It is correct that the signature was not verified correctly, but the software was the same as used in most airports.
From the article:
.. altering microchips so that they are accepted as genuine by Golden Reader, the standard software used by the International Civil Aviation Organisation to test them. It is also the software recommended for use at airports.
Further:
The Home Office has always argued that faked chips would be spotted at border checkpoints because they would not match key codes when checked against an international data-base. But only ten of the forty-five countries with e-passports have signed up to the Public Key Directory (PKD) code system, and only five are using it.
So the system seems to be good, its just the execution that is pants-on-head retarded. They have implented everything except the most important part, the public key exchange, and thus making the whole system moot.
I would guess that the software just greenlighs by default all passports that it doesn't have the country's public key for, with no checking.
http://www.joikuspot.com/ - For Symbian (Nokia) phones. Allows you to use your phone as a modem and share the web using the builtin WLAN, setting it up as an accesspoint.
Yes, Python (or a similar high level language - ruby, or even lua (which is used in many games, giving instant appeal) ) is perfect. Personally, I'm familiar with python, so that's what resources I will use in this post.
First of all : Think Python (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/) - An intro to computer programming, focusing on python. Then PyGame (http://www.pygame.org/) - a good framework for making small games in python. If web is more his deal rather than gaming, check out the Django framework (http://www.djangoproject.com/).
For gui you have wxWindows (or what its called now), and Boa Constructor, a cross platform RAD GUI python thingy (was quite buggy on non-windows when I tried it a few years ago, but could be pretty good now).
These links are my favorite python'ishies, and I think they would be a good start.
The thing with python is that its cross platform, so if he write a small game or something, he can easily show it to his friends, no matter what he made the game on, and what they're running:)
Yeah, my former gmail addy easily beat them, and all because of me using it one place, Joost.
I did not put that email addy in any other place for at least 4 days before, and within an hour after signing up at joost, I started getting spam, so I'm pretty sure that's where the email was leaked.
First page on that address shows 50 spam, from 7:29am to 11:12am. And that's what's not filtered. I have an autoreply filter and the google spam filter filtering out messages too. The email account is totally unusable. Quite a lot of it is replies, since spammers use my address as source address:(
Of course, that does make some interesting mails from time to time, like one that said "STOP SENDING ME SPAM OR I WILL HUNT DOWN AND KILL YOU", and one, which I particulary liked : "I don't have a penis I'm a girl & I'm 16":D Dont think it helped tho.
Anyway, that email addy was abandoned, and I bought a domain and set up google mail for that. The trick I've done now is to have lots of aliases, and never use my real email. Some aliases have rules to skip inbox and get tagged. For example register@domain skips inbox and get tagged Register. I only use that to register on sites. And well, they can be my guest spamming it, because I only check it if I expect to get a mail there. If an alias get spammed, I can just delete it. And if somehow my main account get spammed, I can create a new and move my aliases over. All in all a much better solution.
SpeedTouch is quite capable for upload QoS. I've experimented a bit on my own, and have almost solid shaping. The low priority queue drops packets like there was no tomorrow, but the realtime queue is.. well, solid. No packet loss, and no variance in ping.
Or, my theory, they could just have been lazy. Pseudocode:
ie = start_ie(window=hidden) ie.open_url("http://www.hotgrits.com/index.php?ref=AS24X2J") wait(60) ie.close() All the functionality of a web browser, almost none of the work. It would also have bonuses, like different browser ident strings, tracking cookies, and well.. being an actual browser.
N82 About screen : "This product is based on S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 software". I guess that mean that it's not a v3?
Also look here : http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/installs60v3.html - And I have that program installed. And as I said, that option was already turned to All. Note that this is an N series phone, and not an E series phone.
My N82 have been perfectly stable after newest software update. I had first firmware released before upgrading, and the phone restarted in some cases. As others mention here, grab the nokia updater and keep phone updated:)
it would be less work to give them a correct decryptor, than one that intentionally alters selective parts of a file. Correct decrypting will also give other people a reason to pay the ransom.
So all in all, I think I can trust them to not intentionally do something like that, since that is in both parties' interest.
I've just read the nytimes article, but I think I know how this works.
A bittorrent tracker just keeps a list of clients that have said they're interested in the file, and gives ip's to new clients. The researchers probably connected a client to see how many was connected (get the list of ip's), and not actually downloading or uploading. I will guess that this is the exact same thing that *AA does, and don't check if any of those ip's the tracker gives actually do trade data.
Further on, you can manually set your ip address in most torrent clients, which gets reported to the tracker. Putting 2 and 2 together, you set the ip to some victim's ip, connect, and when *AA vacuums the tracker for ip's, the tracker gives out the fake ip address. No need for advanced mumbo jumbo, just tell the tracker that's your ip, and it'll believe you and tell all its friends.
The bittorrent protocol specification can be found here, btw. Look under "Tracker Request Parmenters", at the "ip" field.
Now, do anyone know the IP address of some judge/lawyer's home networks?;)
There are a lot of naysayers about the video quality of a blueray compressed to 4gb in h264 format by "amateurs" as one comment called them..
Here is a screenshot from Spiderman 2 Blueray rip (You have to click the image to see full resolution), compressed to 4.37 gb (normal dvd size). As you see, the quality is quite good. And this is, as said, 4gb for the whole movie. Dual layer DVD can store 8 gb.
I was a video nerd earlier, and I have developed a good eye for compression artifacts, but I really really rarely see them on HD rips (when done well). The colors are sharp, no blocks even with lots of movement, the only thing I sometimes notice is that smooth color transitions sometimes are broken up (think the sky going from dark blue to black for example). To be honest, I see more comression artifacts on normal DVD's than I do on HD rips.
And now, when you have something to compare, please continue the discussion:)
NCO: We've thrown everything we got at them, and they're still coming! Commander: No.. Not everything.. But to unleash something like that, even if they are our enemies.. NCO: What do you mean? What could possibly be worse than our strategic nukes? Commander: Prepare.. Prepare a rocket. Put in the coordinates, and.. Load it with a space lawyer.
*NCO goes white in the face, unable to utter a word*
Get a mac. And no, I'm not talking about filevault here.
There is a small bug/feature with boot camp that will fail to recognize your linux installation as a windows boot camp install. So to boot linux, you have to hold the Alt button when booting the system, and then click on "Windows".
I noticed this on my mac mini, but I think all Leopard machines will work the same way. Now, add encryption to the linux partition, and what I initially thought of as an annoying bug is suddenly a nice customs evasion feature.
Yeah, I really like it too. Feels a bit surreal, tho. I'm going "oh, this is the joke. *reads* - no.. that doesn't look like a joke.." on every new story that appears, half expecting pink ponies to jump out of my screen every time.
It's kinda like Bill Gates standing saying that he, deep in his heart, really like linux, and use Ubuntu and Fedora at his computers at home. Heey, actually, that would have been a great April Fools if the big G did that. I think the discussion would be VERY interesting (as only about 1/4 would realize / acknowledge that it's a joke). Mad OSS priests frothing at the mouth, Microsofties claiming Armageddon, and snotty mac users proclaiming Steve is The Only True iGod.
The internet is a perfect place for griefing, because you can gloat about a person's suffering without experiencing the empathic response that a real, live, suffering human being might provoke. And, lets not forget, without experiencing the violent response that a real, live, suffering human being might produce.
Hear, hear! Some of these complaints are exactly the same I've noticed. I have had a mac mini for around 4 months now, and althrough the spotlight is good, the basic picture / video system is good (and works well with my phone over bluetooth), it is absolutely HORRIBLE to do any real work on. Especially working with the shell or writing something is fustrating, since just about every keyboard shortcut is changed, and it feels to me its more like "LETS DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!" rather than any practical considerations.
For example ctrl + - for start of line is changed to Mac + -, while typing {} and [] always take me 10 seconds trying to remember how that was done. The key combination for a unix pipe char.. Well, I found that once, after about 10 minutes of googling, but I don't remember what it was. Also, having a special key for @, replacing ', and moving that to where pipe usually is on a normal keyboard (this is on norwegian keyboard), is also pretty fustrating.
And I've yet to find a shell that lets me ssh to my linux boxes, and be able to use arrow keys in vim, and use backspace instead of ctrl+h. Annoyances, but it piles up. Oh, and insert key is gone, home and end don't work like I'm used to (usually they work the same as page up and page down..).
The start dock (or whatever its called) sort of pile up with programs, if I don't go around and exit them manually. And change anything of it? Good lord no! We made this system, it is perfect, so no need to change anything. Really. If it annoys you, its your fault. That's how I feel the developers have been thinking when making this system. Even windows is more configurable, and linux its more like "Hello, we have a nice default setup for you here, but if you're not happy we got these zillion other alternatives, all with good, extensive configuration options, so take your pick! If you feel that something is not right, and can't change it, tell us, and we'll have a look!".
Gah, this was a long post. I initially just wanted to post and say "yep, I feel the same", and all this came out. For the record, I have 1 winxp box, 1 osx box, and 3 linux boxes, plus dualboot laptop win/lin. I use all systems daily. xp for gaming, and those few windows only things, osx for just surfing the web a bit, handling my images / movies, email and music, and linux for when I have work to do (mostly programming/data processing or configuring something).
List of stuffs that is not standard on my machine, and that I have installed myself:
Opera Firefox BFilter (ad filtering proxy) Stickies (http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/) PuTTY (needed for some of my work, and used to connect to my server at home) Python (great for automating stuff) NX Client Notepad2 VIM Gimp Sumatra PDF (Because Adobe Reader 6 kills opera and firefox)
We do not have Administrator access, just ordinary user access, and stuff usually need to be installed under our user directory. Most of those tools are used daily.
In addition to discovering and refining his optical telescope videotaping technique, John has also discovered how to actually hear and record the sounds in real time coming from the particular craft he is videotaping. By carefully aligning a satellite dish receiver with his telescope, he has been able to record some very unusual and intriguing sound from the different spacecraft... How can you call these fakes?? He has even recorded sounds from them! Sound! From these space.. crafts.. which is.. in space.. which is famous for its inability to lead sounds.. clearly he is a misunderstood genius that have all these incredible new technologies which he stole from the aliens he is taking pictures of. Right.
Slashdot Mirror
It is correct that the signature was not verified correctly, but the software was the same as used in most airports.
From the article:
.. altering microchips so that they are accepted as genuine by Golden Reader, the standard software used by the International Civil Aviation Organisation to test them. It is also the software recommended for use at airports.
Further:
The Home Office has always argued that faked chips would be spotted at border checkpoints because they would not match key codes when checked against an international data-base. But only ten of the forty-five countries with e-passports have signed up to the Public Key Directory (PKD) code system, and only five are using it.
So the system seems to be good, its just the execution that is pants-on-head retarded. They have implented everything except the most important part, the public key exchange, and thus making the whole system moot.
I would guess that the software just greenlighs by default all passports that it doesn't have the country's public key for, with no checking.
http://www.joikuspot.com/ - For Symbian (Nokia) phones. Allows you to use your phone as a modem and share the web using the builtin WLAN, setting it up as an accesspoint.
Now that's awesomeness :)
Yes, Python (or a similar high level language - ruby, or even lua (which is used in many games, giving instant appeal) ) is perfect. Personally, I'm familiar with python, so that's what resources I will use in this post.
First of all : Think Python (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/) - An intro to computer programming, focusing on python.
Then PyGame (http://www.pygame.org/) - a good framework for making small games in python.
If web is more his deal rather than gaming, check out the Django framework (http://www.djangoproject.com/).
For gui you have wxWindows (or what its called now), and Boa Constructor, a cross platform RAD GUI python thingy (was quite buggy on non-windows when I tried it a few years ago, but could be pretty good now).
These links are my favorite python'ishies, and I think they would be a good start.
The thing with python is that its cross platform, so if he write a small game or something, he can easily show it to his friends, no matter what he made the game on, and what they're running :)
Yeah, my former gmail addy easily beat them, and all because of me using it one place, Joost.
I did not put that email addy in any other place for at least 4 days before, and within an hour after signing up at joost, I started getting spam, so I'm pretty sure that's where the email was leaked.
First page on that address shows 50 spam, from 7:29am to 11:12am. And that's what's not filtered. I have an autoreply filter and the google spam filter filtering out messages too. The email account is totally unusable. Quite a lot of it is replies, since spammers use my address as source address :(
Of course, that does make some interesting mails from time to time, like one that said "STOP SENDING ME SPAM OR I WILL HUNT DOWN AND KILL YOU", and one, which I particulary liked : "I don't have a penis I'm a girl & I'm 16" :D Dont think it helped tho.
Anyway, that email addy was abandoned, and I bought a domain and set up google mail for that. The trick I've done now is to have lots of aliases, and never use my real email. Some aliases have rules to skip inbox and get tagged. For example register@domain skips inbox and get tagged Register. I only use that to register on sites. And well, they can be my guest spamming it, because I only check it if I expect to get a mail there. If an alias get spammed, I can just delete it. And if somehow my main account get spammed, I can create a new and move my aliases over. All in all a much better solution.
SpeedTouch is quite capable for upload QoS. I've experimented a bit on my own, and have almost solid shaping. The low priority queue drops packets like there was no tomorrow, but the realtime queue is .. well, solid. No packet loss, and no variance in ping.
http://www.speedtouch.nl/docs/ConfigGuides/ConfigGuide_IPQoS.pdf - QoS config guide, the lowend routers don't have the web interface, but do have all the command line options. At least on those I've looked at.
ie.open_url("http://www.hotgrits.com/index.php?ref=AS24X2J")
wait(60)
ie.close() All the functionality of a web browser, almost none of the work.
It would also have bonuses, like different browser ident strings,
tracking cookies, and well.. being an actual browser.
N82 About screen : "This product is based on S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 software". I guess that mean that it's not a v3?
Also look here : http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/installs60v3.html - And I have that program installed. And as I said, that option was already turned to All. Note that this is an N series phone, and not an E series phone.
You can turn the "Signed required" off if you want. You will only get a warning on unsigned programs, but can still install no problem.
In fact, signed was turned off BY DEFAULT on my N82 phone. Go figure.
My N82 have been perfectly stable after newest software update. I had first firmware released before upgrading, and the phone restarted in some cases. As others mention here, grab the nokia updater and keep phone updated :)
it would be less work to give them a correct decryptor, than one that intentionally alters selective parts of a file. Correct decrypting will also give other people a reason to pay the ransom.
So all in all, I think I can trust them to not intentionally do something like that, since that is in both parties' interest.
I've just read the nytimes article, but I think I know how this works.
;)
A bittorrent tracker just keeps a list of clients that have said they're interested in the file, and gives ip's to new clients. The researchers probably connected a client to see how many was connected (get the list of ip's), and not actually downloading or uploading. I will guess that this is the exact same thing that *AA does, and don't check if any of those ip's the tracker gives actually do trade data.
Further on, you can manually set your ip address in most torrent clients, which gets reported to the tracker. Putting 2 and 2 together, you set the ip to some victim's ip, connect, and when *AA vacuums the tracker for ip's, the tracker gives out the fake ip address. No need for advanced mumbo jumbo, just tell the tracker that's your ip, and it'll believe you and tell all its friends.
The bittorrent protocol specification can be found here, btw. Look under "Tracker Request Parmenters", at the "ip" field.
Now, do anyone know the IP address of some judge/lawyer's home networks?
Maybe landscape can help you with that?
There are a lot of naysayers about the video quality of a blueray compressed to 4gb in h264 format by "amateurs" as one comment called them..
:)
Here is a screenshot from Spiderman 2 Blueray rip (You have to click the image to see full resolution), compressed to 4.37 gb (normal dvd size). As you see, the quality is quite good. And this is, as said, 4gb for the whole movie. Dual layer DVD can store 8 gb.
I was a video nerd earlier, and I have developed a good eye for compression artifacts, but I really really rarely see them on HD rips (when done well). The colors are sharp, no blocks even with lots of movement, the only thing I sometimes notice is that smooth color transitions sometimes are broken up (think the sky going from dark blue to black for example). To be honest, I see more comression artifacts on normal DVD's than I do on HD rips.
And now, when you have something to compare, please continue the discussion
Yeah, I can already see the movie.
*Aliens are attacking earth*
NCO: We've thrown everything we got at them, and they're still coming!
Commander: No.. Not everything.. But to unleash something like that, even if they are our enemies..
NCO: What do you mean? What could possibly be worse than our strategic nukes?
Commander: Prepare.. Prepare a rocket. Put in the coordinates, and.. Load it with a space lawyer.
*NCO goes white in the face, unable to utter a word*
Get a mac. And no, I'm not talking about filevault here.
There is a small bug/feature with boot camp that will fail to recognize your linux installation as a windows boot camp install. So to boot linux, you have to hold the Alt button when booting the system, and then click on "Windows".
I noticed this on my mac mini, but I think all Leopard machines will work the same way. Now, add encryption to the linux partition, and what I initially thought of as an annoying bug is suddenly a nice customs evasion feature.
Both of them are pretty easy to do.
Leak it anonymously: use one (or several) of the loads of proxies out there, an anonymous remailer, or use tor.
Authentication method: Get GPG or similar, make a key just for that, sign it, and store the private key someplace safe.
That should give you good enough anonymity, and if needed, authentication.
Of course, if he is opening at random, he have 1/3 chance of actually revealing the car, thus giving you better odds.
Or am I missing something here?
Yeah, I really like it too. Feels a bit surreal, tho. I'm going "oh, this is the joke. *reads* - no.. that doesn't look like a joke.." on every new story that appears, half expecting pink ponies to jump out of my screen every time.
It's kinda like Bill Gates standing saying that he, deep in his heart, really like linux, and use Ubuntu and Fedora at his computers at home. Heey, actually, that would have been a great April Fools if the big G did that. I think the discussion would be VERY interesting (as only about 1/4 would realize / acknowledge that it's a joke). Mad OSS priests frothing at the mouth, Microsofties claiming Armageddon, and snotty mac users proclaiming Steve is The Only True iGod.
I thought that was the best one. But now it's only showing that one :(
And the obvious witty remark:
"Hey, no need to diss Windows ME like that"
Hear, hear! Some of these complaints are exactly the same I've noticed. I have had a mac mini for around 4 months now, and althrough the spotlight is good, the basic picture / video system is good (and works well with my phone over bluetooth), it is absolutely HORRIBLE to do any real work on. Especially working with the shell or writing something is fustrating, since just about every keyboard shortcut is changed, and it feels to me its more like "LETS DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!" rather than any practical considerations.
For example ctrl + - for start of line is changed to Mac + -, while typing {} and [] always take me 10 seconds trying to remember how that was done. The key combination for a unix pipe char.. Well, I found that once, after about 10 minutes of googling, but I don't remember what it was. Also, having a special key for @, replacing ', and moving that to where pipe usually is on a normal keyboard (this is on norwegian keyboard), is also pretty fustrating.
And I've yet to find a shell that lets me ssh to my linux boxes, and be able to use arrow keys in vim, and use backspace instead of ctrl+h. Annoyances, but it piles up. Oh, and insert key is gone, home and end don't work like I'm used to (usually they work the same as page up and page down..).
The start dock (or whatever its called) sort of pile up with programs, if I don't go around and exit them manually. And change anything of it? Good lord no! We made this system, it is perfect, so no need to change anything. Really. If it annoys you, its your fault. That's how I feel the developers have been thinking when making this system. Even windows is more configurable, and linux its more like "Hello, we have a nice default setup for you here, but if you're not happy we got these zillion other alternatives, all with good, extensive configuration options, so take your pick! If you feel that something is not right, and can't change it, tell us, and we'll have a look!".
Gah, this was a long post. I initially just wanted to post and say "yep, I feel the same", and all this came out. For the record, I have 1 winxp box, 1 osx box, and 3 linux boxes, plus dualboot laptop win/lin. I use all systems daily. xp for gaming, and those few windows only things, osx for just surfing the web a bit, handling my images / movies, email and music, and linux for when I have work to do (mostly programming/data processing or configuring something).
Lets see..
List of stuffs that is not standard on my machine, and that I have installed myself:
Opera
Firefox
BFilter (ad filtering proxy)
Stickies (http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/)
PuTTY (needed for some of my work, and used to connect to my server at home)
Python (great for automating stuff)
NX Client
Notepad2
VIM
Gimp
Sumatra PDF (Because Adobe Reader 6 kills opera and firefox)
We do not have Administrator access, just ordinary user access, and stuff usually need to be installed under our user directory. Most of those tools are used daily.
Life imitates art it seems :)
It's good entertainment tho