Of course, the intention is to deceive the customer into thinking they are getting impartial technical advice, when in fact they are getting a sales pitch.
The isn't the first time Microsoft has tried to deceive people into using Vista. Every time I run into some one who claims that Vista is actually doing well or (heaven forbid) a competent OS, I pull up the Mojave Experiment site and say, "Look, Vista is so bad that Microsoft now has to trick ordinary people into using it."
I'm happy to see WebKit being implemented in more browsers. For a long time, it was considered one of the hardest tasks in computing to make a good, solid, standards-compliant HTML rendering engine but when KDE 3.0 came out, the KDE folks seemed to have pulled theirs out of nowhere. It was fast, it rendered things properly, and it was good. Until Apple adopted it and renamed it to WebKit, I was always a little saddened that it never saw wide usage. I'm glad that's changing.
Gecko made huge a leap forward performance-wise with Firefox 3, however. This meant that Firefox finally wasn't sluggish on mediocre hardware. But it still doesn't quite match the speed of WebKit-based browsers.
The Maemo browser, MicroB (which runs on the Nokia N800 and N810) is based on the Firefox 3 version of Gecko and while it's usable, it's actually pretty painful to use for prolonged periods on such limited hardware. They're reportedly working on a WebKit engine which should speed things up dramatically. What I'd really like to see is the Maemo GUI completely rewritten in Qt. Probably won't happen on the N800 and N810, but now that Nokia owns Trolltech, it's a possibility for their next iteration of web tablets.
Because it would show that life can be created from basic non-living components using simple chemical reactions, and that it didn't require some magical "zap" from heaven to do it?
I don't foresee this causing any problems because (to my knowledge) the bible says "God created life," not "Only God can create life."
I can't tell if this is a troll or not, but I'll bite either way...
You'd have to be pretty crazy and/or desperate to risk using the provided bandwidth at DefCon (or any hacker con) for that matter.
I don't think you understand much about hackers or hacker conventions. The conventions tend to have the best network management and security possible, period. That's what these people do all day long. For most of them, it's their job to make things secure so of course they're going to put more effort into it, especially with their friends hanging around.
Regardless of how much faith you may have in the people running the network, you're surrounded on all sides by people who would like nothing more than to steal your information.
Sheesh, let me guess, you check under your bed for hackers at night before you go to sleep?
First off, it's universally accepted at all hacker cons that you don't attack the infrastructure put in place by either the con or the hotel. Doing so will just ruin it everyone. It's the kind of thing that will get a person banned from both permanently.
Second, hackers do not want your information. They mainly care about exploring and exposing weaknesses that will allow less scrupulous elements of society to steal your data. (Namely, fraudsters and most federal governments.)
While at DefCon, stay away from the ATMs and if at all possible stay away from the network entirely.
The advice to stay away from free-standing ATMs is always applicable, but I have no sympathy for someone who sends sensitive information over an insecure channel no matter which network they're on.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 1
I've been using the following user agent string in Firefox for the past few months, just to see what would happen:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
So far, no websites have complained or presented any odd pages. I think the only thing that developers really use the user agent string for any more is tracking user stats.
I'd like to see some kind of study done on the life expectancy of people who retire versus those that don't.
My dad is in his mid-70's and has never stopped working. He claims that everyone he's ever known that retired at 50 or 60 tended to expire just a few years after retirement. The theory, I suppose, is that after they retire, they stop working and become less active while their health deteriorates. Their doctors tell them to take it easy, so they take it easier and their health spirals down and so on.
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but it's interesting nonetheless. When I'm that age, I plan to err on the side of caution and take my father's advice.
I invite you to have a look at the NOAA's predicted track for Gustav and then tell me it's an over-reaction. It's going to hit New Orleans almost square-on tomorrow morning. The hurricane is not predicted to be as strong as Katrina (Katrina was a very strong Category 5 while Gustav is looking to be about a 3), but it's still a fucking hurricane and it's going to cause damage no matter what. Obviously they're going to make a big deal out of it anyway because Katrina is the best example in recent history of the consequences of being unprepared. You're going to fault them for trying to do better this time?
I couldn't have said it better. It's not cheap to run a reliable server room. The hardware that you use to run your systems is rarely the biggest cost. If you need reliability, that means you need:
* easy access to all machines * utility power * battery backups * backup generators * multiple network entry points * adequate cooling * redundant everything
Among other stuff I'm probably forgetting. If you can't afford to build this yourself, it's really best in the long run to host your mission-critical machines in a datacenter that has all of this taken care of for you.
Where I work, we have around 20 great big stonking AC units. These puppies run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I can't imagine the fat check our utility company receives each month, but it's clearly worth it since we never have servers die of heat-related problems.
Until a few months ago, I did some helpdesk work at a web hosting provider. When a customer calls in, we are required to make them verify that they are the account holder by telling us either the last four digits of their credit card or their hosting account password (which they specify when they're signing up for service).
One day, a new customer calls in and says he's having some trouble setting up DNS and would like some advice. He's maybe in his late teens or early twenties He gives me the account number. I notice that he makes his payments via PayPal. When I see his password, I hit mute on the phone and giggle for a few seconds. After my composure is somewhat regained, I unmute and ask him to verify his account password for security purposes.
You could almost hear him tense up. When he starts stuttering, I was sure he never stopped to consider that he might have someone
"Ummm, uh, it's fuckyou2dickhead."
I helped him through his DNS questions as politely as possible and we got along pretty well. Before hanging up, he asked if there was a way he could change his password online. I said yes, through our monitoring and billing system.
While we geeks and hackers really don't mind a bit of humour thrown in our direction from time to time, I would please ask you to reconsider your comparing our hobby to that of an idea which
- asks people to believe in one or more all-powerful beings in the sky despite even a shred of supporting evidence,
- has always been used by the worlds most influential political and social leaders for the sole purpose of personal and monetary gain, and
- has persuaded millions upon millions of people to kill, get killed, or kill themselves over the course of human history.
Although your metaphors are interesting and could make for a mediocre sci-fi novel some day, vanishingly few people actually take the Free Software thing to the degree that you're claiming. 99.9% of us just want to hack away on our machines or build a business without being dependent on closed proprietary systems.
And besides, RMS is way too much of an asshole to be considered a prophet no matter how you torture the definition of the word.
"old school id, 3d realms and apogee folk must be cringing at this kind of comment for it was the shareware "revolution" that created the major games industries we see today."
'Zactly. Doom was the poster child for extremely successful shareware computer games. The first episode was free to play and free to share. If you liked it, you had the option of paying for more episodes. And that's pretty much how Mr. Hollenshead bought his first Ferrari.
Mods: This post had nothing at all to do with the parent. Quit modding up posts like this that reply to the parent just so they can appear higher up in the discussion.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have a security researcher explain the details of a serious vulnerability in a public forum than some script kiddie figure it out quietly.
I tried doing something like this a few months ago. I have a colo in a datacenter with an empty 250GB disk and wanted to use it to back up the contents of my file server at home. I needed secure authentication, transmission, and storage. And although I'm not doing anything illegal nor do I distrust the datacenter staff, I didn't want to keep any encryption keys on the colo box itself. My homebrew solution was to use SSHFS (which uses FUSE) combined with EncFS (also uses FUSE) plus rsnapshot to do the incremental backups.
This worked, but with one major flaw: the datacenter routers have a tendency to reset TCP connections after some random amount of time (between 1 minute and several hours, usually) whether there is any traffic on the connection or not. (I've tried talking to their networking staff about it, since it affects regular SSH sessions as well but they insist that it's a feature rather than a bug.) SSHFS isn't smart enough to deal with a broken connection and instead of reconnecting or issuing an error, the client just blocks forever when accessing the then non-existant device.
Because of this setback, I've nearly resigned myself to buying an external USB hard disk and doing my off-site backups sneakernet-style. I'm happy to entertain any suggestions on an encrypted remote filesystem that works (or at least breaks gracefully) with unreliable connections.
"For a long time, humans were pretty dumb, doing little but make 'the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,'
Yeah, and life itself was pretty dumb for 3 billion years, floating around in oceans being lazy and photosynthesizing for food. Until about 1 billion years ago, one of them said, "screw this, I'm going multi-cellular so I can _earn_ my food."
This is not news, this is evolution. Some species was simply bound to evolve advanced mental capcity at some point.
(Though you wouldn't know it from watching American TV.)
It wouldn't surprise me if the legal situation at YouTube was that they yank any clip against which there is a properly filed copyright complaint, and that they follow up later on the actual applicability of copyright law.
I work for a web hosting company and thus have some exposure to this type of thing.
In a nutshell, you're entirely correct. Under the DMCA, providers are required by law to remove the "offending" material upon receipt of an infringement notice. If they don't, they become liable for infringement as well. No real proof of ownership is required, the author of the notice simply has to say it belongs to them. When we receive one of these, all we do is suspend the concerned account, forward the DMCA to the customer, and then our job is done.
The only thing that makes the DMCA bearable for us is the fact that we're off the hook if our customer decides to unsuspend the account and make the content available again after receiving the notice. From then on, it's a legal battle between the alleged copyright holder and the alleged infringer.
In this case (depending on how draconian YouTube/Google decides to feel today), the user can simply re-upload the video to YouTube and if the alleged copyright holder wants to battle it further, they have to use the legal system to get subpoenas, court orders, etc for further action. (But of course IANAL, so feel free to poke holes in my understanding of the DMCA here.)
Not a victim of having her privacy invaded, not merely being spied upon.. but a full-fledged Webcam Spy Hacker Voyeurism Scandal. A WSHVS. Dear god, WHAT HAVE WE COME TO? I think I'll found a WSHVS victim anonymous.
Seriously. There was no hacking in this story. Not even in the overblown sense in which the media typically use it. But of course a computer was involved so they thought they might as well throw the word "hacker" into it even though there is no logical sense in doing so.
Journalists: Can't live with 'em, can't drop 'em off a bridge onto a busy interstate.
Actually, a MAC address is more permanent than an IP. Except in very rare cases, a MAC address stays the same on a particular network device no matter what network it's connected to nor where the device is physically located.
There's nothing saying it can't be spoofed by those knowledgeable enough to do so, though, which is what I presume you were getting at.
Slashdot Mirror
The isn't the first time Microsoft has tried to deceive people into using Vista. Every time I run into some one who claims that Vista is actually doing well or (heaven forbid) a competent OS, I pull up the Mojave Experiment site and say, "Look, Vista is so bad that Microsoft now has to trick ordinary people into using it."
Google News crawled an obscure reprint...
The story was then picked up by other news aggregators...
This triggered automated trading programs...
Is there even a live person at the wheel anymore?
I wish Douglas Adams were still around, he would have had a great laugh today.
I'm happy to see WebKit being implemented in more browsers. For a long time, it was considered one of the hardest tasks in computing to make a good, solid, standards-compliant HTML rendering engine but when KDE 3.0 came out, the KDE folks seemed to have pulled theirs out of nowhere. It was fast, it rendered things properly, and it was good. Until Apple adopted it and renamed it to WebKit, I was always a little saddened that it never saw wide usage. I'm glad that's changing.
Gecko made huge a leap forward performance-wise with Firefox 3, however. This meant that Firefox finally wasn't sluggish on mediocre hardware. But it still doesn't quite match the speed of WebKit-based browsers.
The Maemo browser, MicroB (which runs on the Nokia N800 and N810) is based on the Firefox 3 version of Gecko and while it's usable, it's actually pretty painful to use for prolonged periods on such limited hardware. They're reportedly working on a WebKit engine which should speed things up dramatically. What I'd really like to see is the Maemo GUI completely rewritten in Qt. Probably won't happen on the N800 and N810, but now that Nokia owns Trolltech, it's a possibility for their next iteration of web tablets.
Because it would show that life can be created from basic non-living components using simple chemical reactions, and that it didn't require some magical "zap" from heaven to do it?
I don't foresee this causing any problems because (to my knowledge) the bible says "God created life," not "Only God can create life."
Of course, I've been wrong before.
I can't tell if this is a troll or not, but I'll bite either way...
I don't think you understand much about hackers or hacker conventions. The conventions tend to have the best network management and security possible, period. That's what these people do all day long. For most of them, it's their job to make things secure so of course they're going to put more effort into it, especially with their friends hanging around.
Sheesh, let me guess, you check under your bed for hackers at night before you go to sleep?
First off, it's universally accepted at all hacker cons that you don't attack the infrastructure put in place by either the con or the hotel. Doing so will just ruin it everyone. It's the kind of thing that will get a person banned from both permanently.
Second, hackers do not want your information. They mainly care about exploring and exposing weaknesses that will allow less scrupulous elements of society to steal your data. (Namely, fraudsters and most federal governments.)
The advice to stay away from free-standing ATMs is always applicable, but I have no sympathy for someone who sends sensitive information over an insecure channel no matter which network they're on.
Is her hovercraft full of eels?
I've been using the following user agent string in Firefox for the past few months, just to see what would happen:
So far, no websites have complained or presented any odd pages. I think the only thing that developers really use the user agent string for any more is tracking user stats.
I'd like to see some kind of study done on the life expectancy of people who retire versus those that don't.
My dad is in his mid-70's and has never stopped working. He claims that everyone he's ever known that retired at 50 or 60 tended to expire just a few years after retirement. The theory, I suppose, is that after they retire, they stop working and become less active while their health deteriorates. Their doctors tell them to take it easy, so they take it easier and their health spirals down and so on.
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but it's interesting nonetheless. When I'm that age, I plan to err on the side of caution and take my father's advice.
I invite you to have a look at the NOAA's predicted track for Gustav and then tell me it's an over-reaction. It's going to hit New Orleans almost square-on tomorrow morning. The hurricane is not predicted to be as strong as Katrina (Katrina was a very strong Category 5 while Gustav is looking to be about a 3), but it's still a fucking hurricane and it's going to cause damage no matter what. Obviously they're going to make a big deal out of it anyway because Katrina is the best example in recent history of the consequences of being unprepared. You're going to fault them for trying to do better this time?
I couldn't have said it better. It's not cheap to run a reliable server room. The hardware that you use to run your systems is rarely the biggest cost. If you need reliability, that means you need:
* easy access to all machines
* utility power
* battery backups
* backup generators
* multiple network entry points
* adequate cooling
* redundant everything
Among other stuff I'm probably forgetting. If you can't afford to build this yourself, it's really best in the long run to host your mission-critical machines in a datacenter that has all of this taken care of for you.
Where I work, we have around 20 great big stonking AC units. These puppies run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I can't imagine the fat check our utility company receives each month, but it's clearly worth it since we never have servers die of heat-related problems.
There might be a flaw in your plan, though.
What happens when grandma walks in and just wants to buy yarn?
Until a few months ago, I did some helpdesk work at a web hosting provider. When a customer calls in, we are required to make them verify that they are the account holder by telling us either the last four digits of their credit card or their hosting account password (which they specify when they're signing up for service).
One day, a new customer calls in and says he's having some trouble setting up DNS and would like some advice. He's maybe in his late teens or early twenties He gives me the account number. I notice that he makes his payments via PayPal. When I see his password, I hit mute on the phone and giggle for a few seconds. After my composure is somewhat regained, I unmute and ask him to verify his account password for security purposes.
You could almost hear him tense up. When he starts stuttering, I was sure he never stopped to consider that he might have someone
"Ummm, uh, it's fuckyou2dickhead."
I helped him through his DNS questions as politely as possible and we got along pretty well. Before hanging up, he asked if there was a way he could change his password online. I said yes, through our monitoring and billing system.
He gave a huge sigh of relief.
While we geeks and hackers really don't mind a bit of humour thrown in our direction from time to time, I would please ask you to reconsider your comparing our hobby to that of an idea which
- asks people to believe in one or more all-powerful beings in the sky despite even a shred of supporting evidence,
- has always been used by the worlds most influential political and social leaders for the sole purpose of personal and monetary gain, and
- has persuaded millions upon millions of people to kill, get killed, or kill themselves over the course of human history.
Although your metaphors are interesting and could make for a mediocre sci-fi novel some day, vanishingly few people actually take the Free Software thing to the degree that you're claiming. 99.9% of us just want to hack away on our machines or build a business without being dependent on closed proprietary systems.
And besides, RMS is way too much of an asshole to be considered a prophet no matter how you torture the definition of the word.
"old school id, 3d realms and apogee folk must be cringing at this kind of comment for it was the shareware "revolution" that created the major games industries we see today."
'Zactly. Doom was the poster child for extremely successful shareware computer games. The first episode was free to play and free to share. If you liked it, you had the option of paying for more episodes. And that's pretty much how Mr. Hollenshead bought his first Ferrari.
Mods: This post had nothing at all to do with the parent. Quit modding up posts like this that reply to the parent just so they can appear higher up in the discussion.
but it seems like a big f-u to everyone else.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have a security researcher explain the details of a serious vulnerability in a public forum than some script kiddie figure it out quietly.
Anyone else feel another Google acquisition coming on?
I tried doing something like this a few months ago. I have a colo in a datacenter with an empty 250GB disk and wanted to use it to back up the contents of my file server at home. I needed secure authentication, transmission, and storage. And although I'm not doing anything illegal nor do I distrust the datacenter staff, I didn't want to keep any encryption keys on the colo box itself. My homebrew solution was to use SSHFS (which uses FUSE) combined with EncFS (also uses FUSE) plus rsnapshot to do the incremental backups.
This worked, but with one major flaw: the datacenter routers have a tendency to reset TCP connections after some random amount of time (between 1 minute and several hours, usually) whether there is any traffic on the connection or not. (I've tried talking to their networking staff about it, since it affects regular SSH sessions as well but they insist that it's a feature rather than a bug.) SSHFS isn't smart enough to deal with a broken connection and instead of reconnecting or issuing an error, the client just blocks forever when accessing the then non-existant device.
Because of this setback, I've nearly resigned myself to buying an external USB hard disk and doing my off-site backups sneakernet-style. I'm happy to entertain any suggestions on an encrypted remote filesystem that works (or at least breaks gracefully) with unreliable connections.
Like many of you, we spend most of our waking hours on-line seeking stuff to entertain our brains
You misspelled "wanking" there. ;)
"For a long time, humans were pretty dumb, doing little but make 'the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,'
Yeah, and life itself was pretty dumb for 3 billion years, floating around in oceans being lazy and photosynthesizing for food. Until about 1 billion years ago, one of them said, "screw this, I'm going multi-cellular so I can _earn_ my food."
This is not news, this is evolution. Some species was simply bound to evolve advanced mental capcity at some point.
(Though you wouldn't know it from watching American TV.)
It wouldn't surprise me if the legal situation at YouTube was that they yank any clip against which there is a properly filed copyright complaint, and that they follow up later on the actual applicability of copyright law.
I work for a web hosting company and thus have some exposure to this type of thing.
In a nutshell, you're entirely correct. Under the DMCA, providers are required by law to remove the "offending" material upon receipt of an infringement notice. If they don't, they become liable for infringement as well. No real proof of ownership is required, the author of the notice simply has to say it belongs to them. When we receive one of these, all we do is suspend the concerned account, forward the DMCA to the customer, and then our job is done.
The only thing that makes the DMCA bearable for us is the fact that we're off the hook if our customer decides to unsuspend the account and make the content available again after receiving the notice. From then on, it's a legal battle between the alleged copyright holder and the alleged infringer.
In this case (depending on how draconian YouTube/Google decides to feel today), the user can simply re-upload the video to YouTube and if the alleged copyright holder wants to battle it further, they have to use the legal system to get subpoenas, court orders, etc for further action. (But of course IANAL, so feel free to poke holes in my understanding of the DMCA here.)
Not a victim of having her privacy invaded, not merely being spied upon.. but a full-fledged Webcam Spy Hacker Voyeurism Scandal. A WSHVS. Dear god, WHAT HAVE WE COME TO? I think I'll found a WSHVS victim anonymous.
Seriously. There was no hacking in this story. Not even in the overblown sense in which the media typically use it. But of course a computer was involved so they thought they might as well throw the word "hacker" into it even though there is no logical sense in doing so.
Journalists: Can't live with 'em, can't drop 'em off a bridge onto a busy interstate.
I heard that in most states, you don't need a detective license to get a job at Peep Squad...
Wow, way to be up to date on last week's news, Slashdot.
Actually, a MAC address is more permanent than an IP. Except in very rare cases, a MAC address stays the same on a particular network device no matter what network it's connected to nor where the device is physically located.
There's nothing saying it can't be spoofed by those knowledgeable enough to do so, though, which is what I presume you were getting at.