My father teaches middle-school in Norway and has been fighting the "art-mafia" for ages now...
The "art-mafia" being the group of (mostly) female teachers that consider "art and workshop" class to be "Charcoal drawing, painting and learning about painters".
He and a few other teachers do their very best to preserve the wood and metal workshop in the school.
Examples of tasks the kids have done: * Using small tools (tiny flatheads etc) scrape out a form in a block of gypsum. They then get to melt a small container of tin and pour into the form making a spiffy art-piece.
* Build a miniature house. With an electric system using a battery-pack and various LEDs and tiny switches. This is part of an energy project that is a part of many classes (math, social studies, nature/science etc)
* Carve a bowl out of a solid block of wood. Without using powertools. If they want anything cut off the outside with a bandsaw they draw it out and justify using the saw and the teacher makes the simple cuts. The rest is up to the kid. If it is shite they suck. If not they have a bowl.
These are just some of the things they do and personally I think these things are very important to learn. Being a hardware guy I can both code in various languages, build circuits/interfaces, handle a bandsaw if need be.. list goes on. Very valuable in my line of work. (Automations)
You never know when you have use for this, but I find that I have use for it often:)
Spending a bit of time on this early on is very very valuable and puts you in a higher value position when people screw up. You know how to fix, they dont:-p
As stated many times in the various posts here the data in question were playback information that identifies that a user/ip listened to an album that was not released yet. Since there was no legal way to acquire the album they could make the claim that anyone who listened to song X by artist Y would have had to pirate the album.
With the current legal stupidity this could be enough to go after someone...
I worked at a science center for kids for a year and half and we had a Paro for about a year. The thing was incredibly flimsy...
All the touch-sensors are based on a rubbery foam with a metal film covering. This doesnt last very long and doesnt handle liquids very well...
The fur covering cant be completely removed. This is a major issue since you cant really wash the bastard so over time it gets grayer... and grayer... and yellowy... yeah... nasty as heck:-p
There is almost no retention on the power-cord. This means that there is very little chance of the charging-cord actually staying in the thing so you end up with flat batteries..
The thing EATS power.. it is hungry.. after about a year use it lasts about 20 minutes... Oh, and it cant be used while charging. And if you switch from AC to Battery while it is on it turns itself off... stupid methinks?
I had to skin the bastard and do brain surgery to modify the power cord to actually work.
This thing might work, but they should have spent a few dollars making it actually -work- from a technical standpoint.
Meh. They're just trying to get it hyped... and failing.
Or it could be that the person reporting the missing item doesnt know the difference between a single external drive and a multi-drive external storage box.
Or it could be a case of a raid from some server being moved to a recently produced external drive as part of the archiving process. A raid of 1 TB isnt unreasonable to have had around during the clinton administration. Keeping it as a raid on a server would be horribly costly compared to stuffing the data onto an external drive.
I dont care either way, but claiming the lack of a 1TB drive means the archive was created later is silly.
The main thing I recover off of privately owned machines for piles of money on a regular basis are:
* Financial paperwork * Photo albums * Email inboxes
Now consider this...
What is usually on the top-3 list of a family person would grab on the way out from a burning house? I keep hearing "Family albums".. Yet people hardly EVER back up their damn digital photo dumps on their laptops......
While I enjoy getting 500$ for recovering 5-10 years worth of private photo albums (weddings, confirmations you name it..) I would prefer if people were smarter... especially when it is so damn cheap to buy an external harddrive.
A fairly ok scheme I give people:
Buy two big usb thumdrives or external harddrives depending on your storage needs.
Put all the files on both of them using the free version of "Syncback". Very simple to do.
Then set syncback to sync to the currently connected drive, and take the other one with you to work and put it in your desk (locked of course:-p).
Every friday morning you take the drive at home with you to work and swap it with the one at work. This means that even if your house burns down your data is safe.
Fairly cheap, fairly easy, and damn nice if you are unfortunate enough to experience a total loss of property in your house/apartment.
A cheap but somewhat annoying to manage system is to have the server simply take the interfaces down when it is not actively backing up data.
This makes it slightly annoying to manage but one solution which I have used in the past is to have a gsm/sms node connected via serial port to take up and dow nthe interfaces. Cost like a 100$ for such a setup for one server. Not too bad.
Apple got torn a new arsehole over that sort of thing in Norway with regard to changing terms after a sale of music. I would love tos ee them try this kind of BS in norway .
You dont have to build an undetectable way. Just one that beats the current system of detection.
If this is distributed on physical media to the schools an update to the software would probably be expensive and would only happen if they had found the cheat;)
Focus on one specific thing, dont try to solve the whole unified theory of VM detection ^.^
Say we have the following PHYSICAL machines in the server rack:
[VM-Host 1]
You rent space in a virtual machine on VM-HOST1. This virtual machine is named [srealm.VM].
Some other bloke rents himself a virtual machine that the service provider just happens to put on the same PHYSICAL machine as yours.. This new is called [somebloke.VM].
You have root on your own virtual machine [srealm.VM] and run this exploit. Using this exploit you can then with a bit of skill inject some pesky stuff into the [somebloke.VM] virtual machine that lets you log into his machine using SSH(or similar).
See the issue here?
The hosting provider thought they separated you two by running your machines as virtual machines. Without this new class of exploit the two virtual machines are not aware of each other and function like any other physical machine (mostly).
WITH this exploit on the other hand you (or him!) could use this exploit to gain privileges on the other person's virtual machine. You BOTH have root on your respective virtual machines but not on the other person's virtual machine.
-that- is the significance of this exploit. The breach of the VM layer.
I need to have virtual drives on my machine for non-gaming related things. Installing from disc images is a hell of a lot faster than burning out discs and installing from them.
Some of the later DRM schemes also throw hissy fits if I have debuggers installed... I do a lot of coding, I need the damn debuggers and find it outrageous that I would have to disable, reboot, play, reboot, enable, reboot for game to work.
I used to buy a lot of games from steam, then they decided to abuse their position by raising the prices of all games by over 25% in a cockbag move of changing from USD to Euro. Prices stayed the same in terms of numerics but with the change in currency it got a whole lot more expensive...
And when it comes to the economy of things..
I didnt buy a single game while a student. I plain couldnt afford it. Food and a place to live was more important..
After I graduated and started working though I have spent a rather sizable chunk of my pay buying games and media. I personally do not have any ethical/moral issue with copyright infringement for students. I do expect a 'starving student' to pay for shit when they graduate though. With a tiny income fine, but when you join the rest of the world and actually make enough to spend on stuff you dont need to survive you pay for games and media.
I'm sure we disagree on this but my view wont change due to someone claiming it destroys the industry (which I do not think it does).
My treshold for buying something is quite high. And most of the time buying the product after trying out a pirated version bites me in the ass.
Case in point:
I spent about 3 months playing "Command and Conquer - First Decade". The big dvd pack with all the games. I figured I would finally buy it as it was promoted at a local game store (yep, I still visit those occationally). I bought it at full price which is about 80 USD or so here in Norway.
Got home, nuked the pirated version off my drive, installed the bought one... and guess what...
"Please insert the original game disc in your cd rom" Yeah.. it is fucking in. Next game "Please insert the original game disc in your cd rom"......... Third game "Please insert the original game disc in your cd rom"................. Fourth game "Plea.."... yeah, you see where I'm going..
I ended up having to apply the same damn cracks to my legally purchased game as I had to apply to the pirated version.
While I do get the satisfaction of owning the game and having the spiffy box on my shelf the game discs themselves are fairly useless. They can not be used on a lot of machine because of virtual drives etc.
I love buying games, but I hate having to spend time cracking the fuckers to play them. That is why I now never buy a game before having tried it.
I ask myself "Is this worth the hassle of getting to work if I buy it?" I also download the pirated version of the games that I -do- own so that I dont have to go looking for the discs when I want to play. Believe it or not, my apartment is small and I do not want to allocate place there for all the game discs. This is 2009... Having a physical archive should not be needed for damn games.
Meh... I downloaded Demigod because it looked interesting but have yet to install it, maybe it is good? If it is I might actually buy it. If it -isnt- good, I will nuke it off my drive and delete the iso as usual... 99% of what I download ends up in the "great harddrive in the sky".
While a lot of people are cheap, especially young teenagers consider the following: How much money does the average teenager have?... Paying 75-90 USD for a game is a fairly big investment for a 15 year old... (and games do cost that here). For a student it is a painful purchase for sure.
After I started working and actually had spending money that didnt end up in food or rent I bought a hell of a lot more games and media in general.
By using such information for hunting file-sharers they pretty much breached the trust relationship with the ISP. If the ISP could keep the data and only give it out in cases of child porn I'm sure they would keep them.. But the law doesnt make that distinction so the only option left to protect his customers is to not keep the data.
Actions have consequences. Sometimes an idea will bite you in the ass in unintended ways... Like the diesel-fuel added to processes in paper-production factories to get money even though diesel is not needed;)
People are creative, and people do what they can to get what they want. If the law allows it I do not see the problem with him doing it. He is forced into a corner.
I spent 6 months building exhibits for a science center while the building was still being put up.
The whole "technological platform" of the center was based around rfid tickets that makes guests able to log video, pictures etc of themselves in the center to a website account...
3 months before opening nothing worked and I spent about 20 hours a day fixing stuff:-p
* Plumber cutting steel sprinkler pipes using a rotary saw. * People using various power-tools to cut or remove concrete. * Electricians testing circuits using 90dB audable measuring tools. * Random power loss? (joy when you dont have UPS on anything)
I'm working elsewhere now:-p All in all a fun job most of the time, when you ignore the environment *grins*
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My father teaches middle-school in Norway and has been fighting the "art-mafia" for ages now...
The "art-mafia" being the group of (mostly) female teachers that consider "art and workshop" class to be "Charcoal drawing, painting and learning about painters".
He and a few other teachers do their very best to preserve the wood and metal workshop in the school.
Examples of tasks the kids have done:
* Using small tools (tiny flatheads etc) scrape out a form in a block of gypsum. They then get to melt a small container of tin and pour into the form making a spiffy art-piece.
* Build a miniature house. With an electric system using a battery-pack and various LEDs and tiny switches. This is part of an energy project that is a part of many classes (math, social studies, nature/science etc)
* Carve a bowl out of a solid block of wood. Without using powertools. If they want anything cut off the outside with a bandsaw they draw it out and justify using the saw and the teacher makes the simple cuts. The rest is up to the kid. If it is shite they suck. If not they have a bowl.
These are just some of the things they do and personally I think these things are very important to learn. Being a hardware guy I can both code in various languages, build circuits/interfaces, handle a bandsaw if need be.. list goes on. Very valuable in my line of work. (Automations)
You never know when you have use for this, but I find that I have use for it often :)
Very true.
Spending a bit of time on this early on is very very valuable and puts you in a higher value position when people screw up. You know how to fix, they dont :-p
Give them the Good Eats boxset :-p
Should sort out any lack of cooking skill.. And Alton Brown is a geek at heart too! :D
The RIAA has not really been all that interested in using decent and logical lines of reasoning.
This information would be more than enough for them to move if you look at their track record.
Hell, they've sued people without the hardware required to do what they're accused of :-p
(run kazaa on an old apple-II for instance.. riiiight)
As stated many times in the various posts here the data in question were playback information that identifies that a user/ip listened to an album that was not released yet.
Since there was no legal way to acquire the album they could make the claim that anyone who listened to song X by artist Y would have had to pirate the album.
With the current legal stupidity this could be enough to go after someone...
Oh... and the damn power-supply isnt grounded so the fucker builds up a static charge strong enough for kids to yelp when touching it.
I worked at a science center for kids for a year and half and we had a Paro for about a year. The thing was incredibly flimsy...
All the touch-sensors are based on a rubbery foam with a metal film covering. This doesnt last very long and doesnt handle liquids very well...
The fur covering cant be completely removed. This is a major issue since you cant really wash the bastard so over time it gets grayer... and grayer... and yellowy... yeah... nasty as heck :-p
There is almost no retention on the power-cord. This means that there is very little chance of the charging-cord actually staying in the thing so you end up with flat batteries..
The thing EATS power.. it is hungry.. after about a year use it lasts about 20 minutes... Oh, and it cant be used while charging. And if you switch from AC to Battery while it is on it turns itself off... stupid methinks?
I had to skin the bastard and do brain surgery to modify the power cord to actually work.
This thing might work, but they should have spent a few dollars making it actually -work- from a technical standpoint.
Meh. They're just trying to get it hyped... and failing.
Ditto.... *dies laughing*
Or it could be that the person reporting the missing item doesnt know the difference between a single external drive and a multi-drive external storage box.
Or it could be a case of a raid from some server being moved to a recently produced external drive as part of the archiving process. A raid of 1 TB isnt unreasonable to have had around during the clinton administration. Keeping it as a raid on a server would be horribly costly compared to stuffing the data onto an external drive.
I dont care either way, but claiming the lack of a 1TB drive means the archive was created later is silly.
For anyone period.
The main thing I recover off of privately owned machines for piles of money on a regular basis are:
* Financial paperwork
* Photo albums
* Email inboxes
Now consider this...
What is usually on the top-3 list of a family person would grab on the way out from a burning house? I keep hearing "Family albums"..
Yet people hardly EVER back up their damn digital photo dumps on their laptops......
While I enjoy getting 500$ for recovering 5-10 years worth of private photo albums (weddings, confirmations you name it..) I would prefer if people were smarter... especially when it is so damn cheap to buy an external harddrive.
A fairly ok scheme I give people:
Buy two big usb thumdrives or external harddrives depending on your storage needs.
Put all the files on both of them using the free version of "Syncback". Very simple to do.
Then set syncback to sync to the currently connected drive, and take the other one with you to work and put it in your desk (locked of course :-p).
Every friday morning you take the drive at home with you to work and swap it with the one at work.
This means that even if your house burns down your data is safe.
Fairly cheap, fairly easy, and damn nice if you are unfortunate enough to experience a total loss of property in your house/apartment.
*stops his ranting and goes home from work :-p*
Bwhahhaha, god yes
A cheap but somewhat annoying to manage system is to have the server simply take the interfaces down when it is not actively backing up data.
This makes it slightly annoying to manage but one solution which I have used in the past is to have a gsm/sms node connected via serial port to take up and dow nthe interfaces. Cost like a 100$ for such a setup for one server. Not too bad.
They changed their terms of sale to not include the clause of being able to change the terms after the sale.
I would cackles out loud in front of my friends if it ever happened :-p
Apple got torn a new arsehole over that sort of thing in Norway with regard to changing terms after a sale of music.
I would love tos ee them try this kind of BS in norway .
Bergen University College does the same thing...
Then again I was told to skip the chapter on "pointers" when taking the C++ course "because you wont need to use pointers when coding c++".
Yeah, I didnt really pay much attention to the teacher in that class *snickers*
You dont have to build an undetectable way. Just one that beats the current system of detection.
If this is distributed on physical media to the schools an update to the software would probably be expensive and would only happen if they had found the cheat ;)
Focus on one specific thing, dont try to solve the whole unified theory of VM detection ^.^
That is missing the point entirely. It was used as an example of how the hack works, not on what is logical to use in a server farm.
Say we have the following PHYSICAL machines in the server rack:
[VM-Host 1]
You rent space in a virtual machine on VM-HOST1.
This virtual machine is named [srealm.VM].
Some other bloke rents himself a virtual machine that the service provider just happens to put on the same PHYSICAL machine as yours.. This new is called [somebloke.VM].
You have root on your own virtual machine [srealm.VM] and run this exploit. Using this exploit you can then with a bit of skill inject some pesky stuff into the [somebloke.VM] virtual machine that lets you log into his machine using SSH(or similar).
See the issue here?
The hosting provider thought they separated you two by running your machines as virtual machines. Without this new class of exploit the two virtual machines are not aware of each other and function like any other physical machine (mostly).
WITH this exploit on the other hand you (or him!) could use this exploit to gain privileges on the other person's virtual machine. You BOTH have root on your respective virtual machines but not on the other person's virtual machine.
-that- is the significance of this exploit. The breach of the VM layer.
I need to have virtual drives on my machine for non-gaming related things. Installing from disc images is a hell of a lot faster than burning out discs and installing from them.
Some of the later DRM schemes also throw hissy fits if I have debuggers installed... I do a lot of coding, I need the damn debuggers and find it outrageous that I would have to disable, reboot, play, reboot, enable, reboot for game to work.
I used to buy a lot of games from steam, then they decided to abuse their position by raising the prices of all games by over 25% in a cockbag move of changing from USD to Euro. Prices stayed the same in terms of numerics but with the change in currency it got a whole lot more expensive...
And when it comes to the economy of things..
I didnt buy a single game while a student. I plain couldnt afford it. Food and a place to live was more important..
After I graduated and started working though I have spent a rather sizable chunk of my pay buying games and media. I personally do not have any ethical/moral issue with copyright infringement for students. I do expect a 'starving student' to pay for shit when they graduate though. With a tiny income fine, but when you join the rest of the world and actually make enough to spend on stuff you dont need to survive you pay for games and media.
I'm sure we disagree on this but my view wont change due to someone claiming it destroys the industry (which I do not think it does).
My treshold for buying something is quite high. And most of the time buying the product after trying out a pirated version bites me in the ass.
Case in point:
I spent about 3 months playing "Command and Conquer - First Decade". The big dvd pack with all the games. I figured I would finally buy it as it was promoted at a local game store (yep, I still visit those occationally). I bought it at full price which is about 80 USD or so here in Norway.
Got home, nuked the pirated version off my drive, installed the bought one... and guess what...
"Please insert the original game disc in your cd rom"
Yeah.. it is fucking in.
Next game
"Please insert the original game disc in your cd rom".........
Third game
"Please insert the original game disc in your cd rom".................
Fourth game
"Plea.."... yeah, you see where I'm going..
I ended up having to apply the same damn cracks to my legally purchased game as I had to apply to the pirated version.
While I do get the satisfaction of owning the game and having the spiffy box on my shelf the game discs themselves are fairly useless. They can not be used on a lot of machine because of virtual drives etc.
I love buying games, but I hate having to spend time cracking the fuckers to play them. That is why I now never buy a game before having tried it.
I ask myself "Is this worth the hassle of getting to work if I buy it?"
I also download the pirated version of the games that I -do- own so that I dont have to go looking for the discs when I want to play. Believe it or not, my apartment is small and I do not want to allocate place there for all the game discs. This is 2009... Having a physical archive should not be needed for damn games.
Meh...
I downloaded Demigod because it looked interesting but have yet to install it, maybe it is good? If it is I might actually buy it. If it -isnt- good, I will nuke it off my drive and delete the iso as usual... 99% of what I download ends up in the "great harddrive in the sky".
While a lot of people are cheap, especially young teenagers consider the following: How much money does the average teenager have?... Paying 75-90 USD for a game is a fairly big investment for a 15 year old... (and games do cost that here).
For a student it is a painful purchase for sure.
After I started working and actually had spending money that didnt end up in food or rent I bought a hell of a lot more games and media in general.
Consider that before calling everyone cheap ;)
By using such information for hunting file-sharers they pretty much breached the trust relationship with the ISP. If the ISP could keep the data and only give it out in cases of child porn I'm sure they would keep them.. But the law doesnt make that distinction so the only option left to protect his customers is to not keep the data.
Actions have consequences. Sometimes an idea will bite you in the ass in unintended ways... Like the diesel-fuel added to processes in paper-production factories to get money even though diesel is not needed ;)
People are creative, and people do what they can to get what they want. If the law allows it I do not see the problem with him doing it. He is forced into a corner.
I spent 6 months building exhibits for a science center while the building was still being put up.
The whole "technological platform" of the center was based around rfid tickets that makes guests able to log video, pictures etc of themselves in the center to a website account...
3 months before opening nothing worked and I spent about 20 hours a day fixing stuff :-p
* Plumber cutting steel sprinkler pipes using a rotary saw.
* People using various power-tools to cut or remove concrete.
* Electricians testing circuits using 90dB audable measuring tools.
* Random power loss? (joy when you dont have UPS on anything)
I'm working elsewhere now :-p
All in all a fun job most of the time, when you ignore the environment *grins*
They will just use tax money to fund some private company to do the work :-p
Depending on what you need to find out there yes... it does happen.
Did you know that the "EasyPic" PIC-development board is also a porn site?
I have numerous other examples. I dont really care that I stumble upon stuff like that and neither does my employer luckily :-p