Given how many millions of microsoft windows machines out there are zombied and controlled by spammers, I'd say it's pretty safe since these crackers don't all get rounded up by their local police.
News isn't really designed for quick access to stuff, and it's easy enough to trace anyone viewing all the suspicious files. Unless they are doing it from someone else's compromised machine. In which case they may as well just send the stuff directly there...
and it never occurred to you that the website itself has been compromised and is forwarding data to somewhere else that can't be easily traced? Such as a machine in a country with looser enforcement of technical issues?
On the other hand, the notice says "You have entered a search term that is likely to return adult content" which suggests strongly that only the query is being studied. So I don't know.
If you search for xfree86 with another term, such as linux, then you get decent results, www.xfree86.org first and www.debian.org second, so perhaps it does do the query first and rejects it based on the returned results. Also, server load made it take around 10 seconds (for me) when submitting "xfree86" alone, so maybe it is actually doing a search.
Someone else mentioned the possibility of porn spammers targetting specific words as well, although I'm not entirely sure why they'd do it for "xfree86".
Roblimo said:
"While I was visiting, for the first time ever plans were being made for Cricket matches between the Indian and Pakistani national teams,..."
Heh. The Indian and Pakistanis have of course played each other many times in cricket. When people say "the first test", they mean the first test in a series of 3 or 5, not the first ever test.
funny that. Of course, that's because NZ money is made at the Australian Mint, so it would make sense that the materials and security features are the same.
NZ is a bloody long way away from South America, even if you take the shortcut over Antarctica. The size of that plane looks like it could barely hold enough fuel to get that far even in favourable conditions. It seems likely that he always intended to be a visitor to the Antartic... I mean it takes a C130 hercules a full load of fuel and about 12 hours to go from NZ to Scott Base in Antarctica and back...
of course, international exchange rates have a lot to do with this. When I bought text books back in 1997 or 1998 (can't remember), it was cheaper for me to buy some from the US than from the campus bookshop. OF course, since then the NZ dropped against the US, and has only started to significantly go up again recently.
this is one of the best things about galeon, in my opinion. The tab implementation is much better than mozilla's. Also, each tab has its own "x" close button so you don't accidentally think of closing the whole window instead of the tab.
Uh, I don't live in America, where it seems everything is for sale. In New Zealand, and indeed the rest of the "Western world", we have privacy acts that say data may only be used for the purpose it was explicitly collected for.
This university had an internal web search thing where you could find people's email addresses given a surname (only accessible from within the university), and they decided that since they didn't mention anything about this on the enrolment form, they had to take it down to comply with our privacy act.
I sincerely doubt any university in New Zealand, or even Australia or Europe, would ever consider selling its users email addresses to spammers. Especially since NZ internet users have to pay for international traffic. Why sell addresses that will result in you paying 5 to 8 cents per megabyte of data received?
I regularly get spam addressed to my address along with other users at the same domain. But I doubt my university sells addresses. It's probably just what some spam software does, since spam assassin can be set up to assign a higher score to messages where your address isn't in the To or Cc fields.
Sheesh, what's with jumping to conclusions? Like assuming if your new hotmail a/c gets spam, then MS must have immediately sold it to spammers who immediately spammed it....
I often wondered about " Australia must pay for all traffic both to and from the US, apparently about 12c/MB, ". I have no actual research in this area, but according to random people during the napster hayday, new zealand users didn't really have the same problem. But this is something i'd seriously look in to.
I'm in NZ, and this is true - Aust and NZ simply aren't big enough markets to be able to peer with US backbone providers, so our ISPs have to pay to send and receive data to the rest of the world (it all goes via USA). When I first when to university in 1996, it cost a couple of $NZ per meg. ($1NZ ~= $US0.56). People older than me remember paying several dollars per kilobyte:p. It's now less than 10c per meg but still isn't like it is for North American ISPs. Perhaps the reason NZ'ers don't complain so much is the residential "broadband" is generally 10 GB per month caps, although rate limited to 128kbps.
One of the replies to your post got me thinking... if this *was* used for cryptography, perhaps it would be possible to compromise the encryption by adding a strong electro-magnetic force to bias the hardware?
For example, DRM encrypting stuff on your box, or perhaps placing a magnet or something in someone else's computer...
So when Europe does it it's called "subsidies" but when USA does it it's called "farm disaster aid"? Interesting.
Here in New Zealand we have no farm subsidies anymore (after the brutal economic reforms of the 1980s) but our lamb/(beef?) exports to USA have something like 30-50% tariffs, mainly because a favourable exchange rate makes it cheaper than US meat (while still being good quality). Oh, and steel tarriffs:) This, of course, is due to lobbying by US politicians in the more agricultural states.
However, "free" trade makes the world a more stable place. People like to say no 2 countries with McDonalds have ever gone to war or something like that (although tell that to the Serbs).
fair enough. I hadn't had breakfast or coffee yet and I'm not terribly good in the mornings...
I guess people in Auckland (>1million) think their 8-lane motorway is the only "proper" one around, but really, our cities are just like in every other Western country. Maybe those guys were pulling your chain...
All the "large" cities (>100,000) have motorways in and out. Perhaps you are thinking of State Highway 1 which runs the length of the country? There are state highways in every direction.....
All you can do is make it difficult or illegal. But give me the most-secure email system, and I can probably do any of these:
I can print the damn thing out and xerox it.
I can do a screen capture and run the image file through OCR, and email that.
I can dictate it as I read and record a.wav file (or pump it through a speech-to-text engine).
Both of the first 2 points require the co-operation of your operating system and/or applications. You can't grab the video memory if the OS won't let you. The third is the only fool-proof method, and it slows communication down back to the speed of a human. If it's a large confidential report, or something else where "time is of the essence", then DRM will have done it's job.
Here in New Zealand, unless you are travelling to Australia or some piddly little Pacific Island, you are going to be stuff in a tin can for 10 - 12 hours. I'd love it if this was in a plane that could afford to give passengers more room.
Auckland, NZ -> LA is about 12 hours. Auckland -> Europe is 10 hours to Singapore and then about another 12 hours to London/Paris/Frankfurt.
There are also direct LA -> Australia flights, about 14 hours.
Not everyone has the luxury of taking smaller point-to-point flights...
There definitely are messages getting lost in NZ. I've had someone send me messages that I never received. (We're both on the same TelecomNZ 025 network). I'd say about 5% of the messages that she sent me (they are saved on her phone and definitely to the right number) never made it. It wouldn't be so bad if the sender was notified or if the SMSs were free....
I put a US one dollar bill on the display case for size comparison;)
There is also a clipping from a newspaper of the time saying how Stanford was suing over warranty issues (such has high unavailability) but it doesn't say what the outcome was...
<hch@lst.de>:
o dump_stack()
o backport yield() and conditional reschedule changes from
o small VM updates from -aa (1/5)
o small VM updates from -aa (2/5)
o small VM updates from -aa (4/5)
o small VM updates from -aa (5/5)
Is this using a Linus definition of small, or a normal definition of small?
...are STILL the major cause for security violations, on both unix and windows platforms. I don't know whether to blame the language or the programmers.
Slightly off-topic, debian has this security advisory for the "purity test" package: http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa- 166
quote: "A malicious user could alter the highscore of several games."
Echelon makes this kind of irrelevant. The 5 countries that are part of Echelon (US, UK, Canada, Australia, and NZ) can basically listen in on ANY phone call/fax/email/IP etc in any of the other countries. There are some computers here in New Zealand that are directly controlled by the US (NSA I think). This means that the NZ govt (and Aust govt etc) can listen to US phone calls. Now part of the reason it is set up like this is that the US authorities can use the NZ bit of the network to listen to US calls. This way it is technically not "domestic spying" as it is occurring over here.
I guess the wiretaps they're talking about here are for court-issued wiretaps for the police, rather than the secret services.
Slashdot Mirror
Given how many millions of microsoft windows machines out there are zombied and controlled by spammers, I'd say it's pretty safe since these crackers don't all get rounded up by their local police.
News isn't really designed for quick access to stuff, and it's easy enough to trace anyone viewing all the suspicious files. Unless they are doing it from someone else's compromised machine. In which case they may as well just send the stuff directly there...
and it never occurred to you that the website itself has been compromised and is forwarding data to somewhere else that can't be easily traced? Such as a machine in a country with looser enforcement of technical issues?
If you search for xfree86 with another term, such as linux, then you get decent results, www.xfree86.org first and www.debian.org second, so perhaps it does do the query first and rejects it based on the returned results. Also, server load made it take around 10 seconds (for me) when submitting "xfree86" alone, so maybe it is actually doing a search.
Someone else mentioned the possibility of porn spammers targetting specific words as well, although I'm not entirely sure why they'd do it for "xfree86".
Heh. The Indian and Pakistanis have of course played each other many times in cricket. When people say "the first test", they mean the first test in a series of 3 or 5, not the first ever test.
funny that. Of course, that's because NZ money is made at the Australian Mint, so it would make sense that the materials and security features are the same.
NZ is a bloody long way away from South America, even if you take the shortcut over Antarctica. The size of that plane looks like it could barely hold enough fuel to get that far even in favourable conditions. It seems likely that he always intended to be a visitor to the Antartic... I mean it takes a C130 hercules a full load of fuel and about 12 hours to go from NZ to Scott Base in Antarctica and back...
of course, international exchange rates have a lot to do with this. When I bought text books back in 1997 or 1998 (can't remember), it was cheaper for me to buy some from the US than from the campus bookshop. OF course, since then the NZ dropped against the US, and has only started to significantly go up again recently.
this is one of the best things about galeon, in my opinion. The tab implementation is much better than mozilla's. Also, each tab has its own "x" close button so you don't accidentally think of closing the whole window instead of the tab.
Uh, I don't live in America, where it seems everything is for sale. In New Zealand, and indeed the rest of the "Western world", we have privacy acts that say data may only be used for the purpose it was explicitly collected for.
This university had an internal web search thing where you could find people's email addresses given a surname (only accessible from within the university), and they decided that since they didn't mention anything about this on the enrolment form, they had to take it down to comply with our privacy act.
I sincerely doubt any university in New Zealand, or even Australia or Europe, would ever consider selling its users email addresses to spammers. Especially since NZ internet users have to pay for international traffic. Why sell addresses that will result in you paying 5 to 8 cents per megabyte of data received?
yes. it's one of spam assassin's signs of spam. It's worth 3.9 points out of 5.0:
SORTED_RECIPS (3.9 points) Recipient list is sorted by address
I regularly get spam addressed to my address along with other users at the same domain. But I doubt my university sells addresses. It's probably just what some spam software does, since spam assassin can be set up to assign a higher score to messages where your address isn't in the To or Cc fields.
Sheesh, what's with jumping to conclusions? Like assuming if your new hotmail a/c gets spam, then MS must have immediately sold it to spammers who immediately spammed it....
I'm in NZ, and this is true - Aust and NZ simply aren't big enough markets to be able to peer with US backbone providers, so our ISPs have to pay to send and receive data to the rest of the world (it all goes via USA). When I first when to university in 1996, it cost a couple of $NZ per meg. ($1NZ ~= $US0.56). People older than me remember paying several dollars per kilobyte
One of the replies to your post got me thinking... if this *was* used for cryptography, perhaps it would be possible to compromise the encryption by adding a strong electro-magnetic force to bias the hardware?
For example, DRM encrypting stuff on your box, or perhaps placing a magnet or something in someone else's computer...
Remember, hardware can be compromised too!
So when Europe does it it's called "subsidies" but when USA does it it's called "farm disaster aid"?
:) This, of course, is due to lobbying by US politicians in the more agricultural states.
:)
Interesting.
Here in New Zealand we have no farm subsidies anymore (after the brutal economic reforms of the 1980s) but our lamb/(beef?) exports to USA have something like 30-50% tariffs, mainly because a favourable exchange rate makes it cheaper than US meat (while still being good quality). Oh, and steel tarriffs
However, "free" trade makes the world a more stable place. People like to say no 2 countries with McDonalds have ever gone to war or something like that (although tell that to the Serbs).
What's my point? I don't know
fair enough. I hadn't had breakfast or coffee yet and I'm not terribly good in the mornings...
I guess people in Auckland (>1million) think their 8-lane motorway is the only "proper" one around, but really, our cities are just like in every other Western country. Maybe those guys were pulling your chain...
Fuck-knuckle.
All the "large" cities (>100,000) have motorways in and out. Perhaps you are thinking of State Highway 1 which runs the length of the country? There are state highways in every direction.....
Here in New Zealand, unless you are travelling to Australia or some piddly little Pacific Island, you are going to be stuff in a tin can for 10 - 12 hours. I'd love it if this was in a plane that could afford to give passengers more room.
Auckland, NZ -> LA is about 12 hours. Auckland -> Europe is 10 hours to Singapore and then about another 12 hours to London/Paris/Frankfurt.
There are also direct LA -> Australia flights, about 14 hours.
Not everyone has the luxury of taking smaller point-to-point flights...
There definitely are messages getting lost in NZ. I've had someone send me messages that I never received. (We're both on the same TelecomNZ 025 network). I'd say about 5% of the messages that she sent me (they are saved on her phone and definitely to the right number) never made it. It wouldn't be so bad if the sender was notified or if the SMSs were free....
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~jrm21/images/platter- lowres.jpg
I put a US one dollar bill on the display case for size comparison ;)
There is also a clipping from a newspaper of the time saying how Stanford was suing over warranty issues (such has high unavailability) but it doesn't say what the outcome was...
Yes I do know that. But Linus was maintaining it when they made a "small" change to the VM sub-system that involved gutting the whole thing.
But you already knew that too...
From the changelog....
<hch@lst.de>:
o dump_stack()
o backport yield() and conditional reschedule changes from
o small VM updates from -aa (1/5)
o small VM updates from -aa (2/5)
o small VM updates from -aa (4/5)
o small VM updates from -aa (5/5)
Is this using a Linus definition of small, or a normal definition of small?
...are STILL the major cause for security violations, on both unix and windows platforms. I don't know whether to blame the language or the programmers.
- 166
Slightly off-topic, debian has this security advisory for the "purity test" package:
http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa
quote: "A malicious user could alter the highscore of several games."
heh.
Google for Nicky Hager, an activist over here who made a lot of details public in a book a few years ago.
Echelon makes this kind of irrelevant. The 5 countries that are part of Echelon (US, UK, Canada, Australia, and NZ) can basically listen in on ANY phone call/fax/email/IP etc in any of the other countries. There are some computers here in New Zealand that are directly controlled by the US (NSA I think). This means that the NZ govt (and Aust govt etc) can listen to US phone calls. Now part of the reason it is set up like this is that the US authorities can use the NZ bit of the network to listen to US calls. This way it is technically not "domestic spying" as it is occurring over here.
I guess the wiretaps they're talking about here are for court-issued wiretaps for the police, rather than the secret services.