I was under the impression that terminal services won't let you log in with an account that has a blank password. That may be a relatively recent change though I guess.
True, however if the password is blank it's relatively trivial to make a group policy change on the target machine to allow connection via RDP using any number of script kiddie tools.
As I recall from the interview he was using some K3\/\/1 H4kk0r T00lz he had downloaded, without any deep understanding of them. He calls himself a hacker however in the Jargon File sense he was a baseline script kiddie - barely even qualifying as a cracker.
The Special Relationship when it works well is an excellent thing - I personally toured the US east coast with a choir in the summer of 2002 with all proceeds donated to the victims and families of 9/11. Lasting bonds across culture and friendships were formed.
The problems with the relationship came about shortly after this time when your president squandered your international good will by mounting a campaign against Iraq on the back of the 9/11 attacks - in which they were completely uninvolved and indeed had been militant about excluding Al Quida members from their shores.
A large political disconnect emerged as a result, though admittedly the fault was mostly ours - our government should have been using the SR to diplomatically point out the massive mistake yours was making, not jumping in at the deep end with you because of it.
He committed several UK offences in the UK under both the Computer Misuse Act and the Data Protection Act. He would get a fair trial on these, I cant imagine why he wouldn't, and they do come with prison term sentences.
We discuss this point every time Gary McKinnon's case comes up, but lets go over the problems with the UK-US fast track extradition agreement one more time:
The agreement is supposed to be reciprocal however the US have not implemented their end of it. We can not fast track the extradition of US citizens but any UK citizen can be fast tracked. All of this was introduced to "fight terrorism" but has largely been used for cases like this and the NatWest Three.
Secondly our law forbids the extradition of persons to countries where they may face inhuman or unreasonable punishment. As such all states which implement the death penalty fall under this heading. The US should fall under this heading.
There are many other reasons why the UK can rightly be labelled a lap dog unrelated to these issues, our Special Relationship with the US is largely asking how high when told to jump.
Didn't he just use Microsoft's Remote Desktop to "hack into" those systems?
Yes. He in fact exploited weak passwords - most commonly "administrator" and a blank password or a password of "password".
More curiously he ran a netstat on the boxes he compromised and viewed connections from other crackers whose IPs addresses put them all over the middle east and China.
As PJ pointed out over on Groklaw, MS are giving a "Promise" not to sue but this is very very far from a license. Careful analysis suggests that any GPL'd software using these binaries could easily fall foul of the fury of MS lawyers.
Surely a more obvious target would be SourceForge Inc. Then you'd own all the servers that so much FOSS relies on as well as being able to subtly inject Pro-Microsoft merchandise into ThinkGeek and subtly veto anti-MS stories right here on/.
One stone. Multiple targets.
That is exactly what he is demanding. The title of the freegary.org.uk site is "Free Gary McKinnon
or at least give him a fair trial in the United Kingdom".
Hmm, maybe I was responsible for the grammatical mistake in the story after all, as I seem to have gratuitously split an infinitive verb in the previous comment.
I suspect that $700k is the amount they spent securing the computers in question properly. Of course if they'd spent $700k securing the computers in question properly before Gary attempted his cracking then perhaps we wouldn't be in this situation.
I further wonder if they want him in Federal custody more so that they can ask him what it was possible for him to see exactly, apart from the whack UFO stuff, as Gary himself has said that there were many other foreign nationals also snooping around at the same time. A damage limitation and mitigation exercise to try and ascertain what might have been compromised by someone more dangerous than a UFO obsessed Weegie pot head.
More to the point the UK is supposed to not extradite people to countries that employ torture or inhumane punishments, which include countries that execute people.
Indeed, and this is not the only example of this sort of thing as the Enron trio example shows. These men may have committed a crime in the UK against a UK company but the parent company was US and connected to Enron, therefore they must be tried in the US. And this as part of a (non-reciprocated) agreement for extradition designed for use with terror suspects. Yes, you have nothing to fear from our new draconian laws if you are not a terrorist. Or white collar criminal. Or dope-skewed cracker.
I recently engaged in a Buffy Marathon. I'd seen most of it, pretty much in order when it was running on Sky but my brother had bought all the box sets so I borrowed them and watched it all over a couple of weeks.
Geek. Yes, I know.
I concur with the parent's summary of the show's good points, but what I found particularly striking was the bare-faced post-modernism; particularly by the seventh season the characters knew they were in a fantasy universe, they knew that their actions were bound to a greater or lesser degree by their stereotype and by the genre they were in. What made the show great is that this made the lead characters love each other even more because that was what they had that was theirs rather than the universe-at-large's.
It was most beautifully summed up in one episode (can't remember which) when Buffy has recovered from death's door and just managed to kick the s*it out of Monster of the Week, collapses on the floor and says "If I was at full Slayer strength, I'd be punning right now."
The British government is big enough to tell our government to piss off if it felt such a thing weren't warranted.
Actually it's only since 9/11 that we (ie the British) have relaxed our extradition proceedings for the US with a new fast track system designed (in theory) to assist in terrorist-related prosecution.
We used to be pretty stringent because we don't like extraditing anyone to countries where the person in question could face the death penalty, torture or some other inhuman form of punishment.
I don't blame Uncle Sam for our change in policy - it was our own parliament's stupid fault. But there it is.
Slashdot Mirror
But I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
...it's full of Higgs Bosons.
They sincerely hope, or we chuck the whole physics model out and start over again.
I was under the impression that terminal services won't let you log in with an account that has a blank password. That may be a relatively recent change though I guess.
True, however if the password is blank it's relatively trivial to make a group policy change on the target machine to allow connection via RDP using any number of script kiddie tools.
As I recall from the interview he was using some K3\/\/1 H4kk0r T00lz he had downloaded, without any deep understanding of them. He calls himself a hacker however in the Jargon File sense he was a baseline script kiddie - barely even qualifying as a cracker.
Hear hear!
The Special Relationship when it works well is an excellent thing - I personally toured the US east coast with a choir in the summer of 2002 with all proceeds donated to the victims and families of 9/11. Lasting bonds across culture and friendships were formed.
The problems with the relationship came about shortly after this time when your president squandered your international good will by mounting a campaign against Iraq on the back of the 9/11 attacks - in which they were completely uninvolved and indeed had been militant about excluding Al Quida members from their shores.
A large political disconnect emerged as a result, though admittedly the fault was mostly ours - our government should have been using the SR to diplomatically point out the massive mistake yours was making, not jumping in at the deep end with you because of it.
He committed several UK offences in the UK under both the Computer Misuse Act and the Data Protection Act. He would get a fair trial on these, I cant imagine why he wouldn't, and they do come with prison term sentences.
We discuss this point every time Gary McKinnon's case comes up, but lets go over the problems with the UK-US fast track extradition agreement one more time:
The agreement is supposed to be reciprocal however the US have not implemented their end of it. We can not fast track the extradition of US citizens but any UK citizen can be fast tracked. All of this was introduced to "fight terrorism" but has largely been used for cases like this and the NatWest Three.
Secondly our law forbids the extradition of persons to countries where they may face inhuman or unreasonable punishment. As such all states which implement the death penalty fall under this heading. The US should fall under this heading.
There are many other reasons why the UK can rightly be labelled a lap dog unrelated to these issues, our Special Relationship with the US is largely asking how high when told to jump.
Didn't he just use Microsoft's Remote Desktop to "hack into" those systems?
Yes. He in fact exploited weak passwords - most commonly "administrator" and a blank password or a password of "password".
More curiously he ran a netstat on the boxes he compromised and viewed connections from other crackers whose IPs addresses put them all over the middle east and China.
This according to the BBC interview we previously discussed.
As PJ pointed out over on Groklaw, MS are giving a "Promise" not to sue but this is very very far from a license. Careful analysis suggests that any GPL'd software using these binaries could easily fall foul of the fury of MS lawyers.
Surely a more obvious target would be SourceForge Inc. Then you'd own all the servers that so much FOSS relies on as well as being able to subtly inject Pro-Microsoft merchandise into ThinkGeek and subtly veto anti-MS stories right here on /.
One stone. Multiple targets.
In Soviet Russia, illegal MP3s share you!
In Soviet Russia, Evil don't be you.
Lol! Damn it! You bet me to it!
In Soviet Russia, secret files shred you!
That is exactly what he is demanding. The title of the freegary.org.uk site is "Free Gary McKinnon or at least give him a fair trial in the United Kingdom".
Fair comment.
Hmm, maybe I was responsible for the grammatical mistake in the story after all, as I seem to have gratuitously split an infinitive verb in the previous comment.
I further wonder if they want him in Federal custody more so that they can ask him what it was possible for him to see exactly, apart from the whack UFO stuff, as Gary himself has said that there were many other foreign nationals also snooping around at the same time. A damage limitation and mitigation exercise to try and ascertain what might have been compromised by someone more dangerous than a UFO obsessed Weegie pot head.
Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Misuse_Act_1 990
More to the point the UK is supposed to not extradite people to countries that employ torture or inhumane punishments, which include countries that execute people.
Indeed, and this is not the only example of this sort of thing as the Enron trio example shows. These men may have committed a crime in the UK against a UK company but the parent company was US and connected to Enron, therefore they must be tried in the US. And this as part of a (non-reciprocated) agreement for extradition designed for use with terror suspects. Yes, you have nothing to fear from our new draconian laws if you are not a terrorist. Or white collar criminal. Or dope-skewed cracker.
I'm fairly sure that's not how I submitted it not.
So currently you think that 20 MPG is good or normal!? You guys really do pay too little for gas.
I have a big heavy 2 litre engine car and it still does well over 42MPG (in US Gallons) and that is not unusual in Euro-land.
...increases mileage by 2.4 times to 100 MPG.
Geek. Yes, I know.
I concur with the parent's summary of the show's good points, but what I found particularly striking was the bare-faced post-modernism; particularly by the seventh season the characters knew they were in a fantasy universe, they knew that their actions were bound to a greater or lesser degree by their stereotype and by the genre they were in. What made the show great is that this made the lead characters love each other even more because that was what they had that was theirs rather than the universe-at-large's.
It was most beautifully summed up in one episode (can't remember which) when Buffy has recovered from death's door and just managed to kick the s*it out of Monster of the Week, collapses on the floor and says "If I was at full Slayer strength, I'd be punning right now."
The British government is big enough to tell our government to piss off if it felt such a thing weren't warranted.
Actually it's only since 9/11 that we (ie the British) have relaxed our extradition proceedings for the US with a new fast track system designed (in theory) to assist in terrorist-related prosecution.
We used to be pretty stringent because we don't like extraditing anyone to countries where the person in question could face the death penalty, torture or some other inhuman form of punishment.
I don't blame Uncle Sam for our change in policy - it was our own parliament's stupid fault. But there it is.