RPGs, some stolen explosives and what seems like an infinite supply of suicidal idiots. People whom O'Reilly, Coulter and Malkin (she substituted for O'Reilly on FOX) are in a position to influence control the most advanced army humanity ever constructed, complete with nuke tipped ICBMs, aircraft carriers and the like.
The "global jihad" managed, after 20 years of plotting, to kill 3000 US citizens on US soil employing the apex of the most advanced of Al-Queda's weapons technologies: 19 pairs of box cutters. The followers of O'Reilly have invaded whole nations and killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens, leveled whole cities and drove millions of refugees out of their homes using armored divisions, aerial bombardment and attack helicopters.
There is just no contest.
you are either severely delusional
Simple empirical observation, see above.
or a fanatical adherent of the theory of universal moral equivalence which states that everything in the universe is always perfectly balanced so that you never have to have a real opinion on anything
Morality?! Both sides in this conflict are deeply immoral, corrupt, dishonest, manipulative, vicious, callous to the human consequences of their actions, and thoroughly vile. One wishes to dominate the world via a barbaric, brainless medieval religious doctrine, the other wants to dominate the world via armies and a corrupt political/economic system aimed at enriching the aristocracy of Corporate America and also does not shy away from utilizing their own medieval religious doctrines as it suits them and their Israeli accomplices. There is no good guys in this fight, other then perheaps some few poor non-sectarian Iraqis who only want to get on with their lives and are being killed, maimed, herded and abused by all sides.
Christians are just as evil as Muslims
You ooze your religious biggotry. What does this nonsensical satement mean?! As "evil" as Muslims? You mean they conducted Crusades and skinned people alive during the Spanish Inquisition? Burned scientists on the stake? Do explain.
I have news for you: all fundamentalist wackos, irrespective of the type of their mental disease are evil. With no exception. They will try to subjegate, and failing that maim and murder anyone who is actively resisting their particular woo-woism. Christians did it, and are actively doing it (see Iraq) and so do Muslims, Jews and many others. Religions are the scourge of civilization. If it weren't for the secular Enlightenment the Catholics would be still spilling the guts of children of Lutherans who would be still spilling the guts of Calvinists and Baptists would be still gutting the children of Catholics and vice versa. And so now the medieval darkness is returning again, and vicious crazies are at each-other's throats again until some adults step in, hopefuly before the Muslim, Christian and Jewish religious lunatics blow the planet apart.
the Quran and Bible are carbon copies of each other
Thay are different flavours of equally irrational and hateful ravings full of vindictive, vicious, violent acts by their respective make-believe invisible old-men-in-the-sky and even more vicious followers of those sick fantasies, both demanding irrational behaviours from their victims and both utterly incompatible with any rational, advanced civilization. Both should have stayed behind where they belong: medieval dark ages.
Saudi Arabia is just as bad as the US
I am sure the billionaire princes within would disagree.
Reports from those who looked at figures from morgues, hospitals and cemeteries, such as the UN and the Los Angeles Times, still don't give figures anywhere near 600,000.
Really? A single newspaper, with at most a few freelance reporters working for it in the field performing an Iraq-wide "check" of morgues, hospitals and cementeries....
Also the UN has no presence in Iraq to speak of since the time their envoy got blown up. Their representatives get shot the moment they identify themselves as they are seen as complicit in bringing about the US invasion, which also presents some small difficulty in conducting Iraq-wide scans.
I do not doubt that some such attempts were made via hired third parties, but the reliability of this methodology is laughable even if they were conducted seriously. Many dead do not end up in any of those places as they are buried in family compounds and villages. Many others, specially the victims of US aerial and local's sucide bombardments, are not buried at all, since nothing is left to bury. Also one has to ask how would these intrepid "counters" distinguish graves of people dying of unrelated disease and old age from those dying from being shot or from malnutrition and disease brought by the US invasion, specially that the locals' families rarely would bring the victims to hospitals if they are obviously dead...
Reporting information is not incitement. Even if he did advocate war against the government of Iraq, there is no sane comparison to militant Islamists who call for the murder of those who refuse to submit to them.
If he only "reported", no one could make a viable charge against him. But you know as well as I do that his "advocacy" extended well beyond and above any impartial reporting. As a matter of fact it still does. He does precisely what the millitant Islamists' ideologues do, namely calls for murder via military aggression of those who would not submit to the ways of the Divenely Chosen, Always Right By Definition, Gloriously Supreme and Perpetually Unjustly Victimized America, as he interprets it for his followers. One example of his hate is the fact that he uses the term "Islamofascists" to describe his Militant Islamist enemies, a term specifically tailored to incite blind hate and having no historical accuracy whatsoever. And it is working because one can see in these threads a lot of his disciples demonstrating their fully effective, hateful brainwashing.
That some in Iraq insist on behaving like sub-human savages is not the fault of the US, regardless of whether or not such behavior was foreseen.
If you open a can of worms to get a gold coin within, worms which you knew were in it because you've been repeatedly told by many worm experts and people who have seen the worms being put in there and whose advice you dismissed sniggering contemptuously and subesquently if the worms escape to chew your carpet, whose fault is it? Yours or the worms'? And then if you proceed to burn your house down in an insane attempt to "fight" them, killing your grandma whom you forgot was sleeping upstairs, whose fault is it? Yours or the worms'?
So basically according to you, news reports are to be dismissed because the reporters are either lying, or censored and tortured by the US.
No, the reports are simply not to be trusted. That is why multiple, varying methodologies, deployed by multiple, varying organizations must be used and the results averaged. That is the only, even if remotely, scientific method of trying to eliminate noise in the data brought on by the factors I enumerated. And it is also for this reason why demagogues object, since they all have one pet report the results of which they find dear because of their closeness to their particular world-view, just like you just did with the LA Times, and then these demagougues proceed to pretend that no other reports exist or are feasible.
Your "test" is not logical, as it presupposes that there are "hundreds of thousands" of deaths, and that O'Reilly somehow "incited" the invasion of Iraq.
The estimates conducted by various organizations and by various methodologies range from 70+ thousand (based only on media reports) to 1,2 million (based on various indirect population polling methods). The Lancet study stands at around 600,000 which is in mid-range of these studies. Since it is patently obvious that the media based estimate is a lowball, as media in any war-torn country is capable of only reporting certain percentage of deaths and it completely ignores delayed after-effects, it is quite reasonable to say that the deaths in into "hundreds of thousands" at least. The exact number will probably never be known.
and that O'Reilly somehow "incited" the invasion of Iraq.
O'Reilly and many other media pundits were used by the planners of Iraqi invasion to uncritically disseminate and enhance their propaganda in order to shape the public opinion so that the invasion can be carried out. Every lie, exaggeration, mis-representation and innuendo deployed by the Iraqi war planners was presented as fact by O'Rilley and his co-bloviators to O'Reilly's already seriously brain-washed audience. Should he and his ilk not be available and if the media performed the function alloted for it in a constitutional democracy by asking important questions and demanding non-evasive answers the invasion of Iraq would have been very unlikely as its true objectives were patently at odds with those of the general public of the USA and of other democratic nations.
As far as Saddam Hussein is concerned, he is thought to have killed somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people during his reign.
Even if this number is correct, the veracity of which is subject to the same problems the estimates above have, it is still a comparison damning beyond any excuse. His reign lasted 23 years, the US occupation mere 4. If the US manages to occupy Iraq for 23 years, I am sure the numbers of dead will be into tens of millions. I also did not include the millions of refugees and internally displaced populace. Even ignoring all that, the major pretense (at least after the WMD charade was exposed) of the US operation was "liberation" bringing with it "democracy" and "propserity". It had brought instead poverty, disease, death and carnage. Blaming the victims of the invasion for being "ungateful" and "unable to appreciate the great US sacrifice" is beyond riduculously hypocritical - it is the responsibility of high and mighty invaders to plan for such possibilities before hand.
According to "Iraq Body Count", between 76,352 and 83,175 have been killed since the beginning of the war. Upon further examination of the news reports they cite, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of killings are done by Muslims targeting other Muslims.
As a typical demagougue, you are attempting to latch onto one flawed methodology and pretend that no others (even if also flawed) exist. Iraq Body Count produces extremely conservative, low-ball estimates based on Iraqi and Western media reports which have the following major difficulties: Iraq media is dominated by partisan sectarian "reporting" and is (or more precisely was during the Bremer days) US censored (the US and Iraqi "government" have repeatedly shut down various papers and TV channels unfriendly to the US occupiers), in which all disasters is always blamed on the other sects (as putting blame on the US risked for a long time a serious danger of the violent shutdown of the paper and its reporters ending up in Abu Graihib, of whom many still languish there), The Western media has very limited access to the local affairs and its reporting relies on local, sectarian sources, of whom many also have been shot and imprisoned by the US in its Gulags for attemting to report on US an
Since these "hundreds of thousands of casualties" are mainly Muslims blowing up other Muslims, your blaming O'Reilly for
their deaths is a sign of mental illness, not even including your other deranged statements.
There is a simple, logical test. If demagouges like O'Reilly would have not incited (with tacit help and approval of Imperial America Neocons and other lords of Disaster Capitalism) the invasion of Iraq, would these hundreds of thousands of deaths have occured, given the fact that Saddam did not manage to kill anywhere near as many of his countrymen during his 23 year long rule? It is a rather simple case of cause and effect. If that is a sign of "mental illness" than the you live in some Reverse Universe, where eating your own fecies is considered the utmost respectable mark of "sanity".
Furthermore, it is incorrect to say that "most" are related to the religious and ethnic warfare, as an unknown percentage is a direct result of large scale and ongoing aerial bombardment, "anti-terrorist sweeps", "pre-emptive" murdrer of whole families at thousands of "checkpoints" and in any vehicle which gets "too close" to panicked US troops, opaque activities of vast mercenary armies, wholesale "pacification" of whole cities like Fallujah to avenge the said mercenaries, not to mention an inderect result of complete (and purposeful, profit motivated) destruction of the Iraqi civilian infrastructure.
Yes, O'Reilly is clearly far more dangerous than the global Jihad.
Well, actually, yes.
You see, all of the jihad is based on demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in the Arab world, and aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-fundamentalist-Islam invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via small arms warfare combined with improvised explosives, punctuated by suicidal bomb attacks and a very rare spectacular terrorist assault on foreign soil, which results in few thousand casualties per year on average.
On the other hand we have demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in of the xenophobic, supremacist white subsectuion of American society, which aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-white-upper-class-Christainst invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via large scale warfare, aerial bombardment and wholesale occupation of foreign nations, exctrajudicial imprisonment in Gulags, torture etc, with hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq alone in a period of 4 years.
In other words, O'Reilly, Coulter, Malkin etc are the ideological equivalents of Osama and various pontificating radical Imams in their various Madrassas. The difference is that their spew is empirically proven to be capable of causing vastly more damage and casualties than that of all the modern jihadis combined so far.
Perheaps that will change when the Pakistani nukes change hands to Taliban or Al-Queda and O'Reilly and Osama will start competing on more even terms.
None of which of course helps the more sane part of the humanity which is likely to caught in the crossfire caused by the blowhard morons of the world.
My dream is that one day all of the most insane of the violence promoting demagouges like O'Reilley, Coulter and Osama are all caught, given flamethrowers or some such and sent to an uninhabited island to practice what they preach on each other, while the rest of the world goes on about making our lives better. The last one standing gets to own the island where his followers are all sent as a punishment to listen to his or her whining 24/7 for the rest of their short lives.
You are right that this scheme can be defeated via the client authentication process, but remember that we were discussing a particular cross-section of web traffic, namely hypothetical HTTPS sites open to the general public which contain ads, not sites like banking or P2P applictions. Unless you somehow manage to issue verifiable certificates to all your potential random web site passers by, or somehow demand that everyone has them and setup a whole infrastructure for it, free of charge (since average Joe will not pay for it), this defense is impractical. That is the main reason why most sites do not use it.
In other words, people who already understand how to defend themselves and who participate in closed, registration based sites can do so, but they were never the target audience for this since they are rather unlikely to install the ISP's funky software with their malicious CA cert in the first place.
yeah, that's exactly what you meant. it was just "shorthand". You're probably very used to your shorthand.
You would have easilly know that from the other posts I made, all very near each other in this thread, should you actually bother to read anything instead of flatulating unduly and prematurely.
and as far as the tight vagina advice - no thanks, already get enough of tight vagina on my own. I highly doubt you'd have anything useful to contribute to anything about tight vagina.
Not tight enough apparently, given all the misdirected gas.
b) is more difficult; the only way to do that is to get a trusted certificate installed in all of their customer's browsers, which they can use to sign the certificates they generate for the site they're spoofing. This could potentially be done as part of an ISP setup package, but they will probably lose a lot of customers when word gets out that they're spoofing secure sites. It may also be illegal to do this.
Well, we were simply having a theoretical discussion about the technical feasibility of the scheme. Its legal and marketing implications are another matter. I was suggesting precisely what you mentioned, that they insert their own CA cert into the browser via the "install teh Intertubes" package and then use it to sigh the certs of their proxied, spoofed sites. This would of course affect only the dumb users who actually use the silly disk, precisely the kind of crowd who will not notice that they are being shafted, and if they do, they probably would not do anything about it. As to illegality... who knows. Uncharted territory.
care to explain what an https lookup is? wait, don't. there's a cname/aname and a reverse lookup. there is no https lookup. in fact, if you had a simple comprehension of how this worked, you would understand that dns has nothing to do with the www. the internet has nothing to do with little pretty web pages, or hypertext.
Before you become too vaginally flatulent, you should have comprehended that we were simply discusing domains which are known to have large amounts of https traffic heading to them, based simply on analysing the volume and destinations of https packets travelling via the ISPs network. The "https lookup" was a shorthand to "a forward DNS lookup for a host (or a domain) known to have a busy HTTPS site with a lot of juicy ads to substitute on it". Clearer now?
Note that once such domain is identified by packet sniffing and other means, all lookups of its name will return the adress of the ISP proxy, irrespective of protocol, since as you farted out correctly, DNS lookups are performed irrespective of protocols later used to make connections. Which of course was clear from the rest of my message.
So keep your vagina tight and do not fart when it makes you look like a... well... a twat.
So can you tell me what protocol I am using if I DNS foobar.dnsalias.org ?? No, wait how about www.foobar.org ?? Is that using http or https?
No, but as I explained, you can tell that www.foobar.org is being accessed via HTTPS by a lot of people from you network. Then if you go and check it out with your own browser then you will know that www.foobar.org has a lot of ads and these two facts combined tell you that www.foobar.com is something worth spoofing.
So let me get this straight. Sniff for HTTPS packets to determine which IP addresses people are using HTTPS on, then reverse lookup that IP address to find the domain, then change your DNS server to spoof the IP address of that domain and route all calls to that IP through your proxy? That it?
No, you pick high traffic sites with a lot of ads on them straring with traffic logs and combined with other factors such as ease of substitution of ads, manually. You keep missing the whole point of the excercise. It is quite likely that your proxy has to be taught how to handle each such site properly, so that the substitutions do not disrupt the user experience.
Like I said, you'd end up trying to spoof all www domains which would then lead to a lot of ftp, ssh, smtp and other traffic having to be handled (since many, many people use the public one IP address for all protocols and redirect internally to private boxes behind the load balancers / firewalls) and you'd end up proxying half the Internet.
For some reason you assume that everyone but you is stupid and cannot discern good target sites from bad ones.
1) The DNS server would not know the request is for HTTPS; and
Yes it would, based on a domain name. The purpose of this is supposedly to repalce ads, therefore the ISP would be targetting specific high-volume sites only, not the whole Internet. They can simply sniff HTTPS traffic and shape their proxy accordingly and then transparently spoof the IP addresses of the sites which look profitable.
2) The proxy would have to proxy ALL ports and protocols for ALL domains.
No, only for the spoofed domains and which is trivial, you simply NAT all non-HTTPS packets and pass them otherwise unaltered to these select domains, which would normally not communicate with users via any other protocol anyway.
I think 2) would get noticed rather quickly and really would be worth the effort...
Only by a select group of users who for some reason have a need to connect to these sites via non-HTTPS means and only if they look at their packet's source addresses. Note that the ISP would not actually block these, merely NAT them.
That assumes that the ISP is not monkeying with the DNS lookups (most sheeple connected use the ISPs DNS servers) and does not return their proxy's address to all HTTPS lookups, following which your browser would simply initiate HTTPS setup sequence with their proxy instead of the www.foo.com you were aiming at. This scheme only depends on the ISP being able to sign their own certs for any fake site they choose to mimick a real one with and that can be easily accomplished by inserting their own CA cert into the browser via "must do ISP update" or the abovementioned stupid "install teh Intertubes" software.
You guys keep forgetting that a typical ISP also contols the caching DNS servers the sheeple connected are using. All they have to do is to respond with the IP address of their fancy proxy to all HTTPS URL lookup requests, following which the normal HTTPS exchange occurs, proxied by their man-in-the-middle proxy (i.e their proxy pretends to be www.foo.com, complete with spoofed IP address for that domain and initiates HTTPS setup sequence with the browser, while on the other side it pretends to be the user and initiates the setup sequence with www.foo.com). That is one weakness in the HTTPS scheme: it depends on non-hijackable DNS servers since it uses domain names instead of IP addresses for verification of your packets' destination.
Their main alternative was to actually hire some sane people to design the thing. You see, Symbian was purpose designed and financed by a consortium of cell phone manufacturers! These idiots funded and then inflicted this shit onto themsleves! There is absolutely no fucking excuse for it, as it was designed from clean slate with an express purpose to be used in the cell phone industry.
The problem is firmly related to the gigiantic ego and utter incompetence of the idiot they hired to "lead" this project. Subsequently they've sunk untold millions into this pile of festering crap, not to mention untold hours of the lives of developers... and users, as the thing is attrociously slow and end-user hostile. And after the millions were sunk, the problem became political and various CEO's egos became involved: "Mistake, ME?! Never! I am the Uber Mega Important CEO! I NEVER make mistakes! It must be the users and developers! We are perfect!" sort of thing.
So they must at some point realize that they've fucked up, scrap this thing, fire the imbecile, and start over.
As a matter of fact some of them did realize it but due to politics of the Symbian "alliance" (and infinite greed of some of its participants who want everything to be "proprietary", "pay to play" technology - chiefly Nokia and Sony-Ericsson) they had no choice but to leave the thing. As a matter of fact, at this point Nokia and Ericsson are really the only players to speak of left in this rapidly dissolving "alliance". That is one of the reasons you see interest in Linux (which is admittedly not the most optimal of platforms for cell phones, but is nevertheless light years ahead of Symbian) and Mobile Windows (also very ill fitting for phones and even if it comes with the whole assimiliation into the Microsoft Empire and a myriad of other problems) - simply because those who left are looking for a reasonably easy and quick to market solutions without massive up-front investment. And dealing with Symbian is just impossible. The other players are also afraid of yet another niche concoction which some lone egomaniac can control and a handful of asshat CEOs from one or two major vendors can unduly influence to everyone else's detrement and thus wreck the whole thing without any oposition.
Did you actually try to develop anything for Symbian?
Well, I did. And let me tell you this: Windows APIs, complete with their haphazard organization and historical baggage, lunatic bugs and arcane undocumented extensions are an example of Reason and Logic, when compared to this positive 10 day old vomit which is Symbian. Any ole Linux API is like an Extatic Symphony of Cosimic Joy, Eternal Purity and All-Encompassing Sanity, next to this 10 day old vomit which is Symbian.
Hell, I am being unfair to 10 day old vomit.
You gotta be a masochist to develop for this thing, downloadable "api" or not.
The toolchain is fucked up beyond belief.
The API is a convoluted mess of overcomplicated certinisms, wheels reinvented to be square and with an offset axis, said square "wheels" within other square "wheels", and all existing only so that Symbian "alliance" can have NDAs, Patents and what not on this shit, which otherwise has been done a million times before, some 900 thousand times of which done much better.
Great majority of it is undocumented or laughably documented (they want you to pay big money for access to the "real" stuff). Most of what is documented you do not want go near.
The OS itself was designed by a brain-damaged monkey, its like a retarded dwarf cousin of Windows, complete with moronic "drive letters" and whole bunch of other truly imbecillic "features" from the early days of DOS, which even Microsoft doesn't want anymore.
You gotta pay money for application certs.
On and and on and on.
Or and did I mention that there is like 6 mutually incompatible versions of the thing in the wild, and about 8 different, mutually incompatible of course, versions of the "ui" deployed on various phones?
One way to gauge of the levels of insanity is the fact that there are a grand total of 4 (to my knowledge) languages ported to this thing, NONE of which has anything resembling something like a useful set of bindings to the Symbian API (Java, which is the only remotely usable one, has a very limited MIDP profile). Ponder that!
In short: do pay good coin for those downloadable Symbian-specific apps if you need them, because their developers have all been through Hell several times to make them.
What really kills me though is how arrogant and pompous the "designer" of this pile of pig manure about this monumental "achievment". Another, mind boggling observation is that there actually cell phone manufacturers using it.
Maybe you are right, I never was too impressed with ReiserFS, primarily because I am a veteran of the IT trenches and I have scars to show for every new and fancy technology meant to replace some mundane, pedestrian, not very sexy, but exceedingly tested, well understood and backwards compatible solution.
So I was plodding over the years with ext, ext2, ext3, and they haven't let me down once yet in all that time. In the days before ext3 one could make serious accusations based on lack of journalling, but once ext3 rolled around, the only thing remaining is filesystem performance. Which while critical in some cases, has only marginal impact in many of the typical IT concoctions and which can also be drastically improved by just a modicum of common sense in userland organisation of what is actually stored and where on these file systems.
So in short I tend to prefer well behaved and compatible even if older and slower over fancy, sporty, constantly changing, just a bit too self-important and more then once out of control cutting edge stuff.
And so you are probably right, that all of the above probably adds some colour to my skeptical outlook on a guy who is responsible for a piece of software with just such characteristics.
What you say is true, but you gotta admit that things do not stack up well for this guy, at least as seen from our seats at the peanut gallery.
So by all means, due process and all that, but I am sure that you realize that utter abusive narcisstic dicks are more likely then other kinds of people to do things... that utter abusive narcisstic dicks do, which includes rage and spousal homicide.
Is it possible that a byzantine set of coincidences coupled with his completely weird and kooky behaviour, accompanied by Tom Clancy-nesque plots by the Russian Mob, hitherto unknown serial killers and Houdini-like spiteful wives all conspired to make poor Hans look like a murderer? Sure, but in my view that is just a tiny, wee bit improbable.
What gets me here is something that could be a fruitful field of sociological study: for some reason Slashdot crowd appears to show some unreasoning, instinctive sympathy towards this guy. Is it because he is a programmer? Or a socially-misfit nerd? Or because he did post on lklm? Is there some sort of deep-seated, subconscious resonance that some here feel with him which results in their need to defend him?
I live in reality and want to deal with people as they are now, while you prefer to sit with a holier-than-thou attitude and wait for evolution to fix the problems of humanity.
I once thought as you do, until I realized that there is no conceivable method of fixing the problems of humanity while "dealing with people as they are now" as this is the very source of all of those problems. All of the convoluted political systems are simply laughably insufficient to prevent the insane part of this humanity from wrecking and perverting everything built by its more reasonable sub-section.
So one can keep pretending and hope for a miraculous societal formula to be devleoped which would somehow make a pile of crazed monkeys suddenly behave as though their brains were located somewhat higher then their crotches, or one can accept the reality and admit that the situation is unfixable without radical, large scale changes to human psyche, which would likely mean for the unfixable varieties of crazed monkeys a fate shared with the earlier, extinct forms of hominids.
Also I do not think we will have to wait more then a few decades, because unlike in the eons past, this time the evolution will have a helping hand of science, for better or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
You bastard! I did and that unsavory host at 127.0.0.1 (isn't the 127.x range like the dark back-alleys of the Intertubes?) infected me with a nasty trojan, probably because it has like a million gajigabytes of completely illegal, pirated contents on it!! A veritable pirate hive, that! I hold you pesonally responsible for directing us, pure, innocent Slashdotters to it!
Well, one sure sign of derangement is to respond with maniacal laughter and accusations of insanity towards all sane people around the patient (it is called "projection"), usually triggered when one's deeply cherished lunatic notions are exposed for all to see and all crazy "arguments" have fallen flat ... more frequently then not followed by flailing arms and uncontrollable drooling. Fortunately your drool cannot be transmitted over the Internet, which is one of the Internet's great features. I would recommend getting help, but since large percentage of the moneys allocated for medical services are now in Iraq, you probably won't get any.
Which I just refuted with a simple example ...
See a specialist. Although I do not think an Optometrist will suffice.
Wait, now you are down to mere two things? What happened to the "whole world"?!
Oh, that did not last very long, back to "everyone" again!
I will bring up that rather inconvenient historical fact as many times as you wish.
Sure sign of running out of "arguments" to spew.
You do seriously expect this kindergarten "I know more then you but I am not telling! You lose!" crap to fly, don't you?
Get a dictionary. Influence does not equal "control".
Impossible to explain, period. To anyone. That is the problem with lunacies.
No, I simply have empirical evidence to that effect, mostly consisting of great heaps of bodies. Do you have evidence proving otherwise?
You are laughably unfamiliar with the medieval European history.
Who am I to believe, you or my lying eyes and ears?
Very well, name the major differences, focus on punishments for disbelief or refusal to follow the tenets of your respective lunacies, as practiced by both historically.
Betwen their respective religious lunacies, why, yes. Also, I do not see much difference between a secular Muslim nation like Jordan and say, Spain. You did notice the epmhasis on "secular", did you? That is an euphemism for "sanity", in both cases. Before being secular, Spain was, well, Inquisitory.
You claimed us "worse" then the religious lunatics. Massacres are one obvious yardstick to measure by ...
No it is you who are desperately seeking some sympthoms of a non-existant condition. As I pointed out already, observing two or more people being morally despicable (based on patently obvious empirical evidence) does not magically lead to a determination that the whole world and all actions of people in it are somehow morally equivalent, which is what you are desperately attempting to insinuate.
No, it is you who is attempting to dismiss the obvious via claiming that a wholly made up "condition" somehow disqualifies these plain to see facts because they do not fit your pre-conceived notions. Thus eveyone but you is "playing" sophisticated and subtle games, which only you, naturally, can see.
All religions are irrational lunacy, as one can easily demonstarte by merely examining their tenets. Christianity is not particulatly distinguished in this regard, nor is Islam, with the exception of the fact that the followers of Christianity account for the lion share of the bulk of mass murder and warfare in recorded history.
As I explained, it quite does. Try to keep up.
No, you are arguing that any comparison between religious lunacies must by definiton inevietably result in a claim of "moral equivalency" of the entire Universe, or some such ridiculous nonsense.
Yes I did forget the magic lamps with Genies in them and the flying carpets. How could have I?!
They have large audiences, they are spewing their demagougery every day for many years now. The effects are cumulative.
How so? Do explain. Demonstrate the clear moral superiority of one wacky delusional religion over the other and justify barbaric acts of one band of believers in an invisible-man-in-the-sky commanding them to maim and murder, over the other.
The "aggression" having been defined as the dirty Muslim "beasts" taking over the "holy land" via sexual reproduction.
Last of them still undergoing on, in Iraq, at least according to some Christianists on TV.
You are far too alike each other for your liking.
Not at all. It is a violent, irrational lunacy. Just as Christianity is. The hair-splitting differences between these lunacies are inconsequential.
Of course it does. Much of the demagougery justifying the invasion would not have taken hold if it were not disseminated via megachurches and the like. The blind hatred against all the Muslims (not just the "jihadis") has Christianist and Zionist ovetones. You can pretend all you like, but the truth is plain to see, even without some of your own zealots who are proudly telling this to anyone who will listen. This does not obscure the fact that the war had also other aims, priority of which ranked higher on the war planners' agenda. But one aim does not necessarily preclude the other. The war was orchestrated by a coalition of interests, some of them Christianist and Zionist.
There is no such thing as "moral equivalence". If you got two vile individuals accosting you for your money, this does not mean that all people are morally equivalent. It only means that you are dealing with two muggers, who for all practical purposes are equivalent. But the whole world is not composed of muggers, or religious lunatics.
So far all the made up crazy shit is yours exclusively.
Yes, we started many a religious massacre, moreso then any of the religious lunatics, did we not?
No such theory exists except in your sick head.
They went into Afghanistan ostensibly to get Osama Bin Ladin, who you might have noticed is still sending out videos complete with a fancy studio setup in 2007. In the process they murdered vast numbers of locals, forged corrupt alliances with local warlords and installed a puppet president whose authority still does not extend beyond Kabul and will fall as soon as the last NATO soldier leaves the country.
They went to Iraq on based on a whole long list of fabricated pretenses, following which the Vice Roy Bremer immediately proceeded to parcel out whatever he could of Iraq to his American cronies, a process which still continues with the attempted ram-rodding of the final insult to Iraqis, the oil "sharing" law which allots most of Iraq's oil to US associated oil conglomerates. The reasons were profit, desire to dominate the region on behalf of Israel, the religious belief in divine supremacy and superiority of USA and Israel over all other nations, hubris from which an idea that the USA can do no wrong flowed, despite of being warned repeatedly that the supposed mission is not achievable within the given parameters.
This is a logical fallacy. There is no cause-and-effect link between Jihadis being a bunch of pig-headed religious imbeciles and the Western Aristocracy being greedy and the Western public being complacent and ignorant and the Christianist and Zionist charlatans working their own demagougery on them to their own ends. These things occur independently from each other, although they do occur in parallel.
I have plain as day, empirical evidence to prove it: the "global jihad" is equipped with AK-47s, RPGs, some stolen explosives and what seems like an infinite supply of suicidal idiots. People whom O'Reilly, Coulter and Malkin (she substituted for O'Reilly on FOX) are in a position to influence control the most advanced army humanity ever constructed, complete with nuke tipped ICBMs, aircraft carriers and the like. The "global jihad" managed, after 20 years of plotting, to kill 3000 US citizens on US soil employing the apex of the most advanced of Al-Queda's weapons technologies: 19 pairs of box cutters. The followers of O'Reilly have invaded whole nations and killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens, leveled whole cities and drove millions of refugees out of their homes using armored divisions, aerial bombardment and attack helicopters.
There is just no contest.
Simple empirical observation, see above.
Morality?! Both sides in this conflict are deeply immoral, corrupt, dishonest, manipulative, vicious, callous to the human consequences of their actions, and thoroughly vile. One wishes to dominate the world via a barbaric, brainless medieval religious doctrine, the other wants to dominate the world via armies and a corrupt political/economic system aimed at enriching the aristocracy of Corporate America and also does not shy away from utilizing their own medieval religious doctrines as it suits them and their Israeli accomplices. There is no good guys in this fight, other then perheaps some few poor non-sectarian Iraqis who only want to get on with their lives and are being killed, maimed, herded and abused by all sides.
You ooze your religious biggotry. What does this nonsensical satement mean?! As "evil" as Muslims? You mean they conducted Crusades and skinned people alive during the Spanish Inquisition? Burned scientists on the stake? Do explain.
I have news for you: all fundamentalist wackos, irrespective of the type of their mental disease are evil. With no exception. They will try to subjegate, and failing that maim and murder anyone who is actively resisting their particular woo-woism. Christians did it, and are actively doing it (see Iraq) and so do Muslims, Jews and many others. Religions are the scourge of civilization. If it weren't for the secular Enlightenment the Catholics would be still spilling the guts of children of Lutherans who would be still spilling the guts of Calvinists and Baptists would be still gutting the children of Catholics and vice versa. And so now the medieval darkness is returning again, and vicious crazies are at each-other's throats again until some adults step in, hopefuly before the Muslim, Christian and Jewish religious lunatics blow the planet apart.
Thay are different flavours of equally irrational and hateful ravings full of vindictive, vicious, violent acts by their respective make-believe invisible old-men-in-the-sky and even more vicious followers of those sick fantasies, both demanding irrational behaviours from their victims and both utterly incompatible with any rational, advanced civilization. Both should have stayed behind where they belong: medieval dark ages.
I am sure the billionaire princes within would disagree.
Really? A single newspaper, with at most a few freelance reporters working for it in the field performing an Iraq-wide "check" of morgues, hospitals and cementeries....
Also the UN has no presence in Iraq to speak of since the time their envoy got blown up. Their representatives get shot the moment they identify themselves as they are seen as complicit in bringing about the US invasion, which also presents some small difficulty in conducting Iraq-wide scans.
I do not doubt that some such attempts were made via hired third parties, but the reliability of this methodology is laughable even if they were conducted seriously. Many dead do not end up in any of those places as they are buried in family compounds and villages. Many others, specially the victims of US aerial and local's sucide bombardments, are not buried at all, since nothing is left to bury. Also one has to ask how would these intrepid "counters" distinguish graves of people dying of unrelated disease and old age from those dying from being shot or from malnutrition and disease brought by the US invasion, specially that the locals' families rarely would bring the victims to hospitals if they are obviously dead ...
If he only "reported", no one could make a viable charge against him. But you know as well as I do that his "advocacy" extended well beyond and above any impartial reporting. As a matter of fact it still does. He does precisely what the millitant Islamists' ideologues do, namely calls for murder via military aggression of those who would not submit to the ways of the Divenely Chosen, Always Right By Definition, Gloriously Supreme and Perpetually Unjustly Victimized America, as he interprets it for his followers. One example of his hate is the fact that he uses the term "Islamofascists" to describe his Militant Islamist enemies, a term specifically tailored to incite blind hate and having no historical accuracy whatsoever. And it is working because one can see in these threads a lot of his disciples demonstrating their fully effective, hateful brainwashing.
If you open a can of worms to get a gold coin within, worms which you knew were in it because you've been repeatedly told by many worm experts and people who have seen the worms being put in there and whose advice you dismissed sniggering contemptuously and subesquently if the worms escape to chew your carpet, whose fault is it? Yours or the worms'? And then if you proceed to burn your house down in an insane attempt to "fight" them, killing your grandma whom you forgot was sleeping upstairs, whose fault is it? Yours or the worms'?
No, the reports are simply not to be trusted. That is why multiple, varying methodologies, deployed by multiple, varying organizations must be used and the results averaged. That is the only, even if remotely, scientific method of trying to eliminate noise in the data brought on by the factors I enumerated. And it is also for this reason why demagogues object, since they all have one pet report the results of which they find dear because of their closeness to their particular world-view, just like you just did with the LA Times, and then these demagougues proceed to pretend that no other reports exist or are feasible.
The estimates conducted by various organizations and by various methodologies range from 70+ thousand (based only on media reports) to 1,2 million (based on various indirect population polling methods). The Lancet study stands at around 600,000 which is in mid-range of these studies. Since it is patently obvious that the media based estimate is a lowball, as media in any war-torn country is capable of only reporting certain percentage of deaths and it completely ignores delayed after-effects, it is quite reasonable to say that the deaths in into "hundreds of thousands" at least. The exact number will probably never be known.
O'Reilly and many other media pundits were used by the planners of Iraqi invasion to uncritically disseminate and enhance their propaganda in order to shape the public opinion so that the invasion can be carried out. Every lie, exaggeration, mis-representation and innuendo deployed by the Iraqi war planners was presented as fact by O'Rilley and his co-bloviators to O'Reilly's already seriously brain-washed audience. Should he and his ilk not be available and if the media performed the function alloted for it in a constitutional democracy by asking important questions and demanding non-evasive answers the invasion of Iraq would have been very unlikely as its true objectives were patently at odds with those of the general public of the USA and of other democratic nations.
Even if this number is correct, the veracity of which is subject to the same problems the estimates above have, it is still a comparison damning beyond any excuse. His reign lasted 23 years, the US occupation mere 4. If the US manages to occupy Iraq for 23 years, I am sure the numbers of dead will be into tens of millions. I also did not include the millions of refugees and internally displaced populace. Even ignoring all that, the major pretense (at least after the WMD charade was exposed) of the US operation was "liberation" bringing with it "democracy" and "propserity". It had brought instead poverty, disease, death and carnage. Blaming the victims of the invasion for being "ungateful" and "unable to appreciate the great US sacrifice" is beyond riduculously hypocritical - it is the responsibility of high and mighty invaders to plan for such possibilities before hand.
As a typical demagougue, you are attempting to latch onto one flawed methodology and pretend that no others (even if also flawed) exist. Iraq Body Count produces extremely conservative, low-ball estimates based on Iraqi and Western media reports which have the following major difficulties: Iraq media is dominated by partisan sectarian "reporting" and is (or more precisely was during the Bremer days) US censored (the US and Iraqi "government" have repeatedly shut down various papers and TV channels unfriendly to the US occupiers), in which all disasters is always blamed on the other sects (as putting blame on the US risked for a long time a serious danger of the violent shutdown of the paper and its reporters ending up in Abu Graihib, of whom many still languish there), The Western media has very limited access to the local affairs and its reporting relies on local, sectarian sources, of whom many also have been shot and imprisoned by the US in its Gulags for attemting to report on US an
There is a simple, logical test. If demagouges like O'Reilly would have not incited (with tacit help and approval of Imperial America Neocons and other lords of Disaster Capitalism) the invasion of Iraq, would these hundreds of thousands of deaths have occured, given the fact that Saddam did not manage to kill anywhere near as many of his countrymen during his 23 year long rule? It is a rather simple case of cause and effect. If that is a sign of "mental illness" than the you live in some Reverse Universe, where eating your own fecies is considered the utmost respectable mark of "sanity".
Furthermore, it is incorrect to say that "most" are related to the religious and ethnic warfare, as an unknown percentage is a direct result of large scale and ongoing aerial bombardment, "anti-terrorist sweeps", "pre-emptive" murdrer of whole families at thousands of "checkpoints" and in any vehicle which gets "too close" to panicked US troops, opaque activities of vast mercenary armies, wholesale "pacification" of whole cities like Fallujah to avenge the said mercenaries, not to mention an inderect result of complete (and purposeful, profit motivated) destruction of the Iraqi civilian infrastructure.
Well, actually, yes.
You see, all of the jihad is based on demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in the Arab world, and aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-fundamentalist-Islam invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via small arms warfare combined with improvised explosives, punctuated by suicidal bomb attacks and a very rare spectacular terrorist assault on foreign soil, which results in few thousand casualties per year on average.
On the other hand we have demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in of the xenophobic, supremacist white subsectuion of American society, which aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-white-upper-class-Christainst invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via large scale warfare, aerial bombardment and wholesale occupation of foreign nations, exctrajudicial imprisonment in Gulags, torture etc, with hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq alone in a period of 4 years.
In other words, O'Reilly, Coulter, Malkin etc are the ideological equivalents of Osama and various pontificating radical Imams in their various Madrassas. The difference is that their spew is empirically proven to be capable of causing vastly more damage and casualties than that of all the modern jihadis combined so far.
Perheaps that will change when the Pakistani nukes change hands to Taliban or Al-Queda and O'Reilly and Osama will start competing on more even terms.
None of which of course helps the more sane part of the humanity which is likely to caught in the crossfire caused by the blowhard morons of the world.
My dream is that one day all of the most insane of the violence promoting demagouges like O'Reilley, Coulter and Osama are all caught, given flamethrowers or some such and sent to an uninhabited island to practice what they preach on each other, while the rest of the world goes on about making our lives better. The last one standing gets to own the island where his followers are all sent as a punishment to listen to his or her whining 24/7 for the rest of their short lives.
You are right that this scheme can be defeated via the client authentication process, but remember that we were discussing a particular cross-section of web traffic, namely hypothetical HTTPS sites open to the general public which contain ads, not sites like banking or P2P applictions. Unless you somehow manage to issue verifiable certificates to all your potential random web site passers by, or somehow demand that everyone has them and setup a whole infrastructure for it, free of charge (since average Joe will not pay for it), this defense is impractical. That is the main reason why most sites do not use it.
In other words, people who already understand how to defend themselves and who participate in closed, registration based sites can do so, but they were never the target audience for this since they are rather unlikely to install the ISP's funky software with their malicious CA cert in the first place.
You would have easilly know that from the other posts I made, all very near each other in this thread, should you actually bother to read anything instead of flatulating unduly and prematurely.
Not tight enough apparently, given all the misdirected gas.
Well, we were simply having a theoretical discussion about the technical feasibility of the scheme. Its legal and marketing implications are another matter. I was suggesting precisely what you mentioned, that they insert their own CA cert into the browser via the "install teh Intertubes" package and then use it to sigh the certs of their proxied, spoofed sites. This would of course affect only the dumb users who actually use the silly disk, precisely the kind of crowd who will not notice that they are being shafted, and if they do, they probably would not do anything about it. As to illegality ... who knows. Uncharted territory.
Before you become too vaginally flatulent, you should have comprehended that we were simply discusing domains which are known to have large amounts of https traffic heading to them, based simply on analysing the volume and destinations of https packets travelling via the ISPs network. The "https lookup" was a shorthand to "a forward DNS lookup for a host (or a domain) known to have a busy HTTPS site with a lot of juicy ads to substitute on it". Clearer now?
Note that once such domain is identified by packet sniffing and other means, all lookups of its name will return the adress of the ISP proxy, irrespective of protocol, since as you farted out correctly, DNS lookups are performed irrespective of protocols later used to make connections. Which of course was clear from the rest of my message.
So keep your vagina tight and do not fart when it makes you look like a ... well ... a twat.
No, but as I explained, you can tell that www.foobar.org is being accessed via HTTPS by a lot of people from you network. Then if you go and check it out with your own browser then you will know that www.foobar.org has a lot of ads and these two facts combined tell you that www.foobar.com is something worth spoofing.
No, you pick high traffic sites with a lot of ads on them straring with traffic logs and combined with other factors such as ease of substitution of ads, manually. You keep missing the whole point of the excercise. It is quite likely that your proxy has to be taught how to handle each such site properly, so that the substitutions do not disrupt the user experience.
For some reason you assume that everyone but you is stupid and cannot discern good target sites from bad ones.
Yes it would, based on a domain name. The purpose of this is supposedly to repalce ads, therefore the ISP would be targetting specific high-volume sites only, not the whole Internet. They can simply sniff HTTPS traffic and shape their proxy accordingly and then transparently spoof the IP addresses of the sites which look profitable.
No, only for the spoofed domains and which is trivial, you simply NAT all non-HTTPS packets and pass them otherwise unaltered to these select domains, which would normally not communicate with users via any other protocol anyway.
Only by a select group of users who for some reason have a need to connect to these sites via non-HTTPS means and only if they look at their packet's source addresses. Note that the ISP would not actually block these, merely NAT them.
That assumes that the ISP is not monkeying with the DNS lookups (most sheeple connected use the ISPs DNS servers) and does not return their proxy's address to all HTTPS lookups, following which your browser would simply initiate HTTPS setup sequence with their proxy instead of the www.foo.com you were aiming at. This scheme only depends on the ISP being able to sign their own certs for any fake site they choose to mimick a real one with and that can be easily accomplished by inserting their own CA cert into the browser via "must do ISP update" or the abovementioned stupid "install teh Intertubes" software.
Err, not really.
You guys keep forgetting that a typical ISP also contols the caching DNS servers the sheeple connected are using. All they have to do is to respond with the IP address of their fancy proxy to all HTTPS URL lookup requests, following which the normal HTTPS exchange occurs, proxied by their man-in-the-middle proxy (i.e their proxy pretends to be www.foo.com, complete with spoofed IP address for that domain and initiates HTTPS setup sequence with the browser, while on the other side it pretends to be the user and initiates the setup sequence with www.foo.com). That is one weakness in the HTTPS scheme: it depends on non-hijackable DNS servers since it uses domain names instead of IP addresses for verification of your packets' destination.
Their main alternative was to actually hire some sane people to design the thing. You see, Symbian was purpose designed and financed by a consortium of cell phone manufacturers! These idiots funded and then inflicted this shit onto themsleves! There is absolutely no fucking excuse for it, as it was designed from clean slate with an express purpose to be used in the cell phone industry.
The problem is firmly related to the gigiantic ego and utter incompetence of the idiot they hired to "lead" this project. Subsequently they've sunk untold millions into this pile of festering crap, not to mention untold hours of the lives of developers ... and users, as the thing is attrociously slow and end-user hostile. And after the millions were sunk, the problem became political and various CEO's egos became involved: "Mistake, ME?! Never! I am the Uber Mega Important CEO! I NEVER make mistakes! It must be the users and developers! We are perfect!" sort of thing.
So they must at some point realize that they've fucked up, scrap this thing, fire the imbecile, and start over.
As a matter of fact some of them did realize it but due to politics of the Symbian "alliance" (and infinite greed of some of its participants who want everything to be "proprietary", "pay to play" technology - chiefly Nokia and Sony-Ericsson) they had no choice but to leave the thing. As a matter of fact, at this point Nokia and Ericsson are really the only players to speak of left in this rapidly dissolving "alliance". That is one of the reasons you see interest in Linux (which is admittedly not the most optimal of platforms for cell phones, but is nevertheless light years ahead of Symbian) and Mobile Windows (also very ill fitting for phones and even if it comes with the whole assimiliation into the Microsoft Empire and a myriad of other problems) - simply because those who left are looking for a reasonably easy and quick to market solutions without massive up-front investment. And dealing with Symbian is just impossible. The other players are also afraid of yet another niche concoction which some lone egomaniac can control and a handful of asshat CEOs from one or two major vendors can unduly influence to everyone else's detrement and thus wreck the whole thing without any oposition.
Did you actually try to develop anything for Symbian?
Well, I did. And let me tell you this: Windows APIs, complete with their haphazard organization and historical baggage, lunatic bugs and arcane undocumented extensions are an example of Reason and Logic, when compared to this positive 10 day old vomit which is Symbian. Any ole Linux API is like an Extatic Symphony of Cosimic Joy, Eternal Purity and All-Encompassing Sanity, next to this 10 day old vomit which is Symbian.
Hell, I am being unfair to 10 day old vomit.
You gotta be a masochist to develop for this thing, downloadable "api" or not.
The toolchain is fucked up beyond belief.
The API is a convoluted mess of overcomplicated certinisms, wheels reinvented to be square and with an offset axis, said square "wheels" within other square "wheels", and all existing only so that Symbian "alliance" can have NDAs, Patents and what not on this shit, which otherwise has been done a million times before, some 900 thousand times of which done much better.
Great majority of it is undocumented or laughably documented (they want you to pay big money for access to the "real" stuff). Most of what is documented you do not want go near.
The OS itself was designed by a brain-damaged monkey, its like a retarded dwarf cousin of Windows, complete with moronic "drive letters" and whole bunch of other truly imbecillic "features" from the early days of DOS, which even Microsoft doesn't want anymore.
You gotta pay money for application certs.
On and and on and on.
Or and did I mention that there is like 6 mutually incompatible versions of the thing in the wild, and about 8 different, mutually incompatible of course, versions of the "ui" deployed on various phones?
One way to gauge of the levels of insanity is the fact that there are a grand total of 4 (to my knowledge) languages ported to this thing, NONE of which has anything resembling something like a useful set of bindings to the Symbian API (Java, which is the only remotely usable one, has a very limited MIDP profile). Ponder that!
In short: do pay good coin for those downloadable Symbian-specific apps if you need them, because their developers have all been through Hell several times to make them.
What really kills me though is how arrogant and pompous the "designer" of this pile of pig manure about this monumental "achievment". Another, mind boggling observation is that there actually cell phone manufacturers using it.
Maybe you are right, I never was too impressed with ReiserFS, primarily because I am a veteran of the IT trenches and I have scars to show for every new and fancy technology meant to replace some mundane, pedestrian, not very sexy, but exceedingly tested, well understood and backwards compatible solution.
So I was plodding over the years with ext, ext2, ext3, and they haven't let me down once yet in all that time. In the days before ext3 one could make serious accusations based on lack of journalling, but once ext3 rolled around, the only thing remaining is filesystem performance. Which while critical in some cases, has only marginal impact in many of the typical IT concoctions and which can also be drastically improved by just a modicum of common sense in userland organisation of what is actually stored and where on these file systems.
So in short I tend to prefer well behaved and compatible even if older and slower over fancy, sporty, constantly changing, just a bit too self-important and more then once out of control cutting edge stuff.
And so you are probably right, that all of the above probably adds some colour to my skeptical outlook on a guy who is responsible for a piece of software with just such characteristics.
What you say is true, but you gotta admit that things do not stack up well for this guy, at least as seen from our seats at the peanut gallery.
So by all means, due process and all that, but I am sure that you realize that utter abusive narcisstic dicks are more likely then other kinds of people to do things ... that utter abusive narcisstic dicks do, which includes rage and spousal homicide.
Is it possible that a byzantine set of coincidences coupled with his completely weird and kooky behaviour, accompanied by Tom Clancy-nesque plots by the Russian Mob, hitherto unknown serial killers and Houdini-like spiteful wives all conspired to make poor Hans look like a murderer? Sure, but in my view that is just a tiny, wee bit improbable.
What gets me here is something that could be a fruitful field of sociological study: for some reason Slashdot crowd appears to show some unreasoning, instinctive sympathy towards this guy. Is it because he is a programmer? Or a socially-misfit nerd? Or because he did post on lklm? Is there some sort of deep-seated, subconscious resonance that some here feel with him which results in their need to defend him?
I once thought as you do, until I realized that there is no conceivable method of fixing the problems of humanity while "dealing with people as they are now" as this is the very source of all of those problems. All of the convoluted political systems are simply laughably insufficient to prevent the insane part of this humanity from wrecking and perverting everything built by its more reasonable sub-section.
So one can keep pretending and hope for a miraculous societal formula to be devleoped which would somehow make a pile of crazed monkeys suddenly behave as though their brains were located somewhat higher then their crotches, or one can accept the reality and admit that the situation is unfixable without radical, large scale changes to human psyche, which would likely mean for the unfixable varieties of crazed monkeys a fate shared with the earlier, extinct forms of hominids.
Also I do not think we will have to wait more then a few decades, because unlike in the eons past, this time the evolution will have a helping hand of science, for better or worse.