We MUST investigate these machines. This is the best time to do so, there is now tons of proof that they are screwed up, but the investigation can be just into the machines themselves and the people behind them, without any threat to the stability of our government.
That's also my take on the election aftermath, more or less.
John Kerry made a tremendous step forward when he refused to unleash the lawyers. Whether it was out of statesmanship or practicality, I don't know. Either way, he and his party have a lot better position for 2008 than Al Gore created for 2004. It also made improving the election process much more likely, ironically by telling people by his actions to have faith in the system.
The process of electing our government officials is well understood, at least by those who specialize in it. That makes it a good candidate (pardon the expression) for stepwise refinements of various kinds. We can (and do) use evolutionary improvement, in which the various Secretaries of State compare notes on what works best.
As much as politicians like attention, messing up an election may be the one area in which the maxim "all press is good press" may not apply. Think of former Florida SecSt Katherine Harris and her involvement in the 2000 elections. Four years later bozos are trying to run her over!
So the folks in charge are motivated even more to make the process run smoothly. That may translate into risk avoidance, but that's probably OK. They won't be as likely to adopt some newfangled gee-whiz electronical thingy just because somebody makes a joke about hanging chads.
[Setup is a firewall and locked-down OS]. Would they still need to be vigilent? Is there anything that is likely to be able to bust through that kind of security? Even if a potential exploit existed somewhere along the chain, isn't the chain sufficiently extensive that nobody could ever make use of it?
My point is that you need to have that kind of situation, which is a multi-layered approach.
But to answer directly, yes, they still need to be vigilant. They're still being a client, unless the box is unplugged from the network. Do I download that RPM or MSI and install it, or do I check it out first? Do I log in as root, or do I waste time with a luser account?
The user who thinks he has a "secure" OS doesn't bother with the basics, or with a virus checker, or checking the signature on a tarball.
There is a regular discussion (or flame war) over which operating system is more "secure": Windows, Linux, the BSDs, Mac OS X, or whatever. Anyone with a bit of understanding knows that there's no answer to that discussion, except if you ask which one is easiest to secure, and even then you have to ask who the securer is and what tasks will be performed. But that's not what I want to talk about.
Telling less experience users that a particular OS is "secure" leads them to think they don't need to be vigilant. Same thing with telling them a firewall will solve their worm problems, or that as long as they keep up with patches they're safe from attacks. All of these are important, but no single one of them is a panacea.
I didn't RTFPDF, but it's common wisdom that a multi-layered approach to security is best. No individual step fixes everything, nor usually even stops all of the attacks it's designed to stop. All we do is raise the bar, and hope attackers will go elsewhere.
So don't tell me that an OS is "secure". I know there isn't such a thing. Tell me what its soft spots are, so I can layer other defenses around them. Maybe the bad guys will pass me by for a while.
Teehee. No, but maybe MTV's audience will be old enough to vote by then.
I heard a report that the 18-21 age group turnout was 17%, same as in 2000. Yet my teenagers were whining that they ought to be able to vote, checking results like politics nerds and everything.
From one of the linked articles: "We need to take a few days to plan and then take to the streets in massive numbers."
That's just plain irresponsible.
Bush was reelected because more voters believed he was trustworthy than believed Kerry was. You may disagree with the outcome, but that's why we have elections.
Rather than protest this election, pick a better guy next time.
Huh? Did the President say something about that? Oh, he did mention the systematic suppression of the freedom of religion through arrest and torture of Christians, but what's a little torture compared to high-tech traffic signals? That's what they deserve for believing the wrong things, after all.
I suppose I should mention Human Rights Watch, another group not affiliated with President Bush or the U.S. Government. They aren't happy with China's approach to human rights, which is to propagandize about how wonderful things are in China.
The People's Republic of China is run by one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet.
They use torture, rape, and intimidation on a massive, systemic scale.
They are introducing capitalism, but not human rights. The economy is still largely managed top-down.
Saying they are upgrading faster than Western countries is like saying you want to go to Antarctica because it's springtime there, and you like warm weather.
Maybe they should stop focusing on "Making the internet better"
Or maybe they asked for ways to make the Internet better, and their customers went out and found them: Netzero and broadband. AOL For Broadband is not taking off, and never will, since the Internet itself provides all the content most people will ever want. Tamed by Google, there is no need for a general-purpose portal like AOL.
Aside from being the default home page for a legacy user base, few have any reason to use the service.
No one waits to see who will be President to file copyright infringement lawsuits. The President has no affect whatsoever on the outcome of civil lawsuits to which the Executive Branch of the U.S. Goverment is not a party.
Maybe you're confused about the shameful treatment of the DOJ/Microsoft case?
The astronomers studied the remnant of a supernova that exploded some 1,000 years ago, leaving behind an expanding shell of debris which, seen from the Earth, is twice the diameter of the Moon.
Do they mean it subtends as large a portion of sky as does the moon? If it's 1000 light-years away, that would make it...
((1000 light-years)*(size of moon))/(moon orbital height)
across,
((9.5 × 10^18 meters) * (3,476,000m))/ (384,403,000 m)
That's about 86 light years in diameter. Its average velocity is left as an exercise to the homebound.
The president of Diebold promissed Bush the victory.
He did that in a 2003 fundraising letter in his capacity as private citizen, not as the head of Diebold. He also realized his mistake, and banned Diebold election employees (including himself) from all political activities except voting.
How stupid would he have to be to try to rig the election, when everyone in the world is watching, when getting caught means jail time and the loss of his reputation and the loss of the Presidency for his party for at least four years and probably more? He'd have to be stupid and insane.
It was reported that exit polls weren't matching reported votes.
That's one reason why the exit polls were not supposed to be published. They aren't statistically valid, since people in one time period may tend to vote all one way. For instance, I understand that women tend to vote early in the day, while men tend to do vote later. Urban areas are easier to exit poll, and that may have been who was reported.
I *don't* trust the process. I consider this election to be a fraud at the presidential level, and possibly from top to bottom....
The process was designed to be difficult to verify, so WHY should it be trusted?
It should be trusted because thousands of grandmothers are watching it. It should be trusted because it's all we've got. We must be diligent and make sure it doesn't get corrupted, but there's no need to assume it's a sham without any evidence.
>you've misunderstood... >byte code, not source code >feature of the language...
My comments were intended to be more general than the Java language. Whether done with a command line switch, on an IDE checkbox at packaging time, or by writing a quickie program to do it yourself (which amortized is on the same order of time), doing anything to seal up your object code is counterproductive.
Work to improve the code by revealing it, not by hiding it.
Unstated and implicit was: what if you lose the source? How do you fix it? How does the poor sap to whom you've sold this prize code debug it when you're hit by a bus and aren't around to sell him the source?
Obfuscation is shortsighted, and a waste.
Maintainance nightmare
on
Decompiling Java
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I had always assumed that obfuscation was a magic fix that I could apply if necessary.
Let me get this straight: the author recommends that 'honest' developers obfuscate their code?
I've read programs that I thought were obfuscated, but later found out were just poorly written. Other times I've run into programmers who, tin hats firmly affixed, went to great lengths to make sure no one learned their Merlinesque techniques for getting the most out of BASIC.
In context, the author seems to be talking about obfuscating object code. Yikes! What's the opposite of debugging? Buggery?
Encrypting object code to make it harder to reverse engineer is a giant waste of time. Here are more productive ways to spend the the same amount of energy:
Making your programs work better
Asking other people to look over your code for bugs
Commenting the source so you (and others) can find bugs better
Replying to 'frist p0sts' on Slashdot
In fact, I can't think of many worse wastes of time than making a compiled program hard to understand.
Sorry, but when you vote for a candidate you put him in charge of your vote. He can concede before the polls close, after they close, or resign on inauguration day if he wins. Your only recourse is what you'll do at the ballot box next time.
As far as I know, concessions don't have any legal strength. In 2000, for instance, Al Gore conceded on election night (or morning, whatever), then had to un-concede when Florida looked like it was coming back around.
Concessions are just a custom, giving a clue to the rest of us that we can stop bickering.
Some people, unfortunately, don't see the big picture. Convinced of their role as watchdog over everyone else (including the other watchdogs), they proudly don their tin hats and demand the equivalent of a recount everywhere.
The country is divided enough over the actual issues. Can we at least agree (within obvious boundaries) to trust the process? I guess I'm arguing for a more 'obvious' definition of the word 'obvious'.
You'll be a lot more effective if you keep your tone civil. In this forum, it's not what you say, it's how you say it that counts. The slashdot crowd, whom you hope to influence, quits listening and clicks "flaimbait" when you start calling names (except some comments directed at conservatives or ).
You don't suppose they ever do any weapons research, do you?
Hmmm, what to do...
Make sure GWB is really, really truly reelected
Hint to Japanese you'll tell White House that Japan has WMD program - "Okinawa has such pretty beaches - it'd be a shame if they got all shot up now, wouldn't it?"
Slashdot Mirror
Seems broken.
...
Hmmm... Sand
That's also my take on the election aftermath, more or less.
John Kerry made a tremendous step forward when he refused to unleash the lawyers. Whether it was out of statesmanship or practicality, I don't know. Either way, he and his party have a lot better position for 2008 than Al Gore created for 2004. It also made improving the election process much more likely, ironically by telling people by his actions to have faith in the system.
The process of electing our government officials is well understood, at least by those who specialize in it. That makes it a good candidate (pardon the expression) for stepwise refinements of various kinds. We can (and do) use evolutionary improvement, in which the various Secretaries of State compare notes on what works best.
As much as politicians like attention, messing up an election may be the one area in which the maxim "all press is good press" may not apply. Think of former Florida SecSt Katherine Harris and her involvement in the 2000 elections. Four years later bozos are trying to run her over!
So the folks in charge are motivated even more to make the process run smoothly. That may translate into risk avoidance, but that's probably OK. They won't be as likely to adopt some newfangled gee-whiz electronical thingy just because somebody makes a joke about hanging chads.
My point is that you need to have that kind of situation, which is a multi-layered approach.
But to answer directly, yes, they still need to be vigilant. They're still being a client, unless the box is unplugged from the network. Do I download that RPM or MSI and install it, or do I check it out first? Do I log in as root, or do I waste time with a luser account?
The user who thinks he has a "secure" OS doesn't bother with the basics, or with a virus checker, or checking the signature on a tarball.
>As for me I'm going with the secure system.
Assuming you mean the system that's more securable, I agree.
Security is an emotion. You decide what level of risk is tolerable (makes you feel you're secure), and do what you need to do to get there.
For you, security is having a "secure system". I wish you the best.
There is a regular discussion (or flame war) over which operating system is more "secure": Windows, Linux, the BSDs, Mac OS X, or whatever. Anyone with a bit of understanding knows that there's no answer to that discussion, except if you ask which one is easiest to secure, and even then you have to ask who the securer is and what tasks will be performed. But that's not what I want to talk about.
Telling less experience users that a particular OS is "secure" leads them to think they don't need to be vigilant. Same thing with telling them a firewall will solve their worm problems, or that as long as they keep up with patches they're safe from attacks. All of these are important, but no single one of them is a panacea.
I didn't RTFPDF, but it's common wisdom that a multi-layered approach to security is best. No individual step fixes everything, nor usually even stops all of the attacks it's designed to stop. All we do is raise the bar, and hope attackers will go elsewhere.
So don't tell me that an OS is "secure". I know there isn't such a thing. Tell me what its soft spots are, so I can layer other defenses around them. Maybe the bad guys will pass me by for a while.
> I, like, totally hate you.
Mom? Mom, is that you?
[...pick a better electorate, too?]
Teehee. No, but maybe MTV's audience will be old enough to vote by then.
I heard a report that the 18-21 age group turnout was 17%, same as in 2000. Yet my teenagers were whining that they ought to be able to vote, checking results like politics nerds and everything.
It seems MTV missed their demographic. Oops.
From one of the linked articles: "We need to take a few days to plan and then take to the streets in massive numbers."
That's just plain irresponsible.
Bush was reelected because more voters believed he was trustworthy than believed Kerry was. You may disagree with the outcome, but that's why we have elections.
Rather than protest this election, pick a better guy next time.
... that apparently started all of this. It was published by Cache Logic, who make traffic statistics boxes.
http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide1.php
Here's a link to the Human Rights in China site. They aren't President Bush.
I suppose I should mention Human Rights Watch, another group not affiliated with President Bush or the U.S. Government. They aren't happy with China's approach to human rights, which is to propagandize about how wonderful things are in China.
Amnesty International, a group critical of the Bush Administration, thinks even less of PRChina.
I've never been to China. Have you?
The People's Republic of China is run by one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet.
They use torture, rape, and intimidation on a massive, systemic scale.
They are introducing capitalism, but not human rights. The economy is still largely managed top-down.
Saying they are upgrading faster than Western countries is like saying you want to go to Antarctica because it's springtime there, and you like warm weather.
Or maybe they asked for ways to make the Internet better, and their customers went out and found them: Netzero and broadband. AOL For Broadband is not taking off, and never will, since the Internet itself provides all the content most people will ever want. Tamed by Google, there is no need for a general-purpose portal like AOL.
Aside from being the default home page for a legacy user base, few have any reason to use the service.
In short: as most geeks know, AOL is redundant.
No one waits to see who will be President to file copyright infringement lawsuits. The President has no affect whatsoever on the outcome of civil lawsuits to which the Executive Branch of the U.S. Goverment is not a party.
Maybe you're confused about the shameful treatment of the DOJ/Microsoft case?
Make that 172 light years in diameter.
((1000 light-years)*(size of moon))/(moon orbital height)
across,
((9.5 × 10^18 meters) * (3,476,000m))/ (384,403,000 m)
That's about 86 light years in diameter. Its average velocity is left as an exercise to the homebound.
Bubba: What're y'in for, kid?
... *gulp* ... nah, but I can get you a nice deal on an interest-only mortgage...
Jeremy: Lotsa stuff - Viagra, mostly.
Bubba: Viagra? You mean "V14gr4"?
Jeremy: Yeah, that's right. And porn, I did a lot of porn.
Bubba: Pr0n, huh? Got any on ya? I could even use an "18+thumbnail" about now. This place makes even somethin' like you look good.
Jeremy: Nah
Bubba: MORTGAGES! Come here, you sunnabitch, I knew I didn't like yer looks!
Jeremy: Guards! Help!!!
Guard: Yeah, *yawn* I'll be right there. Right after I clean out my 'caughtspam' folder.
He did that in a 2003 fundraising letter in his capacity as private citizen, not as the head of Diebold. He also realized his mistake, and banned Diebold election employees (including himself) from all political activities except voting.
How stupid would he have to be to try to rig the election, when everyone in the world is watching, when getting caught means jail time and the loss of his reputation and the loss of the Presidency for his party for at least four years and probably more? He'd have to be stupid and insane.
That's one reason why the exit polls were not supposed to be published. They aren't statistically valid, since people in one time period may tend to vote all one way. For instance, I understand that women tend to vote early in the day, while men tend to do vote later. Urban areas are easier to exit poll, and that may have been who was reported.
The process was designed to be difficult to verify, so WHY should it be trusted?
It should be trusted because thousands of grandmothers are watching it. It should be trusted because it's all we've got. We must be diligent and make sure it doesn't get corrupted, but there's no need to assume it's a sham without any evidence.
>you've misunderstood...
>byte code, not source code
>feature of the language...
My comments were intended to be more general than the Java language. Whether done with a command line switch, on an IDE checkbox at packaging time, or by writing a quickie program to do it yourself (which amortized is on the same order of time), doing anything to seal up your object code is counterproductive.
Work to improve the code by revealing it, not by hiding it.
Unstated and implicit was: what if you lose the source? How do you fix it? How does the poor sap to whom you've sold this prize code debug it when you're hit by a bus and aren't around to sell him the source?
Obfuscation is shortsighted, and a waste.
Let me get this straight: the author recommends that 'honest' developers obfuscate their code?
I've read programs that I thought were obfuscated, but later found out were just poorly written. Other times I've run into programmers who, tin hats firmly affixed, went to great lengths to make sure no one learned their Merlinesque techniques for getting the most out of BASIC.
In context, the author seems to be talking about obfuscating object code. Yikes! What's the opposite of debugging? Buggery?
Encrypting object code to make it harder to reverse engineer is a giant waste of time. Here are more productive ways to spend the the same amount of energy:
In fact, I can't think of many worse wastes of time than making a compiled program hard to understand.
Sorry, but when you vote for a candidate you put him in charge of your vote. He can concede before the polls close, after they close, or resign on inauguration day if he wins. Your only recourse is what you'll do at the ballot box next time.
As far as I know, concessions don't have any legal strength. In 2000, for instance, Al Gore conceded on election night (or morning, whatever), then had to un-concede when Florida looked like it was coming back around.
Concessions are just a custom, giving a clue to the rest of us that we can stop bickering.
Some people, unfortunately, don't see the big picture. Convinced of their role as watchdog over everyone else (including the other watchdogs), they proudly don their tin hats and demand the equivalent of a recount everywhere.
The country is divided enough over the actual issues. Can we at least agree (within obvious boundaries) to trust the process? I guess I'm arguing for a more 'obvious' definition of the word 'obvious'.
You'll be a lot more effective if you keep your tone civil. In this forum, it's not what you say, it's how you say it that counts. The slashdot crowd, whom you hope to influence, quits listening and clicks "flaimbait" when you start calling names (except some comments directed at conservatives or ).
Sorry for the formatting of the first reply.
You don't suppose they ever do any weapons research, do you? Hmmm, what to do...