(Sigh, another highly informative post destined to languish unread at +2... I must check/. more often;)
Good question. A couple of months ago NISCC (the UK's national CERT-like organisation, with added input from police and spooks) announced that they'd found the same thing happening in the UK. The attackers were using custom trojans to attack a handful or organisations at a time. The key point was that they don't NEED to attack ultra-secure air-gapped networks or machines to get useful data. Every typical multinational has vast amounts of commercially sensitive info on NON air-gapped machines - bog standard corporate desktops and file servers, f'rinstance. The thing that people don't seem to be grasping is that normal commercial info (marketing plans, design info on new products, merger & acquisition activity,...) all makes great targets for espionage. This info is all very useful to state actors - especially if the state owns large chunks of the economy and has a direct interest in commercial success for their own companies.
After all, they're only doing what UKUSA have been doing for the last sixty years, latterly with the well-known ECHELON system.
This particular hurricane cannot of course be specifically blamed on global warning.
Correct, and also true for any other particular specific weather event (floods, heatwaves, temperature extremes...)
However, one of the most consistent predicitions of modelling over the last decade and a half has been the expectation of an increase in the frequency and strength of extreme weather events.
There were interesting pieces on Real Climate.org recently suggesting that recent research actually predicts an increase in storminess (the average energy in storm systems), rather than an increase in the frequency of storms.
So we can say that this hurrican is not inconsistent with predicted climate change.
Correct... but the pedant in me would like to point out that this statement also applies to the fact that I'm drinking tea this morning, rather than coffee;)
I have no idea whether it's true or not but... WTF, it's Friday:)
A friend who is a throbbing-brained molecular biologist, with a PhD and everything:), told me this after too many pints of beer.
He was told by the guy from the next lab over, at lunch, who'd heard it from someone in another lab at a party,...
Some behavioural psychologists - I may have their precise taxonomic appellation incorrect - were planning an experiment with an octopus. They had a large maze, constructed of perspex. At one end was the octopus, at the other some food. The idea was just to time how long it took to navigate the maze and get to the food, which different routes it explored and so on. Well, they spent a long day setting everything up, getting the measuring fu in place and so forth. At the end of the day's work, the experiment was ready to run; they'd even connected the aquarium tank with a nice fresh octopus up to the maze equipment. The plan was to unlock the little hatch and give the octupus free access to the maze the following morning.
So they come in bright and early the next day to find the food gone, the octopus fed, and the little hatchway re-locked from the inside...
For god's sake folks, have you been under a rock for the last few years? This is in NO WAY news to anyone who takes any interest in foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, or even watches the evening news for heaven's sake. Look at the datestamps on these BBC stories, just as a quick f'rinstance.
Does this mean I can put LaserJet back on my shortlist for printers? Does it mean they'll take back that ludicrous comment about "working to put DRM in every product we sell" (quote from memory)?
Here's the Register story seeing as people are posting other links... it does sound somewhat acrimonious don't it? Snicker snicker... I hope Mr Packard is happy now:)
I'm surprised Gaiman wants ot have anything to do with Sim, even for a good cause. For those who don't know, somewhere around issue 200 of 300 monthly Cerebus, Sim seemed to completely flip out- although AFAIK he still denies any pschosis - and publishjed the most abhorrent mysoginist bullshit I've ever come across in my life. Subsequently he seemed developed an obsesive interest in religion and turned most the Cerebus (which was certainly one of the best comics I've read for those 200-or-so issus) into a tedious mass of densely written ramblings that, speaking with my Psychologist degree hat on, I'd say indicated more than a hint of paranoid schizophrenia.
For those lucky enuogh to be young enough, or not UK-ish enough to have avoided contact with British Gas - you lucky, lucky bastards!!
Suffice to say that after I moved to a competing provider at the first post-privatisation opportunity, the bastards billed me a totally spurious grand which they then passed to a debt collection agency who just kept on sending pointless threatening letters, eventually my Dad came across one of these things and paid it for me thinking he was doin me a favour. (I had been telling them to see me in court, or fuck off, for two or three years at that point.)
My instant micro-review: the use of original cast members and
sympathetic approach to Douglas Adams' work compensates for the
absence of the now-defunct BBC
Radiophonic Workshop's music and sound effects. The story picks up where the printed'Life the Universe And Everything' starts. Overall it seems to me to be an excellent and worthy interpretation of the published
version. This is especially good news as there are no less than
three complete series in the can! In a fitting moment of
synchronicity, 45 minutes before the broadcast, England
beat Australia at cricket by six wickets to go
into the final of a World limited-overs tournament. (No, we won't get
the Ashes
back until 2005. Hoorah for the King of Spain 8)
Having listened a bit more thoroughly since I wrote that, I'd say that the style _IS_ subtly different from the first two series. I also screwed up by using lame commercial versions of Wikipedia content - Google seems to be thoroughly bombed with such crap now - and of course it's Life The Universe... Not Fish. The missing electronic music is a more serious problem - it sounds like they've used bland library music. The use of snippets of 'commercial' stuff in the original (eg 'Wish you were here' on Magrathea, bits of Jean-michel Jarre etc) was a nice touchj, almost an easter-egg. I still listen to teh original two series at least once a year and still find new pleasures therein. Only time will tell if the new will be as good, but so far it looks hopeful.
Surely it's obvious that, in the interests of science, this rocket should be renovated, refueled, and have a Chevy Impala tacked on the top, where it lies.
No, there's an.../MSHTML directory in there. Presumably that's IE.
My sense (as a non-C coder I don't mind taking the risk of squinting at it;) is that whilst it is only a small portion of the total codebase, it's the core - the guts - the kernel, if you will - of the OS. Plenty of scope for finding 0day in there.
My question to all the IANALs out there is this: whilst a copyrighted work cannot be released under (eg) the GPL if someone were to break into MS.com, steal the code, slap a license.txt file in there and slap it up on sourceforge, once something's out in the open it becomes de facto public domain - ie OUT OF COPYRIGHT. Wasn't that the issue with deCSS - the key was supposedly "stolen" from a leaky player, but was in effect in the public domain by virtue of it's wide distribution? Couldn't the same thing happen here? And if so, does that mean that anyone can distribute their own version of Windows?
Actually if it's 15% the size of the whole thing it's probably about right for a de-bloated OS:)
I'll restrict myself to a single reality-vurt to try snapping you out of your paranoid delirium. Volkswagon have a plant in China building cars. They also have a plant in the Slovak Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia.) The cars from China cost more to build than the cars from Eastern Europe. Really.
You need to realise that China is waaaay ahead of where you think they are on the growth curve. This is what 14% annual GDP growth does over a couple of decades.
I could show you MS bugs that we've known about for more than 8 years.
Yes, they crash your MS SMB server. Yes, we've told Microsoft about them.
Microsoft don't always fix bugs if there are no active exploits against them and knowledge of them is limited.
I guess they just trust that we don't release exploits:-).
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
What about the remote root exploit in the SMB code? One of the Samba people who posts here (Jeremy Alison perhaps?) claimed (in a post here) that he personally knew of a hole in SMB which was discovered early in Samba development. They told Microsoft, were ignored, and [x] years later the bug was still present.
Sorry I'm too lazy to hunt for the original comment and link to it:)
Mercy... save us all from this incipient horror... I speak as someone who's been listening to the Guide since 1979, can probably recite every line of the radio show in the saddest fanboy manner imaginable so yes, I'm never going to be happy but...
Imagine this was LotR. Imagine they'd announced Tim from the Office as Frodo, Mos Def - who IS a great rapper, I only got into him after listening to Scritti Politti's wonder 'Anomie and Bonhomie' alubm but that's a tangent for another time - as Gareth, and that the film was going to be made by Disney.
Ladies and Gentlemen... Disney presents: The Lord of the Rings!
Ah well, what better reason to break out a bottle of Ol' Janx Spirit could you ask for? I may sing a little, it's just been - well, you know how it is.
No. As is now well-known the rovers are running Wind River vxWorks, a commercial, proprietary, closed source environment. True, you helped pay for it (I guess you're an American who still pays what stands in for taxes over there) but you bought a closed commerical product. You don't get to see the source any mpore than you would expect to get a Windows source CD in the XP shrinkwrap.
No they did not misrepresent him, the Newsnight reporter (Susan Harris) who also interviewed him at the same time has a tape recording of him making the same allegations!
Bollocks. Dr Kelly decided to kill himself because he was caught out lying in public. More fool him. No-one else is responsible for his actions. All the BBC did was report his allegations - quite correctly in my view as they were extraordinary and went to the heart of the debate then raging about the legitimacy of the Iraq war. Whatever happens post Hutton this story won't die until the guilty parties in the HMG / the US govt are banged up for war crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
I stopped reading your vile pornography at this point. Doesn't your filthy depraved mind realise that there are children reading this site?!
Good question. A couple of months ago NISCC (the UK's national CERT-like organisation, with added input from police and spooks) announced that they'd found the same thing happening in the UK. The attackers were using custom trojans to attack a handful or organisations at a time. The key point was that they don't NEED to attack ultra-secure air-gapped networks or machines to get useful data. Every typical multinational has vast amounts of commercially sensitive info on NON air-gapped machines - bog standard corporate desktops and file servers, f'rinstance. The thing that people don't seem to be grasping is that normal commercial info (marketing plans, design info on new products, merger & acquisition activity,...) all makes great targets for espionage. This info is all very useful to state actors - especially if the state owns large chunks of the economy and has a direct interest in commercial success for their own companies.
After all, they're only doing what UKUSA have been doing for the last sixty years, latterly with the well-known ECHELON system.
A friend who is a throbbing-brained molecular biologist, with a PhD and everything :), told me this after too many pints of beer.
He was told by the guy from the next lab over, at lunch, who'd heard it from someone in another lab at a party,...
Some behavioural psychologists - I may have their precise taxonomic appellation incorrect - were planning an experiment with an octopus. They had a large maze, constructed of perspex. At one end was the octopus, at the other some food. The idea was just to time how long it took to navigate the maze and get to the food, which different routes it explored and so on. Well, they spent a long day setting everything up, getting the measuring fu in place and so forth. At the end of the day's work, the experiment was ready to run; they'd even connected the aquarium tank with a nice fresh octopus up to the maze equipment. The plan was to unlock the little hatch and give the octupus free access to the maze the following morning.
So they come in bright and early the next day to find the food gone, the octopus fed, and the little hatchway re-locked from the inside...
Right, back to work.
Does this mean I can put LaserJet back on my shortlist for printers? Does it mean they'll take back that ludicrous comment about "working to put DRM in every product we sell" (quote from memory)? Here's the Register story seeing as people are posting other links... it does sound somewhat acrimonious don't it? Snicker snicker... I hope Mr Packard is happy now :)
I'm surprised Gaiman wants ot have anything to do with Sim, even for a good cause. For those who don't know, somewhere around issue 200 of 300 monthly Cerebus, Sim seemed to completely flip out- although AFAIK he still denies any pschosis - and publishjed the most abhorrent mysoginist bullshit I've ever come across in my life. Subsequently he seemed developed an obsesive interest in religion and turned most the Cerebus (which was certainly one of the best comics I've read for those 200-or-so issus) into a tedious mass of densely written ramblings that, speaking with my Psychologist degree hat on, I'd say indicated more than a hint of paranoid schizophrenia.
Suffice to say that after I moved to a competing provider at the first post-privatisation opportunity, the bastards billed me a totally spurious grand which they then passed to a debt collection agency who just kept on sending pointless threatening letters, eventually my Dad came across one of these things and paid it for me thinking he was doin me a favour. (I had been telling them to see me in court, or fuck off, for two or three years at that point.)
Having listened a bit more thoroughly since I wrote that, I'd say that the style _IS_ subtly different from the first two series. I also screwed up by using lame commercial versions of Wikipedia content - Google seems to be thoroughly bombed with such crap now - and of course it's Life The Universe... Not Fish. The missing electronic music is a more serious problem - it sounds like they've used bland library music. The use of snippets of 'commercial' stuff in the original (eg 'Wish you were here' on Magrathea, bits of Jean-michel Jarre etc) was a nice touchj, almost an easter-egg. I still listen to teh original two series at least once a year and still find new pleasures therein. Only time will tell if the new will be as good, but so far it looks hopeful.
guideguide alumni: we read your mail. Then we hash it, put it through some fourier transforms and syntheise the results sync'd with live DJs :)
Saw this the other day...
Surely it's obvious that, in the interests of science, this rocket should be renovated, refueled, and have a Chevy Impala tacked on the top, where it lies.
My question to all the IANALs out there is this: whilst a copyrighted work cannot be released under (eg) the GPL if someone were to break into MS.com, steal the code, slap a license.txt file in there and slap it up on sourceforge, once something's out in the open it becomes de facto public domain - ie OUT OF COPYRIGHT. Wasn't that the issue with deCSS - the key was supposedly "stolen" from a leaky player, but was in effect in the public domain by virtue of it's wide distribution? Couldn't the same thing happen here? And if so, does that mean that anyone can distribute their own version of Windows? Actually if it's 15% the size of the whole thing it's probably about right for a de-bloated OS :)
You need to realise that China is waaaay ahead of where you think they are on the growth curve. This is what 14% annual GDP growth does over a couple of decades.
Sorry I'm too lazy to hunt for the original comment and link to it :)
(no text)
This has made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a Bad Move.
Imagine this was LotR. Imagine they'd announced Tim from the Office as Frodo, Mos Def - who IS a great rapper, I only got into him after listening to Scritti Politti's wonder 'Anomie and Bonhomie' alubm but that's a tangent for another time - as Gareth, and that the film was going to be made by Disney.
Ladies and Gentlemen... Disney presents: The Lord of the Rings!
Ah well, what better reason to break out a bottle of Ol' Janx Spirit could you ask for? I may sing a little, it's just been - well, you know how it is.
No. As is now well-known the rovers are running Wind River vxWorks, a commercial, proprietary, closed source environment. True, you helped pay for it (I guess you're an American who still pays what stands in for taxes over there) but you bought a closed commerical product. You don't get to see the source any mpore than you would expect to get a Windows source CD in the XP shrinkwrap.
Well, so they are. What's your point?
No they did not misrepresent him, the Newsnight reporter (Susan Harris) who also interviewed him at the same time has a tape recording of him making the same allegations!
Bollocks. Dr Kelly decided to kill himself because he was caught out lying in public. More fool him. No-one else is responsible for his actions. All the BBC did was report his allegations - quite correctly in my view as they were extraordinary and went to the heart of the debate then raging about the legitimacy of the Iraq war. Whatever happens post Hutton this story won't die until the guilty parties in the HMG / the US govt are banged up for war crimes.