Putty Cygwin Knoppix CCleaner Hijack This Malwarebytes A virus scanner running under Knoppix even if only to demonstrate to the owner of said computer that it is truly and fully fucked. A Windows password reset tool A backup program (this can be under Knoppix) Gparted Tools for killing Koobface Windirstat - "my drive is full and I don't know why"
Etc.
A lot of that stuff is for people who insist "don't format the machine"
Who says you need to look at source code to find vulnerabilities?
You actually think that's how blackhats find vulnerabilities in Windows? By decompiling? I don't know how to tell you how wrong you are as I lack the words to describe the magnitude of wrongness.
Also, it's not just black hats that look for vulnerabilities in closed source. White and Grey hats do too.
Your message also suggests that you have no idea what decompiling actually does. It does not give the original source code. It generally gives a mess, in assembly, with no comments. Especially if the binary has been through a multi-pass optimizing compiler.
Furthermore, you assume that decompiling is always copyright infringement. The Sega vs Accolade case disagrees with you. There are other cases of fair use, and white hat decompilation would be under that exception in certain circumstances.
I said I'm a lapsed Episcopal back there. I don't have much faith. I don't think I have any left. But that's one of the most insightful quotes out of the Bible.
And it's marked overrated. Yeah, welcome to Slashdot.
Here in the Northeast US, self-promotion through charity is "unseemly" for the most part.
There is one in my town who has his name plastered all over the place (Alan Shawn Feinstein) who tends to make it a requirement that his name be attached to things he donates to.
Some people have a problem with this, up here. I do.
I can see a way of doing promotion of a charity that you start but take away the self-promotion. Don't name it after yourself. You can insist the name of the charity be plastered all over the school it builds, but it won't be your name, it will be the name of the charity.
>Forget that Steve Jobs does NO charitable activities
Steve Jobs isn't public about whether or not he does charities. He thinks it's none of your business.
And I tend to agree with him on that point.
Some people use charity as a means of self-promotion.
Who is better, the Christian that goes to church every Sunday and makes sure everyone knows he goes to church, or the Christian that doesn't always go to church, but volunteers at the soup kitchen downtown and tells nobody?
Disclaimer, I am a lapsed Episcopalian. I can fake my way through a Catholic Mass for weddings and funerals, but that's about it.
>I suspect in Rhode Island, as it is in Michigan, that what you refer to is a "use tax".
Yep. You are supposed to self-report on your state income tax form, and it is called a use tax.
I think all states that have a sales tax have a use tax.
What I see as a problem is requiring every business that sells over the internet (or mail, or phone) to keep an updated database of every single tax jurisdiction in the country. I believe Texas has 300 or more at last check. And this has to be kept up, to the minute. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.
Texas:
Rates State - 6 1/4% (.0625) City - 1/4% (.0025) - 2% (.02), depending on local rate. County - 1/2% (.005) - 1.5% (.015), depending on local rate. Transit - 1/4 % (.0025) - 1% (.01), depending on local rate. Special Purpose Districts - 1/8% (.00125) - 2% (.02), depending on local rate.
Oh my god ow.
It's unwieldy. Amazon is right to fight against this. Make the consumer do the work.
The thing about Putty is that it's a self contained executable, which means you can throw it on the flash drive that's already hanging from your key ring. No need for cygwin or whatever. Nothing to install on the host system.
Some of us have full Linux distributions there and various Windows tools for fixing busted Windows machines.
And this is how Microsoft gets away with this crap.
It's always "blame the user"
Got a virus? "you didn't use the right virus protection" Got spyware? "You shouldn't have gone to that porn site"
etc.
While there is no patch for stupid, there are ways to protect the user that don't involve encasing a machine in concrete and dropping it at the bottom of the Marianas trench.
I have a gmail account. it's only a couple of years old. I've moved everything to it because of convenience, and I have not been spammed to hell-and-back with Google Ads over the years on other sites.
Also....
If you tend toward tinfoil, you have no excuse not using gpg or other encryption for your messages. Plaintext is plaintext and sending email across half the planet is nearly literally sending a postcard and anyone along the way can read it. If you value your email privacy that much to not use Gmail because of scanning for ad serving, then you should be encrypting everything.
Phil Zimmerman nearly went to jail so you could use encryption. If you don't want people looking at your stuff, friggin' get off your ass and use it.
Which brings me to the Cloud and the privacy concerns with that. If you're going to upload sensitive stuff to Dropbox and other providers, without encrypting, you're a complete idiot. With encryption I can put shit up on a public FTP or anywhere that shares files with the public as a "poor man's offsite backup" (you'd have to be really poor, but hey) and nobody can see/anything/ unless they have the key.
So in that light...
Yes, Google gets a pass because the nature of the beast is a known quantity.
>Pretending that Hotmail protects your privacy or that any public email provider does.
No. You cannot trust this shit blindly. There are privacy policies that are written up to say "we can change this at any time" and unless you check these things daily, they can change under your nose and you'd never know. Don't trust 'em. Treat them like you would treat Google. Treat them all the same.
I could go on a rant about FB paranoia, but that is a digression too far.
>The majority of the time, the user will have a stupidly weak password like 1234, 123456, 111111, etc. I do VoIP for a living and one of the platforms I support, Broadworks, can not block a user from having a password like 123456. 111111 is banned, but easy sequences can't be yet.
The next time you go to the ATM take a look at the number pad, where people put in their PINs.
You will see that numbers 1 through 5 have the most wear.
You seem to be missing the strategy that has been used over the past couple of decades.
Come out with something objectionable but aimed at what you want. Indeed, make sure it's objectionable. Get everyone up in arms.
Then roll it back to what you really wanted or slightly less, but an acceptable amount. This is called "compromise" but not really. Now you seem "reasonable" and your goal is achieved. Now the only thing left is to ramp it up and test the tolerance limits of everyone.
Just because something is made of silica doesn't mean it causes the same diseases. Silica dust is different from fiberglass is different from asbestos.
How about you do the same thing I did 10 years ago and actually look this shit up at a university that has access to journals?
Rent time on a waterjet machine and have them cut that way. Burr free, no airborne particles, and done quickly.
At 300 bucks/hr, this sounds expensive, but not really when you consider how many pieces you can get in an hour and the time saved in not having to manually deburr and apply epoxy to the edges.
I had forgotten the OP had been using a shop vac to pick up particles.
Shop Vacs are notorious for spitting out small particles back out into the air without the proper filter. There are different kinds. The default is an open cell foam filter. These do absolutely nothing for fine particles. Indeed, they guarantee that all you will have in the air after vacuuming are fine particles that will stay there for hours.
You need the aftermarket filters. Google for "shop vac hepa" and you will find them.
Hi. I'm a machinist. I used to machine boards and G10 fiberglass parts for circuit board testers (basically a big board with hundreds of probes on it that you plonked a circuit board onto and it QCed the board).
This concerned me.
So I looked it up. The only study I found that had a link to cancer was that they surgically implanted a chunk of fiberglass into rat lungs that the lungs were not able to expel. This chronic irritant did produce tumors. The rat population that only had inhaled fiberglass dust did not have a statistically significant increase in cancer over the control group of rats without exposure.
The human lung cilia and mucus are able to expel fiberglass fibers. This is not the case with asbestos, which is why asbestos is a hazard and fiberglass (a much larger fiber) isn't.
The IARC removed fiberglass from its list of "possibly carcinogenic materials" in 2001.
This is not to say that fiberglass is not a hazard. It is. It can cause asthmatic reactions and difficulty in breathing because it's a strong irritant. Wear a good facemask. Try to keep the fibers from entering the air in the first place. Use vacuum pickup and if you can, try to cut under flood water-based coolant.
Most motherboards (all? I've never seen one on phenolic), are G-10 fiberglass.
G-10 Fiberglass is nasty stuff. While it will not give you cancer (this has been studied because people thought fiberglass seems similar to asbestos, but it isn't) it's definitely an irritant. Your lungs will expel the fibers.
That said:
Wear a dust mask. A full nose-and-mouth mask from the hardware store is fine. You don't need to go overboard. Use a vacuum pickup. Use the correct saw blade. A silicon carbide blade (particles bonded to a steel band saw blade) is ideal.
You also might want to try using a tile cutter saw that uses an abrasive blade and flood water cooling.
>I don't believe you caught the "middle-class" part
I don't believe that you caught my point.
There are thieves in every class. The book keeper down the street might be embezzling. It happens. There was an infamous case here where such a thing happened and a woman stole nearly a third of every dollar that came in, and spent it on lavish parties and gambling and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't ever serve on a jury.
--
BMO
Putty
Cygwin
Knoppix
CCleaner
Hijack This
Malwarebytes
A virus scanner running under Knoppix even if only to demonstrate to the owner of said computer that it is truly and fully fucked.
A Windows password reset tool
A backup program (this can be under Knoppix)
Gparted
Tools for killing Koobface
Windirstat - "my drive is full and I don't know why"
Etc.
A lot of that stuff is for people who insist "don't format the machine"
The real way to fix a Windows machine is to nuke and pave, as argued here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512587.aspx
--
BMO
Who says you need to look at source code to find vulnerabilities?
You actually think that's how blackhats find vulnerabilities in Windows? By decompiling? I don't know how to tell you how wrong you are as I lack the words to describe the magnitude of wrongness.
Also, it's not just black hats that look for vulnerabilities in closed source. White and Grey hats do too.
Your message also suggests that you have no idea what decompiling actually does. It does not give the original source code. It generally gives a mess, in assembly, with no comments. Especially if the binary has been through a multi-pass optimizing compiler.
Furthermore, you assume that decompiling is always copyright infringement. The Sega vs Accolade case disagrees with you. There are other cases of fair use, and white hat decompilation would be under that exception in certain circumstances.
--
BMO
I said I'm a lapsed Episcopal back there. I don't have much faith. I don't think I have any left. But that's one of the most insightful quotes out of the Bible.
And it's marked overrated. Yeah, welcome to Slashdot.
--
BMO
>Of course who'd want to hack linux, it only runs around ~ 60% of the most used web servers in the world.
I'm with you here, bro.
>That said, Linux is open source, I can take a look at it and look for flaws. Windows is closed,
Still with you
> looking at it is illegal.
Aw hell no....
> So the only people who will look at Windows/OS X/anything closed are black hats,
Never go full retard.
--
BMO
Here in the Northeast US, self-promotion through charity is "unseemly" for the most part.
There is one in my town who has his name plastered all over the place (Alan Shawn Feinstein) who tends to make it a requirement that his name be attached to things he donates to.
Some people have a problem with this, up here. I do.
I can see a way of doing promotion of a charity that you start but take away the self-promotion. Don't name it after yourself. You can insist the name of the charity be plastered all over the school it builds, but it won't be your name, it will be the name of the charity.
--
BMO
>Forget that Steve Jobs does NO charitable activities
Steve Jobs isn't public about whether or not he does charities. He thinks it's none of your business.
And I tend to agree with him on that point.
Some people use charity as a means of self-promotion.
Who is better, the Christian that goes to church every Sunday and makes sure everyone knows he goes to church, or the Christian that doesn't always go to church, but volunteers at the soup kitchen downtown and tells nobody?
Disclaimer, I am a lapsed Episcopalian. I can fake my way through a Catholic Mass for weddings and funerals, but that's about it.
--
BMO
The US has some of the lowest tax rates of any civilized nation.
Your argument is invalid.
--
BMO
>I suspect in Rhode Island, as it is in Michigan, that what you refer to is a "use tax".
Yep. You are supposed to self-report on your state income tax form, and it is called a use tax.
I think all states that have a sales tax have a use tax.
What I see as a problem is requiring every business that sells over the internet (or mail, or phone) to keep an updated database of every single tax jurisdiction in the country. I believe Texas has 300 or more at last check. And this has to be kept up, to the minute. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.
Texas:
Rates
State - 6 1/4% (.0625)
City - 1/4% (.0025) - 2% (.02), depending on local rate.
County - 1/2% (.005) - 1.5% (.015), depending on local rate.
Transit - 1/4 % (.0025) - 1% (.01), depending on local rate.
Special Purpose Districts - 1/8% (.00125) - 2% (.02), depending on local rate.
Oh my god ow.
It's unwieldy. Amazon is right to fight against this. Make the consumer do the work.
--
BMO
>Taxation is simply theft
You rely on civilization for your daily needs.
Pay for it.
--
BMO
Indeed.
If I order something by mail or drive up to New Hampshire and buy an item, I am responsible for paying the tax here in Rhode Island.
How is this any different than ordering something over the internet?
I have an idea whose argument is intellectually bereft, and it's not Amazon's.
--
BMO
The thing about Putty is that it's a self contained executable, which means you can throw it on the flash drive that's already hanging from your key ring. No need for cygwin or whatever. Nothing to install on the host system.
Some of us have full Linux distributions there and various Windows tools for fixing busted Windows machines.
Where's yours?
--
BMO
And this is how Microsoft gets away with this crap.
It's always "blame the user"
Got a virus? "you didn't use the right virus protection"
Got spyware? "You shouldn't have gone to that porn site"
etc.
While there is no patch for stupid, there are ways to protect the user that don't involve encasing a machine in concrete and dropping it at the bottom of the Marianas trench.
--
BMO
Because they've always done it.
I have a gmail account. it's only a couple of years old. I've moved everything to it because of convenience, and I have not been spammed to hell-and-back with Google Ads over the years on other sites.
Also....
If you tend toward tinfoil, you have no excuse not using gpg or other encryption for your messages. Plaintext is plaintext and sending email across half the planet is nearly literally sending a postcard and anyone along the way can read it. If you value your email privacy that much to not use Gmail because of scanning for ad serving, then you should be encrypting everything.
Phil Zimmerman nearly went to jail so you could use encryption. If you don't want people looking at your stuff, friggin' get off your ass and use it.
Which brings me to the Cloud and the privacy concerns with that. If you're going to upload sensitive stuff to Dropbox and other providers, without encrypting, you're a complete idiot. With encryption I can put shit up on a public FTP or anywhere that shares files with the public as a "poor man's offsite backup" (you'd have to be really poor, but hey) and nobody can see /anything/ unless they have the key.
So in that light...
Yes, Google gets a pass because the nature of the beast is a known quantity.
>Pretending that Hotmail protects your privacy or that any public email provider does.
No. You cannot trust this shit blindly. There are privacy policies that are written up to say "we can change this at any time" and unless you check these things daily, they can change under your nose and you'd never know. Don't trust 'em. Treat them like you would treat Google. Treat them all the same.
I could go on a rant about FB paranoia, but that is a digression too far.
--
BMO
>The majority of the time, the user will have a stupidly weak password like 1234, 123456, 111111, etc. I do VoIP for a living and one of the platforms I support, Broadworks, can not block a user from having a password like 123456. 111111 is banned, but easy sequences can't be yet.
The next time you go to the ATM take a look at the number pad, where people put in their PINs.
You will see that numbers 1 through 5 have the most wear.
It's like this everywhere.
--
BMO
You seem to be missing the strategy that has been used over the past couple of decades.
Come out with something objectionable but aimed at what you want. Indeed, make sure it's objectionable. Get everyone up in arms.
Then roll it back to what you really wanted or slightly less, but an acceptable amount. This is called "compromise" but not really. Now you seem "reasonable" and your goal is achieved. Now the only thing left is to ramp it up and test the tolerance limits of everyone.
It's a cynical strategy, but it works.
--
BMO
....is already written.
"he's hooked, he's hooked, his brain is cooked... Spaaaaace Invaders!"
I first heard it on Dr. Demento, a long...long time ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McteLDT01Ig
Song by Uncle Vic.
I love the "fair use" and "disclaimer" and other stuff this guy has on the posting.
--
BMO
Ballmer? Is that you?
We've got a new load of chairs straight off the boat from China. Would you like them delivered or will you send someone to pick them up?
--
BMO - nah, man, I'll eat 'em here.
You're stupid.
Just because something is made of silica doesn't mean it causes the same diseases. Silica dust is different from fiberglass is different from asbestos.
How about you do the same thing I did 10 years ago and actually look this shit up at a university that has access to journals?
--
BMO
One thing I could think of is not using a press.
Waterjet.
Rent time on a waterjet machine and have them cut that way. Burr free, no airborne particles, and done quickly.
At 300 bucks/hr, this sounds expensive, but not really when you consider how many pieces you can get in an hour and the time saved in not having to manually deburr and apply epoxy to the edges.
--
BMO
Replying to myself
I had forgotten the OP had been using a shop vac to pick up particles.
Shop Vacs are notorious for spitting out small particles back out into the air without the proper filter. There are different kinds. The default is an open cell foam filter. These do absolutely nothing for fine particles. Indeed, they guarantee that all you will have in the air after vacuuming are fine particles that will stay there for hours.
You need the aftermarket filters. Google for "shop vac hepa" and you will find them.
--
BMO
>it can give you cancer.
Hi. I'm a machinist. I used to machine boards and G10 fiberglass parts for circuit board testers (basically a big board with hundreds of probes on it that you plonked a circuit board onto and it QCed the board).
This concerned me.
So I looked it up. The only study I found that had a link to cancer was that they surgically implanted a chunk of fiberglass into rat lungs that the lungs were not able to expel. This chronic irritant did produce tumors. The rat population that only had inhaled fiberglass dust did not have a statistically significant increase in cancer over the control group of rats without exposure.
The human lung cilia and mucus are able to expel fiberglass fibers. This is not the case with asbestos, which is why asbestos is a hazard and fiberglass (a much larger fiber) isn't.
The IARC removed fiberglass from its list of "possibly carcinogenic materials" in 2001.
This is not to say that fiberglass is not a hazard. It is. It can cause asthmatic reactions and difficulty in breathing because it's a strong irritant. Wear a good facemask. Try to keep the fibers from entering the air in the first place. Use vacuum pickup and if you can, try to cut under flood water-based coolant.
--
BMO
First off, you need the correct saw blade.
Most motherboards (all? I've never seen one on phenolic), are G-10 fiberglass.
G-10 Fiberglass is nasty stuff. While it will not give you cancer (this has been studied because people thought fiberglass seems similar to asbestos, but it isn't) it's definitely an irritant. Your lungs will expel the fibers.
That said:
Wear a dust mask. A full nose-and-mouth mask from the hardware store is fine. You don't need to go overboard.
Use a vacuum pickup.
Use the correct saw blade. A silicon carbide blade (particles bonded to a steel band saw blade) is ideal.
You also might want to try using a tile cutter saw that uses an abrasive blade and flood water cooling.
Don't try to cut with a steel blade.
--
BMO
You're disgusting.
--
BMO
>I don't believe you caught the "middle-class" part
I don't believe that you caught my point.
There are thieves in every class. The book keeper down the street might be embezzling. It happens. There was an infamous case here where such a thing happened and a woman stole nearly a third of every dollar that came in, and spent it on lavish parties and gambling and such.
How about you suck on a cock, you class warrior?
Fuck you.
--
BMO