I'm working on a similar project (well, if you consider trying to raise the money to be "working"). Being a professional photographer, I want professional results, and that means remote preview through the camera via USB (why oh why don't prosumer cameras come with FireWire?) and of course USB craps out after about 5 meters.
I would personally would try to go wireless instead of trying to pull a 1000' cable with the baloon. You could plug your USB cable to a very small computer (Soekris) and have that computer send the JPG preview wirelessly using 802.11b. You could see the previews with a laptop computer using a 802.11b card.
That's an interesting project, good luck with it, GFK's
Taking mores law into account, it such a machine would cost about $25k today, and it would take a couple days to crack one phone call.
Remember that you're talking about the NSA, the organisation that has the most powerfull supercomputers in the world, and hires the greatest number of mathematicians in the world. It's kind of unfair to compare them to the EFF... I personally believe that they can crack DES in real time, and even maibe RSA.
gfilion wrote:
Mac is the Harley-Davidson of computers.
CAIMLAS wrote:
So what are you saying, exactly, by this signature? Are you truely intending to say that macs are stylish and trendy, but don't hold a match to their competition in terms of performance, quality, and innovation? Surely you must be kidding.
I came up with that tought when watching a documentary on Discovery channel about the design of the new Harley V-Rod. The way they design their bike really striked me as being similar to the way Apple design a Mac. They have a vision, and they design every part of the thing to be in accordance with the vision.
You can buy a perfectly good Honda bike that will perform its duties, but some people want to buy a Harley because they love the spirit of the bike. I have the same feeling about the Mac and PCs, I could buy a PC that would do everything I want it to do, but I prefer to buy a Mac because I love the its spirit.
GFK's PS: I don't know much about bikes; but I saw a biker once who was wearing a T-Shirt with "If you can read this, the chick felt down" written on its back. That must be worth something.
Apple, as a company, represents an ALTERNATIVE, and therefore they try to maintain alternative hardware choices: SCSI over IDE, ATI over NVIDIA, USB over PCI, the one button & metakey paradigm, Flat Panel over CRT -- and the big one, RISC over CISC.
I don't want to nitpick but, well okay, I want to nitpick. Apple has been using IDE drives for years. I got a beige G3 and it has IDE drives. And also I would say that Apple proposes Firewire against USB, rather than USB against PCI, but I sure everyone understood what you meant anyway.
how do we prevent terrorist from using this kind of stuff ?
Dammit, a bunch of teenagers with box cutters have fly jumbo jets in the WTC. They had about 200 times more explosive in these jets than in one of these missiles and their equipement cost was box cutters and airplane tickets. Why would they want to build one of those missiles?
You have to solve the weakest link, not the sexy link.
Would it be a good idea for Al-jazeera to publish their content on freenet? Their articles would then be immune to any kind of censorship like they claim they are victim of.
What I mean is theya re talking about using the 802.11 protocol for communication on the Amateur Bands. This means they will use a Ham Band like 2m, 70cm or maybe the 1.2 GHz band. They are not going to be using the SAME band as WiFi uses.
What I'm worried about is that they're talking about implementing the 802.11b protocol, which is the annexe B of the 802.11 protocol. This annexe specifies the specific frequencies to use. If they want to implement 802.11 over their own freqs (2m, 70 cm, etc) they should not implement annexe B.
It's maibe just a typo or an honest mistake, but it may also mean that they don't what their doing...
Okay, this is a little bit offtopic but here it is anyway.
In Canada, the gun registry system was supposed to cost only 2 million dollars, because gun owners were suposed to pay 30$/year for their permit. After three years, it has cost 600 millions and not even all guns have been registered.
At 2 millions dollars the lifes_saved:dollars ratio was pretty high, but at 600 millions (and counting), it would have been better to invest it in hospitals or something like that...
What the attacker is going is illegal, and the police investigators should do ther job.
The fact that they don't have enough technical expertise is not an excuse, they should hire someone technically savvy to help the investigators prepare their warrants and analyse their logs. But often they say that a simple threat is not enough to justify hiring a technician. In that case, you should tell them to consider this as a threat by (snail) mail, they don't need any technical knowledge to investigate this.
What you friend should do, at the very least, is to print a copy of the arrassing texts and handle them to the police investigators. You can also tell them who you suspect is doing this. More often than others the investigators will meet with the suspect attacker and they'll often be able to make him stop just by showing that their involved and that they will take the investigation further if the threats don't stop.
You'd be surprised to see how much social engeneering is important in these kind of things, much more than technical knowledge. The investigators are pretty much experts in social engeneering, so they shouldn't be affraid to take this case because it's on the web.
So tell your friend to print the texts and handle them to the police, if they refuse to take the case, ask to speak with the police chief.
They have an awful lot of bandwidth to transmit so the messages should be pretty "bursty" and fast unless they're downloading entire web pages and such.
They're using HF, which is often used for CW (morse code), they have a very narrow bandwidth.
My father was hired by a publisher to translate some chapters of a physics book. They provided him with a few copies of the book along with theses instructions:
Don't use any formatting when writing your text, no bold, no italics, nothing. When there's a figure, place [FIGURE ##] where ## is the number of the figure. I repeat, do not do any formating, we won't accept your document if it's formated.
I'm pretty sure that they we're taking this unformated text and transforming it into docbook.
So you may want to do this: ask your non-technical people to write unformated text, and hire a technical person (programer) to do the markup.
Wow, it's the most interesting article I've read this summer. I really suggest people who are interested in security to take the time to read it entirely; it's well worth it.
A hacker now just has to do some more work. Instead of just the DNS misdirection, they now need to create a checksum for their bad/malicious code. The updater will query their fake update server for the now forged checksum and see it matches the fake update package that was retrieved from the same hacked up server.
Ever heared about public key cryptography? They sign their packages with their private key, and their public key is hard coded in the software. It's not just a checksum, it's a cryptographically signed checksum. It's pretty safe.
To sign a checksum for his bad code, the attacker needs to crack Apple's private key. Which can take a few weeks if you're the NSA, but a few hundreds years if you're anyone else.
In one of our course, we had to do a network game in Java and we decided to use UDP. When we where using it in the university Labs (130 boxens, 100 Mbps) we had a packet loss of about 5%. Mainly caused by ethernet collisions I guess.
It is a good thing to remember that genetic algorithms are not garanteed to converge (generate the best layout). Also, the author doesn't seem to make the best layouts reproduce; it seems to me that this is one of the key features of genetic algorithms, so he may be missing some good layouts out there.
For those interested in genetic programming, OpenBeagle, a very good genetic programming program is available at http://www.gel.ulaval.ca/~beagle/ It's made in C++ and it's LGPLed.
Programmers have a tendency to always blame the user of being clueless, not making enough efforts, etc.
I personnally think that the user is ALWAYS right. If a user has problems with an operation, the problem is with the program. The program/computer should serve the human, not the other way around.
The problem is that a program that is easy to use is very hard to create. You can easily double or triple your creation time if you want to make your program intuitive to use.
Linux is a good example of this, no one beside computer savvy people and programmers are able/willing to make it work. Just today, I spent two hours figuring how to make debian recognise my NIC. Windows has a better interface, but has still lots of problems when it comes to ease of use. IMHO, MacOS is the most user friendly computer. I rarely need to read the manual when using a Mac program, everything is intuitive.
I know that some people will flame me saying that Mac are for weenies because they are easy to use and Unix rules since less than 0.01% of the population is able to make it work. I'll only answer that for me, being hard to use is a problem, and being easy to use is a quality. Better yet, being easy to use and versatile is the best you can have. But these things are hard to program...
But, what's the practical application? Surely traffic analysis makes stuff like this pretty lame for routine use? Yes, you can hide one message, or a few, but how do you have a conversation using this kind of technology and not stick out for emailing huge JPEGs back and forth?
What do you do? Have a competition to photoshop images? Run a porn site?
Simple, post a pr0n picture (with hidden message) to usenet and put a subject like "Any1 have more pictures of her!", your correspondant gets the message, make another pr0n picture (with hidden response) and post it to usenet with subject "Requested: a picture of that chix, request more" and so on.
I see it everyday on pr0n newsgroups, err, no that I go there everyday, but errr, well gotta go!
The phrase "Hi'tuk Mi'jobb" is Arabic for "I'm killing you, but I really want to kill your children in the name of Allah. Allah permits me to kill children in order to secure my place in heaven!"
Wow! Arabic should be considered as a compression method, it's definitly better than gzip! 8)
Slashdot Mirror
here's your cheap unstoppable delivery device.
Dude, be serious, even the Iraqi farmer with 100 years old riffle could shoot this plane down.
I also found this when searching for the farmer: Comical Ali on DVD. hehehe
I'm working on a similar project (well, if you consider trying to raise the money to be "working"). Being a professional photographer, I want professional results, and that means remote preview through the camera via USB (why oh why don't prosumer cameras come with FireWire?) and of course USB craps out after about 5 meters.
I would personally would try to go wireless instead of trying to pull a 1000' cable with the baloon. You could plug your USB cable to a very small computer (Soekris) and have that computer send the JPG preview wirelessly using 802.11b. You could see the previews with a laptop computer using a 802.11b card.
That's an interesting project, good luck with it,
GFK's
Taking mores law into account, it such a machine would cost about $25k today, and it would take a couple days to crack one phone call.
Remember that you're talking about the NSA, the organisation that has the most powerfull supercomputers in the world, and hires the greatest number of mathematicians in the world. It's kind of unfair to compare them to the EFF... I personally believe that they can crack DES in real time, and even maibe RSA.
Hire a big fat ugly biker to go at that compagny and tell them to pay up right now. Works all the times!
Then you give $400 to the biker and everyone is happy.
Have a nice day,
GFK's
gfilion wrote:
Mac is the Harley-Davidson of computers.
CAIMLAS wrote:
So what are you saying, exactly, by this signature? Are you truely intending to say that macs are stylish and trendy, but don't hold a match to their competition in terms of performance, quality, and innovation? Surely you must be kidding.
I came up with that tought when watching a documentary on Discovery channel about the design of the new Harley V-Rod. The way they design their bike really striked me as being similar to the way Apple design a Mac. They have a vision, and they design every part of the thing to be in accordance with the vision.
You can buy a perfectly good Honda bike that will perform its duties, but some people want to buy a Harley because they love the spirit of the bike. I have the same feeling about the Mac and PCs, I could buy a PC that would do everything I want it to do, but I prefer to buy a Mac because I love the its spirit.
GFK's
PS: I don't know much about bikes; but I saw a biker once who was wearing a T-Shirt with "If you can read this, the chick felt down" written on its back. That must be worth something.
I don't know why, but I'm really attracted by this scooter.
Those germans sure know about marketing...
GFK's
Apple, as a company, represents an ALTERNATIVE, and therefore they try to maintain alternative hardware choices: SCSI over IDE, ATI over NVIDIA, USB over PCI, the one button & metakey paradigm, Flat Panel over CRT -- and the big one, RISC over CISC.
I don't want to nitpick but, well okay, I want to nitpick. Apple has been using IDE drives for years. I got a beige G3 and it has IDE drives. And also I would say that Apple proposes Firewire against USB, rather than USB against PCI, but I sure everyone understood what you meant anyway.
how do we prevent terrorist from using this kind of stuff ?
Dammit, a bunch of teenagers with box cutters have fly jumbo jets in the WTC. They had about 200 times more explosive in these jets than in one of these missiles and their equipement cost was box cutters and airplane tickets. Why would they want to build one of those missiles?
You have to solve the weakest link, not the sexy link.
Now I'm putting my aluminium foil beanie back on.
Would it be a good idea for Al-jazeera to publish their content on freenet? Their articles would then be immune to any kind of censorship like they claim they are victim of.
I was unable to find the motorola oncore gps board you're referring to at bgmicro.com. Am I in the right place?
It's available on the Google cache but with a big "Sorry sold out" over it... 8( Maibe you could find it somewhere else.
GFK's
What I mean is theya re talking about using the 802.11 protocol for communication on the Amateur Bands. This means they will use a Ham Band like 2m, 70cm or maybe the 1.2 GHz band. They are not going to be using the SAME band as WiFi uses.
What I'm worried about is that they're talking about implementing the 802.11b protocol, which is the annexe B of the 802.11 protocol. This annexe specifies the specific frequencies to use. If they want to implement 802.11 over their own freqs (2m, 70 cm, etc) they should not implement annexe B.
It's maibe just a typo or an honest mistake, but it may also mean that they don't what their doing...
GFK's
Okay, this is a little bit offtopic but here it is anyway.
In Canada, the gun registry system was supposed to cost only 2 million dollars, because gun owners were suposed to pay 30$/year for their permit. After three years, it has cost 600 millions and not even all guns have been registered.
At 2 millions dollars the lifes_saved:dollars ratio was pretty high, but at 600 millions (and counting), it would have been better to invest it in hospitals or something like that...
Ref: http://cbc.ca/storyview/CBC/2002/12/03/auditor0212 03
GFK's
What the attacker is going is illegal, and the police investigators should do ther job.
The fact that they don't have enough technical expertise is not an excuse, they should hire someone technically savvy to help the investigators prepare their warrants and analyse their logs. But often they say that a simple threat is not enough to justify hiring a technician. In that case, you should tell them to consider this as a threat by (snail) mail, they don't need any technical knowledge to investigate this.
What you friend should do, at the very least, is to print a copy of the arrassing texts and handle them to the police investigators. You can also tell them who you suspect is doing this. More often than others the investigators will meet with the suspect attacker and they'll often be able to make him stop just by showing that their involved and that they will take the investigation further if the threats don't stop.
You'd be surprised to see how much social engeneering is important in these kind of things, much more than technical knowledge. The investigators are pretty much experts in social engeneering, so they shouldn't be affraid to take this case because it's on the web.
So tell your friend to print the texts and handle them to the police, if they refuse to take the case, ask to speak with the police chief.
GFK's
I see the message but the PGP key fingerprint does not match his key on the server for some reason. (Not that the meassage isn't accurate.)
It does match key 0xD48A5892 on keyserver.pgp.com.
They have an awful lot of bandwidth to transmit so the messages should be pretty "bursty" and fast unless they're downloading entire web pages and such.
They're using HF, which is often used for CW (morse code), they have a very narrow bandwidth.
My father was hired by a publisher to translate some chapters of a physics book. They provided him with a few copies of the book along with theses instructions:
Don't use any formatting when writing your text, no bold, no italics, nothing. When there's a figure, place [FIGURE ##] where ## is the number of the figure. I repeat, do not do any formating, we won't accept your document if it's formated.
I'm pretty sure that they we're taking this unformated text and transforming it into docbook.
So you may want to do this: ask your non-technical people to write unformated text, and hire a technical person (programer) to do the markup.
I'd kill for the dual-head setup depicted on that page.
Yeah, when I saw it Dude, I think I filled the cup.
GFK's
Wow, it's the most interesting article I've read this summer. I really suggest people who are interested in security to take the time to read it entirely; it's well worth it.
GFK's
A hacker now just has to do some more work. Instead of just the DNS misdirection, they now need to create a checksum for their bad/malicious code. The updater will query their fake update server for the now forged checksum and see it matches the fake update package that was retrieved from the same hacked up server.
Ever heared about public key cryptography? They sign their packages with their private key, and their public key is hard coded in the software. It's not just a checksum, it's a cryptographically signed checksum. It's pretty safe.
To sign a checksum for his bad code, the attacker needs to crack Apple's private key. Which can take a few weeks if you're the NSA, but a few hundreds years if you're anyone else.
Yep, I did.
In one of our course, we had to do a network game in Java and we decided to use UDP. When we where using it in the university Labs (130 boxens, 100 Mbps) we had a packet loss of about 5%. Mainly caused by ethernet collisions I guess.
It is a good thing to remember that genetic algorithms are not garanteed to converge (generate the best layout). Also, the author doesn't seem to make the best layouts reproduce; it seems to me that this is one of the key features of genetic algorithms, so he may be missing some good layouts out there.
For those interested in genetic programming, OpenBeagle, a very good genetic programming program is available at http://www.gel.ulaval.ca/~beagle/ It's made in C++ and it's LGPLed.
Programmers have a tendency to always blame the user of being clueless, not making enough efforts, etc.
I personnally think that the user is ALWAYS right. If a user has problems with an operation, the problem is with the program. The program/computer should serve the human, not the other way around.
The problem is that a program that is easy to use is very hard to create. You can easily double or triple your creation time if you want to make your program intuitive to use.
Linux is a good example of this, no one beside computer savvy people and programmers are able/willing to make it work. Just today, I spent two hours figuring how to make debian recognise my NIC. Windows has a better interface, but has still lots of problems when it comes to ease of use. IMHO, MacOS is the most user friendly computer. I rarely need to read the manual when using a Mac program, everything is intuitive.
I know that some people will flame me saying that Mac are for weenies because they are easy to use and Unix rules since less than 0.01% of the population is able to make it work. I'll only answer that for me, being hard to use is a problem, and being easy to use is a quality. Better yet, being easy to use and versatile is the best you can have. But these things are hard to program...
GFK's
He he he, I'm not surprised. Those guys at Radio-Canada tend to watch CNN and repeat what they hear. Talk about true journalism.
But, what's the practical application? Surely traffic analysis makes stuff like this pretty lame for routine use? Yes, you can hide one message, or a few, but how do you have a conversation using this kind of technology and not stick out for emailing huge JPEGs back and forth? What do you do? Have a competition to photoshop images? Run a porn site?
Simple, post a pr0n picture (with hidden message) to usenet and put a subject like "Any1 have more pictures of her!", your correspondant gets the message, make another pr0n picture (with hidden response) and post it to usenet with subject "Requested: a picture of that chix, request more" and so on.
I see it everyday on pr0n newsgroups, err, no that I go there everyday, but errr, well gotta go!
The phrase "Hi'tuk Mi'jobb" is Arabic for "I'm killing you, but I really want to kill your children in the name of Allah. Allah permits me to kill children in order to secure my place in heaven!"
Wow! Arabic should be considered as a compression method, it's definitly better than gzip! 8)