Come from the classic BBC TV serial of the late 70s and early 80s, "Blake's Seven". Apart from teleportation, FTL space travel and various rayguns and the like, it feels very like 2006 to me. The protagonists are anti-heroes, a group of renegades and outlaws - some are freedom fighters, some are thieves and smugglers - fighting a galaxy-wide police state called (I swear this is true!) "The Federation". The crew steal various spaceships and fly around blowing shit up, stealing valuable cargoes & generally trying to overthrow the state, whilst a huge amount of conflict (aha, conflict == drama!) within the crew, and with various members getting killed along the way, before the entire remaining crew are ruthlessly gunned down without warning at the end of the fourth series. Stunning stuff for a typical audience aged 8-15. Compare and contrast with the squeeky-clean, professional, benevolent meritocracy "predicted" in Star Trek. Blake's Seven is to Star Trek as Bladerunner is to 2001 - both the technology and the humans are far, far more realistic, because they're both fallible. Technology is dirty, hacked about, cannibalised; it breaks down in a shower of sparks, rots and collapses. And so do the crew. The State is corrupt, brutal, bureaucratic, filled with chair-warmers, scheming policians, sadistic torturers and of course the PBI -- the anonymous black-masked state troopers who of course are mostly there as raygun fodder.
Returning to the topic, I believe episide 27 (1981) is the first mention of the idea of using one computer to connect to another remotely and proxy instructions through an encrypted link. Yes, Avon Zen and Orac invented ssh!
If you can get past the production values (roughly on a par with Dr Who of the same era) and allow yourself to get absorbed in the drama and story, you'll love it. Of course, I'm biased because I was an obsessive fan from the moment in 1978 when I saw the first trailer. And the doom-laden, martial yet somehow spacey theme tune is a work of art in it's own right.
It's not that it's the best SF TV or film of the era --- not even I would say that --- but it's a real shame it's only a "cult favourite". As the attempt to produce a feature film version appears to have gone tits-up, it seems likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future - a real shame IMO. If the US had been exposed to B7 in the 70s rather than Star Trek re-runs, I bet we'd be living in a different, better, world today.
" Microsoft is specifically asking for feedback on this release, so make sure and let them know what you think."
I think they already have me down on their list of "dangerous subversive t-shirt wearing yoghurt-knitting gadget freak Linux fanboy" types, aka "not interested in non-Free software". It would be needlessly self-important of me to get in touch again just to let them know I haven't changed my mind since 1996.
Use it at work, and (without becoming the Free Software bore) let people know what it is. I'm lucky, in that I have enough freedom at work to be trusted with root on my own machine; I've installed and configured everything myself. Occasionally, I'll be in a meeting with project managers, directors or veeps, and I'll let them get a glimpse of my desktop, or Nautilus (better eye-candy than Konq. IMO:) before opening up a web page or "a Powerpoint" in OpenOffice. So far I seem to be getting away with it, and I think it gradually sinks in to people that Linux actually exists. (Non-tech people, and indeed lots of Windows and web developer types, too, might hear about Linux, but they never see it - it's a word in a box on a network diagram. Showing them that nice big icons, anti-aliased fonts, multiple desktops etc *and* that websites look just the same as they do on Windows, and that you can read/write Office docs without problems is worth more than any amount of well-intentioned button-holing, earnest explanations and possibly even giving out CDRs (I've never actually tried that, tho' I think I will try to have a few Live CDs hanging around that I can hand to those people who say "Hey, I like those big icons, what is that?"
I'm sure I remember breathless articles in PC Weak and the like in the late 90s (around the time of the release of IE4) that they were going to be porting Office and a load of other stuff to fully ActiveX-based web-hosted services. This crops up every few years at Microsoft - cf the current, soon to be abortive, attempt with ".live", or whatever it's called. No-one will use it, and it will be quietly canned after a few years.
No, the collapse of the world economy caused by the loss of all the world's ports and of the major food-producing areas, stirred in with the inevitable social (read: military) upheavals that will result from that are what's going to kill tens and hundreds of millions of people. Fuck me, you're ignorant.
Here in the UK a serious climate research science institute - the Tyndall Centre, who've been working on this stuff for years -- have said that we need 70% cuts within the next 25 years, and the official govt targets of 60% by 2050 are not nearly enough. Of course, there's no way in hell the general public would accept the sort of measures required for that to happen, unless there's a really obvious, huge, and most important very imminent threat to the UK economy and/or society. I'm reminded of the passage in John Wyndham's classic "The Kraken Wakes". Aliens have established colonies in the deepest parts of the ocean (this was written in the 50s, when such places were barely accessible.) They set about melting the poles in order to alien-form Terra. A British scientist works out what they're up against and then goes on TV making dire predictions of imminent doom, ending by announcing that the sea-level has already risen by a quarter of an inch... with the predictable effect that everyone writes him off as an alarmist and a nutter, because why would anyone care about a quarter of an inch? He then protests to some friends, saying "But the amount of water required to cover the oceans to a depth of a quarter of an inch is immense! Think of the amount of energy required to achieve that!!"
And that is pretty much what's happening here, except that between the skeptic nutters in the US, the petrochemical-funded astroturf pseudo-science that the Royal Society publicly protested about yesterday. By the time the evidence is clear that not only are massive changes occurring, but that these changes are going to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people, it will be too late.
I think you're smart enough to see through it. It is my fervent hope that we (the true intellectual elite) can move this country forward without jingoism and without nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance.
Dream on, kid. (I'm assuming you're a kid, because after 10 or 20 years' experience of adult life and keeping up with current affairs and politics, if you're not suicidally depressed, you don't really know what's going on.)
it's a hell of alot better way to die than an alergic reaction to an ointment or something.
It's a hell of a lot better way to die than being strapped down and hollowed out by parasitic wasps, whose grubs slowly eat you from the inside, too -- what's your point?
The level of technical illiteracy in the comments on this thread would be terrifying (if I was American.) Google "eyeballs service provider AS network peering"
Interesting -- I'm running minefield on Linux and enjoying it, eeh! it's like Y2K all over again;) -- where are the reflow branch builds be available? (I assume they're Talkback enabled?)
There's some pretty funny stuff in there, check this out f'rinstance:
Also, e-mail messages are now stored as individual files rather than in a binary database to reduce frequent corruption and make messages searchable in real-time. Backing up and restoring account setup information, configuration and mail store is now made easier.
Welcome to the brave new world of the 1970s, Windows fans! Now, please excuse me, as I have to go an change my trousers.
I use a Linux machine at work as my normal workstation; it interops perfectly well with all the MS crap, including Exchange, the Windows file servers, docs in all the Office formats (except Access, which is a dangerous toy anyway), reads and writes PDFs,.. printing, internal and external web apps,.. as well as allowing me to admin Windows machines (via rdesktop and/or ssh), our Cisco switches, run all my security stuff - pentesting, vuln and port scanning, as well as a test-bed and dev environment for various tools & setups - rrdtool for monitoring and charting system status, syslogng for centralised log management, writing rules for our Snort IDS,...
The only thing I haven't made to work yet is Exchange calendaring -- when I get one of those broken meeting request mails I use OWA, then duplicate the event into a local iCal app (Korganizer), probably because I'm too lazy to look up how to set up the Exchange plugin.
It's true I don't play games on it, that's because I don't have time to waste on such stuff -- if I did, I'd buy a console. And it wouldn't be an XBox, 'cos I loathe and despise Microsoft and will never give them money if I can help it.
when I first started working in infosec (5, 6 years ago) I spent a lot of time downloading and playing with the free trials for various vuln scanners - ISS, Retina, LANGuard and so on. I mentioned this to someone with more security experience who replied "ISS? It's Still Shit, right?"
And, as I have no intention or interest in visiting the US, I gave it 30 seconds in the microwave. Problem solved. They've been issuing these things over here since the end of July - I missed the deadline for a "real" passport by 5 days. Oh, and the thing is described as "biometric" which can't be right, as they've never taken any biometrics from me. They can't store a 40K jpeg in an RFID tag, at most it could be a (small) hash, but that would be useless as obviously another image of my face will have a completely different hash. Anyone got any idea what the UKPO means by asserting this thing's "biometric"? My guess is that they're just breaking people into the idea gradually, so as not to alarm us too much...
People will always need someone to perform some editing or classification. I used to work in a music company and took on the thankless task of skimming the unsolictited demos. For every one interesting artist there are thousands, I mean really/thousands/ of delusional talentless no-hopers. You may think of the manufactured slop that spews from the audio media factories and laugh when I say this, but it's a fact -- music listeners will always need someone else to do quality control. That's why I can happily walk into the Virgin Megastore in London once every few months and splurge £100 on half a dozen albums by bands I've never heard of; I may not end up liking them all (Willy Mason, come on down!) but at least I know there'll be basic competence in the performance and recordings, and generally the titles the shop staff have added to their 'recommended' lists are much better than that. It also saves me a lot of tedium listening to the radio, reading NME and Melody Maker every week etc that I used to do fifteen years ago.
I haven't seen anyone else point out the difference in power consumption. LCDs are much more frugal. You may not think it a big deal now, but wait the real cost of oil trickles down to your household electricity bill.
We just got a quarterly bill for 70 quid -- this time last year it was over 300 -- the difference being (a) solar water heating, and (b) pointing out to the other inhabitants that a TV on standby burns a/lot/ of current just to power the LED (and similar injunctions about not overfilling kettles, not washing up every plate as soon as it's used but doing it all in one batch in the evening, and so on.
About the only easy-to-reach economising measure will be upgrading the three remaining CRT screens (TV, two monitors) to LCD... when the TV gets upgraded (presumably to a nice hi-def widescreen display), it's not going to be a plasma screen.
Note that none of this stuff is really affecting our lifestyle, and we're using a LOT less electricity. Somewhere down the line, that means less CO2 in the atmosphere.
Such systems almost invariably fall over due to the FP/FN rates and the "low rate fallacy". Here's the ever-reliable Schneier on the subject. Profound, simple, enables everyone to immediately debunk much of the security theatre we are surrounded by these days. (warning, don't try arguing it out with a cop or other jumped-up little hitler type as you are likely to find yourself banged up for being a smart-arse, barrack-room lawyer or similar troublemaker.)
So companies like Immunity reverse-engineer an identified Microsoft patched vulnerability, release an exploit and expect kudos?
Nope, they do it to make money from selling the superb CANVAS product to penetration testers and other security professionals. They couldn't give a rat's ass what some random fucko on Slashdot thinks of it. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news...;p
Immunity RE'd the patch to find the original vulnerability. The exploit attacks unpatched machines. Sorry if you were being sarcastic or weird or something (I find it hard to tell the difference.)
Anyway, CANVAS (which costs mucho dineros) is not the problem. I'd be more enclined to worry about the (Free) Metasploit Framework exploit, by H D Moore - it only works on XP SP1 , W2K3 SP0 and W2K, but there are probably still lots of machines out there in those categories. You may remember Mr Moore, he it was who wrote the DCOM exploit in - when was it, January 2004 I think? - the exploit code which was subsequently ripped and repackaged as the Blaster worm.
-1 Troll for the silly (but apparently mandatory, these days) 'buried treasure' feedline, just to give all the lame Tomb Raider jokers something to hang their crap from.
(off-topic)
I wish Slashdot had qualitative scoring for posts, instead of a simple 0-5 points scale of bad->good. I read at +5 because I remembered one day that I had other things to do with my life than read every comment. Unfortunately a lot of pretty lame gags, and equally glib dinner-party received opinions get modded up. Most of the humour is just crap; I usually know the dinner-party type arguments and counterarguments on the typical/. controversies. What I like are authoratative comments (the type that begin "Why, yes, I am a rocket scientst" (/PhD in molecular biologist / have an MBA from INSEAD / was head of infrastructure at ISP FooCom, or whatever...), plus pointers to other interesting and relevant stuff (other papers in the field, summaries of current consensu, etc)... and some personal anecdotes (thought I dowish people would remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdote". And I wish people would sometimes stop and think "hey, I wonder if these incredibly intelligent over-educated specialists in the field of [FOO] have perhaps thought of my [idea / objection / suggestion / problem with their approach / reason why it won't work] already? After all, it took me 15 seconds to read the writeup and think of it, and they've been working in the field for 30 years...
Slashdot Mirror
Returning to the topic, I believe episide 27 (1981) is the first mention of the idea of using one computer to connect to another remotely and proxy instructions through an encrypted link. Yes, Avon Zen and Orac invented ssh!
If you can get past the production values (roughly on a par with Dr Who of the same era) and allow yourself to get absorbed in the drama and story, you'll love it. Of course, I'm biased because I was an obsessive fan from the moment in 1978 when I saw the first trailer. And the doom-laden, martial yet somehow spacey theme tune is a work of art in it's own right.
It's not that it's the best SF TV or film of the era --- not even I would say that --- but it's a real shame it's only a "cult favourite". As the attempt to produce a feature film version appears to have gone tits-up, it seems likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future - a real shame IMO. If the US had been exposed to B7 in the 70s rather than Star Trek re-runs, I bet we'd be living in a different, better, world today.
Use it at work, and (without becoming the Free Software bore) let people know what it is. I'm lucky, in that I have enough freedom at work to be trusted with root on my own machine; I've installed and configured everything myself. Occasionally, I'll be in a meeting with project managers, directors or veeps, and I'll let them get a glimpse of my desktop, or Nautilus (better eye-candy than Konq. IMO :) before opening up a web page or "a Powerpoint" in OpenOffice. So far I seem to be getting away with it, and I think it gradually sinks in to people that Linux actually exists. (Non-tech people, and indeed lots of Windows and web developer types, too, might hear about Linux, but they never see it - it's a word in a box on a network diagram. Showing them that nice big icons, anti-aliased fonts, multiple desktops etc *and* that websites look just the same as they do on Windows, and that you can read/write Office docs without problems is worth more than any amount of well-intentioned button-holing, earnest explanations and possibly even giving out CDRs (I've never actually tried that, tho' I think I will try to have a few Live CDs hanging around that I can hand to those people who say "Hey, I like those big icons, what is that?"
I'm sure I remember breathless articles in PC Weak and the like in the late 90s (around the time of the release of IE4) that they were going to be porting Office and a load of other stuff to fully ActiveX-based web-hosted services. This crops up every few years at Microsoft - cf the current, soon to be abortive, attempt with ".live", or whatever it's called. No-one will use it, and it will be quietly canned after a few years.
No, the collapse of the world economy caused by the loss of all the world's ports and of the major food-producing areas, stirred in with the inevitable social (read: military) upheavals that will result from that are what's going to kill tens and hundreds of millions of people. Fuck me, you're ignorant.
And that is pretty much what's happening here, except that between the skeptic nutters in the US, the petrochemical-funded astroturf pseudo-science that the Royal Society publicly protested about yesterday. By the time the evidence is clear that not only are massive changes occurring, but that these changes are going to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people, it will be too late.
Hence, We're all doomed. I rest my case.
Dream on, kid. (I'm assuming you're a kid, because after 10 or 20 years' experience of adult life and keeping up with current affairs and politics, if you're not suicidally depressed, you don't really know what's going on.)
It's a hell of a lot better way to die than being strapped down and hollowed out by parasitic wasps, whose grubs slowly eat you from the inside, too -- what's your point?
Or as Bill Hicks would have said: "Hey, we just lost a moron! I feel better already!"
The level of technical illiteracy in the comments on this thread would be terrifying (if I was American.) Google "eyeballs service provider AS network peering"
Interesting -- I'm running minefield on Linux and enjoying it, eeh! it's like Y2K all over again ;) -- where are the reflow branch builds be available? (I assume they're Talkback enabled?)
Also, e-mail messages are now stored as individual files rather than in a binary database to reduce frequent corruption and make messages searchable in real-time. Backing up and restoring account setup information, configuration and mail store is now made easier.
Welcome to the brave new world of the 1970s, Windows fans! Now, please excuse me, as I have to go an change my trousers.
The only thing I haven't made to work yet is Exchange calendaring -- when I get one of those broken meeting request mails I use OWA, then duplicate the event into a local iCal app (Korganizer), probably because I'm too lazy to look up how to set up the Exchange plugin.
It's true I don't play games on it, that's because I don't have time to waste on such stuff -- if I did, I'd buy a console. And it wouldn't be an XBox, 'cos I loathe and despise Microsoft and will never give them money if I can help it.
Source?
when I first started working in infosec (5, 6 years ago) I spent a lot of time downloading and playing with the free trials for various vuln scanners - ISS, Retina, LANGuard and so on. I mentioned this to someone with more security experience who replied "ISS? It's Still Shit, right?"
And, as I have no intention or interest in visiting the US, I gave it 30 seconds in the microwave. Problem solved. They've been issuing these things over here since the end of July - I missed the deadline for a "real" passport by 5 days. Oh, and the thing is described as "biometric" which can't be right, as they've never taken any biometrics from me. They can't store a 40K jpeg in an RFID tag, at most it could be a (small) hash, but that would be useless as obviously another image of my face will have a completely different hash. Anyone got any idea what the UKPO means by asserting this thing's "biometric"? My guess is that they're just breaking people into the idea gradually, so as not to alarm us too much...
We just got a quarterly bill for 70 quid -- this time last year it was over 300 -- the difference being (a) solar water heating, and (b) pointing out to the other inhabitants that a TV on standby burns a /lot/ of current just to power the LED (and similar injunctions about not overfilling kettles, not washing up every plate as soon as it's used but doing it all in one batch in the evening, and so on.
About the only easy-to-reach economising measure will be upgrading the three remaining CRT screens (TV, two monitors) to LCD... when the TV gets upgraded (presumably to a nice hi-def widescreen display), it's not going to be a plasma screen.
Note that none of this stuff is really affecting our lifestyle, and we're using a LOT less electricity. Somewhere down the line, that means less CO2 in the atmosphere.
Just askin'...
Professor - it's alive!
Such systems almost invariably fall over due to the FP/FN rates and the "low rate fallacy". Here's the ever-reliable Schneier on the subject. Profound, simple, enables everyone to immediately debunk much of the security theatre we are surrounded by these days. (warning, don't try arguing it out with a cop or other jumped-up little hitler type as you are likely to find yourself banged up for being a smart-arse, barrack-room lawyer or similar troublemaker.)
Nope, they do it to make money from selling the superb CANVAS product to penetration testers and other security professionals. They couldn't give a rat's ass what some random fucko on Slashdot thinks of it. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news... ;p
Immunity RE'd the patch to find the original vulnerability. The exploit attacks unpatched machines. Sorry if you were being sarcastic or weird or something (I find it hard to tell the difference.) Anyway, CANVAS (which costs mucho dineros) is not the problem. I'd be more enclined to worry about the (Free) Metasploit Framework exploit, by H D Moore - it only works on XP SP1 , W2K3 SP0 and W2K, but there are probably still lots of machines out there in those categories. You may remember Mr Moore, he it was who wrote the DCOM exploit in - when was it, January 2004 I think? - the exploit code which was subsequently ripped and repackaged as the Blaster worm.
(off-topic) I wish Slashdot had qualitative scoring for posts, instead of a simple 0-5 points scale of bad->good. I read at +5 because I remembered one day that I had other things to do with my life than read every comment. Unfortunately a lot of pretty lame gags, and equally glib dinner-party received opinions get modded up. Most of the humour is just crap; I usually know the dinner-party type arguments and counterarguments on the typical /. controversies. What I like are authoratative comments (the type that begin "Why, yes, I am a rocket scientst" (/PhD in molecular biologist / have an MBA from INSEAD / was head of infrastructure at ISP FooCom, or whatever...), plus pointers to other interesting and relevant stuff (other papers in the field, summaries of current consensu, etc) ... and some personal anecdotes (thought I dowish people would remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdote". And I wish people would sometimes stop and think "hey, I wonder if these incredibly intelligent over-educated specialists in the field of [FOO] have perhaps thought of my [idea / objection / suggestion / problem with their approach / reason why it won't work] already? After all, it took me 15 seconds to read the writeup and think of it, and they've been working in the field for 30 years...