Reminds me of a good article.
From The New York Times:
A Disgusting Practice Vanishes With the Token
By RANDY KENNEDY
In five days, when the last New York City subway token slides through the slot of the last booth to sell them, few people will notice and fewer will care. There will be no official ceremony to mark the passing. If there is music in the background, it will not be taps; it will be the bleating song that turnstiles sing to valid MetroCards.
But off in a corner, hidden in the shadows where things begin to smell bad, at least a few observers will notice and care quite a lot. They belong to a sad and desperate breed of criminal that has been in decline for a long time, one that will soon become as irrelevant as bootleggers and horse thieves.
Officially, the crime is classified as theft of Transit Authority property. But among transit police officers it is more accurately and less delicately known as token sucking. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it is exactly what it sounds like.
The criminal carefully jams the token slot with a matchbook or a gum wrapper and waits for a would-be rider to plunk a token down. The token plunker bangs against the locked turnstile and walks away in frustration. Then from the shadows, the token sucker appears like a vampire, quickly sealing his lips over the token slot, inhaling powerfully and producing his prize: a $1.50 token, hard earned and obviously badly needed.
Even among officers who had seen it all, it was widely considered the most disgusting nonviolent crime ever to visit the subway.
"It gave you the willies," said Brendan J. McGarry, a veteran transit police officer. "We've had cases every so often, these guys would end up choking and swallowing the tokens. Then what do you do? You've got to wait for the evidence to come out?"
In truth, most token suckers usually had enough evidence already in their pockets to warrant locking them up some of the most dedicated were able to extract more than $50 worth of tokens a day. And deterrence, when dealing with someone willing to clamp his mouth to one of the most public surfaces in all of New York City, was next to impossible.
"These guys were on their last legs," Officer McGarry said. "If they were going to jail, it was just an inconvenience for them." (In an interview with a reporter for The Los Angeles Times in the early 1990's, one token sucker acknowledged the depths of his desperation. "Hard times makes you do it," he explained, adding: "Anyways, I've kissed women that's worse.")
Eddie Cassar, a retired transit officer, recalled making his first token-sucker arrests in the late 1970's, and by the time he retired in 1982, there was already a dedicated corps of inhalers, mostly teenagers and homeless men, working the station at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. By 1989, with the rise of the crack trade, token sucking reached almost unbelievable proportions.
During a typical summer week, repair crews were sent on 1,779 calls to fix turnstiles in a system that had 2,897 turnstiles in all. More than 60 percent of the calls involved paper stuffed into the token slots. (A related subway crime involved people who disabled the turnstiles and charged riders cut-rate fees to enter through the gates, to which they had stolen keys. These criminals, somewhat higher on the social ladder than token suckers, were known affectionately as trolls.)
Occasionally, methods other than incarceration were employed to dissuade the suckers. Token booth clerks were known to sprinkle chili powder into the token slots most often jammed. Some officers resorted to spraying a small amount of Mace around the regular slots and keeping an eye out for the usual suspects. The ones with bright red lips were then arrested.
By the time the MetroCard was introduced in the mid-1990's, token suckers could sense the beginning of the end. But Officer McGarry said that even the introduction of advanced new turnstiles did little more than thin their ranks. By the late 1990's, he said, he was on a firs
Latest MyDoom search engine use
(initial analysis. more details, and eventual corrections, will be posted as they become available)
The latest version of MyDoom, which started arriving in peoples mail boxes in force today, uses search eninges to find more recipients for its message.
Once the virus is started, it searched the users files for domain names. Once it spotted a domain name (e.g. '@example.com', or in 'www.example.com'), it will search various search engines for valid e-mail addresses within these domains. These search engines include Lycos, Google, Altavista, Yahoo and possibly others. Some of the search strings used:
http://search.lycos.com/default.asp?lpv=1&loc=sear chhp&tab=web&query=%s &nbq=%d
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q=%s&kgs=0&kl s=0 &n=%d
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp -tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab= &num=%d
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=%s
Google and Lycos appear to have problems responding to queries as a result.
Antivirus vendors are currently publishing updated signature files. Please update ASAP. Infected machines can be identified by looking for excessive traffic to search engines and smtp traffic.
The virus is UPX packed, after unpacking, the following strings are evident:
(a) Strings that suggest that the virus attempts to decode obfuscated e-mail addresses.dot. _dot_ (dot) at _at_ (at).at.
(b) Mail headers for outbound mail
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="%s"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date:
Subject: %s
To: %s
From: %s
(c) Strings that are appreantly used to avoid certain e-mail addresses:
mailer-d spam abuse master sample accoun privacycertific bugs listserv submit ntivi support admin page the.bat gold-certs feste help soft site rating your someone anyone nothing nobody noone info winrar winzip rarsoft sf.net sourceforge ripe. arin. google gnu. gmail seclist secur bar. foo.com trend update uslis domain example sophos yahoo spersk panda hotmail msn. msdn. microsoft sarc. syma
Anti Virus Vendor Links:
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/defau lt5.asp?VName=WORM_MYDOOM.M
http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=desc ription&virus_k=127033
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32mydoom o.html
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.mydoom.m@mm.html
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/mydoom_m.shtml
http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/virus.aspx?id=39711
http://www.pandasoftware.com/virus_info/encycloped ia/overview.aspx?IdVirus=49861&sind=0
http://www.viruslist.com/eng/alert.html?id=1927068
http://www.grisoft.com/virbase/virbase.php?lng=us& type=web&action=view&qvirus=086fda5c5c9e70 00
"SOUTHFIELD, MIBored with scaring elderly misers, the Ghost of Christmas Future is spending the holiday season taunting modern children with visions of Christmas 2016's hottest toy: the Sony PlayStation 5, a 2,048-bit console featuring a 45-Ghz trinary processor, CineReal graphics booster with 2-gig biotexturing, and an RSP connector for 360-degree online-immersion play."
now if i just had the time to play one
I found this article
Your Body's Efficiency
Have you ever wondered why, for so many people (and especially for anyone older than 30 years old), weight gain seems to be a fact of life? It's because the human body is way too efficient! It just does not take that much energy to maintain the human body at rest; and when exercising, the human body is amazingly frugal when it comes to turning food into motion.
At rest (for example, while sitting and watching television), the human body burns only about 12 calories per pound of body weight per day (26 calories per kilogram). That means that if you weigh 150 pounds (68 kg), your body uses only about:
150 X 12 = 1,800 calories per day
Twelve calories per pound per day is a rough estimate -- see How Calories Work for details.
Those 1,800 calories are used to do everything you need to stay alive:
They keep your heart beating and lungs breathing.
They keep your internal organs operating properly.
They keep your brain running.
They keep your body warm.
In motion, the human body also uses energy very efficiently. For example, a person running a marathon (26 miles or 42 km) burns only about 2,600 calories. In other words, you burn only about 100 calories per mile (about 62 calories per km) when you are running.
You can see just how efficient the human body is if you compare your body to a car. A typical car in the United States gets between 15 and 30 miles per gallon of gasoline (6 to 12 km/L). A gallon of gas contains about 31,000 calories. That means that if a human being could drink gasoline instead of eating hamburgers to take in calories, a human being could run 26 miles on about one-twelfth of a gallon of gas (0.3 L). In other words, a human being gets more than 300 miles per gallon (120 km/L)! If you put a human being on a bicycle to increase the efficiency, a human being can get well over 1,000 miles per gallon (more than 500 km/L)!
The fact that you wouldnt be carrying your laptop wouldnt mean that you couldnt physically carry your files on a hard drive. Say a 200 gb solid state hard drive with all your programs, config files, and data on it. Excuse me while i sop up the drool on my desk.;)
my bicycle gets 20 miles to the burrito. My round-trip commute to work takes 1.2 burritos. this page calculates bike ride to Kcall. I made some assumptions about your bike and I assume you are eatting a decent sized burrito. it said that the average/.er would burn 900 KCall per 24 mile bike ride going 15 mph. meaning it takes you approximately 45 min to get to work which seemed like a hell of a bike trip for a comute. I'm impressed:)
I completely agree. I just took that test, and it said that Im slightly left of center and somewhat libertarian, which I imagine is typical for/. But I am consistently portrayed as being a whack nut liberal by my conservative friends and I generally feel incredibly disenfranchised by major news outlets. That is enough to disprove a liberal bias in my eyes. This is off course assuming that this test is actually representative of the political zeitgeist of the country. Does anyone have any insight into their methodology?
The folks who make the hand scaners that read the patterns of your blood vessels under you skin are probably pretty happy about this. I havent ever read about someone fooling those hand scanners.
yea, but if people have a false sense of security and trust that all the people who have been fingerprinted are who they say they are it will make it easier for the dedicated terrorist to pass through other safeguards. Keeping the insecurity of fingerprint scanners a secret will only serve to hurt this country in the long run.
I completely agree with the above post with exception of
If we are going to be serious about security follow El Al's procedures, most of which are deliberately kept very quiet and out of the public view.
namely because I do not believe that the concept of security by obscurity works. The reason El Al is so successful at averting terror is because they are through. i.e. every bag is hand searched. I remember once they poured out my mom's shampoo into a container and poured it back after they verified it didnt contain anything.
Is it me or does the article make allot of assumptions that don't really make sense?
For instance on page 5 second column when he is talking about the models of vulnerability rediscovery. he says
"If reliability does not increase, then the projected number of vulnerabilities is effectively infinite and the probability of rediscovery in any given time period must be very low."
I don't think that given a constant increase of vulnerabilities over the lifespan of the software you can presume that the number of vulnerabilities will approach effective infinity. Plus if the vulnerability has been found once there is a greater possibility that it will be rediscovered. Not all vulnerabilities are equally easy to find. Another assumption was that Vulnerability finding is not interdependent. This was another notion that struck me as odd. I would imagine that Vulnerabilities are often interdependent in one way or another.
There were many such assumptions I didnt necessarily agree with most are probably not very relevant to the final conclusion. That said I think it is exciting that people treat these questions with any rigor at all.
PS did the author consider the effect of giving up trying to find vulnerabilities on the length of time that Bhats will take to let everyone know that they have discovered the vulnerability. IE If the Bhat doesnt expect M$ to self discover the vulnerability he will be cleverer and not blow his load as soon as he discovers a new exploit
This program seems to take all these concerns into account. Evidence Eraser
I dont know how well it works but the resident pedorast here at work swears by it.
Yea, but why are they involving themselves in how a company chooses to run its business in the first place. I dont think the gov has any business telling me what chemicals I put in my body, who I marry, whether or not I want to rip that tag off my mattress or weather I want to offer a novel email service to consenting individuals. The gov should stick to the things its good at like nation building.
Actually Bork Edition is what got me started with Opera. I wonder how this whole thing affected Opera's bottom line. I suspect it would have done more good than harm even sans the settlement.
Slashdot Mirror
the man said that gov take 10x and buisness will take 2x. if x just means multiplication why didnt he just say gov will take 5x the time of buisness?
where is x is equal to what?
Reminds me of a good article.
From The New York Times:
A Disgusting Practice Vanishes With the Token By RANDY KENNEDY
In five days, when the last New York City subway token slides through the slot of the last booth to sell them, few people will notice and fewer will care. There will be no official ceremony to mark the passing. If there is music in the background, it will not be taps; it will be the bleating song that turnstiles sing to valid MetroCards.
But off in a corner, hidden in the shadows where things begin to smell bad, at least a few observers will notice and care quite a lot. They belong to a sad and desperate breed of criminal that has been in decline for a long time, one that will soon become as irrelevant as bootleggers and horse thieves.
Officially, the crime is classified as theft of Transit Authority property. But among transit police officers it is more accurately and less delicately known as token sucking. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it is exactly what it sounds like.
The criminal carefully jams the token slot with a matchbook or a gum wrapper and waits for a would-be rider to plunk a token down. The token plunker bangs against the locked turnstile and walks away in frustration. Then from the shadows, the token sucker appears like a vampire, quickly sealing his lips over the token slot, inhaling powerfully and producing his prize: a $1.50 token, hard earned and obviously badly needed.
Even among officers who had seen it all, it was widely considered the most disgusting nonviolent crime ever to visit the subway.
"It gave you the willies," said Brendan J. McGarry, a veteran transit police officer. "We've had cases every so often, these guys would end up choking and swallowing the tokens. Then what do you do? You've got to wait for the evidence to come out?"
In truth, most token suckers usually had enough evidence already in their pockets to warrant locking them up some of the most dedicated were able to extract more than $50 worth of tokens a day. And deterrence, when dealing with someone willing to clamp his mouth to one of the most public surfaces in all of New York City, was next to impossible.
"These guys were on their last legs," Officer McGarry said. "If they were going to jail, it was just an inconvenience for them." (In an interview with a reporter for The Los Angeles Times in the early 1990's, one token sucker acknowledged the depths of his desperation. "Hard times makes you do it," he explained, adding: "Anyways, I've kissed women that's worse.")
Eddie Cassar, a retired transit officer, recalled making his first token-sucker arrests in the late 1970's, and by the time he retired in 1982, there was already a dedicated corps of inhalers, mostly teenagers and homeless men, working the station at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. By 1989, with the rise of the crack trade, token sucking reached almost unbelievable proportions.
During a typical summer week, repair crews were sent on 1,779 calls to fix turnstiles in a system that had 2,897 turnstiles in all. More than 60 percent of the calls involved paper stuffed into the token slots. (A related subway crime involved people who disabled the turnstiles and charged riders cut-rate fees to enter through the gates, to which they had stolen keys. These criminals, somewhat higher on the social ladder than token suckers, were known affectionately as trolls.)
Occasionally, methods other than incarceration were employed to dissuade the suckers. Token booth clerks were known to sprinkle chili powder into the token slots most often jammed. Some officers resorted to spraying a small amount of Mace around the regular slots and keeping an eye out for the usual suspects. The ones with bright red lips were then arrested.
By the time the MetroCard was introduced in the mid-1990's, token suckers could sense the beginning of the end. But Officer McGarry said that even the introduction of advanced new turnstiles did little more than thin their ranks. By the late 1990's, he said, he was on a firs
Its not just hitting google. its hitting all other search engines. according to sans.org internet storm center
Latest MyDoom search engine use (initial analysis. more details, and eventual corrections, will be posted as they become available) The latest version of MyDoom, which started arriving in peoples mail boxes in force today, uses search eninges to find more recipients for its message. Once the virus is started, it searched the users files for domain names. Once it spotted a domain name (e.g. '@example.com', or in 'www.example.com'), it will search various search engines for valid e-mail addresses within these domains. These search engines include Lycos, Google, Altavista, Yahoo and possibly others. Some of the search strings used: http://search.lycos.com/default.asp?lpv=1&loc=sear chhp&tab=web&query=%s &nbq=%d
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q=%s&kgs=0&kl s=0 &n=%d
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp -tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab= &num=%d
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=%s
Google and Lycos appear to have problems responding to queries as a result.
Antivirus vendors are currently publishing updated signature files. Please update ASAP. Infected machines can be identified by looking for excessive traffic to search engines and smtp traffic.
The virus is UPX packed, after unpacking, the following strings are evident:
(a) Strings that suggest that the virus attempts to decode obfuscated e-mail addresses .dot. _dot_ (dot) at _at_ (at) .at.
(b) Mail headers for outbound mail
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="%s"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date:
Subject: %s
To: %s
From: %s
(c) Strings that are appreantly used to avoid certain e-mail addresses:
mailer-d spam abuse master sample accoun privacycertific bugs listserv submit ntivi support admin page the.bat gold-certs feste help soft site rating your someone anyone nothing nobody noone info winrar winzip rarsoft sf.net sourceforge ripe. arin. google gnu. gmail seclist secur bar. foo.com trend update uslis domain example sophos yahoo spersk panda hotmail msn. msdn. microsoft sarc. syma
Anti Virus Vendor Links:
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/defau lt5.asp?VName=WORM_MYDOOM.M
http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=desc ription&virus_k=127033
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32mydoom o.html
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc /data/w32.mydoom.m@mm.html
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/mydoom_m.shtml
http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/virus .aspx?id=39711
http://www.pandasoftware.com/virus_info/encycloped ia/overview.aspx?IdVirus=49861&sind=0
http://www.viruslist.com/eng/alert.html?id=1927068
http://www.grisoft.com/virbase/virbase.php?lng=us& type=web&action=view&qvirus=086fda5c5c9e70 00
"SOUTHFIELD, MIBored with scaring elderly misers, the Ghost of Christmas Future is spending the holiday season taunting modern children with visions of Christmas 2016's hottest toy: the Sony PlayStation 5, a 2,048-bit console featuring a 45-Ghz trinary processor, CineReal graphics booster with 2-gig biotexturing, and an RSP connector for 360-degree online-immersion play."
now if i just had the time to play one
Ghost Of Christmas Future Taunts Children With Visions Of PlayStation 5
I found this article
Your Body's Efficiency Have you ever wondered why, for so many people (and especially for anyone older than 30 years old), weight gain seems to be a fact of life? It's because the human body is way too efficient! It just does not take that much energy to maintain the human body at rest; and when exercising, the human body is amazingly frugal when it comes to turning food into motion. At rest (for example, while sitting and watching television), the human body burns only about 12 calories per pound of body weight per day (26 calories per kilogram). That means that if you weigh 150 pounds (68 kg), your body uses only about: 150 X 12 = 1,800 calories per day Twelve calories per pound per day is a rough estimate -- see How Calories Work for details. Those 1,800 calories are used to do everything you need to stay alive: They keep your heart beating and lungs breathing. They keep your internal organs operating properly. They keep your brain running. They keep your body warm. In motion, the human body also uses energy very efficiently. For example, a person running a marathon (26 miles or 42 km) burns only about 2,600 calories. In other words, you burn only about 100 calories per mile (about 62 calories per km) when you are running. You can see just how efficient the human body is if you compare your body to a car. A typical car in the United States gets between 15 and 30 miles per gallon of gasoline (6 to 12 km/L). A gallon of gas contains about 31,000 calories. That means that if a human being could drink gasoline instead of eating hamburgers to take in calories, a human being could run 26 miles on about one-twelfth of a gallon of gas (0.3 L). In other words, a human being gets more than 300 miles per gallon (120 km/L)! If you put a human being on a bicycle to increase the efficiency, a human being can get well over 1,000 miles per gallon (more than 500 km/L)!
The fact that you wouldnt be carrying your laptop wouldnt mean that you couldnt physically carry your files on a hard drive. Say a 200 gb solid state hard drive with all your programs, config files, and data on it. Excuse me while i sop up the drool on my desk. ;)
Burritos are not a mexican food. They are purely an american invention. Same stuff they just dont roll it up the same way.
he ended up giving over the memos anyway though. The problem is once they were handed over no one really gave a shit.
my bicycle gets 20 miles to the burrito. My round-trip commute to work takes 1.2 burritos. /.er would burn 900 KCall per 24 mile bike ride going 15 mph. meaning it takes you approximately 45 min to get to work which seemed like a hell of a bike trip for a comute. I'm impressed :)
this page calculates bike ride to Kcall. I made some assumptions about your bike and I assume you are eatting a decent sized burrito. it said that the average
I completely agree. I just took that test, and it said that Im slightly left of center and somewhat libertarian, which I imagine is typical for /. But I am consistently portrayed as being a whack nut liberal by my conservative friends and I generally feel incredibly disenfranchised by major news outlets. That is enough to disprove a liberal bias in my eyes. This is off course assuming that this test is actually representative of the political zeitgeist of the country. Does anyone have any insight into their methodology?
magine their chagrin when a fellow passenger coming down the aisle suddenly boomed out, "Oh, I see we have air marshals on board!"
The folks who make the hand scaners that read the patterns of your blood vessels under you skin are probably pretty happy about this. I havent ever read about someone fooling those hand scanners.
did you RTFAits not a thing of gelatin its a "wafer thin" coating on your real finger
yea, but if people have a false sense of security and trust that all the people who have been fingerprinted are who they say they are it will make it easier for the dedicated terrorist to pass through other safeguards. Keeping the insecurity of fingerprint scanners a secret will only serve to hurt this country in the long run.
If we are going to be serious about security follow El Al's procedures, most of which are deliberately kept very quiet and out of the public view.
namely because I do not believe that the concept of security by obscurity works. The reason El Al is so successful at averting terror is because they are through. i.e. every bag is hand searched. I remember once they poured out my mom's shampoo into a container and poured it back after they verified it didnt contain anything.
finaly my sig makes some sort of sense
I hate when word suggests grammatical changes when there are no.
Is it me or does the article make allot of assumptions that don't really make sense? For instance on page 5 second column when he is talking about the models of vulnerability rediscovery. he says "If reliability does not increase, then the projected number of vulnerabilities is effectively infinite and the probability of rediscovery in any given time period must be very low." I don't think that given a constant increase of vulnerabilities over the lifespan of the software you can presume that the number of vulnerabilities will approach effective infinity. Plus if the vulnerability has been found once there is a greater possibility that it will be rediscovered. Not all vulnerabilities are equally easy to find. Another assumption was that Vulnerability finding is not interdependent. This was another notion that struck me as odd. I would imagine that Vulnerabilities are often interdependent in one way or another. There were many such assumptions I didnt necessarily agree with most are probably not very relevant to the final conclusion. That said I think it is exciting that people treat these questions with any rigor at all. PS did the author consider the effect of giving up trying to find vulnerabilities on the length of time that Bhats will take to let everyone know that they have discovered the vulnerability. IE If the Bhat doesnt expect M$ to self discover the vulnerability he will be cleverer and not blow his load as soon as he discovers a new exploit
This program seems to take all these concerns into account. Evidence Eraser I dont know how well it works but the resident pedorast here at work swears by it.
Yea, but why are they involving themselves in how a company chooses to run its business in the first place. I dont think the gov has any business telling me what chemicals I put in my body, who I marry, whether or not I want to rip that tag off my mattress or weather I want to offer a novel email service to consenting individuals. The gov should stick to the things its good at like nation building.
Actually Bork Edition is what got me started with Opera. I wonder how this whole thing affected Opera's bottom line. I suspect it would have done more good than harm even sans the settlement.
uh huh.... you have a different perspective on films...ZZZZzzzz.....oh sorry i must have dozed of...you were saying?