I've been looking at the site linked from the parent post, and it's worth noting that it's not secure, because they provide the pads.
The problem with this approach is that you do not know how they are generated (you do not know if they keep copies, or sell the same pad to someone else). Even if they are honest, you should never import random pads from an unknown party.
Even assuming they are not doing anything wrong with them, these pads have to be transmitted and could be intercepted. Once intercepted and copied, the game is over. Even if they were encrypted, an attacker just has to crack the encryption used for transporting the key, copy it and your message's compromised (sure, cracking RSA-2048 or AES-256 is a lot of work, but it's less than uncrackeable, you could have just used AES in your message).
If you lease a RNG, then it might be secure (implementation matters), but in that case just pipe the random bits into a XOR and save on software costs.
The page also contains too much technobabble (probably just market drone speak, but better safe than sorry).
I thought this might be obvious, but I'd better mention that it's not safe to use fourmilab's hotbits for the same reason, it you want a secure pad, you should build (or buy and check) your own hotbits (or other good) generator.
Implementing a program that encrypts with an OTP is a no-brainer. Any program capable of doing a bitwise XOR can do it (basically because the algoriths IS a XOR).
There are two BIG problems with OTP:
1) You need a lot of random bits (the good stuff, like this, not your cheap pseudo random numbers). You need exactly as many as your plaintext.
2) You need to securely send a copy to the intended receiver, and make sure the pads are destroyed once used.
Basically, no one does it because it's a real bitch to implement correctly (pad creation) and it's not worth the effort (unless you're using them in a hotline from Washington to Moscow or something like that).
You probably don't want a OTP. If you want something to encrypt your files and recover them with a password, you CERTAINLY don't want a OTP (in fact, you can't have one because the pad is not random, it's pseudo random, generated from the password and thus lacks the important properties of an OTP).
And very important: most companies that sell "One time pad" software usually sell snakeoil, so be very careful.
And if you think you can get away with a pseudo random pad, the soviets spent some big time making pads for diplomatic and espionage messages, and made the little mistake of using the pads more than once, you can see the results here.
Spam used to be a big problem for me until I stopped using Outlook and started using Thunderbird. Dealing with spam used to take minutes, now only seconds. Really, just about 10-30 seconds to identify the bad mail that Thunderbird's filter didn't catch.
Is it not the same for you?
Yes, it's true for lots of people. There's a catch, though. Sometimes one "ham" mail gets misclassified as spam. You should always make a quick check to make sure that you have no false possitives. That somehow defeats the purpose of the filter.
Yes, not only burning a CD is a special process, but if you used a CD-R (the only optical disk that's on par with floppy, as price goes), you have to dump the thing when you're done with it because they're not rewriteable (although you could make them multisession and hide one session with another).
Plus it feels kind of dirty to have to write 20-something MB because of overhead to hold some hundred KB of data.
Algorithms research is mathematical design and analysis of algorithms for interesting problems. Today it has little bearing on how fast applications run. For eg. algorithmic research cannot help Microsoft Excel sort a list of 10000 numbers faster, because the time bounds to this problem are already known.
Algorithms research has everything to do when the "interesting problem" is what you want your copy of MS Excel to do (like sorting numbers, a classical one).
You wouldn't believe how inefficient these apps turn to be. I've seen lots of cases where apps use algorithms far from optimal (such as merging two sorted lists via nested loops, O(n*m), instead of merge-sorting, O(n+m)).
If programmers (and designers) chose their algorithms properly, it would probably be a different story.
What you say would work if those CF cards were really cheap, like a dollar each (even less, here we have a 3:1 exchange ratio to dollars).
The big problem with CF cards, USB drives and things like that is their cost. If a friend were to visit you and saw something interesting in your computer, you probably won't give him a usb drive for me to take a copy home, but you probably wouldn't mind giving him a floppy disk.
In that case of couse you might just burn a CD-R, but then you could be wasting a 700MiB CD just to send a couple of MB.
If you're thinking about email or a file transfer, consider that the destination might be isolated from a network.
Diskettes cost about USD 0.3 here, that's why nobody cares about giving them to other people (in the end, it evens out too, you send some and you get some). That is not going to happen with a product worth USD 15.
PS: Do not have a FD drive on my machine, but I can import/export via other machines that have one. Sometimes it is useful (usually whenever you're not expecting it).
You've got to admit there is a fundamental difference that would also cause that change of attitudes.
Debian security guys tend to have an attitude of trying to do things right. You're talking about the same people that chose to stop everything when they were compromised last year (and that was two days before a woody revision release). It's no surprise that people think of them as a good team without the necesary resources that need help. After all, they appear to do what they can with whatever resources they've got.
Microsoft, however, is known for turning a blind eye to big problems, trusting no one will find out and trying to NDA the hell out of everyone. Considering people pay big $$$ to them, and they do play dumb more often than they should, guess what the attitude toward them would be.
MS has been doing things a little better lately, but years of treating security like they did in the '90s aren't forgotten that easily.
I like Debian, and really hope they can solve their staff shortage. I wouldn't like them to go under because of this.
And of course, a ton of very recent games that uses copy protection. I can't tell you how irritated I was when I found out I couldn't play Deus Ex 2 without being administrator.
And worse of all, the only thing that needs administrator privileges is the copy protection itself, not the game.
When the game is cracked, it can be run as a normal user (worked with "Playboy, the mansion").
I hope that you were joking. This was one of the dumbest ideas security-wise I've heard in this thread.
What if some suicidal nut decided to stab a few passengers before being himself stabbed to death? Yes, sure.... he would not be able to take over the plane, but who cares? It's a loss the moment someone else dies because of the nutter.
If some group wanted to capture a plane, they would simply have to put enough men on a plane, weapons provided for free by the airline! And it wouldn't need to be a big percentage of the passengers. (How many John Does can your average commando overpower? A decent number I guess.)
That's exactly what happened when MS contributed new computers to one of our computer labs. A policy was set so that no software that has an equivalent MS product would be installed. The big problem with that is that they were overzealous with that policy. No administrator would install a CVS client because of MS visual source safe (and VSS would be useless to connect to the already existing CVS server at home).
You need some memorization of obscure commands, but usually you need the logic skills necesary to combine simple (and not obscure) commands into something useful. Those skills (as I said) are also needed if you get into windows' guts (where the commands are even more obscure and user unfriendly than their unix counterparts).
The point in my post (which you seemed not to understand) is that there is no equivalent of the "cheap windows admin" (a button pusher) on unix because of that. And one of those button pushers is no substitute for a real admin.
When things get dicey, those skills make the difference. An admin that can form a big picture while making several small programs do a big task can also form a big picture when seeing only a few parts of, say, an intrusion in progress. A button pusher cannot see more than whatever clippo is telling him.
About the user-unfriendlyness, root is not for everyone (neither in unix nor in windows). It might be a very user-unfriendly place, but have no doubt that it a pretty admin-friendly one.
My father works for the local power company developing customer support systems. Rather than an Open Source alternative, such as Linux, they opted to go with Microsoft Windows. The reason? Costs. They figured that the TCO of Linux, including support, training developers, etc. would actually be more expensive than the licensing fees that a Windows solution would incur.
Good support/development staff costs money, regardless the OS/language they use at work.
For example, a good network administrator probably has a university degree ($$$), and has some theorethical idea about his trade (more $$$, independent of the platform used).
Linux developers and administrators tend to be more expensive because they are usually better trained because the environment (no wizard, easy to do IDE) forces them to know their system. OTOH windows people can get away with learning much less (and knowing much less as a result).
Were you to hire a windows administrator that's on par with a linux administrator (I'm an administrator, but I guess it's the same with developers) you would have to pay about as much as you would be paying for the linux guy. After all, knowing everything about every protocol that can be seen on a wire is really platform independent.
The problem with that line of thought is that by comparing by price, your father has selected the crappiest available personnel. With those criteria, though, windows will always win because even though a "button pusher" could earn a living working on windows machines, on a unix machine he would never get anything done.
This isn't about which is the better product... it's about which one will get the project done AND be supported if shit hits the fan.
Support does NOT mean Forums or RTFM. They want real people. The fact is most people are not IT people. They just want it to work and forget about it. If it breaks they want someone to call to get it working again.
Let me tell you a story about windows 2000 server and a BIOS raid (highpoint, cheap but usable)we were using to store our exchange information store.
One day, said information store started showing parity errors that appeared out of thin air. We started searching for possible causes and reading about the error codes that appeared in the event viewer. After reading lots of nonsense on the help files we sent the error codes to MS support.
In case you're doubting you analysis of the help files, I'm have 5 years experience as a network administrator, as does my co-admin. The third member of our group has a couple of years experience too, trained by us two. We're mostly unix admins, but one of us (not me) is also a veteran windows admin too. We also had our fair share of experience with out exchange 2000 (including cutting it in three, and making a reverse proxy for it with apache). The help files were lots of things to do as workarounds for known problems, with no explanation of the problems themselves or their causes.
Eventually we concluded that there was some kind of conflict between some unknown windows subsystem and the raid device. It would cause the store to corrupt itself (slightly but enough for it to cease operating) within a few days while operating on the mirrored disks (don't ask me why, we never found out).
At the same time, the answer from MS support came back, telling us exactly the same shit that was written on the help files cut and pasted into the mail.
After finding a hardware compatibility list, and not finding the highpoint raid listed (mind you, it's the BIOS raid found on most consumer motherboards) we wrote back asking if there was a patch or update available. The answer was "that piece of hardware is not supported".
The final result is that we had to get rid of the mirroring disk.
Now, you were saying talking about REAL PEOPLE instead of mailing lists and newsgroups, but let me tell you that having THAT kind of support is far from having real support staff (it's like having, as I call it, a "meat robot", a person that just follows a script). I've had better experience asking in mailing lists, at least the people hanging down there act like intelligent humans, instead of meat robots.
What are we going to have to do to convince "ordinary users" to visit WindowsUpdate once in a while?"
Teach them how to use Linux.
That won't work. Irresponsible users will always be irresponsible, no matter what OS they are using. If that is your case, consider the user's responsibility and skills.
If he has no computer skills at all, just change his settings without him knowing.
If he thinks he has lots of computer know how, but really is some inexperienced (and irresponsible) n00b, I suggest tricking him into doing theing securely appealing to his 133tness ("Only ordinary mortals use IE6, we hackers use IE7 firefox edition", the firesomething extension might be useful in that case).
If he's responsible, but reluctant to change, wait for him to screw up, make him feel bad for screwing things up (just letting him know how much effort it takes to reinstall a workstation usually works) and them offer him a chance to do things securely. If doing things securely is not a hassle (activating windows update, for example), he will not change back either because the same inertia will make him stay secure, or because he sees the benefit of doing things securely.
There are more things to consider, but that should be a rough guide. Some people do not know how to use a general purpose machine, and would be happy with a "web browser" (or other) appliance. You cannot let these people loose with root priviledges.
The document was garbled, however the first page was readable.
In that page, it is mentioned that this method is used to add garbage to generate a second, garbled file that is not recognizable from a first, copyrighted file (the copyrighted part IS in the document).
That would mean that this patent is good only for copyrighted files. What if someone patents the SAME algorithm (using the SAME document) but for NOT COPYRIGHTED FILES (by adding a not to the original patent)? Either both should be accepted or not (they are both equally creative). If they are both accepted, when they fuck up and use their program on a non-copyrighted file they get sued for patent infringement.
Yes, I know it won't happen, but it was funny that the patent "works" only on copyrighted material and I wanted to make you guys notice that.
(And if you sue the hell out of them, don't forget to tell me;-). Sorry, too much h2g2)
lol... The parent's website consumed 100% of my CPU resources
That's funny. I have a dual processor machine and the one thing I love about them is related to what you said: a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU does not make the machine unusable, because the UI can run on the other (which I promptly use to send a SIGKILL). You do not also feel those 100% bursts that some apps do.
Sure, if a two threaded app does that, you're screwed. Then again, an app that misbehaves like that will probably be erased ASAP (programmers that do that should be ahot).
All in all, dual processors (and dual cores I guess) make very "smooth" machines.
how would one even know if they have the extra range?
By comparing results with someone else, of course.
For instance, I can easily spot a monitor with a slow refresh rate. It simply bothers me a lot. Not everyone notices this, because people is usually working on them and don't seem to care. It is not an illusion because every time I tell any of my coworkers his monitor's refresh rate is 60Hz, they check and that's how it is set. Evidently I can see or notice something most people can't.
The original poster even mentioned the method used to detect that anomaly: he does not see the edges of things clearly when little UV light is present. He probably noticed something and went to the eye doctor, or noticed that nobody cared and then found someone else with the same problem, or deduced the cause (UV lamps are common).
I was RTFA (well, someone has to do it) and found that interesting bit.
The envisioned computerized system came about after mysterious holes were cut in three layers of wire fences in southern boundary border fences in October. The ministry said the holes were cut by an unidentified South Korean civilian defecting to the North.
I wonder how much deterrence is the DMZ against people defecting to the north, and how many South Koreans would go to North Korea if there was no such barrier in place.
I really was expecting some sort of intrusion from the north as the reason to increase the DMZ's security, not the other way around. Was anyone surprised like me when reading the article?
I cannot tell you WHY light travels at the speed it does, but I can show you it does in every reference frame.
The idea behind that concept is that in every frame of reference, all "scientific properties" (correct me if I'm using the wrong term) have to be valid and the same. That means having the same results even if you (and you laboratory, messuring instruments, etc) change frames. The speed of light is one of those properties. Therefore it would be unreasonable to assume that if you change frames it should change (a certain object at rest has a certain mass, no matter the plane of reference, water boils at the same temperature, no matter the plane of reference, etc, if all other conditions are the same). That simple principle stated in the theory (relativity), plus the experiment mentioned in the grandparent post explains time dilation.
Now, how can we be sure that Einstein was not wrong? Enter the Michelson-Morley experiment. Michelson and Morley wanted to show some evidence of the "ether" that had to be present for the light to travel in (in the late 1800's it was supposed that every wave had to travel in some kind of medium). They thought that if they measured the speed of light on different times of the year and/or day should give them different results (because at some time their lab sould be moving in the same direction of the ether and at other times in opposite directions, so their detectors would be running away from the light beam and at some other times they sould be running into them). The real M-M experiment was not exactly that, they really measured two perpendicular beams, but you can check wikipedia for a precise explanation, the simple one should do. To make a long story short, they did the experiment and did not get the expected results, they got no speed difference. That result (after lots of other improved experiments confirmed them) led to some scientists (like Einstein) to think about alternate theories that we use today.
If the light speed was not constant independently of the frame, the Michelson-Morley should have returned some sort of speed difference (after all, in summer we are going in one direction and in winter we are going in the opposite, because we orbit the sun). Well, either that or it was a HUGE coincidence that all M-M experiments yielded the same results.
Most of all, it just saddens me to hear people say that the US is not as nice and friendly as it used to be. The government has stricter policies now, but that not necessarily what I perceive as less friendly towards foreigners. Rather, there's a feeling of allowing people to come here like before, but expending more effort on making sure they're not going to cause trouble. Unfortunately, the mess that is US immigration (cost, waiting time, inflexible process) has only gotten worse since these new policies were put into effect.
One thing is getting stricter, another different thing is what the USA has become. Sending people to camp X-ray without a fair trial or arresting someone because of something he did in another country that the US did not like (Sklyarov) is not being stricter, it's being a jerk.
If you want to investigate Osama's terrorist links, fine. But do it and send the guilty people to trial, as your law says. Harrassing everyone and using the law as toilet paper, however, is not ok.
If you want to forbid illegal software in the USA, fine. Arresting someone for making a piece of legal (in Russia) software that he did is not ok. In fact you should be open to the possibility of changing the law because although that using that software is illegal, it might not be illegitimate (as in it is in the best interest of the people, reasonable to do so and accepted).
I don't know about China, but I live in one of those "exporting" countries (Argentina), and personally I do not feel like going into the USA for a long time (think like "I'm going to be fingerprinted, my data will be in some intelligence database and if someone important suspects I might be a terrorist, or simply doesn't like something I say, I'm going to be shipped to Guantanamo at once"). I wouldn't go into Puerto Rico because of its links to the USA.
You might think that "war on terror" is a small thing, but it's not (we've had 30000 "missing people", desaparecidos, during the last military dictatorship in the late 70's and early 80's and it all started like this, here that "ship to Guantanamo" thing would have raised a MAJOR alarm ).
Same stories with a few friends I have. One won the green card lottery but got a job here so he didn't go, and now he's glad he didn't. Another lives in France and won't go until that nonsense stops (and some time passes).
That, coupled with some laws being passed for the benefit of the big companies ("do something original, get crushed by a patent company") really scares the shit out of me.
I know the possibility of me ending in a terrorist camp are infinitesimal, but you never know, better safe than sorry.
As for going to europe, well I'm a Spanish citizen also, and although the EU is not perfect, the "average Jacques" tends to be more a reasonable and informed person, and thus the government remains in check. Think about what happened in spain after the Atocha bombings: Aznar wanted to blame ETA but the evidence pointed to Al-Qaeda (and even ETA declared they had nothing to do with that). Instead of swallowing a lie (as I think the "average Joe" would have done) the gave him the finger, voted socialist and pulled out of Iraq (and don't start talking about treason here, we (the Spanish people) DID NOT want to get involved in that mess). Same thing with the UK, even if the govenment is in bed with the USA, you can hear a dissenting voice, and you could watch BBC and get a decent report, if somewhat western biased, on the war in Iraq (something that could not be said of CNN).
Basically the USA has lost a sort of "common sense", and is too powerful so that it's dangerous (and it's a shame). It's unbeliavable that lots of people there have not noticed that something like their FREEDOM has been robbed.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been looking at the site linked from the parent post, and it's worth noting that it's not secure, because they provide the pads.
The problem with this approach is that you do not know how they are generated (you do not know if they keep copies, or sell the same pad to someone else). Even if they are honest, you should never import random pads from an unknown party.
Even assuming they are not doing anything wrong with them, these pads have to be transmitted and could be intercepted. Once intercepted and copied, the game is over. Even if they were encrypted, an attacker just has to crack the encryption used for transporting the key, copy it and your message's compromised (sure, cracking RSA-2048 or AES-256 is a lot of work, but it's less than uncrackeable, you could have just used AES in your message).
If you lease a RNG, then it might be secure (implementation matters), but in that case just pipe the random bits into a XOR and save on software costs.
The page also contains too much technobabble (probably just market drone speak, but better safe than sorry).
I thought this might be obvious, but I'd better mention that it's not safe to use fourmilab's hotbits for the same reason, it you want a secure pad, you should build (or buy and check) your own hotbits (or other good) generator.
Implementing a program that encrypts with an OTP is a no-brainer. Any program capable of doing a bitwise XOR can do it (basically because the algoriths IS a XOR).
There are two BIG problems with OTP:
1) You need a lot of random bits (the good stuff, like this, not your cheap pseudo random numbers). You need exactly as many as your plaintext.
2) You need to securely send a copy to the intended receiver, and make sure the pads are destroyed once used.
Basically, no one does it because it's a real bitch to implement correctly (pad creation) and it's not worth the effort (unless you're using them in a hotline from Washington to Moscow or something like that).
You probably don't want a OTP. If you want something to encrypt your files and recover them with a password, you CERTAINLY don't want a OTP (in fact, you can't have one because the pad is not random, it's pseudo random, generated from the password and thus lacks the important properties of an OTP).
And very important: most companies that sell "One time pad" software usually sell snake oil, so be very careful.
And if you think you can get away with a pseudo random pad, the soviets spent some big time making pads for diplomatic and espionage messages, and made the little mistake of using the pads more than once, you can see the results here.
Yes, it's true for lots of people. There's a catch, though. Sometimes one "ham" mail gets misclassified as spam. You should always make a quick check to make sure that you have no false possitives. That somehow defeats the purpose of the filter.
Yes, not only burning a CD is a special process, but if you used a CD-R (the only optical disk that's on par with floppy, as price goes), you have to dump the thing when you're done with it because they're not rewriteable (although you could make them multisession and hide one session with another).
Plus it feels kind of dirty to have to write 20-something MB because of overhead to hold some hundred KB of data.
Maybe DVD+RW when it gets cheap enough will do?
Algorithms research has everything to do when the "interesting problem" is what you want your copy of MS Excel to do (like sorting numbers, a classical one).
You wouldn't believe how inefficient these apps turn to be. I've seen lots of cases where apps use algorithms far from optimal (such as merging two sorted lists via nested loops, O(n*m), instead of merge-sorting, O(n+m)).
If programmers (and designers) chose their algorithms properly, it would probably be a different story.
What you say would work if those CF cards were really cheap, like a dollar each (even less, here we have a 3:1 exchange ratio to dollars).
The big problem with CF cards, USB drives and things like that is their cost.
If a friend were to visit you and saw something interesting in your computer, you probably won't give him a usb drive for me to take a copy home, but you probably wouldn't mind giving him a floppy disk.
In that case of couse you might just burn a CD-R, but then you could be wasting a 700MiB CD just to send a couple of MB.
If you're thinking about email or a file transfer, consider that the destination might be isolated from a network.
Diskettes cost about USD 0.3 here, that's why nobody cares about giving them to other people (in the end, it evens out too, you send some and you get some). That is not going to happen with a product worth USD 15.
PS: Do not have a FD drive on my machine, but I can import/export via other machines that have one. Sometimes it is useful (usually whenever you're not expecting it).
I think an epileptic seizure acts like some sort of storm in the brain, with signals being sent all over the place without control.
You've got to admit there is a fundamental difference that would also cause that change of attitudes.
Debian security guys tend to have an attitude of trying to do things right. You're talking about the same people that chose to stop everything when they were compromised last year (and that was two days before a woody revision release). It's no surprise that people think of them as a good team without the necesary resources that need help. After all, they appear to do what they can with whatever resources they've got.
Microsoft, however, is known for turning a blind eye to big problems, trusting no one will find out and trying to NDA the hell out of everyone. Considering people pay big $$$ to them, and they do play dumb more often than they should, guess what the attitude toward them would be.
MS has been doing things a little better lately, but years of treating security like they did in the '90s aren't forgotten that easily.
I like Debian, and really hope they can solve their staff shortage. I wouldn't like them to go under because of this.
And worse of all, the only thing that needs administrator privileges is the copy protection itself, not the game.
When the game is cracked, it can be run as a normal user (worked with "Playboy, the mansion").
I hope that you were joking. This was one of the dumbest ideas security-wise I've heard in this thread.
What if some suicidal nut decided to stab a few passengers before being himself stabbed to death?
Yes, sure.... he would not be able to take over the plane, but who cares? It's a loss the moment someone else dies because of the nutter.
If some group wanted to capture a plane, they would simply have to put enough men on a plane, weapons provided for free by the airline! And it wouldn't need to be a big percentage of the passengers. (How many John Does can your average commando overpower? A decent number I guess.)
That's exactly what happened when MS contributed new computers to one of our computer labs.
A policy was set so that no software that has an equivalent MS product would be installed.
The big problem with that is that they were overzealous with that policy. No administrator would install a CVS client because of MS visual source safe (and VSS would be useless to connect to the already existing CVS server at home).
Not quite like that.
You need some memorization of obscure commands, but usually you need the logic skills necesary to combine simple (and not obscure) commands into something useful. Those skills (as I said) are also needed if you get into windows' guts (where the commands are even more obscure and user unfriendly than their unix counterparts).
The point in my post (which you seemed not to understand) is that there is no equivalent of the "cheap windows admin" (a button pusher) on unix because of that. And one of those button pushers is no substitute for a real admin.
When things get dicey, those skills make the difference. An admin that can form a big picture while making several small programs do a big task can also form a big picture when seeing only a few parts of, say, an intrusion in progress. A button pusher cannot see more than whatever clippo is telling him.
About the user-unfriendlyness, root is not for everyone (neither in unix nor in windows). It might be a very user-unfriendly place, but have no doubt that it a pretty admin-friendly one.
Good support/development staff costs money, regardless the OS/language they use at work.
For example, a good network administrator probably has a university degree ($$$), and has some theorethical idea about his trade (more $$$, independent of the platform used).
Linux developers and administrators tend to be more expensive because they are usually better trained because the environment (no wizard, easy to do IDE) forces them to know their system. OTOH windows people can get away with learning much less (and knowing much less as a result).
Were you to hire a windows administrator that's on par with a linux administrator (I'm an administrator, but I guess it's the same with developers) you would have to pay about as much as you would be paying for the linux guy. After all, knowing everything about every protocol that can be seen on a wire is really platform independent.
The problem with that line of thought is that by comparing by price, your father has selected the crappiest available personnel. With those criteria, though, windows will always win because even though a "button pusher" could earn a living working on windows machines, on a unix machine he would never get anything done.
Let me tell you a story about windows 2000 server and a BIOS raid (highpoint, cheap but usable)we were using to store our exchange information store.
One day, said information store started showing parity errors that appeared out of thin air. We started searching for possible causes and reading about the error codes that appeared in the event viewer. After reading lots of nonsense on the help files we sent the error codes to MS support.
In case you're doubting you analysis of the help files, I'm have 5 years experience as a network administrator, as does my co-admin. The third member of our group has a couple of years experience too, trained by us two. We're mostly unix admins, but one of us (not me) is also a veteran windows admin too. We also had our fair share of experience with out exchange 2000 (including cutting it in three, and making a reverse proxy for it with apache). The help files were lots of things to do as workarounds for known problems, with no explanation of the problems themselves or their causes.
Eventually we concluded that there was some kind of conflict between some unknown windows subsystem and the raid device. It would cause the store to corrupt itself (slightly but enough for it to cease operating) within a few days while operating on the mirrored disks (don't ask me why, we never found out).
At the same time, the answer from MS support came back, telling us exactly the same shit that was written on the help files cut and pasted into the mail.
After finding a hardware compatibility list, and not finding the highpoint raid listed (mind you, it's the BIOS raid found on most consumer motherboards) we wrote back asking if there was a patch or update available. The answer was "that piece of hardware is not supported".
The final result is that we had to get rid of the mirroring disk.
Now, you were saying talking about REAL PEOPLE instead of mailing lists and newsgroups, but let me tell you that having THAT kind of support is far from having real support staff (it's like having, as I call it, a "meat robot", a person that just follows a script). I've had better experience asking in mailing lists, at least the people hanging down there act like intelligent humans, instead of meat robots.
That won't work. Irresponsible users will always be irresponsible, no matter what OS they are using.
If that is your case, consider the user's responsibility and skills.
If he has no computer skills at all, just change his settings without him knowing.
If he thinks he has lots of computer know how, but really is some inexperienced (and irresponsible) n00b, I suggest tricking him into doing theing securely appealing to his 133tness ("Only ordinary mortals use IE6, we hackers use IE7 firefox edition", the firesomething extension might be useful in that case).
If he's responsible, but reluctant to change, wait for him to screw up, make him feel bad for screwing things up (just letting him know how much effort it takes to reinstall a workstation usually works) and them offer him a chance to do things securely. If doing things securely is not a hassle (activating windows update, for example), he will not change back either because the same inertia will make him stay secure, or because he sees the benefit of doing things securely.
There are more things to consider, but that should be a rough guide. Some people do not know how to use a general purpose machine, and would be happy with a "web browser" (or other) appliance. You cannot let these people loose with root priviledges.
Guess what company I thought about whenever I found references to Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in H2G2.
SCC is the microsoft of the future.
That won't work, Mr. AC.
You might be bombarding someone who is not really involved in spamming, but had his address used in the "From:" field.
That's called a "Joe Job" and has already been done by spammers.
The document was garbled, however the first page was readable.
;-). Sorry, too much h2g2)
In that page, it is mentioned that this method is used to add garbage to generate a second, garbled file that is not recognizable from a first, copyrighted file (the copyrighted part IS in the document).
That would mean that this patent is good only for copyrighted files. What if someone patents the SAME algorithm (using the SAME document) but for NOT COPYRIGHTED FILES (by adding a not to the original patent)? Either both should be accepted or not (they are both equally creative). If they are both accepted, when they fuck up and use their program on a non-copyrighted file they get sued for patent infringement.
Yes, I know it won't happen, but it was funny that the patent "works" only on copyrighted material and I wanted to make you guys notice that.
(And if you sue the hell out of them, don't forget to tell me
That's funny. I have a dual processor machine and the one thing I love about them is related to what you said: a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU does not make the machine unusable, because the UI can run on the other (which I promptly use to send a SIGKILL). You do not also feel those 100% bursts that some apps do.
Sure, if a two threaded app does that, you're screwed. Then again, an app that misbehaves like that will probably be erased ASAP (programmers that do that should be ahot).
All in all, dual processors (and dual cores I guess) make very "smooth" machines.
By comparing results with someone else, of course.
For instance, I can easily spot a monitor with a slow refresh rate. It simply bothers me a lot. Not everyone notices this, because people is usually working on them and don't seem to care. It is not an illusion because every time I tell any of my coworkers his monitor's refresh rate is 60Hz, they check and that's how it is set. Evidently I can see or notice something most people can't.
The original poster even mentioned the method used to detect that anomaly: he does not see the edges of things clearly when little UV light is present. He probably noticed something and went to the eye doctor, or noticed that nobody cared and then found someone else with the same problem, or deduced the cause (UV lamps are common).
Oh, man. Had you posted that 3 days ago, I would have modded you +1 insightful.
I wonder how much deterrence is the DMZ against people defecting to the north, and how many South Koreans would go to North Korea if there was no such barrier in place.
I really was expecting some sort of intrusion from the north as the reason to increase the DMZ's security, not the other way around. Was anyone surprised like me when reading the article?
I cannot tell you WHY light travels at the speed it does, but I can show you it does in every reference frame.
The idea behind that concept is that in every frame of reference, all "scientific properties" (correct me if I'm using the wrong term) have to be valid and the same. That means having the same results even if you (and you laboratory, messuring instruments, etc) change frames.
The speed of light is one of those properties. Therefore it would be unreasonable to assume that if you change frames it should change (a certain object at rest has a certain mass, no matter the plane of reference, water boils at the same temperature, no matter the plane of reference, etc, if all other conditions are the same).
That simple principle stated in the theory (relativity), plus the experiment mentioned in the grandparent post explains time dilation.
Now, how can we be sure that Einstein was not wrong? Enter the Michelson-Morley experiment. Michelson and Morley wanted to show some evidence of the "ether" that had to be present for the light to travel in (in the late 1800's it was supposed that every wave had to travel in some kind of medium). They thought that if they measured the speed of light on different times of the year and/or day should give them different results (because at some time their lab sould be moving in the same direction of the ether and at other times in opposite directions, so their detectors would be running away from the light beam and at some other times they sould be running into them).
The real M-M experiment was not exactly that, they really measured two perpendicular beams, but you can check wikipedia for a precise explanation, the simple one should do.
To make a long story short, they did the experiment and did not get the expected results, they got no speed difference. That result (after lots of other improved experiments confirmed them) led to some scientists (like Einstein) to think about alternate theories that we use today.
If the light speed was not constant independently of the frame, the Michelson-Morley should have returned some sort of speed difference (after all, in summer we are going in one direction and in winter we are going in the opposite, because we orbit the sun).
Well, either that or it was a HUGE coincidence that all M-M experiments yielded the same results.
One thing is getting stricter, another different thing is what the USA has become. Sending people to camp X-ray without a fair trial or arresting someone because of something he did in another country that the US did not like (Sklyarov) is not being stricter, it's being a jerk.
If you want to investigate Osama's terrorist links, fine. But do it and send the guilty people to trial, as your law says. Harrassing everyone and using the law as toilet paper, however, is not ok.
If you want to forbid illegal software in the USA, fine. Arresting someone for making a piece of legal (in Russia) software that he did is not ok. In fact you should be open to the possibility of changing the law because although that using that software is illegal, it might not be illegitimate (as in it is in the best interest of the people, reasonable to do so and accepted).
I don't know about China, but I live in one of those "exporting" countries (Argentina), and personally I do not feel like going into the USA for a long time (think like "I'm going to be fingerprinted, my data will be in some intelligence database and if someone important suspects I might be a terrorist, or simply doesn't like something I say, I'm going to be shipped to Guantanamo at once"). I wouldn't go into Puerto Rico because of its links to the USA.
You might think that "war on terror" is a small thing, but it's not (we've had 30000 "missing people", desaparecidos, during the last military dictatorship in the late 70's and early 80's and it all started like this, here that "ship to Guantanamo" thing would have raised a MAJOR alarm ).
Same stories with a few friends I have. One won the green card lottery but got a job here so he didn't go, and now he's glad he didn't. Another lives in France and won't go until that nonsense stops (and some time passes).
That, coupled with some laws being passed for the benefit of the big companies ("do something original, get crushed by a patent company") really scares the shit out of me.
I know the possibility of me ending in a terrorist camp are infinitesimal, but you never know, better safe than sorry.
As for going to europe, well I'm a Spanish citizen also, and although the EU is not perfect, the "average Jacques" tends to be more a reasonable and informed person, and thus the government remains in check. Think about what happened in spain after the Atocha bombings: Aznar wanted to blame ETA but the evidence pointed to Al-Qaeda (and even ETA declared they had nothing to do with that). Instead of swallowing a lie (as I think the "average Joe" would have done) the gave him the finger, voted socialist and pulled out of Iraq (and don't start talking about treason here, we (the Spanish people) DID NOT want to get involved in that mess).
Same thing with the UK, even if the govenment is in bed with the USA, you can hear a dissenting voice, and you could watch BBC and get a decent report, if somewhat western biased, on the war in Iraq (something that could not be said of CNN).
Basically the USA has lost a sort of "common sense", and is too powerful so that it's dangerous (and it's a shame). It's unbeliavable that lots of people there have not noticed that something like their FREEDOM has been robbed.