All you need is one boring afternoon.
Writing mass-mailer SMTP client is trivial.
You don't actually need to do anything, there are excellent SMTP components in all frameworks. You just need to write code to randomize subjects, attachment names, seemingly plausible content, and scan the Winblows machine in question for address books. The couple of most common formats will do.
Then the part about getting it to run.. for my hypothetical win32.Goatse email worm that changes the background image to hello.jpg I would not even have to resort to holes in outlook or anything. Just send the executable. In a perfect world mail servers would drop win32 executables automatically, but this is not widespread policy.
Let it pop up a requester: 'This attachment is executable content. Are you sure you want to run it?' [Yes]/No
'To provide better support to the goatse community, do you want to send unsolicidated email?' [Yes]/No
'Do you want to install desktop shortcuts?' [Yes]/No
'Do you want goatseMailer to run automatically upon Windows startup?' [Yes]/No
If this was launched late sunday evening, the number of goatse'd background imaged would reach thousands easily. Windows users ARE that stupid.
"XCF is an internal format of the Gimp just like PSD is for photoshop! these formats are not really intended to be opened by other programs!"
GIMP opens PSD.
When counting the cost of winblows, you should also include:
-cost of Anti-Virus software (that slows the system down)
-cost of anti-spyware solutions. Typically you need two or more cleaners to get the most common ones.
-cost of downtime. Typical desktop PC in a business is down for most of a day many times a year.
-cost of the forced upgrade cycle.
-On top of that, Windows comes with NOTHING bundled. Everything costs extra. Just managing the licenses in a corporate environment is pain!
Add to this the much bigger probability of data loss and theft, and the Windoze solution does not seem like a solution at all.
Bandaid over duct tape. Legacy crap is what keeps people using Win32, there are no other sane reasons.
I had some 300 mp3 CD's, burnt in late 90's.
It was too much of a hassle to find the right one, so I transferred everything to HD. About 10 or so CD's were irrecoverably damaged. Some had faulty areas but were mostly readable.
Nowadays you should just buy a couple of 160+ gig HD's to store this kind of stuff. CD just does not have the capacity or ease of use or longevity, and DVD is not much better.
DVD drives in particular seem to be very picky about what they can read - I have 5 DVD drives only 2 of which read DVD+R's burned with HP NC8000, for example.
No-one actually has these anymore. But most people have used them. The rotaries were replaced by keypads and even wireless in-home-proprietary systems in the 90's... anyone older than 20 must have used them. I remember using the rotary throughout the 80's.
It's not like this is ancient history.
And FYI, the 8-track players... in Finland I have _never_ seen even one. I'm 31. It was all C-cassette and radio, and shitty small japanese Datsuns for the mainstream. The 8-track must be an American-only-thing? I do have A-TRAC by Sony...
PS.
(the Datsuns were a hit in Finland in late 70's because the japanese pioneered targeting a car for a specific climate and audience.)
What we need is an old-style malicious Win32 worm
on
MyDoom Strikes Again
·
· Score: 1
What we need is the kind we met some years back... the one that caused havoc to hundreds of thousands of Windoze-PC:s in Korea, overwriting their BIOSes.
What we need is a really malicious Windows worm that will spread for two weeks, then wipe out the host's disks, then preferably its BIOS, rendering the machine even more useless than it was under Bill's rule.
As it is now, infected Winblows users simply run a cleaner program every now and then and hope their puter gets better, and feel secure, until the six-month-cycle is full and they have to reinstall Winshit. And in the meanwhile, their 0wned boxes continue to be a nuisance to the rest of the Net.
If a really malicious worm, using old, patched holes, is released and manages to practically destroy those hundreds of thousands of shitboxes on wideband, the better to the rest of us.
The victims will either get a clue, or buy a Mac.
Can you imagine losing two years worth of photos? I for one would want to point a finger at SOMEONE. In this case, M$.
Jesus christ.
Those images are like...
I'll be making an install image for a new batch of HP machines soon, at least now I know what the background image will be.
My eyes.
I subscribed security issue related sites, like F-Secure for WinCrap(tm), cert.fi... hell, even Slashdot has RSS feed;-)
Works like a charm. It's just that KDE's tight monopolistic ingegration with Konqueror gets in the way.
Try as I will, I cannot tie Firefox as tightly to KDE as I'd like. Now I end up using lightweight Konqueror for some stuff and Firefox for surfing (familiarity over speed, or something).
Since N-Gage is really just a cheap Series 60 phone, do they need to have that many extras for it? I mean it's mostly just another Series 60 phone with gaming-targeted design.
In Finland the QD model sold well this xmas since its price dropped to about 140 euros.
That's cheaper than a lame basic phone with possibly a useless camera, and certainly cheap for a phone you can hack using Python and play C64 games on...
I would assume this works with any Series 60 phone that does not have MP3 decoder (like N-Gage QD). Just use sidplay to create 16kHz 8bit mono sound and convert it using sox and the -i -option (IMA_ADPCM).
E32frodo http://e32frodo.sourceforge.net/ already works quite fine. H.E.R.O, Boulder Dash and Blue Max work flawlessly, and are very suitable games for a handheld.
The latest official version is over a year old, so try to get a newer beta somewhere (it has better sound support and turnable screen, so the funky aspect ratio is not a problem.
Some games are a bit too slow for the ~100MHz phones like N-Gage QD... but I would assume the newer ~200MHz ones can run even those without any trickery like frameskip.
I used to destroy a keyboard every couple of weeks at work, but only a couple after installing debian a few years ago.
The reason for my snapups was the idiotic way Winblows works and assumes things and always asks useless questions and how the installers don't work and requesters steal focus and disk access is slow and the GUI just crashes and NOTHING JUST WORKS, every f***n thing has to be done in the clumsiest way possible and even then it has to be thrice to get it work! Hey where's the logic? Where's all the money poured into that useless piece of rhino feces? God I hate it hate it hate it. Feel like breaking something again.
Yes, it does.
Opera works excellently with Nokia 6600, 7650 and Ngage, and AFAIK those have 4M or so RAM.. correct if I'm wrong. They do have craploads of mem card storage.
You always carry the friggin mobile. It's your insurance policy against being netless.
When on vacation or partying, I sometimes use a symbian phone to check out mail using IMAP, occasionally reply to it, use SSH to do some quick fix... It's pain to type with that shitty phone keyset but the small screen is actually very useful for something like SSH.
I cannot imagine carrying a laptop with me to a holiday resort, or to eastern Europe, or to Russia... it'd be enormous pain, could break, and could be stolen. GSM is universal, and a symbian phone very handy and always, always available.
Come on, I have GBA SP too, but never carry it because even that little case with its power supply is TOO MUCH. GBA emulator on symbian is much more handy, even if it sucks.
Well not solution, but it helps on small sites with fast enough workstations with 768+M RAM.
Run debian or some other lean, stable linux distro under the hood, run VMware in fullscreen mode on top of it. Use different virtual disk for "Documents and Settings" folder. Install all the proprietary win32 crap you need, backup the virtual system disk and set it up so that it overwrites the system disk on every real boot.
If you don't need SMB browsing and printers, you can further protect Windoze by using NAT networking so the virtual machine is not visible on network. You can still use SMB/CIFS disk shares and CUPS printers (2K and XP support CUPS somewhat).
Running winblows under VMware is 100 times preferable to wasting perfectly good hardware to a dedicated, "real" installation. And it's cheap, v3->v4 upgrade is currently 99 US$ + VAT.
Another plus: as admin, when installing new software, just make a snapshot of the VM state, then install the proprietary crap, and if it breaks anything, just restore snapshot and you timewarp to pre-fuckup state. Excellent!
I hate Windows from the bottom of my soulless being as it is now, trying to solve menial tasks running trivial software. I'd rank controlling the vehicle I'm in as mission-critical.
The nearest it gets to my car is in the trunk as long as the puter in question is turned off.
>> "Third, an updated version of some form of antivirus software on workstations to prevent risk by mailer worms that don't get caught by the firewall."
This is blatant bullshit in its smelliest form. Antivirus software is useless, it means "attack the evil once it's already inside the system" - besides, antivirus software is a memory and other resource hog that slows down otherwise usable old computers to a halt. A P133 with 32 or 64M memory is still usable for most use if it's used as a telnet / ssh / X terminal.
If the platform under the said client is winshit, you can as well scrap the machine, the amount of extra software needed to keep it non-ownzored for more than a week is impossible.
Better to totally ban all executable content downloading in any way (it's slow but can be done outside the perimeter firewall by for example separating winshit machines from the rest of the network and let them alone suffer from the slowdown).
Something like anomy proxy and amavis for mail, total executable blockage for http, total blockage for ftp except from chosen sites, and total blockage for all other traffic. Open pinholes as needed. Add snort or other IDS on the perimeter and you get nice warning about another winshit machine gone havoc.
I don't run antivirus software on my windoze, at work or at home. Just keep the machines up to date, use a firewall that blocks everything in AND outbound unless explicitly allowed. The machines respond faster (well, as fast as windoze's explorer does, its usefulness as GUI is another issue). Periodic systemwide scans are enough.
The "normal" users simply can not be allowed to do anything. If a problem arises - rollback or reformat and restore from backup, all the data is on network anyways.
The troll part:
Yes I consider windoze users idiots unless proven innocent. There is tons of legacy software that requires wincrap but really, there is no need for anyone to even consider a new project for this puss-dripping infested excuse for a platform. For those legacy apps one should get a citrix server or another kludge, or vmware, or something, anything to keep that piece of crap as far from the real network as possible.
Creative has made nothing but crap. This is not a troll.
The original SB was total crap, SB Pro was little better. SB16 was kinda ok BUT the actual manufacture left everything to be desired. The card had to be carefully placed to minimize the amount of 50Hz hum and other anomalies from the PC hardware around it.
The Sb Live! was touted as a new world but it was crap. It broke the PCI spec, the drivers were useless, we had to wait over a year for a really working Windows 2000 driver and on Linux side the situation was even worse. It either worked, or didn't. Or messed with some other PCI device. Sb Live! was a sub-par kludge that totally and utterly destroyed any intent I ever had to purchasing another Creative device, ever.
I haven't tried the Audigy, but because of their track record I believe it sucks as well. I bought a Hercules instead, never have had any trouble, the sound is actually tolerable, and this is a low-end Hercules. Had I bought a Turtle Beach or one of those nice boxed external Hercules devices, I'd be in heaven.
AMD, VIA, Creative... crap for the masses. I want things to Just Work.
Slashdot Mirror
Abandon all hope ye who install Winblows.
Writing mass-mailer SMTP client is trivial.
You don't actually need to do anything, there are excellent SMTP components in all frameworks. You just need to write code to randomize subjects, attachment names, seemingly plausible content, and scan the Winblows machine in question for address books. The couple of most common formats will do.
Then the part about getting it to run.. for my hypothetical win32.Goatse email worm that changes the background image to hello.jpg I would not even have to resort to holes in outlook or anything. Just send the executable. In a perfect world mail servers would drop win32 executables automatically, but this is not widespread policy.
Let it pop up a requester: 'This attachment is executable content. Are you sure you want to run it?' [Yes]/No
'To provide better support to the goatse community, do you want to send unsolicidated email?' [Yes]/No
'Do you want to install desktop shortcuts?' [Yes]/No
'Do you want goatseMailer to run automatically upon Windows startup?' [Yes]/No
If this was launched late sunday evening, the number of goatse'd background imaged would reach thousands easily. Windows users ARE that stupid.
"XCF is an internal format of the Gimp just like PSD is for photoshop! these formats are not really intended to be opened by other programs!" GIMP opens PSD.
-cost of Anti-Virus software (that slows the system down)
-cost of anti-spyware solutions. Typically you need two or more cleaners to get the most common ones.
-cost of downtime. Typical desktop PC in a business is down for most of a day many times a year.
-cost of the forced upgrade cycle.
-On top of that, Windows comes with NOTHING bundled. Everything costs extra. Just managing the licenses in a corporate environment is pain!
Add to this the much bigger probability of data loss and theft, and the Windoze solution does not seem like a solution at all.
Bandaid over duct tape. Legacy crap is what keeps people using Win32, there are no other sane reasons.
It was too much of a hassle to find the right one, so I transferred everything to HD. About 10 or so CD's were irrecoverably damaged. Some had faulty areas but were mostly readable.
Nowadays you should just buy a couple of 160+ gig HD's to store this kind of stuff. CD just does not have the capacity or ease of use or longevity, and DVD is not much better.
DVD drives in particular seem to be very picky about what they can read - I have 5 DVD drives only 2 of which read DVD+R's burned with HP NC8000, for example.
It contains next to no theory at all, it's very practically targeted. Mostly "how to use M$ product XYZ."
Link to english version: http://www.tieke.fi/ajokortti_english.nsf
Thanks to slashdot the future does not seem so bright any more.
MS better up their R&D budget fast. Imagine if the company was known for bug-ridden, non-innovative software!
No-one actually has these anymore. But most people have used them. The rotaries were replaced by keypads and even wireless in-home-proprietary systems in the 90's... anyone older than 20 must have used them. I remember using the rotary throughout the 80's. It's not like this is ancient history. And FYI, the 8-track players... in Finland I have _never_ seen even one. I'm 31. It was all C-cassette and radio, and shitty small japanese Datsuns for the mainstream. The 8-track must be an American-only-thing? I do have A-TRAC by Sony... PS. (the Datsuns were a hit in Finland in late 70's because the japanese pioneered targeting a car for a specific climate and audience.)
What we need is a really malicious Windows worm that will spread for two weeks, then wipe out the host's disks, then preferably its BIOS, rendering the machine even more useless than it was under Bill's rule.
As it is now, infected Winblows users simply run a cleaner program every now and then and hope their puter gets better, and feel secure, until the six-month-cycle is full and they have to reinstall Winshit. And in the meanwhile, their 0wned boxes continue to be a nuisance to the rest of the Net.
If a really malicious worm, using old, patched holes, is released and manages to practically destroy those hundreds of thousands of shitboxes on wideband, the better to the rest of us.
The victims will either get a clue, or buy a Mac.
Can you imagine losing two years worth of photos? I for one would want to point a finger at SOMEONE. In this case, M$.
Jesus christ. Those images are like... I'll be making an install image for a new batch of HP machines soon, at least now I know what the background image will be. My eyes.
Works like a charm. It's just that KDE's tight monopolistic ingegration with Konqueror gets in the way.
Try as I will, I cannot tie Firefox as tightly to KDE as I'd like. Now I end up using lightweight Konqueror for some stuff and Firefox for surfing (familiarity over speed, or something).
In Finland the QD model sold well this xmas since its price dropped to about 140 euros.
That's cheaper than a lame basic phone with possibly a useless camera, and certainly cheap for a phone you can hack using Python and play C64 games on...
At least in finland porn is often called hydraulics. Fluids and pumping motion after all. Except in some japanese flicks.
I would assume this works with any Series 60 phone that does not have MP3 decoder (like N-Gage QD). Just use sidplay to create 16kHz 8bit mono sound and convert it using sox and the -i -option (IMA_ADPCM).
The latest official version is over a year old, so try to get a newer beta somewhere (it has better sound support and turnable screen, so the funky aspect ratio is not a problem.
Some games are a bit too slow for the ~100MHz phones like N-Gage QD... but I would assume the newer ~200MHz ones can run even those without any trickery like frameskip.
I used to destroy a keyboard every couple of weeks at work, but only a couple after installing debian a few years ago. The reason for my snapups was the idiotic way Winblows works and assumes things and always asks useless questions and how the installers don't work and requesters steal focus and disk access is slow and the GUI just crashes and NOTHING JUST WORKS, every f***n thing has to be done in the clumsiest way possible and even then it has to be thrice to get it work! Hey where's the logic? Where's all the money poured into that useless piece of rhino feces? God I hate it hate it hate it. Feel like breaking something again.
Yes, it does. Opera works excellently with Nokia 6600, 7650 and Ngage, and AFAIK those have 4M or so RAM.. correct if I'm wrong. They do have craploads of mem card storage.
You always carry the friggin mobile. It's your insurance policy against being netless.
When on vacation or partying, I sometimes use a symbian phone to check out mail using IMAP, occasionally reply to it, use SSH to do some quick fix... It's pain to type with that shitty phone keyset but the small screen is actually very useful for something like SSH.
I cannot imagine carrying a laptop with me to a holiday resort, or to eastern Europe, or to Russia... it'd be enormous pain, could break, and could be stolen. GSM is universal, and a symbian phone very handy and always, always available.
Come on, I have GBA SP too, but never carry it because even that little case with its power supply is TOO MUCH. GBA emulator on symbian is much more handy, even if it sucks.
Jpeg support for quality jackage? You bet.
Well not solution, but it helps on small sites with fast enough workstations with 768+M RAM. Run debian or some other lean, stable linux distro under the hood, run VMware in fullscreen mode on top of it. Use different virtual disk for "Documents and Settings" folder. Install all the proprietary win32 crap you need, backup the virtual system disk and set it up so that it overwrites the system disk on every real boot. If you don't need SMB browsing and printers, you can further protect Windoze by using NAT networking so the virtual machine is not visible on network. You can still use SMB/CIFS disk shares and CUPS printers (2K and XP support CUPS somewhat). Running winblows under VMware is 100 times preferable to wasting perfectly good hardware to a dedicated, "real" installation. And it's cheap, v3->v4 upgrade is currently 99 US$ + VAT. Another plus: as admin, when installing new software, just make a snapshot of the VM state, then install the proprietary crap, and if it breaks anything, just restore snapshot and you timewarp to pre-fuckup state. Excellent!
Sentinel had a sequel, running realtime with 3D acceleration (on peesea, win32). Music by John Carpenter.
I hate Windows from the bottom of my soulless being as it is now, trying to solve menial tasks running trivial software. I'd rank controlling the vehicle I'm in as mission-critical. The nearest it gets to my car is in the trunk as long as the puter in question is turned off.
>> "Third, an updated version of some form of antivirus software on workstations to prevent risk by mailer worms that don't get caught by the firewall." This is blatant bullshit in its smelliest form. Antivirus software is useless, it means "attack the evil once it's already inside the system" - besides, antivirus software is a memory and other resource hog that slows down otherwise usable old computers to a halt. A P133 with 32 or 64M memory is still usable for most use if it's used as a telnet / ssh / X terminal. If the platform under the said client is winshit, you can as well scrap the machine, the amount of extra software needed to keep it non-ownzored for more than a week is impossible. Better to totally ban all executable content downloading in any way (it's slow but can be done outside the perimeter firewall by for example separating winshit machines from the rest of the network and let them alone suffer from the slowdown). Something like anomy proxy and amavis for mail, total executable blockage for http, total blockage for ftp except from chosen sites, and total blockage for all other traffic. Open pinholes as needed. Add snort or other IDS on the perimeter and you get nice warning about another winshit machine gone havoc. I don't run antivirus software on my windoze, at work or at home. Just keep the machines up to date, use a firewall that blocks everything in AND outbound unless explicitly allowed. The machines respond faster (well, as fast as windoze's explorer does, its usefulness as GUI is another issue). Periodic systemwide scans are enough. The "normal" users simply can not be allowed to do anything. If a problem arises - rollback or reformat and restore from backup, all the data is on network anyways. The troll part: Yes I consider windoze users idiots unless proven innocent. There is tons of legacy software that requires wincrap but really, there is no need for anyone to even consider a new project for this puss-dripping infested excuse for a platform. For those legacy apps one should get a citrix server or another kludge, or vmware, or something, anything to keep that piece of crap as far from the real network as possible.
The original SB was total crap, SB Pro was little better. SB16 was kinda ok BUT the actual manufacture left everything to be desired. The card had to be carefully placed to minimize the amount of 50Hz hum and other anomalies from the PC hardware around it.
The Sb Live! was touted as a new world but it was crap. It broke the PCI spec, the drivers were useless, we had to wait over a year for a really working Windows 2000 driver and on Linux side the situation was even worse. It either worked, or didn't. Or messed with some other PCI device. Sb Live! was a sub-par kludge that totally and utterly destroyed any intent I ever had to purchasing another Creative device, ever.
I haven't tried the Audigy, but because of their track record I believe it sucks as well. I bought a Hercules instead, never have had any trouble, the sound is actually tolerable, and this is a low-end Hercules. Had I bought a Turtle Beach or one of those nice boxed external Hercules devices, I'd be in heaven.
AMD, VIA, Creative ... crap for the masses. I want things to Just Work.