... would be a chimera made of "Code Red", "Seven Dwarves", and of course our friend "Sircam":
It would spread like Code Red by exploiting the hole in IIS
Like "7 Dwarves" it would be field-upgradable. Indeed, rumors are that the "7 Dwarves" virus has code in it to check certain newsgroups for messages signed with a certain cryptographic key. If it finds any, it can download them to patch itself to add new "functionality". This new functionality could be new payload, new exploits, new boilerplate text for the e-mails, whatever...
And, last but not least, from the infected IIS servers, it would send a barrage of e-mails to addresses harvested from Usenet or wherever, which would carry a Sircam-like payload...
No, it was sarcastic. However, the poster apparently anticipated that some might not get it, and put a reference to "Brave new world" in the last sentence. In case you don't know "Brave new world" describes a distopian society that you'd rather not live in...
> Have you ever seen clips of the news in Iraq? They still say that they won the Gulf war!
Not that the CNN "Nintendo-wars" reporting was any better...
> Is there anything else in your company that costs any money that could possibly be damaged by a disgruntled employee? Desks? Lamps? Chairs? Hard drives?
There is a big difference between intellectual propery and physical good. Let's take your example, lamps:
You don't see lamp manufacturers actively encouraging disgruntled employees to break their desk lamps. Sure, it might boost sales, but lamp manufacturers are above such sleezy tactics.
Lamps are actually useful, and if broken, it gets noticed pretty quickly. Whereas a missing license sticker on a PC might not get noticed for months... You'll never know for sure whether it was Joe who tore off the license of his computer when before he left, or whether that computer was part of a batch which happened to have no sticker, or whether it was Paul who did it 3 months ago, before he left!
Motivation is difficult to prove. Somebody might have torn off the sticker, not because he wanted to get his boss into trouble, but just because he considered it an eyesore. However, smashing a lamp is somewhat harder to justify. If the fluorescent lights in the office annoy you, you just leave them off. But you don't smash them.
And most important: people never leave or get fired over their taste in desk lamps (well not usually, at least). You get that distinct "they slept with the dragon; they got eaten by the dragon" mentality that fosters poetic justice.
> And we'd better not accumulate any intellectual property, as it may be disclosed.
If this is company-owned IP, it will in most cases be only known by a handful of people. And if it tend to get leaked, it will thus be pretty easy to find out who did it (Who had access to it? Who had a motivation to do it? Where did the leaked info first turn up?). Of course, the raise of the Sircam and Magistr virii has changed the outlook on this issue (pun intended...) by providing enough plausible deniability, but this is a quite new phenomenon.
Yeah right. So that it is within easy reach of any disgruntled employee for trashing just before he leaves (...and turns his employer in, two weeks later...)
> they have to cease listening after 1 minute if there is nothing relevant to the case said, and wait 1 hour before resuming listening, or something like that)
Does this mean that if you spend one minute talking about the weather, how are the wifes and the kids, etc. you get one wiretap-free hour of talking "business"?
Ah, those were the days! Not only did Kroyer save the Kuwaiti water supply, but he also saved the insurance lots of money. Nowadays, Disney would probably sue for a cut...
> "And if none of the people you talked to are interested in books, they are hardly a representative sample, are they?"
> For all of those I just offended, 50% of you can bug off because you elected the best repersentation of your inherent ignorance to lead/repersent your country
This is especially funny if you consider how that guy got elected. Apparently Merkins not only cannot read, but they can't even be trusted to punch a hole into a ballot at the correct place...
Czeisler reckons the people in the original study were probably just leaving the lights on later at night to liven up a month of clockless cave-dwelling, and their sleep adjusted to it.
> Trademarks, unlike copyrights, must be defended vigorously or they are lost.
But that doesn't mean he has to sue. He only needs to react. And a perfectly valid reaction would be to grant the light-saber wielding doctors a license to use the term. And no, this won't force him to grant a license to everybody else too; he still keeps the right to consider each infringment individually.
The only thing he cannot do is silently ignore the case. Btw, the purpose of this regulation about "having to react" is actually to protect the "infringer" rather than the trademark owner: it avoids situations like we hav with patents (.gif, etc.), where the owner may wait until the infringer has built a sufficiently large business around the trademark, and then force a costly change of name.
> That story doesn't debunk anything. The guy merely showed that with light, you can synchronize people to a 28h cycle.
You missed the bit about the hormal cycles versus the sleep/wake pattern (third last paragraph; yes, you do have to read it to the bottom...).
If the externally imposed cycle is sufficiently far from the "natural" 24 hours, only the sleep/wake pattern adjusts to the external stimulus, whereas the more fundamental cycle of body temperature and hormone levels ignores the external stimulus and goes to 24 hours "precisely".
The explanation for the 25 hour cycle was that in the first tests, the subjects controlled their own lights, and accidentally imposed a 25 hour "external" cycle on themselves. This was sufficiently close to the natural cycle of 24 hours that both the sleep/wake and the temperature&hormones cycle could keep up with it.
The point of the 28 hour cycle was to get so far away from the natural cycle that some body functions could no longer follow.
> Yeah, DOS works pretty well, for small amounts of data at least. There are plenty of OSes, including some free ones, that can read DOS floppies.
...
> Either of these formats will be much easier to read decades in the future than zip disks or other proprietary/closed formats.
Aren't we confusing high-level formats (i.e. filesystem layout) with low-level formats here (i.e. how each single bit is represented)? The reason why I ask this is because, errmm, in most cases, Zip disks use a plain old FAT MS-DOS filesystem! The only pecularity is that for some weird reason they use partition number 4 rather than 1.
However, what is different is the low level encoding, i.e. which magnetic patterns represent ones, and which represent zeroes. Many people are not aware of those issues, because they are handled transparently by the drive controller, whereas the OS only has to worry about high-level formatting. And those pecularities are far from trivial, even for a floppy disk or a CD-Rom.
And this might also be the reason why they aren't just posting the tapes to a web site: they may have no way to read those tape into any digital form!
> I live in Europe and find it improper to mail ACLU (or EFF for that matter) about this case. It's up to you now.
Hey, I live in Europe too, and I used their feedback form to submit them a comment. Given the US' position in the Western World, I don't consider it innapropriate to participate in US politics that way. Indeed, those US laws often find their ways into Europena legislation via international treaties. We better voice our opinion before these laws become binding for us too.
In case anybody's interested here's what I sent them:
Recently Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian programmer was arrested while visiting the US for a conference. He is still being held without bail in Las Vegas.
His crime: he did a presentation which Adobe (
http://www.adobe.com) felt was against their corporate interests. You can read more about it on http://www.freesklyarov.org. Although Adobe has withdrawn their complaint that triggered Mr Sklyarov's arrest (http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressre leases/200107/20010723dcma.html),
probably due to the PR backlash, he is still in prison!
This link is a little bit more interesting. It allows you to send them feedback. Maybe if enough people attract the ACLU's attention to this free-speech issue, they may take it up. Who knows, maybe it isn't a conspiracy, but just ignorance. Indeed, the issue may not be that obvious for someone not in the field.
You can find any of those in Pi... The real challenge however is to find not only an interesting message, but also to find it at an interesting position. And indeed, at position 242424 (including the 3 and the.), you
find 42424242. Check for yourself at the PI Search page.
For an even more spooky coincidence, click twice on Find Next, and carefully note the 3 last digits of the error message (start position...).
There is also a significant risk for each individual researcher participating in the boycott. The new "free" journal has not yet an established reputation, and papers published in there might not be valued as highly as papers published in traditional journals. By shunning the traditional journals, the researchers deprive themselves of recognized publications, which could have an impact on grants, on diplomas (for young researchers), etc. And probably, many will (understandibly) consider their scolarity, their career or their lab's funding more important then some political cause.
And, the less people participate in the boycott, the more likely such adverse consequences will be, which will again dimish the number of participants...
> Worst case, the current user is somebody who bought the computer from your thief and not the thief her- or himself, but it still gets you close.
No, that's not the worst case. Worst case is that the virus didn't actually infect the stolen computer, but rather the replacement computer that you're using now...
> Actually, we won't be sending out noise for that much longer. Digital radio/communication with encryption and compression should be completely entrpic (random). In other words, no distinct signal coming from us unless they know the DTV CoDec. And we're not even that noisy a radiation source.
So we better stop those SETI type projects. Or else an alien ship might destroy the earth to punish us for violating their equivalent of the DMCA...
> You learn alot about assembler writing a second virus to kill off the first.
Yeah, right. Make that "your learn alot writing another one which won't be caught as easily as the first, and which does even more fun stuff".
Btw, Sircam is fun. It indeed succeeds at mailing out interesting stuff: tax filings, business proposals (including pricing/special favors), etc. Does it have a heuristics algorithm to pick out the juicy stuff, or is it just being lucky?
And change jobs, if your current one don't let you use the OS of your choice. Despite the dot-bomb crash, the labor market for software engineers is still splendid.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it was sarcastic. However, the poster apparently anticipated that some might not get it, and put a reference to "Brave new world" in the last sentence. In case you don't know "Brave new world" describes a distopian society that you'd rather not live in...
> Have you ever seen clips of the news in Iraq? They still say that they won the Gulf war!
Not that the CNN "Nintendo-wars" reporting was any better...
Hey, it's not only the moderator's but also some of the replies.
There is a big difference between intellectual propery and physical good. Let's take your example, lamps:
- You don't see lamp manufacturers actively encouraging disgruntled employees to break their desk lamps. Sure, it might boost sales, but lamp manufacturers are above such sleezy tactics.
- Lamps are actually useful, and if broken, it gets noticed pretty quickly. Whereas a missing license sticker on a PC might not get noticed for months... You'll never know for sure whether it was Joe who tore off the license of his computer when before he left, or whether that computer was part of a batch which happened to have no sticker, or whether it was Paul who did it 3 months ago, before he left!
- Motivation is difficult to prove. Somebody might have torn off the sticker, not because he wanted to get his boss into trouble, but just because he considered it an eyesore. However, smashing a lamp is somewhat harder to justify. If the fluorescent lights in the office annoy you, you just leave them off. But you don't smash them.
- And most important: people never leave or get fired over their taste in desk lamps (well not usually, at least). You get that distinct "they slept with the dragon; they got eaten by the dragon" mentality that fosters poetic justice.
> And we'd better not accumulate any intellectual property, as it may be disclosed.If this is company-owned IP, it will in most cases be only known by a handful of people. And if it tend to get leaked, it will thus be pretty easy to find out who did it (Who had access to it? Who had a motivation to do it? Where did the leaked info first turn up?). Of course, the raise of the Sircam and Magistr virii has changed the outlook on this issue (pun intended...) by providing enough plausible deniability, but this is a quite new phenomenon.
Yeah right. So that it is within easy reach of any disgruntled employee for trashing just before he leaves (...and turns his employer in, two weeks later...)
Does this mean that if you spend one minute talking about the weather, how are the wifes and the kids, etc. you get one wiretap-free hour of talking "business"?
Ah, those were the days! Not only did Kroyer save the Kuwaiti water supply, but he also saved the insurance lots of money. Nowadays, Disney would probably sue for a cut...
> For all of those I just offended, 50% of you can bug off because you elected the best repersentation of your inherent ignorance to lead/repersent your country
This is especially funny if you consider how that guy got elected. Apparently Merkins not only cannot read, but they can't even be trusted to punch a hole into a ballot at the correct place...
But that doesn't mean he has to sue. He only needs to react. And a perfectly valid reaction would be to grant the light-saber wielding doctors a license to use the term. And no, this won't force him to grant a license to everybody else too; he still keeps the right to consider each infringment individually.
The only thing he cannot do is silently ignore the case. Btw, the purpose of this regulation about "having to react" is actually to protect the "infringer" rather than the trademark owner: it avoids situations like we hav with patents (.gif, etc.), where the owner may wait until the infringer has built a sufficiently large business around the trademark, and then force a costly change of name.
You missed the bit about the hormal cycles versus the sleep/wake pattern (third last paragraph; yes, you do have to read it to the bottom...).
If the externally imposed cycle is sufficiently far from the "natural" 24 hours, only the sleep/wake pattern adjusts to the external stimulus, whereas the more fundamental cycle of body temperature and hormone levels ignores the external stimulus and goes to 24 hours "precisely".
The explanation for the 25 hour cycle was that in the first tests, the subjects controlled their own lights, and accidentally imposed a 25 hour "external" cycle on themselves. This was sufficiently close to the natural cycle of 24 hours that both the sleep/wake and the temperature&hormones cycle could keep up with it.
The point of the 28 hour cycle was to get so far away from the natural cycle that some body functions could no longer follow.
> Either of these formats will be much easier to read decades in the future than zip disks or other proprietary/closed formats.
Aren't we confusing high-level formats (i.e. filesystem layout) with low-level formats here (i.e. how each single bit is represented)? The reason why I ask this is because, errmm, in most cases, Zip disks use a plain old FAT MS-DOS filesystem! The only pecularity is that for some weird reason they use partition number 4 rather than 1.
However, what is different is the low level encoding, i.e. which magnetic patterns represent ones, and which represent zeroes. Many people are not aware of those issues, because they are handled transparently by the drive controller, whereas the OS only has to worry about high-level formatting. And those pecularities are far from trivial, even for a floppy disk or a CD-Rom.
And this might also be the reason why they aren't just posting the tapes to a web site: they may have no way to read those tape into any digital form!
Yeah, that search came up with this page, which thoroughly debunked the story of the 25-hour day.
Hey, I live in Europe too, and I used their feedback form to submit them a comment. Given the US' position in the Western World, I don't consider it innapropriate to participate in US politics that way. Indeed, those US laws often find their ways into Europena legislation via international treaties. We better voice our opinion before these laws become binding for us too.
In case anybody's interested here's what I sent them:
This link is a little bit more interesting. It allows you to send them feedback. Maybe if enough people attract the ACLU's attention to this free-speech issue, they may take it up. Who knows, maybe it isn't a conspiracy, but just ignorance. Indeed, the issue may not be that obvious for someone not in the field.
In Europe, we put the day of the month before the month. I.e. this would be the 11th of May.
And the question would be What do you find at position 242424 of pi?
For an even more spooky coincidence, click twice on Find Next, and carefully note the 3 last digits of the error message (start position...).
There is also a significant risk for each individual researcher participating in the boycott. The new "free" journal has not yet an established reputation, and papers published in there might not be valued as highly as papers published in traditional journals. By shunning the traditional journals, the researchers deprive themselves of recognized publications, which could have an impact on grants, on diplomas (for young researchers), etc. And probably, many will (understandibly) consider their scolarity, their career or their lab's funding more important then some political cause. And, the less people participate in the boycott, the more likely such adverse consequences will be, which will again dimish the number of participants...
Nowthat'sacruelandunusualpunishment!
Not even necessary. That info is in the e-mail header anyways, unless your friends goofed and saved the mails without their headers.
No, that's not the worst case. Worst case is that the virus didn't actually infect the stolen computer, but rather the replacement computer that you're using now...
So we better stop those SETI type projects. Or else an alien ship might destroy the earth to punish us for violating their equivalent of the DMCA...
Yeah, right. Make that "your learn alot writing another one which won't be caught as easily as the first, and which does even more fun stuff".
Btw, Sircam is fun. It indeed succeeds at mailing out interesting stuff: tax filings, business proposals (including pricing/special favors), etc. Does it have a heuristics algorithm to pick out the juicy stuff, or is it just being lucky?
And change jobs, if your current one don't let you use the OS of your choice. Despite the dot-bomb crash, the labor market for software engineers is still splendid.