In this risky situation in Iraq or Afghanistan http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/3ACRPatrol(OIF3).jpg the soldiers and the vehicle do have an excellent protection armor. But one does not want to fool with this patrol not only because of protection armor, but because the soldiers are obviously vigilant, aware of environment, and ready to respond decisively. Not only to take and resist hits.
How protect oneself with a helmet and bullet-resistant west?
No matter what brand one uses still a criminal can aim at an unprotected area between helmet and vest. Or use an RPG.
The same, it is not possible to protect only with passive technological means. Speaking figuratively, a shield alone is not enough. There should be a sword too.
In this case it should be an active law-enforcement by government agencies. Bot-net operators should be placed in prisons, where they could obtain a profession, read fiction books, like, say, "Crime and Punishment", but not programming books, and not to have an access to computers at least for several years.
It should not be only Trans-Siberian. Imagine a line between, say, Moscow and Tehran, 4 hours only. Or Saint-Petersburg and Tel-Aviv, 5 hours of comfortable speed train.
All present day terrorist of the region (unemployed hopeless people) could be well employed in building this railway network. It should be built correct from the beginning, as a direct line, not a serpantine. It means building tunnels, bridges, etc. It would be quite a job.
I would also recommend the line to the USA & Canada via Russia and then via Bering strait. This strait is only 85 km wide.
It is high time.
It can be build for a fraction of the money which is spent each year to fight the mountain tribes in Eurasia. Besides these tribesmen could be hired to build this railroad instead.
This project would catch the imagination of the people worldwide. This is what I call leadership and global vision.
I've had systems compromised quite a few times before I knew any better, and had to clean up after many people who have had their systems compromised as well. Although if you mean I haven't been a "serious victim" I guess you are correct, though that wouldn't change my attitude about it. Not studying the problem is a sure-fire way to remain vulnerable to it.
Security technology alone cannot protect against this crime, the same way as a helmet and bullet-resistant vest cannot protect by itself, the same as a steel reinforced door cannot protect by itself.
The law enforcement and our rejection of this type of criminal behavior are necessary too. These people are not Robin Hoods, they are thieves, who steal from families and destroy companies. And it is a pity that a "security professional" associates with them.
There is a difference with a journalist interviewing a criminal for newspaper, because the criminal is in prison. And these people, whom author describes with fascination as "black hats" are in the middle of committing crime, which may as well involve minors and violence, for all I know.
a cop going undercover to find out how criminals operate
This is a cop, who has an official, documented undercover task, but this man is a civilian associating with criminals on his own will. It is his duty to report the crime in progress.
Otherwise any gang member could say: "I am a sociologist. I was studying the way murderers and thieves operate and think. This is why I was on the crime scene."
Probably you are lucky and were not a victim of these bot-nets and trojans' writers. But these are just about the same crime tools as picklock, gun, ax, etc. And these people are robbers, who just use some other tools.
Your fascination with them is unjustified. It is like a person, who likes to knit, would be fascinated by a criminal, who, say, strangle people by a cord.
One can well be a good talented programmer and not be fascinated by moral freaks, who use programming to commit crime.
I've been spending more and more time talking to blackhats lately. Frankly, I think they're fascinating people
They are criminals who steal from people. Fascinating people? How sick.
Glamorizing thieves and moral creeps is sending a wrong message especially to young people. If it were up to me I would lock this Robert Hansen into a jail together with his "blackhats" thieves and thrown away the key. This is where he and they belong.
In 90s we had to build a complete interactive web-page in Perl or C, with html tags and JavaScript, and then print it out to a browser. And we were grateful.
Nowadays, having PHP, which is so easy to use, people want to make it even easier. I don't get it.
I know what is strict. I used strict in VBA, visual basic for applications. I do not remember if I used strict in Perl or not, but obviously I am not the only one who deserted from Perl to PHP. Just have a look at the popularity graph.
One can implement strict in PHP too. Just check that a variable is an integer, string of a certain length, bool, etc.
I remember that Perl was not too good for web programming. It was unstable in a sense that variables sometimes got strange values inexplicably.
And also the architecture of the language was not suited for web pages. When I saw PHP3, I switched to it immediately and never looked back.
PHP also has got its minuses (why I cannot create RAR or ZIP archive locked by a password on a website?), but in general it is OK, if one pays attention to what he gets from users.
I found out that casting: page.php?id=123 , i.e. $id=(int)$id; is not enough. One has also check that $id is not greater than, say, 1000, and is not less or equal zero. Because I saw that some visitors try to insert huge numbers into $id for some reason. So basically value of incoming variables should be carefully checked before processing it further. If $id cannot be more than 1000 or negative, than we just enforce it.
1,5 billions of spam messages per day. Multiply each message by 10 seconds of working time it takes to activate e-mail window and delete the spam-message, and it becomes clear what damage to the word economy it brings. Let alone disrupted work-flow.
It is the weapon of mass economic destruction.
Such spammers should be warned, once, twice, and if they do not cool down a drone should come above their building and shoot a "Hellfire" missile right into the server room.
Or at least black-clad agents should enter the server room and sprinkle some special solution into the spam-servers, which becomes conductive after some time and shortcut.
I do not feel sorry for them either. But bot-nets cause problems to hosts. Hosts block IPs of the ISPs and website owners, businesses, suffer.
The truth is that Windows is also free OS, like Linux because, obviously, it is easy to pirate. Too easy, if it routinely done even in developing countries.
But unlike Linux the free version of Windows does not update itself.
As for anti-virus, I do not know free anti-virus for Windows, say, in Russian language. "Clamwin", "Avira", etc. do not have Russian language versions, and people mostly can read only this language in those parts.
A also thought that they will understand in English (not so many things to read in an anti-virus), but they do not. For 99% of them words in Latin letters like hieroglyphs.
Windows Security Essentials anti-virus are not available in all countries. I am on the duty trip in the FSU and Windows Security Essentials Page informs me: "Not available in your country".
Windows update checks for the authenticity of Windows.
As a result on millions of computers the OS is un-updated and anti-virus is absent.
In western countries the PCs have the authentic Windows, which is regularly updates itself, and an anti-virus. However, the majority of PCs in the world have a pirated Windows, no anti-virus, no-OS update.
These PCs are infested with viruses and trojans. I saw several bot-nets on one PC.
For people in western countries it may look like everything is more or less OK. But it is not OK. It is well manage chaos, part of the monopoly's strategy to suffocate its main threat: the free safe Internet (web applications), as its monopoly is in silos (PCs' applications).
I would also add that government consists of people. Even if rules are OK some people can be corrupted.
I am not so afraid of a government as a whole, I tend to be afraid of a low-level low-paid government official, but who may have an access to a firearm and an eavesdropping device, and happened to be corrupted.
It makes sense to produce a web-cam with a lid. A piece of paper and scotch tape could be used on older web-cams.
For all I know a spyware soft could be installed on my PC relatively easy and someone may watch my room.
Web-cams are getting smaller and smaller. The same about drones. Soon an artificial creature of the size of a fly will be able to fly into a room and transmit the vdeo and audio in a perfect quality, including night-vision infrared video.
Using protective nets on windows will not help as robots similar to cockroaches may be deployed. It will be the word without secrets.
In real life lightening happens about 10 times per year in a given area. In a laboratory it is possible to simulate lightening 100 times per minute.
But life did not and will not ignite from a primordial soup anyway.
It is a question similar to the atom's insides. It turns out that there is nothing solid inside an atom. Just some bizarre electromagnetic and gravitational fields and waves, sort of a surreal mirage.
The appearance of life is of about the same bizarreness. There is just no way it can ignite by itself. I am not suggesting a mystical or a religious explanation. My point is that we do not know it yet.
In the former USSR the large scale industrial experiments were conducted to create living cells from a primordial soup. It was done as a part of defense effort.
It does not work. They tried everything lightening, temperature change, radiation, UV, infrared, vibrations, etc. Nothing worked. Life is starting in some different way.
Free makes a difference sometimes too. We can add a new colleague to a task with no cost. Or exclude him away if he/she is not up to the task.
I would not be able to do so, absolutely, if it involved buying PhotoShop for this colleague for 999. Nikon D5000 or Lumix G-1 costs less.
We try to get out of GIMP, and also ImageMagic and GD2-PHP library whatever we can. Besides I am sort of accustomed to GIMP already. I think it is a soft of the same league as MySQL or Notepad++.
Thanks for the language remark though. Nice of you.
I have an older version of "PhotoShop". And I was not impressed.
For what I am doing (product photography, thousands of published images per year) GIMP seems to be better. I tried to work with RAWs images but I do not see the point. GIMP 2.6.8 for Windows allows me to do the same things with JPGs at least not worse.
Such things as a mass image re-sizing, thumbs creation, EXIF info removal, etc. I do with "ImageMagic" www.imagemagick.org scripts. In the past I was doing it with the GD2-PHP library and PHP scripts. But now I prefer "ImageMagic" for Windows and BAT scripts.
Mass EXIFs writing I do with the program, which is called "Exifer" (the best things in life are free).
I am also a programmer that is why these tools are better for me. I do not argue "PhotoShop" does work for some people. But I have a feeling that it is an over-priced tool for, sort of, wedding photographers (like a profession badge) and mom's doing photos of their kids.
When an error made by a non-native speaker seems to be funny it is the first sign that this person does not speak any foreign language.
Because one, who can speak a foreign language or at least tried to learn it, knows what a difficult task it is. Like in a joke: "Who served in an army does not laugh in a circus."
Slashdot Mirror
Rather: bullet-resistant vest.
In this risky situation in Iraq or Afghanistan http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/3ACRPatrol(OIF3).jpg the soldiers and the vehicle do have an excellent protection armor. But one does not want to fool with this patrol not only because of protection armor, but because the soldiers are obviously vigilant, aware of environment, and ready to respond decisively. Not only to take and resist hits.
Absolutely the same in the Internet.
How protect oneself with a helmet and bullet-resistant west?
No matter what brand one uses still a criminal can aim at an unprotected area between helmet and vest. Or use an RPG.
The same, it is not possible to protect only with passive technological means. Speaking figuratively, a shield alone is not enough. There should be a sword too.
In this case it should be an active law-enforcement by government agencies. Bot-net operators should be placed in prisons, where they could obtain a profession, read fiction books, like, say, "Crime and Punishment", but not programming books, and not to have an access to computers at least for several years.
If you are not in Shanghai, Chennai, Bombay, and Dubai, then goodbye.
It should not be only Trans-Siberian. Imagine a line between, say, Moscow and Tehran, 4 hours only. Or Saint-Petersburg and Tel-Aviv, 5 hours of comfortable speed train.
All present day terrorist of the region (unemployed hopeless people) could be well employed in building this railway network. It should be built correct from the beginning, as a direct line, not a serpantine. It means building tunnels, bridges, etc. It would be quite a job.
I would also recommend the line to the USA & Canada via Russia and then via Bering strait. This strait is only 85 km wide.
It is high time.
It can be build for a fraction of the money which is spent each year to fight the mountain tribes in Eurasia. Besides these tribesmen could be hired to build this railroad instead.
This project would catch the imagination of the people worldwide. This is what I call leadership and global vision.
Good point. I agree with you that it is a continuous theft.
I've had systems compromised quite a few times before I knew any better, and had to clean up after many people who have had their systems compromised as well. Although if you mean I haven't been a "serious victim" I guess you are correct, though that wouldn't change my attitude about it. Not studying the problem is a sure-fire way to remain vulnerable to it.
Security technology alone cannot protect against this crime, the same way as a helmet and bullet-resistant vest cannot protect by itself, the same as a steel reinforced door cannot protect by itself.
The law enforcement and our rejection of this type of criminal behavior are necessary too. These people are not Robin Hoods, they are thieves, who steal from families and destroy companies. And it is a pity that a "security professional" associates with them.
There is a difference with a journalist interviewing a criminal for newspaper, because the criminal is in prison. And these people, whom author describes with fascination as "black hats" are in the middle of committing crime, which may as well involve minors and violence, for all I know.
a cop going undercover to find out how criminals operate
This is a cop, who has an official, documented undercover task, but this man is a civilian associating with criminals on his own will. It is his duty to report the crime in progress.
Otherwise any gang member could say: "I am a sociologist. I was studying the way murderers and thieves operate and think. This is why I was on the crime scene."
Probably you are lucky and were not a victim of these bot-nets and trojans' writers. But these are just about the same crime tools as picklock, gun, ax, etc. And these people are robbers, who just use some other tools.
Your fascination with them is unjustified. It is like a person, who likes to knit, would be fascinated by a criminal, who, say, strangle people by a cord.
One can well be a good talented programmer and not be fascinated by moral freaks, who use programming to commit crime.
I've been spending more and more time talking to blackhats lately. Frankly, I think they're fascinating people
They are criminals who steal from people. Fascinating people? How sick.
Glamorizing thieves and moral creeps is sending a wrong message especially to young people. If it were up to me I would lock this Robert Hansen into a jail together with his "blackhats" thieves and thrown away the key. This is where he and they belong.
In Soviet Russia the laptop is watching you. No...wait...
In 90s we had to build a complete interactive web-page in Perl or C, with html tags and JavaScript, and then print it out to a browser. And we were grateful.
Nowadays, having PHP, which is so easy to use, people want to make it even easier. I don't get it.
I know what is strict. I used strict in VBA, visual basic for applications. I do not remember if I used strict in Perl or not, but obviously I am not the only one who deserted from Perl to PHP. Just have a look at the popularity graph.
One can implement strict in PHP too. Just check that a variable is an integer, string of a certain length, bool, etc.
I used Perl in 90's. Then switched over to PHP.
I remember that Perl was not too good for web programming. It was unstable in a sense that variables sometimes got strange values inexplicably.
And also the architecture of the language was not suited for web pages. When I saw PHP3, I switched to it immediately and never looked back.
PHP also has got its minuses (why I cannot create RAR or ZIP archive locked by a password on a website?), but in general it is OK, if one pays attention to what he gets from users.
I found out that casting: page.php?id=123 , i.e. $id=(int)$id; is not enough. One has also check that $id is not greater than, say, 1000, and is not less or equal zero. Because I saw that some visitors try to insert huge numbers into $id for some reason. So basically value of incoming variables should be carefully checked before processing it further. If $id cannot be more than 1000 or negative, than we just enforce it.
1,5 billions of spam messages per day. Multiply each message by 10 seconds of working time it takes to activate e-mail window and delete the spam-message, and it becomes clear what damage to the word economy it brings. Let alone disrupted work-flow.
It is the weapon of mass economic destruction.
Such spammers should be warned, once, twice, and if they do not cool down a drone should come above their building and shoot a "Hellfire" missile right into the server room.
Or at least black-clad agents should enter the server room and sprinkle some special solution into the spam-servers, which becomes conductive after some time and shortcut.
This I would call a mild government response.
I do not feel sorry for them either. But bot-nets cause problems to hosts. Hosts block IPs of the ISPs and website owners, businesses, suffer.
The truth is that Windows is also free OS, like Linux because, obviously, it is easy to pirate. Too easy, if it routinely done even in developing countries.
But unlike Linux the free version of Windows does not update itself.
As for anti-virus, I do not know free anti-virus for Windows, say, in Russian language. "Clamwin", "Avira", etc. do not have Russian language versions, and people mostly can read only this language in those parts.
A also thought that they will understand in English (not so many things to read in an anti-virus), but they do not. For 99% of them words in Latin letters like hieroglyphs.
Windows Security Essentials anti-virus are not available in all countries. I am on the duty trip in the FSU and Windows Security Essentials Page informs me: "Not available in your country".
Windows update checks for the authenticity of Windows.
As a result on millions of computers the OS is un-updated and anti-virus is absent.
In western countries the PCs have the authentic Windows, which is regularly updates itself, and an anti-virus. However, the majority of PCs in the world have a pirated Windows, no anti-virus, no-OS update.
These PCs are infested with viruses and trojans. I saw several bot-nets on one PC.
For people in western countries it may look like everything is more or less OK. But it is not OK. It is well manage chaos, part of the monopoly's strategy to suffocate its main threat: the free safe Internet (web applications), as its monopoly is in silos (PCs' applications).
Good point.
I would also add that government consists of people. Even if rules are OK some people can be corrupted.
I am not so afraid of a government as a whole, I tend to be afraid of a low-level low-paid government official, but who may have an access to a firearm and an eavesdropping device, and happened to be corrupted.
This is the thing to worry about by my opinion.
It makes sense to produce a web-cam with a lid. A piece of paper and scotch tape could be used on older web-cams.
For all I know a spyware soft could be installed on my PC relatively easy and someone may watch my room.
Web-cams are getting smaller and smaller. The same about drones. Soon an artificial creature of the size of a fly will be able to fly into a room and transmit the vdeo and audio in a perfect quality, including night-vision infrared video.
Using protective nets on windows will not help as robots similar to cockroaches may be deployed. It will be the word without secrets.
In real life lightening happens about 10 times per year in a given area. In a laboratory it is possible to simulate lightening 100 times per minute.
But life did not and will not ignite from a primordial soup anyway.
It is a question similar to the atom's insides. It turns out that there is nothing solid inside an atom. Just some bizarre electromagnetic and gravitational fields and waves, sort of a surreal mirage.
The appearance of life is of about the same bizarreness. There is just no way it can ignite by itself. I am not suggesting a mystical or a religious explanation. My point is that we do not know it yet.
In the former USSR the large scale industrial experiments were conducted to create living cells from a primordial soup. It was done as a part of defense effort.
It does not work. They tried everything lightening, temperature change, radiation, UV, infrared, vibrations, etc. Nothing worked. Life is starting in some different way.
Free makes a difference sometimes too. We can add a new colleague to a task with no cost. Or exclude him away if he/she is not up to the task.
I would not be able to do so, absolutely, if it involved buying PhotoShop for this colleague for 999. Nikon D5000 or Lumix G-1 costs less.
We try to get out of GIMP, and also ImageMagic and GD2-PHP library whatever we can. Besides I am sort of accustomed to GIMP already. I think it is a soft of the same league as MySQL or Notepad++.
Thanks for the language remark though. Nice of you.
I have an older version of "PhotoShop". And I was not impressed.
For what I am doing (product photography, thousands of published images per year) GIMP seems to be better. I tried to work with RAWs images but I do not see the point. GIMP 2.6.8 for Windows allows me to do the same things with JPGs at least not worse.
Such things as a mass image re-sizing, thumbs creation, EXIF info removal, etc. I do with "ImageMagic" www.imagemagick.org scripts. In the past I was doing it with the GD2-PHP library and PHP scripts. But now I prefer "ImageMagic" for Windows and BAT scripts.
Mass EXIFs writing I do with the program, which is called "Exifer" (the best things in life are free).
I am also a programmer that is why these tools are better for me. I do not argue "PhotoShop" does work for some people. But I have a feeling that it is an over-priced tool for, sort of, wedding photographers (like a profession badge) and mom's doing photos of their kids.
When an error made by a non-native speaker seems to be funny it is the first sign that this person does not speak any foreign language.
Because one, who can speak a foreign language or at least tried to learn it, knows what a difficult task it is. Like in a joke: "Who served in an army does not laugh in a circus."
Yes, maybe. And a marketing department of 5000 creative people. One needs it to sell soft for 999.-
But the rest is about the same, if not worse than in GIMP.
Sorry for grammar errors, by the way; English is a foreign language for me.
But I keep learning it. As the saying goes: "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me."
What PS has what GIMP does not have?