the over-the-shoulder-attack... That will work even WITH masked passwords, which I found out when a woman watched me use my debit card. Lot of good it did me for the numbers to not be displayed when she simply had to look at what keys I was pressing. In the case of ATMs, masking it "security theater".
When I enter PIN's or other private information on a digital pad, I make it a habit of using 3 fingers (2nd, 3rd, 4th fingers) and just move it between the 3 rows of the numeric keypad. It's not as inconvenient or gauche as covering the keys (and your other hand might be busy covering up the screen anyway), and at least they can't tell the difference between 1/2/3, 4/5/6, or 7/8/9. If the digit 0 exists in the number, I will cover the keys 7/0/9, and also use the same finger pattern for the other numbers so 1/5/3 look the same, 4/8/6 look the same, etc. (This refers to a phone-type keypad with 1-2-3 at the top. For calculator-type keypads with 7-8-9 at the top, the same applies, but for different digits, of course.)
Good security involves locking out the user after a certain number of attempts in order to stop a "dictionary attack". I just had to reset a users PW twice this afternoon because she locked herself out of her account. Sure, it's extra hassle but the security is worth it.
My own favourite, about which I've posted before, is to gradually (but exponentially) increase the delay between entries, so after 1 failure, you can retry in 1 second; after 2 failures, 3 seconds. The third failure locks it for 9 seconds, and by the time the brute-forcer is on the 5th time, he'll be waiting almost a minute and a half (and rapidly increasing --you can only do 9 tries the first hour).
I'm not really sure how to login as root in Knoppix.
Someone correct me if I remember wrongly, but the key to Knoppix is that there is a root account, with a password that no one knows; and there's the usual user account ("knoppix") which has admin rights and no password. So you type in a command-line: "sudo password" to set your own password for root, and then "su" to switch-user to root. That will give whatever rights you need.
What he was referring to is the "burn-in" plasma screens have. Leave it on CNN all day (with the CNN logo in the bottom corner) and then change it to something else, and you will still be able to see that CNN logo. It issue with static images is how they effect future images, not in quality.
Wow. That sounds just as bad as CRT screens. Even if one is not watching logo'd content, then, but (say) plays from some DVD player and decides to display the time permanently in the corner, then that would cause burn-in on the screen? Even if the digits are changing, the first "1" from "10:00" to "12:59" would be there for 3 hours, or 10 hours if the owner happens to set it for military time; and even if not, the colon would be permanent.
Presumably there's a reason why someone would use plasma over, LCD, then? Plasma has more contrast? Or is it just some early thinscreen technology that is better than CRT but has been obsolete by LCD?
I was tempted to label you troll, but there is a chance you are not being purposefully obtuse.
Plasma is for people who will purchase Blu-Ray movies, Apple TV HD content or having something to display 1080 content and... watch movies! Yes, nothing else. Watch movies on Plasma and enjoy 10K+ black levels, 12 bit per channel colour with high end enhancements dedicated to enhance moving content (which is, movies).
Plasma isn't even suitable for people who keeps watching logo"ed content like mainstream TV channels, talk shows etc.
Please clarify. Do you mean that plasma has lower resolution which is not noticeable when watching changing video but becomes apparent with static images? When you say logo"ed content [sic], do you mean that the logo is static and one would notice the poor resolution? Also, it sounds like you're saying an advantage of plasma is the well-defined colours, correct?
For me, non-native English speaker, "google" meant nothing. Yeah, I know it's a misspelling for "goggle"
No, "Google" is a misspelling of "googol". (That's why the Chinese version is called "Baidu", which means "googol".) Actually the word came from the founder's baby daughter (not sure if Sergey's or Larry's), but the founder remembered that the word had a meaning so he went with that.
To be vulnerable as an interactive ssh user you would have to ignore 100,000 aborted sessions to expose 14 bits of plaintext, I think I would notice, and block the attacker.
What you say is true.
However, who says SSH has to be interactive? What about rsync backups over SSH? Automated connections that use SSH? Basically, anything and everything is tunnelled through SSH, so this is huge. If the attacker has time and you have a network of, say, 100 machines that initiate 1000 SSH sessions a day, you could have a breach in a day. If the attacker has a few weeks to work undetected, you could have a huge breach and have no idea because you're basking in the false security of working in SSH. Think you'd notice that?
I, too, use a Citi credit card which lets me generate virtual credit card numbers on the fly. Very handy. Set your own credit limit (up to your max) and expiry date (2-12 months from now). Once that credit card is charged once, only the same merchant can use it again.
Recently I bought something on the Internet. It would cost $78, so I created a virtual card with a $90 credit limit and submitted that. I went through the purchase on the web, but I wasn't sure it was cmoplete; the final web page gave me an "invoice" but I wasn't sure that it was a receipt. Had I finished making my purchase, or was I seeing some javascript error because I was using Firefox on Linux instead of IE on Windows? Undaunted, I just went through the purchase a second time to make sure (this time being laxer with NoScript restrictions). I had no fear that I would accidentally make a second $78 purchase, since the card was only good for $90. If my first purchase worked, well and good, and the second purchase would automatically fail. If my first purchase failed, then maybe the second purchase would work.
Very handy.
Does anyone else know any other credit card issuer that does this? I used to have a MBNA card that did this, but MBNA got swallowed up by Bank of America and I don't know if the BoA has virtual credit card numbers.
Okay, I feel really stupid now. After requesting that moderators mod up the GP post, I realize that I actually have mod points. Which I can use on any Slashdot article. Except this one, now.:P
If you manage to protect government secrets for 50 years - even if this involves a $2 padlock and a footlocker - the security can be upgraded at any point to a higher level suitable for current threats. Cyber security on the other hand is only as good as its weakest expression over those 50 years. Expose a rot13 copy of a file even one time and it doesn't matter if you later re-encrypt the file using the NSA's latest and greatest algorithm.
"Torrent was EXACTLY the word I was looking for. Thank you, The Economist!" If you think that happened by accident, you don't read The Economist regularly. That's exactly the sort of dry wit their writers use.
Agree, especially since the writer is savvy enough to build his own media centre with Ubuntu and Boxee. He knew exactly what he was writing, and I'm sure the editors did, too. For all we know, the writer probably reads Slashdot.
Okay, Economist-correspondent-writer-in-Japan, reply to my post and prove me right! (Or at least someone pretending to be him reply to my post and make me look good.:) )
Kubuntu is KDE4.2? Thanks for the warning!
on
Ubuntu 9.04 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So, I'm a die-hard KDE user. I'm all excited about the new release! I can't wait to upgrade to a KDE that's actually useful as opposed to the get-lost-this-is-for-developers-only version. So I check out the release web page, and I see that there are a few known issues here:
Connection to non-broadcasting (hidden SSID) wireless networks with the network-manager widget isn't possible Bug 330811
Network Manager does not connect to some networks Bug 339313
Network Manager is not added to the panel on upgrades Bug 349066
KPackageKit (which is now the default package manager for Kubuntu Jaunty) doesn't support installations which require a removal or updates which require additional software. The packages to be removed / installed will be shown as blocked. Bug 342671
Kmail sieve functionality is buggy and causes CPU hang. You shouldn't use it at the moment.
WTF?? Wireless doesn't work? Package manager doesn't work!? Kmail doesn't work!?? Okay, you may be saying, "It's not that it doesn't work, it's that certain functions with certain applications in certain circumstances don't work." Umm, but it worked before, and now with the newer version it stops working? Okay, network manager only fails to connect to some networks. I mean, who cares, right? As long as your network is not one of those "some". It only fails if the network is hidden. I mean, what's the infinitesimal chance that you would actually hide your network SSID, right? KPackageKit works some of the time!? I don't care if it's "most" of the time. How would you like it if you bought a product that worked "most" of the time? It's not as if this is some bleeding edge version. It's KDE 4.2 already. And, sitting right next to it is a perfectly functional KDE 3.5 that people have been using for ages. Why Kubuntu being released with so many issues? What were those Kubuntu distro managers thinking!? In an effort to find out, I browsed some bug discussion pages. One person said: "Maybe we should switch back to knetworkmanager as the default network manager because I don't think this problem will be fixed shortly. knetworkmanager doesn't look as nice as the plasma widget, but can handle hidden aps and works fine with kubuntu." But another one says, "This won't be possible for two reasons. First, the final release is only weeks away. It is way to late to make an intrusive change like that. Second, I have heard the developers say that there is no room on the CD left for the KDE3 libraries that would be necessary to run NetworkManager. Hopefully, KNetworkManager4 will have been released and/or the bugs in the plasmoid will have been fixed in time for Karmic." Umm, so, translation: we have to use software that works "most" of the time instead of a perfectly functioning networking piece of software, whose only disadvantage is that it is not as aesthetically pleasing, because
it's too late for us to realize that our aesthetically pleasing software is actually dysfunctional. Gotta release EARLY, release OFTEN, release ANYTHING EVEN IF IT DOESN'T WORK!
Our not-so-perfectly working system takes up too much room to fit the system that's been working fine for the past 2 release cycles while we were working on this KDE4 mess.
Our solution is to HOPE that MAYBE in the next release, things will be fixed.
This attitude of "yeah, it's buggy --we'll just get it out there, get some users to beta-test it for us (Surprise! YOU'VE been selected to beta-test OUR buggy software!) and just tell people to upgrade" makes me wonder whether the KDE developers are trying to update their resumes for a job hunt at Microsoft. "My software engineering skills include: successfully releasing piece-of-crap software and fo
They've been calling HTML "programming" for 10 years. *sigh*
Tell me about it. I want to tell them, "Yeah, and I programmed my word processor to print out my essay." But then they probably wouldn't know what a word processor was.
Slightly OT: an interesting doomsday scenario was predicted in the sci-fi thriller novel Icefire, by Reeves-Stevens, where a rogue faction in the government of a large country detonates a bunch of bombs around the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf to detach it from land, and then detonate a big blast above it, in effect slapping the ice shelf into the Antarctic Ocean and creating a tsunami that threatens to wipe out the Pacific Rim --Hawaii, California, Japan, etc. It's a fast-paced novel about how the protagonists try to outrace the tsunami wave, which will take most of a day to get to the Pacific Rim, and how they try to warn various incredulous government organizations about how big the danger is, etc.
Oops, waitaminnit, that's the Ross Ice Shelf, not the Wilkins Ice Shelf. Sorry, wrong shelf.
Anyway, worth a read on your next flight that doesn't have WiFi to keep you occupied.
Ever notice how just about every contract/eula has some statement to the effect of "we reserve the right to change these terms at any time without notice"?... Of course, they'll do everything in their power to prevent you from noticing the changes.
Agreed! While I still haven't figured out what to do about such notices on paper, I decided to do something about the electronic equivalent where (for example) every time I pay my cell phone bill online, they have a tiny scrolling window with the Terms & Conditions (T&C) with the "accept" and "reject" buttons.
Of course, if you don't actually check, you don't realize what a huge bunch of text there is within the tiny scrolling window. And since I pay the bill monthly, I'm not about to wade through all that text each time to see if they added a "and you owe us your first-born son" clause or something.
I wrote a quick shell script to make a comparison. Now whenever such T&C text shows up, I select the text with my mouse and run the script, which pulls text from the clipboard and compares it to a bunch of text files in a directory (which contain T&C from various web sites, services, etc). It will identify which file contains the old version of the T&C, and check if there are any changes. If there are, it will alert you.
So far I haven't found any service trying to sneak in changes yet, but I'm going to keep my guard up.
If you're interested in the script, I put it in this entry in my journal. Constructive criticism welcome. GPL.
you don't know package management pain till you use a package manager you have to first setup (or it will only install packages from the install CDs)
Tell me about it. My favourite (not!) time was when I couldn't use the CD drive: it wouldn't eject because it was "still in use by another program". Trying to figure out what program had failed to release the CD drive, I saw on the web that the "lsof" command could give me the info I wanted. But "lsof" was not installed by default, so I told the "urpmi" program to go install it. It said: "Please insert Mandrake CD #1 into CD drive."
That was Mandrake 9. Mandrake 10 was where I jumped over to Ubuntu, and I never installed anything named "Mandriva" on any of my computers.
I'm sure Mandriva is much improved now, and PCLinuxOS is winning awards, I hear. But it doesn't matter that much to me now.
...including the ultimate destroyer of productivity: Battle for Wesnoth!
I've fiddled with Wesnoth before. Are you sure it's as much of a productivity-sucker as Freeciv?
I tried Freeciv after reading this Slashdot article about using strategy games to make you smarter, and have spent countless hours exercising the neural connections in my cranium. There's an incredible amount of planning involved, in order to coordinate all the units' movement and production so that they all converge simultaneously on a single enemy city (say) and crush it.
It got to be complex enough that I had to start recording my plans and thoughts in a text file with different sections for different parts of the map, with comments like "Let's attack here with my battleship! Oh, wait, the battleship needs to go elsewhere to prepare for an assault in 2 turns." Sometimes it would take half an hour or more to make a turn, and on more than one occasion I ended up writing comments like, "Hey, what's this transport doing here? I already said before that I planned to move it over there. Did I forget to move it? Oh, wait, this is still the same turn."
The planning makes a difference, though. When you step into the gutted enemy capital city and take it over, it looks like it just happened that one turn, but in order to make that happen, you'd time your science to finish researching mechanized infantry just before your attack, so that the enemy that was expecting cavalry is now suddenly dealing with mechanized armor. And just as your engineers finish building the railroad, suddenly the units that were hovering just outside detection now have the target within striking distance. Because you know that if you don't kill all of the enemy troop units camped at the capital in 1 single turn, the enemy will just replenish units from nearby cities and your burst of force is wasted.
Of course, I'm talking about playing against the computer AI which is infinitely patient in waiting for me to make a move. And my settings are not that difficult either. I can't wait to start playing at a more challenging level, sometime when I finish my current game around Christmas (have been playing for 3 months so far). I can't even begin to conceive playing a networked game against other human players.
So... Wesnoth similar? Should I plan for lots of time like this if I start a game?
I'm not surprised that Nursie finds this intuitive. What astounds me is that Nursie doesn't understand why other people don't find it intuitive as well. The fact that you have to type in certain character strings (not even words) in a predetermined order with no hint from the prompt as to what to do, the fact that the computer does not understand near misses like "app-get install firefox" or "install firefox" or "aptget install firefox" or "apt-get firefox" is a far cry from the GUI that guides the user down a limited set of possible choices. Presumably Nursie would scratch his/her head trying to figure out what's so funny about following obquote taken from http://www.bash.org/?464385:
<@insomnia> it only takes three commands to install Gentoo <@insomnia> cfdisk/dev/hda && mkfs.xfs/dev/hda1 && mount/dev/hda1/mnt/gentoo/ && chroot/mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && ./etc/profile && emerge sync && cd/usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi/etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd/usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp/boot/grub/grub.conf.sample/boot/grub/grub.conf && vi/boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6 <@insomnia>that's the first one
This story comes just as I finished reading Richard Feynman's account of the Rogers commission about the Challenger disaster in What Do You Care What Other People Think? that gives a rare candid look not only at the type of management attitude that led to preventable disaster, but also how it can end up getting buried in the resulting commission investigation. Interesting book, that could only come from someone with Richard Feynman's personality. (The Challenger disaster investigation is in the second half of the book.)
I completely agree about the attitude of KDE developers, who have basically abandoned their KDE 3 users, as I mentioned in a previous posting. Like you, I am seriously considering moving away from KDE, although since I have a ton of dcop-based scripting calls, it's not going to be just a matter of getting used to a new "Look & Feel". I'll probably try for as long as I can to stick with the latest available KDE3 setup from Ubuntu (v8.04 not-Long-Term-Support) while GNOME advances, and then make the jump when I have to.
Unfortunately, the KDE dev community seems to have regressed into the type of attitude prevalent when the Internet was still in its infancy and the main users were the developers themselves. A pity... just as Qt, and by extension KDE, was starting to become known outside the OSS circles.
For those who want to point out that KDE4 is "really good" or that I should "really try the latest version because there have been many many improvements recently", you may have missed the point. The point, the SECONDARY point, is not how much KDE 4.2 is better than KDE 4.1, but how it is not as functional as KDE 3.5. And that's just the secondary point. The primary point is that we have to migrate at all when KDE 3.5 is what we're using.
I'm not dissing the devs for making KDE4, and in fact I actually appreciate very much that there continue to be improvements. I'm upset about them pulling support from under KDE3. I'm upset about them not caring about people continuing to use KDE3 until KDE4 is just as functional. (Not "looks prettier" or "is better in the following respects", but "at least as functional" --you can start by putting in all the Kioslaves, please.) Just as KDE 2 went to KDE 3, someday KDE 4 will be nice and beautiful. We shall see, on that day, whether I have already switched to GNOME.
Thank you very much for your info and clarification! Also many thanks to Quikah for making this comment.
Armed with the knowledge that, yes, digital TV signals really are already present in the air, and yes, an ordinary antenna can receive those signals, and, yes, my TV can receive digital signals, I went to get an ordinary antenna with loop for the UHF band and rabbit ears for the VHF band. I got the cheapest one available. It cost $10 and looked like an ugly piece of garbage sitting atop the sleek LCD TV.
But when my wife hooked it up, lo! and behold --suddenly instead of 4 analog channels from the crappy building antenna, we got 23 analog channels and 41 digital channels! Channels that we never knew existed suddenly appeared. This included multiple channels of minority language programming that we had originally been thinking of subscribing to. And instead of the crappy signal, these came through crystal-clear. So we saved having to pay for not only the specialty cable channels that we had originally wanted, but also the basic (but worthless) cable package that they force you to get in order to get the additional specialty channels.
KDE 3.5 made me a diehard KDE user. I use KDE4.1 + compiz-fusion for my desktop environment, and have KDE 3.5 installed so I have access to all the apps with the kio slaves for work.
I am interested in how you are able to have components of both versions of KDE at the same time. Perhaps this would help ease my transition to KDE4.
I have been a die-hard KDE3 user, and all my scripts are set up with KDE3-style dcop calls. Apparently this is among the things that will have to change when I switch to KDE4, quite apart from the user interface itself.
One of the reasons I switched to Linux was so that I wouldn't be put through the upgrade treadmill. Software freedom was supposed to mean that they couldn't put forced obsolence or vendor lock-in into programs. Although it's probably simple to do a "sed -e 's/dcop/dbus/g'" to all my scripts, it still bugs me that I have to do it. I consider it unnecessary maintenance.
However, I am beginning to become resigned to the inevitability of having to upgrade. I once asked one of the developers of a well-known KDE program (but not part of the official KDE baseline set). S/he said:
At Last year, February, there was a survey how many people use KDE3 / KDE4 in Hungary. 85% of the people used KDE3 at that time.
At the end of 2008 this survey was repeated, and 54% used KDE4.
My personal opinion is that developing on KDE3 = wasting time.
Well, a couple of points:
I'm not sure that the survey cited above was a representative sample! I get the feeling that they surveyed people who went to a KDE conference or who frequent the KDE.org website. If KDE is to be taken seriously, they have to show support for the conservative corporate users and other not-so-savvy users.
you can't just ignore the 46% that use KDE3!
I wonder if there is a significant number of people like Kimvette who use both KDE3 and KDE4, so that 54% using KDE4 might still mean that more than 46% use KDE3.
All grumbling aside, I have some extra spare time in the coming few weeks, so I figure that this would be a good time to make the transition to KDE4. Returning to my original question, how did you make KDE3 and KDE4 overlap? Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for those of us who want to minimize the effort of making the transition?
I checked the back of my TV, and the RF coax is labeled "TV/DTV", so it should be digital ready. Now my question is: how come I'm not receiving any digital signal from my antenna? Is it that any old antenna from decades ago is capable of receiving digital signals? Or do I need to tell building management to get off their duffs and think about upgrading the antenna?
Thanks. (this is my second reply to your response; I posted a first response before I was able to verify that my TV was indeed digital-ready)
Might help if you actually told us WHICH LCD TV you have. If it has an ATSC tuner you are fine, if it doesn't you need a box.
Thanks for that info; you have already helped me partially. I guess that's the information I need to go checking around.
We bought a 37" LCD TV from Vizio. I'm actually not sure which model it was. Their web site shows three such 37" TV's, which all resemble ours but not exactly. It was a bargain price, so the cheapest is the most likely of the three, but I suspect that it is actually a discontinued model. Wish we could locate the instruction manuals, but I am beginning to think that for some reason it never came with any.
If it has ATSC tuning capability, does it necessarily follow that it will be able to do that for the RF coax input? It wouldn't have ATSC for some other input but not the coax connector, right?
Could a kind-hearted Slashdotter please help clear my confusion about whether I need a converter box? I suspect I'm not the only one with this question.
We bought a LCD TV half a year ago. By all rights it looks like it should be able to handle digital TV, with HDMI inputs, component inputs and all. Its VGA input even lets it function as a computer monitor for my laptop. I'm sure that the digital *capability* is there.
But we live in an apartment building with all the units just sharing the usual antenna from which we receive 3 or 4 semi-fuzzy TV stations. It comes in to our home through coax and we are able to hook this up to the RF input on the LCD TV to watch semi-fuzzy shows, just as we did with our old conventional TV before we got the LCD one.
Once, we saw a news station broadcast a signal saying "If you see the word PASS on your screen, you are receiving the digital signal and you're ready for the transition." We saw the word FAIL appear. I knew that already, anyway, since the picture was semi-fuzzy like a typical analog signal.
So it looks like a digital signal is already being broadcast. What does it take to get the digital signal? Do I have to hook up the coax to one of the other inputs on the TV? If so, is it just a coax-to-HDMI adapter? (Not sure how that would work.) Or would I have to change the antenna itself to be capable of receiving a digital signal? (In that case, wish me luck --the building management will get around to it after my grandchildren retire.) Or will it actually be fixed with a converter box that takes RF input from coax and output it to some digital form with some compatible connector?
Thanks for clarifying this. Sorry that this is slightly OT, but I wanted to harness the collective wisdom of the Slashdot community.
Slashdot Mirror
When I enter PIN's or other private information on a digital pad, I make it a habit of using 3 fingers (2nd, 3rd, 4th fingers) and just move it between the 3 rows of the numeric keypad. It's not as inconvenient or gauche as covering the keys (and your other hand might be busy covering up the screen anyway), and at least they can't tell the difference between 1/2/3, 4/5/6, or 7/8/9. If the digit 0 exists in the number, I will cover the keys 7/0/9, and also use the same finger pattern for the other numbers so 1/5/3 look the same, 4/8/6 look the same, etc. (This refers to a phone-type keypad with 1-2-3 at the top. For calculator-type keypads with 7-8-9 at the top, the same applies, but for different digits, of course.)
My own favourite, about which I've posted before, is to gradually (but exponentially) increase the delay between entries, so after 1 failure, you can retry in 1 second; after 2 failures, 3 seconds. The third failure locks it for 9 seconds, and by the time the brute-forcer is on the 5th time, he'll be waiting almost a minute and a half (and rapidly increasing --you can only do 9 tries the first hour).
I'm giving up mod points to voice my agreement with you. Anyone else remember Tuttle, Oklahoma? I don't expect managers, even IT managers, to know everything, but it would be nice if they admitted they made mistakes rather than acting like jerks.
Someone correct me if I remember wrongly, but the key to Knoppix is that there is a root account, with a password that no one knows; and there's the usual user account ("knoppix") which has admin rights and no password. So you type in a command-line: "sudo password" to set your own password for root, and then "su" to switch-user to root. That will give whatever rights you need.
Wow. That sounds just as bad as CRT screens. Even if one is not watching logo'd content, then, but (say) plays from some DVD player and decides to display the time permanently in the corner, then that would cause burn-in on the screen? Even if the digits are changing, the first "1" from "10:00" to "12:59" would be there for 3 hours, or 10 hours if the owner happens to set it for military time; and even if not, the colon would be permanent.
Presumably there's a reason why someone would use plasma over, LCD, then? Plasma has more contrast? Or is it just some early thinscreen technology that is better than CRT but has been obsolete by LCD?
Thanks for not giving in to temptation.
Please clarify. Do you mean that plasma has lower resolution which is not noticeable when watching changing video but becomes apparent with static images? When you say logo"ed content [sic], do you mean that the logo is static and one would notice the poor resolution? Also, it sounds like you're saying an advantage of plasma is the well-defined colours, correct?
No, "Google" is a misspelling of "googol". (That's why the Chinese version is called "Baidu", which means "googol".) Actually the word came from the founder's baby daughter (not sure if Sergey's or Larry's), but the founder remembered that the word had a meaning so he went with that.
What you say is true.
However, who says SSH has to be interactive? What about rsync backups over SSH? Automated connections that use SSH? Basically, anything and everything is tunnelled through SSH, so this is huge. If the attacker has time and you have a network of, say, 100 machines that initiate 1000 SSH sessions a day, you could have a breach in a day. If the attacker has a few weeks to work undetected, you could have a huge breach and have no idea because you're basking in the false security of working in SSH. Think you'd notice that?
I, too, use a Citi credit card which lets me generate virtual credit card numbers on the fly. Very handy. Set your own credit limit (up to your max) and expiry date (2-12 months from now). Once that credit card is charged once, only the same merchant can use it again.
Recently I bought something on the Internet. It would cost $78, so I created a virtual card with a $90 credit limit and submitted that. I went through the purchase on the web, but I wasn't sure it was cmoplete; the final web page gave me an "invoice" but I wasn't sure that it was a receipt. Had I finished making my purchase, or was I seeing some javascript error because I was using Firefox on Linux instead of IE on Windows? Undaunted, I just went through the purchase a second time to make sure (this time being laxer with NoScript restrictions). I had no fear that I would accidentally make a second $78 purchase, since the card was only good for $90. If my first purchase worked, well and good, and the second purchase would automatically fail. If my first purchase failed, then maybe the second purchase would work.
Very handy.
Does anyone else know any other credit card issuer that does this? I used to have a MBNA card that did this, but MBNA got swallowed up by Bank of America and I don't know if the BoA has virtual credit card numbers.
Okay, I feel really stupid now. After requesting that moderators mod up the GP post, I realize that I actually have mod points. Which I can use on any Slashdot article. Except this one, now. :P
Good point.
Agree, especially since the writer is savvy enough to build his own media centre with Ubuntu and Boxee. He knew exactly what he was writing, and I'm sure the editors did, too. For all we know, the writer probably reads Slashdot.
Okay, Economist-correspondent-writer-in-Japan, reply to my post and prove me right! (Or at least someone pretending to be him reply to my post and make me look good. :) )
So, I'm a die-hard KDE user. I'm all excited about the new release! I can't wait to upgrade to a KDE that's actually useful as opposed to the get-lost-this-is-for-developers-only version. So I check out the release web page, and I see that there are a few known issues here:
WTF?? Wireless doesn't work? Package manager doesn't work!? Kmail doesn't work!??
Okay, you may be saying, "It's not that it doesn't work, it's that certain functions with certain applications in certain circumstances don't work." Umm, but it worked before, and now with the newer version it stops working? Okay, network manager only fails to connect to some networks. I mean, who cares, right? As long as your network is not one of those "some". It only fails if the network is hidden. I mean, what's the infinitesimal chance that you would actually hide your network SSID, right? KPackageKit works some of the time!? I don't care if it's "most" of the time. How would you like it if you bought a product that worked "most" of the time?
It's not as if this is some bleeding edge version. It's KDE 4.2 already. And, sitting right next to it is a perfectly functional KDE 3.5 that people have been using for ages. Why Kubuntu being released with so many issues?
What were those Kubuntu distro managers thinking!? In an effort to find out, I browsed some bug discussion pages.
One person said:
"Maybe we should switch back to knetworkmanager as the default network manager because I don't think this problem will be fixed shortly. knetworkmanager doesn't look as nice as the plasma widget, but can handle hidden aps and works fine with kubuntu."
But another one says,
"This won't be possible for two reasons. First, the final release is only weeks away. It is way to late to make an intrusive change like that. Second, I have heard the developers say that there is no room on the CD left for the KDE3 libraries that would be necessary to run NetworkManager. Hopefully, KNetworkManager4 will have been released and/or the bugs in the plasmoid will have been fixed in time for Karmic."
Umm, so, translation: we have to use software that works "most" of the time instead of a perfectly functioning networking piece of software, whose only disadvantage is that it is not as aesthetically pleasing, because
This attitude of "yeah, it's buggy --we'll just get it out there, get some users to beta-test it for us (Surprise! YOU'VE been selected to beta-test OUR buggy software!) and just tell people to upgrade" makes me wonder whether the KDE developers are trying to update their resumes for a job hunt at Microsoft. "My software engineering skills include: successfully releasing piece-of-crap software and fo
Tell me about it. I want to tell them, "Yeah, and I programmed my word processor to print out my essay." But then they probably wouldn't know what a word processor was.
Slightly OT: an interesting doomsday scenario was predicted in the sci-fi thriller novel Icefire, by Reeves-Stevens, where a rogue faction in the government of a large country detonates a bunch of bombs around the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf to detach it from land, and then detonate a big blast above it, in effect slapping the ice shelf into the Antarctic Ocean and creating a tsunami that threatens to wipe out the Pacific Rim --Hawaii, California, Japan, etc. It's a fast-paced novel about how the protagonists try to outrace the tsunami wave, which will take most of a day to get to the Pacific Rim, and how they try to warn various incredulous government organizations about how big the danger is, etc.
Oops, waitaminnit, that's the Ross Ice Shelf, not the Wilkins Ice Shelf. Sorry, wrong shelf.
Anyway, worth a read on your next flight that doesn't have WiFi to keep you occupied.
Agreed! While I still haven't figured out what to do about such notices on paper, I decided to do something about the electronic equivalent where (for example) every time I pay my cell phone bill online, they have a tiny scrolling window with the Terms & Conditions (T&C) with the "accept" and "reject" buttons.
Of course, if you don't actually check, you don't realize what a huge bunch of text there is within the tiny scrolling window. And since I pay the bill monthly, I'm not about to wade through all that text each time to see if they added a "and you owe us your first-born son" clause or something.
I wrote a quick shell script to make a comparison. Now whenever such T&C text shows up, I select the text with my mouse and run the script, which pulls text from the clipboard and compares it to a bunch of text files in a directory (which contain T&C from various web sites, services, etc). It will identify which file contains the old version of the T&C, and check if there are any changes. If there are, it will alert you.
So far I haven't found any service trying to sneak in changes yet, but I'm going to keep my guard up.
If you're interested in the script, I put it in this entry in my journal. Constructive criticism welcome. GPL.
Tell me about it. My favourite (not!) time was when I couldn't use the CD drive: it wouldn't eject because it was "still in use by another program". Trying to figure out what program had failed to release the CD drive, I saw on the web that the "lsof" command could give me the info I wanted. But "lsof" was not installed by default, so I told the "urpmi" program to go install it. It said: "Please insert Mandrake CD #1 into CD drive."
That was Mandrake 9. Mandrake 10 was where I jumped over to Ubuntu, and I never installed anything named "Mandriva" on any of my computers.
I'm sure Mandriva is much improved now, and PCLinuxOS is winning awards, I hear. But it doesn't matter that much to me now.
I've fiddled with Wesnoth before. Are you sure it's as much of a productivity-sucker as Freeciv?
I tried Freeciv after reading this Slashdot article about using strategy games to make you smarter, and have spent countless hours exercising the neural connections in my cranium. There's an incredible amount of planning involved, in order to coordinate all the units' movement and production so that they all converge simultaneously on a single enemy city (say) and crush it.
It got to be complex enough that I had to start recording my plans and thoughts in a text file with different sections for different parts of the map, with comments like "Let's attack here with my battleship! Oh, wait, the battleship needs to go elsewhere to prepare for an assault in 2 turns." Sometimes it would take half an hour or more to make a turn, and on more than one occasion I ended up writing comments like, "Hey, what's this transport doing here? I already said before that I planned to move it over there. Did I forget to move it? Oh, wait, this is still the same turn."
The planning makes a difference, though. When you step into the gutted enemy capital city and take it over, it looks like it just happened that one turn, but in order to make that happen, you'd time your science to finish researching mechanized infantry just before your attack, so that the enemy that was expecting cavalry is now suddenly dealing with mechanized armor. And just as your engineers finish building the railroad, suddenly the units that were hovering just outside detection now have the target within striking distance. Because you know that if you don't kill all of the enemy troop units camped at the capital in 1 single turn, the enemy will just replenish units from nearby cities and your burst of force is wasted.
Of course, I'm talking about playing against the computer AI which is infinitely patient in waiting for me to make a move. And my settings are not that difficult either. I can't wait to start playing at a more challenging level, sometime when I finish my current game around Christmas (have been playing for 3 months so far). I can't even begin to conceive playing a networked game against other human players.
So ... Wesnoth similar? Should I plan for lots of time like this if I start a game?
Agree with above. From the GGGP:
I'm not surprised that Nursie finds this intuitive. What astounds me is that Nursie doesn't understand why other people don't find it intuitive as well. The fact that you have to type in certain character strings (not even words) in a predetermined order with no hint from the prompt as to what to do, the fact that the computer does not understand near misses like "app-get install firefox" or "install firefox" or "aptget install firefox" or "apt-get firefox" is a far cry from the GUI that guides the user down a limited set of possible choices. Presumably Nursie would scratch his/her head trying to figure out what's so funny about following obquote taken from http://www.bash.org/?464385:
<@insomnia> it only takes three commands to install Gentoo /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6
<@insomnia> cfdisk
<@insomnia>that's the first one
This story comes just as I finished reading Richard Feynman's account of the Rogers commission about the Challenger disaster in What Do You Care What Other People Think? that gives a rare candid look not only at the type of management attitude that led to preventable disaster, but also how it can end up getting buried in the resulting commission investigation. Interesting book, that could only come from someone with Richard Feynman's personality. (The Challenger disaster investigation is in the second half of the book.)
I completely agree about the attitude of KDE developers, who have basically abandoned their KDE 3 users, as I mentioned in a previous posting. Like you, I am seriously considering moving away from KDE, although since I have a ton of dcop-based scripting calls, it's not going to be just a matter of getting used to a new "Look & Feel". I'll probably try for as long as I can to stick with the latest available KDE3 setup from Ubuntu (v8.04 not-Long-Term-Support) while GNOME advances, and then make the jump when I have to.
Unfortunately, the KDE dev community seems to have regressed into the type of attitude prevalent when the Internet was still in its infancy and the main users were the developers themselves. A pity ... just as Qt, and by extension KDE, was starting to become known outside the OSS circles.
For those who want to point out that KDE4 is "really good" or that I should "really try the latest version because there have been many many improvements recently", you may have missed the point. The point, the SECONDARY point, is not how much KDE 4.2 is better than KDE 4.1, but how it is not as functional as KDE 3.5. And that's just the secondary point. The primary point is that we have to migrate at all when KDE 3.5 is what we're using.
I'm not dissing the devs for making KDE4, and in fact I actually appreciate very much that there continue to be improvements. I'm upset about them pulling support from under KDE3. I'm upset about them not caring about people continuing to use KDE3 until KDE4 is just as functional. (Not "looks prettier" or "is better in the following respects", but "at least as functional" --you can start by putting in all the Kioslaves, please.) Just as KDE 2 went to KDE 3, someday KDE 4 will be nice and beautiful. We shall see, on that day, whether I have already switched to GNOME.
Thank you very much for your info and clarification! Also many thanks to Quikah for making this comment.
Armed with the knowledge that, yes, digital TV signals really are already present in the air, and yes, an ordinary antenna can receive those signals, and, yes, my TV can receive digital signals, I went to get an ordinary antenna with loop for the UHF band and rabbit ears for the VHF band. I got the cheapest one available. It cost $10 and looked like an ugly piece of garbage sitting atop the sleek LCD TV.
But when my wife hooked it up, lo! and behold --suddenly instead of 4 analog channels from the crappy building antenna, we got 23 analog channels and 41 digital channels! Channels that we never knew existed suddenly appeared. This included multiple channels of minority language programming that we had originally been thinking of subscribing to. And instead of the crappy signal, these came through crystal-clear. So we saved having to pay for not only the specialty cable channels that we had originally wanted, but also the basic (but worthless) cable package that they force you to get in order to get the additional specialty channels.
Thank you, Slashdot!
I am interested in how you are able to have components of both versions of KDE at the same time. Perhaps this would help ease my transition to KDE4.
I have been a die-hard KDE3 user, and all my scripts are set up with KDE3-style dcop calls. Apparently this is among the things that will have to change when I switch to KDE4, quite apart from the user interface itself.
One of the reasons I switched to Linux was so that I wouldn't be put through the upgrade treadmill. Software freedom was supposed to mean that they couldn't put forced obsolence or vendor lock-in into programs. Although it's probably simple to do a "sed -e 's/dcop/dbus/g'" to all my scripts, it still bugs me that I have to do it. I consider it unnecessary maintenance.
However, I am beginning to become resigned to the inevitability of having to upgrade. I once asked one of the developers of a well-known KDE program (but not part of the official KDE baseline set). S/he said:
Well, a couple of points:
All grumbling aside, I have some extra spare time in the coming few weeks, so I figure that this would be a good time to make the transition to KDE4. Returning to my original question, how did you make KDE3 and KDE4 overlap? Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for those of us who want to minimize the effort of making the transition?
I checked the back of my TV, and the RF coax is labeled "TV/DTV", so it should be digital ready. Now my question is: how come I'm not receiving any digital signal from my antenna? Is it that any old antenna from decades ago is capable of receiving digital signals? Or do I need to tell building management to get off their duffs and think about upgrading the antenna?
Thanks.
(this is my second reply to your response; I posted a first response before I was able to verify that my TV was indeed digital-ready)
Thanks for that info; you have already helped me partially. I guess that's the information I need to go checking around.
We bought a 37" LCD TV from Vizio. I'm actually not sure which model it was. Their web site shows three such 37" TV's, which all resemble ours but not exactly. It was a bargain price, so the cheapest is the most likely of the three, but I suspect that it is actually a discontinued model. Wish we could locate the instruction manuals, but I am beginning to think that for some reason it never came with any.
http://www.vizio.com/productCatalog.aspx?id=1506
If it has ATSC tuning capability, does it necessarily follow that it will be able to do that for the RF coax input? It wouldn't have ATSC for some other input but not the coax connector, right?
Could a kind-hearted Slashdotter please help clear my confusion about whether I need a converter box? I suspect I'm not the only one with this question.
We bought a LCD TV half a year ago. By all rights it looks like it should be able to handle digital TV, with HDMI inputs, component inputs and all. Its VGA input even lets it function as a computer monitor for my laptop. I'm sure that the digital *capability* is there.
But we live in an apartment building with all the units just sharing the usual antenna from which we receive 3 or 4 semi-fuzzy TV stations. It comes in to our home through coax and we are able to hook this up to the RF input on the LCD TV to watch semi-fuzzy shows, just as we did with our old conventional TV before we got the LCD one.
Once, we saw a news station broadcast a signal saying "If you see the word PASS on your screen, you are receiving the digital signal and you're ready for the transition." We saw the word FAIL appear. I knew that already, anyway, since the picture was semi-fuzzy like a typical analog signal.
So it looks like a digital signal is already being broadcast. What does it take to get the digital signal? Do I have to hook up the coax to one of the other inputs on the TV? If so, is it just a coax-to-HDMI adapter? (Not sure how that would work.) Or would I have to change the antenna itself to be capable of receiving a digital signal? (In that case, wish me luck --the building management will get around to it after my grandchildren retire.) Or will it actually be fixed with a converter box that takes RF input from coax and output it to some digital form with some compatible connector?
Thanks for clarifying this. Sorry that this is slightly OT, but I wanted to harness the collective wisdom of the Slashdot community.