Should have posted it on bugtraq or another full-disclosure list... or go to the BBC. I'm sure they would have reprinted anonymously - they have the integrity to go toe-to-toe if the story is worth it. They are comparable to the US' NY Times - they do their research!
He was naive. I've found a couple bugs too in turn-key systems. They have all been reported anonymously.. and fixed. Who do you blame if you don't have a name?
Okay, with that out of the way, even if you stole an ATM and decrypted everything in it, here's what you'd find: Nothing.
The network is specifically designed to avoid silly things like that - the ATM stores no persistent information beyond who used it, some accounting information, and when it was used. *that* information *may* be compromised, but a) it wouldn't do you any good and b) it's unlikely they're using anything less than 3DES. Give these people some credit, ok?
Now, if somebody was able to do realtime decoding of the ATM network itself... that would do several things a) panic people who normally don't panic, b) increase the local population drastically after the influx of federal agents, c) make international headlines and d) would not be submitted by an anonymous coward.
Guys.. I know people who work/have worked for financial institutions. I'd estimate the security to be B2 or above (if it was government certified). Unlike the DoD's "NIPR" net which was/supposed/ to be physically disconnected from any/every other network, the financial institutions just plain don't transfer important info over networks. The data is too valuable.
For example, credit bureaus will not accept an update to anybody's credit report electronically - it is done by hand with tape drives. Makes the movie "Hackers" seem more than alittle unrealistic. =) In short, DON'T PANIC. This crack means nothing to the financial industry. Now, if you want to be worried... you should note some of them run Windows 95..................
Re:Dystopian fiction from Stallman
on
RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 2
The answer is simple, eternal vigilance. We have to fight to keep them. However, there is no inclination to fight for something when you have been placated with material goods and have had your wants satisfied. Animals do not attack after they have eaten.
You want a revolution - make your people hungry, unemployed, and miserable. Thankfully we're heading for a head-on collision with that fate based on the laws we're passing and the way the global economy is shifting about. Wait about 20 years.. we'll have that revolution you want.. maybe this time we can kill all the lawyers.
Fight? With what, exactly? Shall we storm the bastille with our keyboards?!
Geeks are a determinedly non-violent group. The courts and legislative bodies in this country have been compromised beyond our ability to correct them through normal social or political means. The recourse of this is to either start a grass-roots movement and ratify an amendment to the constitution (probably the only way to effectively undo the patent and copyright mess in any reasonably quick way), or create a technical solution which is impossible to subvert. The latter of the two is being done by a multitude of geeks, thus far without success. It would seem that geeks never considered the possibility that someone would want to stop their network from allowing free access to information.
Oh my god, they're stealing knowledge!
on
RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 2
For any society to survive in the information age it is necessary to provide it's citizens which as much access to information as possible. It is not certain information - viewing marketing material does not make one intelligent or allow oneself to aquire any new skills.
Information must be available - any information, all information, for society to achieve the maximum benefit of it. It does no good for it to be hidden away in a locked vault or scrambled in ever-increasing layers of encryption.
Countries that allow it's citizens to view and share information free of charge will lead the world into the 21st century. The US, apparently the pioneer of these draconian information-control measures, will fall far behind as the global economy switches to a primarily service-based economy. Proponents of copyright extensions will swiftly find themselves locked out of the market by themselves - unable to use the technology and information freely available to other countries. Naturally, these companies will quietly move overseas, decreasing the economic value of *this* country and further widening the gap between imports and exports.
In short, if we don't get our act together, our economy will collapse. It's just a question of when and how bad.
Bandwidth is irrelevant if you lose half your packets and need to retransmit.. and have high latency. Tech like this is useless up here in places like Minnesota (or Seattle, WA) due to weather.
I recall a long time ago on slashdot (yeah, rob.. you reposted, heh) somebody stated the laws of physics dictate latencies of atleast 300ms.
Most slashdotters got theirs when they opened their user accounts. =) Anyway, I'm still learning electronics, but hey.. I'll be happy to show my ignorance. Only way to learn...
In addition, Amperage is NOT measured per second. Both are time insensitive measures!!
Ampere/Amperage (Amp) -- Standard unit used to measure electric current; proportional to the quantity of electrons flowing through a conductor past a given point in one second. Amperage is calculated by dividing watts by volts.
Source: EVVA, glossary. Well, they got it mostly right.. except for the "calulated by" part.. and a better example might have been E=I*R.. but what the hell, eh?
I would say IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) but oh wait, I do have a BSEE.
I really have to wonder about that.. considering you don't even know what a fscking amp of current is...
Did you read my post as a reply on this same thread? You got the math backwards! Wattage is a measurement PER SECOND, not per hour (the reason being amps is measured per second.. voltage is, of course, instantanious). This is why your electric bill is measured in "kilowatt hours".. not in watts.
So the math is botched on your post. Also, the ratings for the solar cell are maximum, not nominal. If I take a 120 watt bulb and hold it directly over the solar cell, the rating listed is what you'll get, ie: 13.4. Full sunlight is roughly equivalent.
Also keep in mind a solar panel isn't like a battery.. it has fluxuating power as the light on it brightens/dims. Maybe if you threw a.1F cap across the leads that would help... but I doubt they did that. This means that if you use this without a battery.. you're not giving your notebook clean power. As any good geek can tell you, insufficient or fluxuating power means corrupt data, unpredictable performance and a slew of other issues. Without a large capacitor or a battery (properly filtered, esp. since some of them have a nasty tendency of *exploding* when too much power goes in) to filter the solar panel's input.. eek.
But.. that of course assumes the solar panel could supply a reasonable level of power.. which it can't. =)
For proof of my above post, the webpage lists "Power Output: 13.8 watts (regulated to proper voltage)". Proper voltage would be 12v, btw. Referring to Intel's PII power consumption charts we can derive that 11.8 watts is used for a typical laptop processor at 1.6v. This excludes things like harddrive, LCD, motherboard, fans, and the other miscellany of what's connected. In short, under ideal conditions this thing STILL won't give you enough power. Calculation of the exact amount of additional time is left as an excercise for the reader...
Well, barring a tremendous breakthrough in cell tech, you'll never get enough energy. The conversion ratio is in the single-digits.. the rest of the energy is either bled off as heat or reflected. Your current would be ludicriously low inside.. you might get, uhh.. 20 seconds of extra life per hour of use. With 30 flourescent lights shining on it. Which would make the screen impossible to view.
Nice idea, but completely impractical, especially considering most people use their laptops inside (which is low-lighting conditions, btw). When was the last time you saw a system admin outside? Well... back in '83 we saw one go outside on a sunny day... poor bastard turned to dust, and 'ver since no sysadmin has gone outside.
most geeks overclock their hardware for improved performance, and like anything else will boast about their computers. Atleast the younger geeks will. Either way, I suspect it's purely an issue of performance. The fact that over 90% of geeks are male may have something to do with the idea that it's a "male" subculture.
One thing is for certain: most computer users don't do it - only gamers and geeks.
I think it'll be some time yet before IPv6 is adopted on the 'net at large. While the infrastructure is getting close to being there, the sad truth is that the "dot coms" will do the typical corporate dance and ignore the problem until it affect their bottom line. "Why upgrade to IPv4? It costs more, and doesn't get us any new customers" they'll say. And then some fine afternoon ARIN will announce we've run out of IP addresses. Then everyone will panic and try to upgrade their hardware overnight.. millions of ISPs will experience network blackouts and brownouts, router loops, and all kinds of other madness as software and hardware updates go awry. Usenetters will proclaim it's the end of the internet.. again. Slashdot will run an article on it.. a few weeks later after billions are wasted in capital everything will start working again, people will forget all about it.. and it'll be blamed on somebody else. Probably us, of course, for not telling them this would happen sooner. As if.
I'm tired of telling people there's a problem. I'm sick and tired of nobody listening to me and the shock and disbelief people are having. "Oh, it can't happen HERE". That's how the holocaust started! Take note from your own history - The Wave started because nobody believed it was possible. History will repeat itself.
Force them into the open. Force them to be extreme. Encourage the use of profiling, let the police into our schools, let them punish, compartmentalize, tear apart, destory, label, emotionally scar and hurt the people who don't fit their Utopian world. Drive the suicide rate up. Make the school environment tense. Make the kids paranoid, make the teachers afraid of the students and the students afraid of the teachers. TURN UP THE HEAT. And then.. when the death toll rises, the media clamors for justice and asks why this happened....
No, you've built yourself a reputation as a karma whore.
Other people built that reputation, not me. I showed up the moderation system for 1 month. The idea caught on. Now I'm the poster-child for anyone who thinks slashdot has moderation problems. I haven't done anything like it in 4-6 months.. yet the misconception persists.
I said if you want to get high karma, that's what you do. My karma hasn't gone significantly up or down in a long time. I may go up 5 points a week. I'm not exactly trying though, either. I speak my mind, and that's good enough. I made my point (repeatedly) - that the mod system is flawed. Nobody listened. Fine. Now we have trolls by the thousands. Let slashdotters deal with them now. Maybe someday the light will dawn on them and they'll change the system like they promised before the andover.net merger.
There is ZERO (as in NO) incentive to get more than about 50 karma points. Please stop buying into the trolls who reply to *every* post I make calling me a karma whore. It's sad to see someone who's as intelligent as you are being suckered like that.
Every damn time somebody moderates me up I get somebody crying "karma whore!" Is this some kind of sick revenge because I proved slashdot wasn't perfect? That it had flaws? That is sad.
What's worse, it's apparently not true anymore that you're judged by what you say.. and more on who you are. Really depressing from a group that considers themselves to be enlightened with technology. I would have hoped the gender/age/social biases present in society would not have carried over to a purely online forum. How dissapointing that it has.. and how many people fall for such simple traps like this.
Since nothing can grow forever, does this mean that capitalism will fail when it's unable to grow anymore?
Marx thinks so. Ayn Rand doesn't. Depends on who you talk to. I think it will eventually die by virtue of the split between the rich and the poor. Without a middle class this country would quickly turn on itself and civil war would erupt. But.. so long as we keep the average american stocked with SUVs and big screen TVs... we'll be OK.
Hey! I work helpdesk and I've never gotten any calls from AI cyborg killing machines... on the contrary, I get calls from people who are about as sophisticated as Eliza.
Spam is a logical consequence of the marketing-saturated economy we live in. Keep in mind that capitalism requires growth to survive. It can't be in equilibrium with anything else - it must constantly grow.
What we're seeing now is that the economy is getting "tapped out" - we're using all of our resources to their fullest - people, capital, land, entreprenuership - it's all there, and in use. So companies are fighting with each other now because we're running out of available resources. Whether it's for employees or customers.
Result: SPAM! Spam doesn't cost much money. And, like toxic dumping in international waters, it's easier to let someone else deal with cleaning up the mess - and cheaper.
Suprise... welcome to the/downside/ of global capitalism.
Bah. That's impossible - remember the bell-curve? 69% of people are "average". That leaves only 30% on each side of that. Well.. 15% are below, so that leaves 15% who are "above average". Of that, only about 10% could be considered "smart" (again, dividing by 69%). So only about 1 in 10 people are "smart".
I say we need to focus on AI so we can replace the 15% of below-average people who have driver's licenses with robots who can drive better.
Slashdot Mirror
"Folgers Inside"?
He was naive. I've found a couple bugs too in turn-key systems. They have all been reported anonymously.. and fixed. Who do you blame if you don't have a name?
Dammit.. hit the wrong letter. :) Please forgive me, my knowledge is second-hand...
Okay, with that out of the way, even if you stole an ATM and decrypted everything in it, here's what you'd find: Nothing.
The network is specifically designed to avoid silly things like that - the ATM stores no persistent information beyond who used it, some accounting information, and when it was used. *that* information *may* be compromised, but a) it wouldn't do you any good and b) it's unlikely they're using anything less than 3DES. Give these people some credit, ok?
Now, if somebody was able to do realtime decoding of the ATM network itself... that would do several things a) panic people who normally don't panic, b) increase the local population drastically after the influx of federal agents, c) make international headlines and d) would not be submitted by an anonymous coward.
Guys.. I know people who work/have worked for financial institutions. I'd estimate the security to be B2 or above (if it was government certified). Unlike the DoD's "NIPR" net which was /supposed/ to be physically disconnected from any/every other network, the financial institutions just plain don't transfer important info over networks. The data is too valuable.
For example, credit bureaus will not accept an update to anybody's credit report electronically - it is done by hand with tape drives. Makes the movie "Hackers" seem more than alittle unrealistic. =) In short, DON'T PANIC. This crack means nothing to the financial industry. Now, if you want to be worried... you should note some of them run Windows 95..................
You want a revolution - make your people hungry, unemployed, and miserable. Thankfully we're heading for a head-on collision with that fate based on the laws we're passing and the way the global economy is shifting about. Wait about 20 years.. we'll have that revolution you want.. maybe this time we can kill all the lawyers.
Geeks are a determinedly non-violent group. The courts and legislative bodies in this country have been compromised beyond our ability to correct them through normal social or political means. The recourse of this is to either start a grass-roots movement and ratify an amendment to the constitution (probably the only way to effectively undo the patent and copyright mess in any reasonably quick way), or create a technical solution which is impossible to subvert. The latter of the two is being done by a multitude of geeks, thus far without success. It would seem that geeks never considered the possibility that someone would want to stop their network from allowing free access to information.
Information must be available - any information, all information, for society to achieve the maximum benefit of it. It does no good for it to be hidden away in a locked vault or scrambled in ever-increasing layers of encryption.
Countries that allow it's citizens to view and share information free of charge will lead the world into the 21st century. The US, apparently the pioneer of these draconian information-control measures, will fall far behind as the global economy switches to a primarily service-based economy. Proponents of copyright extensions will swiftly find themselves locked out of the market by themselves - unable to use the technology and information freely available to other countries. Naturally, these companies will quietly move overseas, decreasing the economic value of *this* country and further widening the gap between imports and exports.
In short, if we don't get our act together, our economy will collapse. It's just a question of when and how bad.
I recall a long time ago on slashdot (yeah, rob.. you reposted, heh) somebody stated the laws of physics dictate latencies of atleast 300ms.
Most slashdotters got theirs when they opened their user accounts. =) Anyway, I'm still learning electronics, but hey.. I'll be happy to show my ignorance. Only way to learn...
In addition, Amperage is NOT measured per second. Both are time insensitive measures!!
Ampere/Amperage (Amp) -- Standard unit used to measure electric current; proportional to the quantity of electrons flowing through a conductor past a given point in one second. Amperage is calculated by dividing watts by volts.
Source: EVVA, glossary.
Well, they got it mostly right.. except for the "calulated by" part.. and a better example might have been E=I*R.. but what the hell, eh?
I would say IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) but oh wait, I do have a BSEE.
I really have to wonder about that.. considering you don't even know what a fscking amp of current is...
So the math is botched on your post. Also, the ratings for the solar cell are maximum, not nominal. If I take a 120 watt bulb and hold it directly over the solar cell, the rating listed is what you'll get, ie: 13.4. Full sunlight is roughly equivalent.
Also keep in mind a solar panel isn't like a battery.. it has fluxuating power as the light on it brightens/dims. Maybe if you threw a .1F cap across the leads that would help... but I doubt they did that. This means that if you use this without a battery.. you're not giving your notebook clean power. As any good geek can tell you, insufficient or fluxuating power means corrupt data, unpredictable performance and a slew of other issues. Without a large capacitor or a battery (properly filtered, esp. since some of them have a nasty tendency of *exploding* when too much power goes in) to filter the solar panel's input.. eek.
But.. that of course assumes the solar panel could supply a reasonable level of power.. which it can't. =)
For proof of my above post, the webpage lists "Power Output: 13.8 watts (regulated to proper voltage)". Proper voltage would be 12v, btw. Referring to Intel's PII power consumption charts we can derive that 11.8 watts is used for a typical laptop processor at 1.6v. This excludes things like harddrive, LCD, motherboard, fans, and the other miscellany of what's connected. In short, under ideal conditions this thing STILL won't give you enough power. Calculation of the exact amount of additional time is left as an excercise for the reader...
Nice idea, but completely impractical, especially considering most people use their laptops inside (which is low-lighting conditions, btw). When was the last time you saw a system admin outside? Well... back in '83 we saw one go outside on a sunny day... poor bastard turned to dust, and 'ver since no sysadmin has gone outside.
One thing is for certain: most computer users don't do it - only gamers and geeks.
No.
Today's strip makes everyone here guilty. Please turn yourself in now. :(
I'm tired of telling people there's a problem. I'm sick and tired of nobody listening to me and the shock and disbelief people are having. "Oh, it can't happen HERE". That's how the holocaust started! Take note from your own history - The Wave started because nobody believed it was possible. History will repeat itself.
Force them into the open. Force them to be extreme. Encourage the use of profiling, let the police into our schools, let them punish, compartmentalize, tear apart, destory, label, emotionally scar and hurt the people who don't fit their Utopian world. Drive the suicide rate up. Make the school environment tense. Make the kids paranoid, make the teachers afraid of the students and the students afraid of the teachers. TURN UP THE HEAT. And then.. when the death toll rises, the media clamors for justice and asks why this happened....
"Just Wave."
Well.. now somebody has an excuse to port linux to it... =)
Other people built that reputation, not me. I showed up the moderation system for 1 month. The idea caught on. Now I'm the poster-child for anyone who thinks slashdot has moderation problems. I haven't done anything like it in 4-6 months.. yet the misconception persists.
There is ZERO (as in NO) incentive to get more than about 50 karma points. Please stop buying into the trolls who reply to *every* post I make calling me a karma whore. It's sad to see someone who's as intelligent as you are being suckered like that.
Every damn time somebody moderates me up I get somebody crying "karma whore!" Is this some kind of sick revenge because I proved slashdot wasn't perfect? That it had flaws? That is sad.
What's worse, it's apparently not true anymore that you're judged by what you say.. and more on who you are. Really depressing from a group that considers themselves to be enlightened with technology. I would have hoped the gender/age/social biases present in society would not have carried over to a purely online forum. How dissapointing that it has.. and how many people fall for such simple traps like this.
Marx thinks so. Ayn Rand doesn't. Depends on who you talk to. I think it will eventually die by virtue of the split between the rich and the poor. Without a middle class this country would quickly turn on itself and civil war would erupt. But.. so long as we keep the average american stocked with SUVs and big screen TVs... we'll be OK.
Hey! I work helpdesk and I've never gotten any calls from AI cyborg killing machines... on the contrary, I get calls from people who are about as sophisticated as Eliza.
What we're seeing now is that the economy is getting "tapped out" - we're using all of our resources to their fullest - people, capital, land, entreprenuership - it's all there, and in use. So companies are fighting with each other now because we're running out of available resources. Whether it's for employees or customers.
Result: SPAM! Spam doesn't cost much money. And, like toxic dumping in international waters, it's easier to let someone else deal with cleaning up the mess - and cheaper.
Suprise... welcome to the /downside/ of global capitalism.
Bah. That's impossible - remember the bell-curve? 69% of people are "average". That leaves only 30% on each side of that. Well.. 15% are below, so that leaves 15% who are "above average". Of that, only about 10% could be considered "smart" (again, dividing by 69%). So only about 1 in 10 people are "smart".
I say we need to focus on AI so we can replace the 15% of below-average people who have driver's licenses with robots who can drive better.