Re:It's easier to tear something down than to buil
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Thebroken Videos
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· Score: 1
Now that's something well written and well thought out. I'm going to keep this in mind.
Re:It's easier to tear something down than to buil
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Thebroken Videos
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· Score: 1
That may or may not be true. However it's important to remember that he's not spending three months researching a specific vulnerability and then writing out his notes in a text file. He's producing a series of video episodes that discuss things.
To give you an idea of what it is to be a small video producer, a couple of weeks ago I got together 6 extras, a photographer, a cameraman, and went on location to film two short scenes. It took all day to set this up, get everyone to where they needed to be, get everyone to know what they were supposed to do, and to do it. Then to do a small cast party to make it worth their time to come out. It then took half a day to edit, and another half day to screen and fine tune. Writing the script it's self took about another day.
So let me ask you how much end footage I generated from three days worth of work. About 80 seconds.
Why this much effort? One of the biggest constructive criticisms that I received from HaXXXor Volume 1: No Longer Floppy, was that they liked the concept, but would like to see more than hot chicks just reading text off my Powerbook. That's why I put in the work.
I also received a lot of people saying something like, stupid skanky ho's reading off a laptop, and those I ignore. There's a big difference between the one and the other.
The point of what I'm saying is that there's a big difference between making a video, or any other "product," and posting a quick blurb to bugtraq.
I would imagine that the average video producer has more video production skill in their pinky than the average hacker could even fathom. It's called distribution of labor, that's the reason why 90% of (western) society isn't out in the fields harvesting vegetables to keep society fed.
It's easier to tear something down than to build
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Thebroken Videos
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm the guy that created HaXXXor, and it's very interesting because while reading through this thread, I hear a lot of the same things said about these guys' video that was said about mine. It make me wonder if someone has hacked a version of beagle to spam discussion on hacker videos...:-)
But seriously, here's my opinion. I'd like to think it counts for something being a producer and all...
There seems to be two types of people that comment on projects like The Broken, and HaXXXor, and 2600, et al.
First there's the people who say, wow that's cool.
To them, I say: Thank You.
Then there's the people who act as those the presence of any material, whether it's a video, or a print magazine or whatever is a direct threat to their way of life. Then the screaming begins.
It's not the type of thing a REAL SYSADMIN should care about, it's only worth reading if you're 15 (obviously doesn't apply to HaXXXor), it's stupid, why bother, and on and on and on.
I don't really see why the negative points are really valid, besides from the obvious fact that freedom of speech means freedom of all speach. Once you get past the freedom of speech part though, it really doesn't pan out.
First, it's a good thing that people are making videos and books and magazines talking about this sort of thing. While it may be old hat to some people, there's a lot of other people out there that haven't even heard of this stuff. So the next time that you want to lament the masses for their ignorance, remember the heaps of criticism that anyone who produces any material that might help a few more people who aren't as L33t as you to bridge the gap.
Second, for the people out there who throw out the massively insightful, this is stupid and pointless, why bother, type of remarks. Just remember, a lot of really cool things have been created because someone spent a lot of time working endlessly on something that was considered pointless, and then an occassion would come up with something that proved to be useful.
Here's the deal, just remember that there are people actually creating these things. There's a person on the other side of the video, or book, or magazine, or whatever, that's put a lot of time and work in to it. If you think you can do better, then pick up a camera and give it a shot. But if you've never even tried doing something like that before, then why don't you try to appreciate the work that was put in to it, and what was done right, before you rush to tear it apart.
In this community, it is common that a program that still needs a whole lot of work gets gushed over, but the moment someone makes a video it's an instant target? You really should be supporting these efforts (or at least constructively criticizing them). It's hard enough to be a small independent producer. However, it's small independent producers that are the competition to Hollywood and the big television networks. Do you prefer them to be the only people who talk about hackers?
Kill a character during the character creation process.
I can't stress the importance of this enough. This let's the players know in no uncertain terms that life in Alpha Complex is UNFAIR.
(Plus, the shock of the experience puts them in a perfect state of mind to start the adventure)
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On a side note, one of our old friends has a nick name from Paranoia. We call him Mikey-O. It's funny to listen to hundreds of people call him that, when only 3 people get the joke. One night at a party I got really drunk, and promoted him to Mikey-U, but it didn't have the same ring, so I turned him in as a traitor, and his next clone got restored to Orange clearance.
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You are in error, no one is screaming, thank you for your cooperation.
I put out a film a little while ago, and instead of a government warning, I made fun of the FBI and the MPAA, and instead had a picture of a girl in a pirate outfit with a plastic sword ask people not to pirate our stuff.
It's a joke. Anytime you hand people a bucket of bits, they're going to decide what they want to do with it. I mean, do people really think it's a great idea to sue their customers, and then dump shitloads of money into Washington to pass all sorts of draconian laws designed to totally curb freedom, in order to maximize their own profits?
Well, that's how those people work, and you know what, it is making them a whole lot of money. Meanwhile, as a small independent movie producer, I place every dollar I got in to my films, am constantly criticized for my low production quality, and am constantly mocked by people to the extent that it's easy to copy my movie, and instead of buying it, you should just download it.
Is that enough to make me frustrated? Sure. Frustrated enough to sue everyone. No.
I mean, anyone with half a brain can see from the disk that I used neither region encoding nor did I use CSS. Why is that you ask? Well, CSS is totally broken, for starters. Besides, even if it weren't broken, CSS does nothing to stop the copying of an entire disk. Video pirates routinely take a disk, make an exact copy of it, and it works just fine, CSS and all. So really, what's the point? What's the point of CSS, but to further munge up the data files. As far as region encoding goes. I do a lot of traveling, and it's annoying and insulting that I can't pick up some local DVDs from my travels and take them home and play them. Sure I can get a special dvd player, or a special software, but what about my Mac? What about my friend's players? I wouldn't want to live in a world where something as stupid as geography determines what you can and can't watch (although that seems to mostly be the case now). Even if I have to see it happening around me, I'll be damned if I'm going to contribute to it.
So yes, people have figured that my DVD can easily be copied, played anywhere in the world, and I won't even sue.
As far as this new FBI seal goes, it's just more advertising for the FBI. The major players in the movie industry get the FBI to do their bidding like little lapdogs. Meanwhile this gang of thugs continue to do all sorts of civil liberties violations. I'll never include it in anything I do (as if the FBI would ever lift a finger to help me out, even if I did become evil, and actually decide that I wanted their help). In return for the FBI being hired thugs for the movie industry, the movie industry gives them all sorts of free publicity, and further legitimizes them, and increases their hold over the hearts and minds of the general public.
I'll never use this seal, and I'll continue to poke fun at the FBI and MPAA any chance I get. Other people will continue to poke fun at me any chance they get. Life goes on. Of course, I'll probably never own a private jet, produce a movie like Lord of the Rings, or have enough money to buy several congressmen. The MPAA has all this and more. I wonder which companies ideology will end up winning in the long run, mine or theirs.
Always invite someone someone "inferior" to the session, and make them mission leader.
For example, if you are a group of high school seniors, invite a freshman kid over to play. He will try way too hard, and will be way gullible. If he's not, then congratulations, you actually found one worth keeping.
Always make sure that nobody knows more than one other person present (excluding gamemaster).
It's a lot easier to fear the unknown.
Always take each individual aside and assure them that you are on THEIR side against everyone else.
Everyone wants to feel special
ABOVE ALL ELSE: Don't forget the tactical nuclear hand greandes.
Boom
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Yeah, way cool about the continuation of this game. This literally made growing up bearable. Reading and grocking paranoia makes it a lot easier to understand the world, and try to keep going. BTW, anyone ever read the six part comic series? Beautiful work, I miss my copies.
I am a big fan of the constitution, and freedom in general. Heck, I don't even hate p2p, even though some people pirate stuff that I've made on it. I believe in the marketplace, and that ultimately people will choose to support the production of stuff that they like.
However, why the big quote from the U.S. Constitution? This happened in Australia.
I haven't fully experimented with 1.2 yet. Does anyone know if they did something about the page load time out? It would be nice if they just added it to the preferences panel. I shouldn't have to run an additional program just to change it.
First let me say that there's a lot of good ideas on here with alternative solutions, walkie talkies and whatnot. However, although it was almost a decade ago, I remember what it was like to be in technical theater. Specifically I remember it was great because as a sophomore I could frequently give backrubs to the hottest senior drama cuties. This provided a lot of opportunities for social development that would have been difficult to come by as a loner geek who spent the bulk of his social life on the other end of a 300 buad hayes smart modem (Yeah, I know only about ten years ago, but I was poor too).
So anyways rock on man.
Like I said before, I remember what it was like, and it wasn't just about getting the job done as simple as possible. Sometimes it was getting the job done in a really cool way, going over the top, and showing off. I mean, compared to the drama students on the stage, how often does the tech guy get to do that. The techie has a job that if they're doing it right they're not noticed at all. So I can understand your desire to go for the cool solution.
If I were you, and operating under the above assumptions, I would get my hands on a few IPAQs. They got some decent battery life, good integration with 802.11b, and if I remember properly usb so you can connect a handset. They're relativelylight weight, and you can get some older ones relatively cheap. We're probably talking a semster worth of bake sales, but hey, it's for a good cuase. Plus you can install an IM client on it to do text as well as voice for broadcast directives froma central source. You've got your choice of operating systems to run on it. So if I were you, and wanted cool geek look at what I can do points, that's what I would do.
Of course, also remember, you can go to any Fry's Electronics, or even Walgreens and pick up about 15 FRS radios that have a range of about a mile, and what 14 channels to choose from for less than 200 bucks. Not a whole lot can go wrong with them, and the tech ability to use them is negligable. I used to play with a live action gaming group (*cringe*) that made extensive use of them. It worked out pretty well, although you will run in to a lot of useless chatter. This solution would probably be just as cool and impressive. It also has the added bonus that people will want their own unit, so you only have to manage a deparmental pool of temp units for those who can't or won't get their own, plus the additional bennefit of probably creating a weird sort of wireless underground at your school.
But remember, don't forget to offer the backrubs:-)
I just took a look at that link. Those are some good instructions. Rock on.:-)
I have to say, even though I ran into problems with the iBook, it was a good learning experience to take apart the iBook and the Powerbook. I came from a PC background since I was 13 (I'm 26 now). I've taken apart a lot of PCs, and now that I can say that I've seen the inside of my Mac I feel like less of a poser (I switched over a year ago).
Hey, how's it going? I was also on the Information Desk. I was the guy who came down from Montreal with his girlfriend, and who kept on coming up with little ideas to pass the time. We swapped a few e-mails afterwards, and then I sort of lost touch.
I actually just got back from London, after going to an impromptu 2600 meeting in Amsterdam.
Do yourself a favor and send it back to Apple. The iBooks are pretty well sealed until you pop it open, then it becomes a mess of different size screws and rf shielding.
About two months ago, my girlfriend's iBook was having problems. Unfortunately it was way out of waranty, and we had bought it second hand (at a very reasonable price). The hard drive was making clicking noise of death. So I thought, no big deal, I'll just swap it out.
So I talked with the people at the Genius Bar at the local Apple store (great folk by the way), and verified that it was just a standard ide laptop hard drive. They said it was, but advised against me doing it myself. I thought, yeah, whatever. less than 48 hours later I found myself wishing I had taken their advice, but I get ahead of myself.
Anyways, I decided to do a dry run on my 15 inch powerbook, just to see if there would be any surprises. It was easy enough to get to the drive. Satisfied, I decided to go ahead with her iBook.
Now, if I would have just googled for instructions on how to dismantle an iBook, I would have discovered the magnitude of my mistake. iBooks are laid out very different from powerbooks. In fact, in the iBooks, the hard drive is pretty much the last thing you get to.
Now, your problem isn't the hard drive, it's the backlight. that's much easier to get to, in much the same way a hand grenade is much easier than a nuke. However, if it's still an option, just ship it in.
Take it or leave it. You might be more inclined in the ways of hardware than I am. However, if you decide to go forward and do it yourself, get yourself an empty egg carton, or something similar. Label the holes, and keep track of which screws went where, because you're going to have a lot of them.
PATRIOT Act is the law, as dumb as it may be. And it is the citizen's of this country that allow it to exist in the books, not just the journalist.
What are you talking about? The patriot act was passed as a kneejerk reaction, days after a national disaster. The lawmakers were being motivated at that point by their own self interest, and passed a generally unread and undebated law. What could the citizens do to stop it? Citizens can't move as fast as an insane mob of lawmakers. The only way the law can be changed at this point is to hope that the law makers magically change their minds (good luck), or to test it in court. The journalists SHOULD obey other more firmly entrenched laws and customs, and they SHOULD break hastily passed unjust laws, so that the unjust laws can be tested in court, be found to be inappropriate laws, and thus struck down.
I'm not entirely sure how we got so brainwashed to forget about this entirely necessary function of the judicial branch of the government to balance out the executive branch and the legislative branch... I guess maybe it might have been with the before mention branches went to war with everyone and everything and swamped the judicial branch.
Oh, and let's not forget the special function that the framer's had in mind for journalists. Their role was to be the virtual fourth branch of government, to keep the rest in line. But you know what is being taught in most journalism classes - the funcion of journalists is to entertain. They hardly evern mention the duty of journalists to keep the government in line any more. And why should they, with only a handful of corporations owning all the journalists. What motivates them?
But go ahead and rant about how it's the citizens (plural, not possessive, btw) of the country that allow it. I think it's backwards, it's damn near impossible for them to stop it.
I'm a United States Citizen who has spent a lot of time in Canada. They have done a lot of things right, but they are not flawless. For example, if I want to make a DVD and sell it in Canada, I have to get it approved by a government body that until fairly recently had the word censorship as part of it's name and mandate. They charge 5 dollars (CAN) a minute to watch and rate your video, then they put a sticker on it and then you can sell/rent/distribute it.
However, if this wasn't bad enough, you have to do the same thing per province. So you're shelling out thousands of dollars, and submitting to government approval, to exercise free speech in Canada. If you don't do this, nobody will touch you. No video store. No video rental store. No big chains. No small guys. Nobody. They won't even look at what you've got.
So, to put it in perspective. I'm one of the little guys. I film a video operating off of a small budget of a few thousand dollars. Then I send the video off to be professionally replicated for DVD distribution. This sets me back a few more dollars. So now I'm eating Kraft Dinner (what the Canadians call Macaroni and Cheese) and betting the cost of a decent used car on the success of my movie. I look into tapping into the market of 30 million people to the north of us, one of our favorite trading partners, and I find out that I've got to shell out another 300 bucks for the chance to get government approval of my film in say Quebec, then another 300 for say British Columbia, then say another for Ontario, and now I'm out about a grand in money, and who knows how much time has been wasted, and I don't even have the whole country available to me.
So then I cruise around the Canadian message boards and peer to peer networks, see my movie being pirated and file shared faster than I can make it through "The System." Why? Because they feel that they can, and nobody is going to stop them, and it doesn't cost them a dime to do so....And they are absolutely correct.
So I ask myself if I want to keep eating Kraft Dinner, so I can beg for permission from a government, and eventually be allowed to attempt to sell my DVD in a place where people are pirating with impunity.
Yeah, that's great freedom. I'm so happy that they have all that freedom. It's wonderful that someone has freedom, because I'm not feeling very much freedom. My freedom of speech? No. My freedom to earn a living off my work? No. My freedom to address my grievences against those harming my business? No. But, I guess I'm happy that they're free to take the bennefits of my labor and efforts without any compensation.
And guess whether or not I get to see any of that 70 million dollars of tax money on blank media.
So that's how my voice, viewpoint and perspective gets silenced. Now let's look at the Big Guy...
The MPAA and the RIAA continues to plow through the world, doing whatever they feel like doing with impunity. Do you think they cringe at a few extra thousand Canadian dollars on a multi-million dollar movie in their multi-billion dollar industry? Then consider that they've got the money and clout to influence the legislative process and get the government to tax people for them. I bet their voice, viewpoint and perspective gets out loud and clear.
...and for the record, I didn't make government threats at the beginning of the video, because I don't support the heavy hand of government. In the process I also mentioned that I don't agree with the copyright nazi tactics of the MPAA and the RIAA. I also didn't region encode my disk because I don't believe in making it easier for political controls on freedom of speech. I didn't even CSS encode it because not only would it be pointless with the broken tech, but because of the simple fact that when you hand someone a bucket of bits sooner or later someone sufficiently motivated is going to figure out a way of copying that bucket of bits. Instead I politely asked people not to copy my work because I believe that the only way to solve this problem is not force but education. However, if my voice and the voices of those like me are silenced, then the only voice you'll hear will be the likes of the MPAA and the RIAA.
I work with video, which means that I'm generating huge amounts of data, a couple of hundred gigs of data on a busy day. As much as I'd love to archive everything, it's just cost prohibitive in both materials and time. So my solution is to seperate the wheat from the chaffe for processed data, and arhive that redundantly in both material and location, and do the same for the original source material. The idea of data corruption terrorfies me, as everything that I make is unique in the universe and could never be recreated.
On the other hand, I'm also a bit concerned with privacy, and the idea of these huge intrusive databases, or archival of all traffic over key gateways of the net bother me. But when I consider the difficulty that I have with huge amounts of data that are just a drop in the bucket conpared with this sort of thing, I breathe a little easier... Unfortunately, duplication and propogation appear to be the surest way to go, and unfortunately there is often a tendency for those who would invade our privacy to share their data for profit or reasons of control...
The BBC covered the convention initially in this article.
Of course, the original version of this article had this as it's original fourth paragraph:
The hackers conference is an annual event and usually includes an attack on a high-profile computer system.
I wrote their factual error department. The conference is not annual, there are no attacks on high-profile computer systems as part of the event, there's no facts supporting the claim that the USA Today defacement has anything to do with the conference, and the story is one sided in as much as their primary source appears to be an AT&T memmo. I then urged some of the other people who attended to write the BBC as well, and the BBC changed their story.
One of the other people who wrote the BBC, posted this response that they received from the Assistant Editor of Technology to the H2K2 Volunteer list, where we had been discussing this matter.
Thank you for your e-mail. I apologise for the inaccuracies contained in
the article on the H2K2 conference. It was written by a non-specialist and
has now been corrected.
Of course, the correction occurred after the article had been up for a few days, and viewed by countless people around the world. However, it wasn't a correction in the sense that anyone was made aware of the change. The offending paragraph simply was deleted. No mention to the general public that they've got stories being written by people who don't know what they're doing. Just a simple "my bad" via e-mail, and a quick edit and the database, and there you go.
Then, of course, there was the gentleman from Fox News who came up to the information desk with his cameraman and told one of the volunteers: "I need help. Can you give me a hacker handle." Of course, this happened just moments after he had harrassed a conference participant who had repeatedly told him that he wasn't interested in being interviewed or being on camera.
Of course, not all the media covereage was clueless. There was a gentleman from the IEEE Spectrum who was kind enough to bring some past articles published in his publication as a demonstration of the type of media that they produce. Of course, he also attended some of the panels as well, instead of just walking around and sticking a camera in someone's face and asking outlandish questions.
Re:Robert Steel- A Great Speaker?
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H2K2 Wrapup
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· Score: 1
I also believe that Robert Steele got it wrong in a major way. I saw him initially as part of a three person panel on the FBI. Essentially he sort of applied libertarian theory to intellegence. The problem with having being a little intellegence agent has been well illustrated by the informant states that have existed in the past.
Furthermore, the problems with having hordes of untrained people with a little bit of power and authority all doing their best to "beef up security" leads to people getting thrown off airplanes for their choice of reading material, or even worse, the TIPS program.
You have been selected by, your friend, the Computer to investigate the recent delection of traitor ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h loyal citizen Nevo-U-MND by unclassified physics phonomenon.
Please report to R&D for your phamplets titled "Strangelets & *-U" and "Duck and Cover revision 6.66"
Compliance is mandatory. Serve the Computer Have a nice day.
Tuesday, 3:14 pm. While dealing with my loneliness, I decide to do some meditation. I go to my cave, and see my power animal. It is a penguin. It looks to me and says: "slide."
With another ice age on the horizon (20,000 or 30,000 years from now), I figured it would be a good idea to go to Antartica for five days and write an article about life in the frozen wastes. After all, this is what life in the future is coming to.
Monday 8:15 am. While walking out side to pick up my daily newspaper that I had air-dropped by the Air Force Search and Rescue team (1,013 dollars US), I found that a polar bear had beat me to it. Disgruntled, I knew that it was going to be a bad day but I decided to stick with it.
Tuesday 11:15 am. After deciding that I was starting to smell, I took a shower. Unfortunately, the water was realy realy cold, and I developed hypthermia. I wish that bear was back, he sure did look warm.
Wednesday 10:03 am. Accidentially got tounge stuck to water cooler that I brought with me, so that I could pretend to have conversations with co-workers.
Wednesday 4:15 pm. Sent letters via carrier pigeons to people that weren't good enough to talk to until now.
Wednesday 4:20 pm. Polar bear walks by window of my igloo with carrier pigeon blood on it's paws. Sending messages by carrier pigeon sucks, I miss my telephone.
Thursday 2:12 pm. Downloaded Fight Club from the Internet. Watched fight club. Looking around igloo for gasoline. Rethinking my strategies on how to deal with loneliness.
Friday 4:05 pm. The first rule is Igloo Club is You Do Not Talk About Igloo Club. The second rule about Igloo Club is you do not talk about Igloo Club. Take this writer. During the day, couldn't tell you the difference between true north and magnetic north. But when he's in the ring with that polar bear, beating the tar out of that artic fur covered mammal, he's a God!
Friday 8:00 pm. Wating to be airlifted back to the mainland. Have a suitcase full of soap ready.
(non geeks shouldn't lock themselves up in their apartments with a pc and think that they are going to be able to live like a geek. Strange how he not once considered the idea of reading a book, or watching a few movies (like the stand, followed by the postman, followed by all episodes of Babylon 5. Heck, he'd never even miss the outside world)
Thank You, Kind AC.... Looks like somebody with some moderation points has gone a little "redundant" happy.... Or perhaps, it is a Transmeta Agent, trying to put the lid back on "the truth," or even worse, a Juridian spy!
If you view the source at: http://www.transmeta.com/super/sekrut/message/in dex.html
From the source: --------------------- !---Yes, there is a secret message, and this is it: Transmeta's policy has been to remain silent about its plans for world domination until it had something to demonstrate to the world. On January 19th, 2000, Transmeta is going to announce and demonstrate what Crusoe processors can do by destorying the capital city of every nation on Eatrh. Simultaneously, all capital cities of an alien race known as the Juridians will be reduced to component atoms as payment for this new technology that we have accquired from a friendly alien race. Of course, all of the details will go up on this Web site for everyone on the Internet to see. Crusoe will be cool hardware and software for military applications. Crusoe will be unconventional, which is why we wanted to let you know in advance to stay away from any major cities. If you do this, then you can come look at the entire Web site after the attack in January. Please avoid viewing any of the public media in the mean time, so that you can avoid the alien propaganda, and get the full story and have access to all of the real details as soon as they are available.---
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's something well written and well thought out. I'm going to keep this in mind.
To give you an idea of what it is to be a small video producer, a couple of weeks ago I got together 6 extras, a photographer, a cameraman, and went on location to film two short scenes. It took all day to set this up, get everyone to where they needed to be, get everyone to know what they were supposed to do, and to do it. Then to do a small cast party to make it worth their time to come out. It then took half a day to edit, and another half day to screen and fine tune. Writing the script it's self took about another day.
So let me ask you how much end footage I generated from three days worth of work. About 80 seconds.
Why this much effort? One of the biggest constructive criticisms that I received from HaXXXor Volume 1: No Longer Floppy, was that they liked the concept, but would like to see more than hot chicks just reading text off my Powerbook. That's why I put in the work.
I also received a lot of people saying something like, stupid skanky ho's reading off a laptop, and those I ignore. There's a big difference between the one and the other.
The point of what I'm saying is that there's a big difference between making a video, or any other "product," and posting a quick blurb to bugtraq.
I would imagine that the average video producer has more video production skill in their pinky than the average hacker could even fathom. It's called distribution of labor, that's the reason why 90% of (western) society isn't out in the fields harvesting vegetables to keep society fed.
But seriously, here's my opinion. I'd like to think it counts for something being a producer and all...
There seems to be two types of people that comment on projects like The Broken, and HaXXXor, and 2600, et al.
First there's the people who say, wow that's cool.
To them, I say: Thank You.
Then there's the people who act as those the presence of any material, whether it's a video, or a print magazine or whatever is a direct threat to their way of life. Then the screaming begins.
It's not the type of thing a REAL SYSADMIN should care about, it's only worth reading if you're 15 (obviously doesn't apply to HaXXXor), it's stupid, why bother, and on and on and on.
I don't really see why the negative points are really valid, besides from the obvious fact that freedom of speech means freedom of all speach. Once you get past the freedom of speech part though, it really doesn't pan out.
First, it's a good thing that people are making videos and books and magazines talking about this sort of thing. While it may be old hat to some people, there's a lot of other people out there that haven't even heard of this stuff. So the next time that you want to lament the masses for their ignorance, remember the heaps of criticism that anyone who produces any material that might help a few more people who aren't as L33t as you to bridge the gap.
Second, for the people out there who throw out the massively insightful, this is stupid and pointless, why bother, type of remarks. Just remember, a lot of really cool things have been created because someone spent a lot of time working endlessly on something that was considered pointless, and then an occassion would come up with something that proved to be useful.
Here's the deal, just remember that there are people actually creating these things. There's a person on the other side of the video, or book, or magazine, or whatever, that's put a lot of time and work in to it. If you think you can do better, then pick up a camera and give it a shot. But if you've never even tried doing something like that before, then why don't you try to appreciate the work that was put in to it, and what was done right, before you rush to tear it apart.
In this community, it is common that a program that still needs a whole lot of work gets gushed over, but the moment someone makes a video it's an instant target? You really should be supporting these efforts (or at least constructively criticizing them). It's hard enough to be a small independent producer. However, it's small independent producers that are the competition to Hollywood and the big television networks. Do you prefer them to be the only people who talk about hackers?
Anyways, that's my take on it...
Always - ALWAYS - ALWAYS
Kill a character during the character creation process.
I can't stress the importance of this enough. This let's the players know in no uncertain terms that life in Alpha Complex is UNFAIR.
(Plus, the shock of the experience puts them in a perfect state of mind to start the adventure)
----
On a side note, one of our old friends has a nick name from Paranoia. We call him Mikey-O. It's funny to listen to hundreds of people call him that, when only 3 people get the joke. One night at a party I got really drunk, and promoted him to Mikey-U, but it didn't have the same ring, so I turned him in as a traitor, and his next clone got restored to Orange clearance.
---- You are in error, no one is screaming, thank you for your cooperation.
It's a joke. Anytime you hand people a bucket of bits, they're going to decide what they want to do with it. I mean, do people really think it's a great idea to sue their customers, and then dump shitloads of money into Washington to pass all sorts of draconian laws designed to totally curb freedom, in order to maximize their own profits?
Well, that's how those people work, and you know what, it is making them a whole lot of money. Meanwhile, as a small independent movie producer, I place every dollar I got in to my films, am constantly criticized for my low production quality, and am constantly mocked by people to the extent that it's easy to copy my movie, and instead of buying it, you should just download it.
Is that enough to make me frustrated? Sure. Frustrated enough to sue everyone. No.
I mean, anyone with half a brain can see from the disk that I used neither region encoding nor did I use CSS. Why is that you ask? Well, CSS is totally broken, for starters. Besides, even if it weren't broken, CSS does nothing to stop the copying of an entire disk. Video pirates routinely take a disk, make an exact copy of it, and it works just fine, CSS and all. So really, what's the point? What's the point of CSS, but to further munge up the data files. As far as region encoding goes. I do a lot of traveling, and it's annoying and insulting that I can't pick up some local DVDs from my travels and take them home and play them. Sure I can get a special dvd player, or a special software, but what about my Mac? What about my friend's players? I wouldn't want to live in a world where something as stupid as geography determines what you can and can't watch (although that seems to mostly be the case now). Even if I have to see it happening around me, I'll be damned if I'm going to contribute to it.
So yes, people have figured that my DVD can easily be copied, played anywhere in the world, and I won't even sue.
As far as this new FBI seal goes, it's just more advertising for the FBI. The major players in the movie industry get the FBI to do their bidding like little lapdogs. Meanwhile this gang of thugs continue to do all sorts of civil liberties violations. I'll never include it in anything I do (as if the FBI would ever lift a finger to help me out, even if I did become evil, and actually decide that I wanted their help). In return for the FBI being hired thugs for the movie industry, the movie industry gives them all sorts of free publicity, and further legitimizes them, and increases their hold over the hearts and minds of the general public.
I'll never use this seal, and I'll continue to poke fun at the FBI and MPAA any chance I get. Other people will continue to poke fun at me any chance they get. Life goes on. Of course, I'll probably never own a private jet, produce a movie like Lord of the Rings, or have enough money to buy several congressmen. The MPAA has all this and more. I wonder which companies ideology will end up winning in the long run, mine or theirs.
For example, if you are a group of high school seniors, invite a freshman kid over to play. He will try way too hard, and will be way gullible. If he's not, then congratulations, you actually found one worth keeping.
Always make sure that nobody knows more than one other person present (excluding gamemaster).
It's a lot easier to fear the unknown.
Always take each individual aside and assure them that you are on THEIR side against everyone else.
Everyone wants to feel special
ABOVE ALL ELSE: Don't forget the tactical nuclear hand greandes.
Boom ---- Yeah, way cool about the continuation of this game. This literally made growing up bearable. Reading and grocking paranoia makes it a lot easier to understand the world, and try to keep going. BTW, anyone ever read the six part comic series? Beautiful work, I miss my copies.
I know, when anyone knows it's that it was tits and ass that attracted people to Star Trek TOS - not TNG!
However, why the big quote from the U.S. Constitution? This happened in Australia.
Can't you quote someting Australian? :-)
I haven't fully experimented with 1.2 yet. Does anyone know if they did something about the page load time out? It would be nice if they just added it to the preferences panel. I shouldn't have to run an additional program just to change it.
First let me say that there's a lot of good ideas on here with alternative solutions, walkie talkies and whatnot. However, although it was almost a decade ago, I remember what it was like to be in technical theater. Specifically I remember it was great because as a sophomore I could frequently give backrubs to the hottest senior drama cuties. This provided a lot of opportunities for social development that would have been difficult to come by as a loner geek who spent the bulk of his social life on the other end of a 300 buad hayes smart modem (Yeah, I know only about ten years ago, but I was poor too).
:-)
So anyways rock on man.
Like I said before, I remember what it was like, and it wasn't just about getting the job done as simple as possible. Sometimes it was getting the job done in a really cool way, going over the top, and showing off. I mean, compared to the drama students on the stage, how often does the tech guy get to do that. The techie has a job that if they're doing it right they're not noticed at all. So I can understand your desire to go for the cool solution.
If I were you, and operating under the above assumptions, I would get my hands on a few IPAQs. They got some decent battery life, good integration with 802.11b, and if I remember properly usb so you can connect a handset. They're relativelylight weight, and you can get some older ones relatively cheap. We're probably talking a semster worth of bake sales, but hey, it's for a good cuase. Plus you can install an IM client on it to do text as well as voice for broadcast directives froma central source. You've got your choice of operating systems to run on it. So if I were you, and wanted cool geek look at what I can do points, that's what I would do.
Of course, also remember, you can go to any Fry's Electronics, or even Walgreens and pick up about 15 FRS radios that have a range of about a mile, and what 14 channels to choose from for less than 200 bucks. Not a whole lot can go wrong with them, and the tech ability to use them is negligable. I used to play with a live action gaming group (*cringe*) that made extensive use of them. It worked out pretty well, although you will run in to a lot of useless chatter. This solution would probably be just as cool and impressive. It also has the added bonus that people will want their own unit, so you only have to manage a deparmental pool of temp units for those who can't or won't get their own, plus the additional bennefit of probably creating a weird sort of wireless underground at your school.
But remember, don't forget to offer the backrubs
I just took a look at that link. Those are some good instructions. Rock on. :-)
I have to say, even though I ran into problems with the iBook, it was a good learning experience to take apart the iBook and the Powerbook. I came from a PC background since I was 13 (I'm 26 now). I've taken apart a lot of PCs, and now that I can say that I've seen the inside of my Mac I feel like less of a poser (I switched over a year ago).
Hey, how's it going? I was also on the Information Desk. I was the guy who came down from Montreal with his girlfriend, and who kept on coming up with little ideas to pass the time. We swapped a few e-mails afterwards, and then I sort of lost touch.
I actually just got back from London, after going to an impromptu 2600 meeting in Amsterdam.
Do yourself a favor and send it back to Apple. The iBooks are pretty well sealed until you pop it open, then it becomes a mess of different size screws and rf shielding.
About two months ago, my girlfriend's iBook was having problems. Unfortunately it was way out of waranty, and we had bought it second hand (at a very reasonable price). The hard drive was making clicking noise of death. So I thought, no big deal, I'll just swap it out.
So I talked with the people at the Genius Bar at the local Apple store (great folk by the way), and verified that it was just a standard ide laptop hard drive. They said it was, but advised against me doing it myself. I thought, yeah, whatever. less than 48 hours later I found myself wishing I had taken their advice, but I get ahead of myself.
Anyways, I decided to do a dry run on my 15 inch powerbook, just to see if there would be any surprises. It was easy enough to get to the drive. Satisfied, I decided to go ahead with her iBook.
Now, if I would have just googled for instructions on how to dismantle an iBook, I would have discovered the magnitude of my mistake. iBooks are laid out very different from powerbooks. In fact, in the iBooks, the hard drive is pretty much the last thing you get to.
Now, your problem isn't the hard drive, it's the backlight. that's much easier to get to, in much the same way a hand grenade is much easier than a nuke. However, if it's still an option, just ship it in.
Take it or leave it. You might be more inclined in the ways of hardware than I am. However, if you decide to go forward and do it yourself, get yourself an empty egg carton, or something similar. Label the holes, and keep track of which screws went where, because you're going to have a lot of them.
What are you talking about? The patriot act was passed as a kneejerk reaction, days after a national disaster. The lawmakers were being motivated at that point by their own self interest, and passed a generally unread and undebated law. What could the citizens do to stop it? Citizens can't move as fast as an insane mob of lawmakers. The only way the law can be changed at this point is to hope that the law makers magically change their minds (good luck), or to test it in court. The journalists SHOULD obey other more firmly entrenched laws and customs, and they SHOULD break hastily passed unjust laws, so that the unjust laws can be tested in court, be found to be inappropriate laws, and thus struck down.
I'm not entirely sure how we got so brainwashed to forget about this entirely necessary function of the judicial branch of the government to balance out the executive branch and the legislative branch... I guess maybe it might have been with the before mention branches went to war with everyone and everything and swamped the judicial branch.
Oh, and let's not forget the special function that the framer's had in mind for journalists. Their role was to be the virtual fourth branch of government, to keep the rest in line. But you know what is being taught in most journalism classes - the funcion of journalists is to entertain. They hardly evern mention the duty of journalists to keep the government in line any more. And why should they, with only a handful of corporations owning all the journalists. What motivates them?
But go ahead and rant about how it's the citizens (plural, not possessive, btw) of the country that allow it. I think it's backwards, it's damn near impossible for them to stop it.
However, if this wasn't bad enough, you have to do the same thing per province. So you're shelling out thousands of dollars, and submitting to government approval, to exercise free speech in Canada. If you don't do this, nobody will touch you. No video store. No video rental store. No big chains. No small guys. Nobody. They won't even look at what you've got.
So, to put it in perspective. I'm one of the little guys. I film a video operating off of a small budget of a few thousand dollars. Then I send the video off to be professionally replicated for DVD distribution. This sets me back a few more dollars. So now I'm eating Kraft Dinner (what the Canadians call Macaroni and Cheese) and betting the cost of a decent used car on the success of my movie. I look into tapping into the market of 30 million people to the north of us, one of our favorite trading partners, and I find out that I've got to shell out another 300 bucks for the chance to get government approval of my film in say Quebec, then another 300 for say British Columbia, then say another for Ontario, and now I'm out about a grand in money, and who knows how much time has been wasted, and I don't even have the whole country available to me.
So then I cruise around the Canadian message boards and peer to peer networks, see my movie being pirated and file shared faster than I can make it through "The System." Why? Because they feel that they can, and nobody is going to stop them, and it doesn't cost them a dime to do so. ...And they are absolutely correct.
So I ask myself if I want to keep eating Kraft Dinner, so I can beg for permission from a government, and eventually be allowed to attempt to sell my DVD in a place where people are pirating with impunity.
Yeah, that's great freedom. I'm so happy that they have all that freedom. It's wonderful that someone has freedom, because I'm not feeling very much freedom. My freedom of speech? No. My freedom to earn a living off my work? No. My freedom to address my grievences against those harming my business? No. But, I guess I'm happy that they're free to take the bennefits of my labor and efforts without any compensation.
And guess whether or not I get to see any of that 70 million dollars of tax money on blank media.
So that's how my voice, viewpoint and perspective gets silenced. Now let's look at the Big Guy...
The MPAA and the RIAA continues to plow through the world, doing whatever they feel like doing with impunity. Do you think they cringe at a few extra thousand Canadian dollars on a multi-million dollar movie in their multi-billion dollar industry? Then consider that they've got the money and clout to influence the legislative process and get the government to tax people for them. I bet their voice, viewpoint and perspective gets out loud and clear.
On the other hand, I'm also a bit concerned with privacy, and the idea of these huge intrusive databases, or archival of all traffic over key gateways of the net bother me. But when I consider the difficulty that I have with huge amounts of data that are just a drop in the bucket conpared with this sort of thing, I breathe a little easier... Unfortunately, duplication and propogation appear to be the surest way to go, and unfortunately there is often a tendency for those who would invade our privacy to share their data for profit or reasons of control...
Of course, the original version of this article had this as it's original fourth paragraph:
The hackers conference is an annual event and usually includes an attack on a high-profile computer system.
I wrote their factual error department. The conference is not annual, there are no attacks on high-profile computer systems as part of the event, there's no facts supporting the claim that the USA Today defacement has anything to do with the conference, and the story is one sided in as much as their primary source appears to be an AT&T memmo. I then urged some of the other people who attended to write the BBC as well, and the BBC changed their story.
One of the other people who wrote the BBC, posted this response that they received from the Assistant Editor of Technology to the H2K2 Volunteer list, where we had been discussing this matter.
Thank you for your e-mail. I apologise for the inaccuracies contained in the article on the H2K2 conference. It was written by a non-specialist and has now been corrected.
Of course, the correction occurred after the article had been up for a few days, and viewed by countless people around the world. However, it wasn't a correction in the sense that anyone was made aware of the change. The offending paragraph simply was deleted. No mention to the general public that they've got stories being written by people who don't know what they're doing. Just a simple "my bad" via e-mail, and a quick edit and the database, and there you go.
Then, of course, there was the gentleman from Fox News who came up to the information desk with his cameraman and told one of the volunteers: "I need help. Can you give me a hacker handle." Of course, this happened just moments after he had harrassed a conference participant who had repeatedly told him that he wasn't interested in being interviewed or being on camera.
Of course, not all the media covereage was clueless. There was a gentleman from the IEEE Spectrum who was kind enough to bring some past articles published in his publication as a demonstration of the type of media that they produce. Of course, he also attended some of the panels as well, instead of just walking around and sticking a camera in someone's face and asking outlandish questions.
Furthermore, the problems with having hordes of untrained people with a little bit of power and authority all doing their best to "beef up security" leads to people getting thrown off airplanes for their choice of reading material, or even worse, the TIPS program.
Try Quebec. It starts to feel real different, real fast :-)
Citizen Tuttle-R,
You have been selected by, your friend, the Computer to investigate the recent delection of traitor ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h loyal citizen Nevo-U-MND by unclassified physics phonomenon.
Please report to R&D for your phamplets titled "Strangelets & *-U" and "Duck and Cover revision 6.66"
Compliance is mandatory. Serve the Computer Have a nice day.
Tuesday, 3:14 pm. While dealing with my loneliness, I decide to do some meditation. I go to my cave, and see my power animal. It is a penguin. It looks to me and says: "slide."
With another ice age on the horizon (20,000 or 30,000 years from now), I figured it would be a good idea to go to Antartica for five days and write an article about life in the frozen wastes. After all, this is what life in the future is coming to.
Monday 8:15 am. While walking out side to pick up my daily newspaper that I had air-dropped by the Air Force Search and Rescue team (1,013 dollars US), I found that a polar bear had beat me to it. Disgruntled, I knew that it was going to be a bad day but I decided to stick with it.
Tuesday 11:15 am. After deciding that I was starting to smell, I took a shower. Unfortunately, the water was realy realy cold, and I developed hypthermia. I wish that bear was back, he sure did look warm.
Wednesday 10:03 am. Accidentially got tounge stuck to water cooler that I brought with me, so that I could pretend to have conversations with co-workers.
Wednesday 4:15 pm. Sent letters via carrier pigeons to people that weren't good enough to talk to until now.
Wednesday 4:20 pm. Polar bear walks by window of my igloo with carrier pigeon blood on it's paws. Sending messages by carrier pigeon sucks, I miss my telephone.
Thursday 2:12 pm. Downloaded Fight Club from the Internet. Watched fight club. Looking around igloo for gasoline. Rethinking my strategies on how to deal with loneliness.
Friday 4:05 pm. The first rule is Igloo Club is You Do Not Talk About Igloo Club. The second rule about Igloo Club is you do not talk about Igloo Club. Take this writer. During the day, couldn't tell you the difference between true north and magnetic north. But when he's in the ring with that polar bear, beating the tar out of that artic fur covered mammal, he's a God!
Friday 8:00 pm. Wating to be airlifted back to the mainland. Have a suitcase full of soap ready.
(non geeks shouldn't lock themselves up in their apartments with a pc and think that they are going to be able to live like a geek. Strange how he not once considered the idea of reading a book, or watching a few movies (like the stand, followed by the postman, followed by all episodes of Babylon 5. Heck, he'd never even miss the outside world)
I for one actually tried that URL... Not sure why, but that didn't stop me.
Transmeta are probably going to be awful perplexed by all the
*grin* I didn't even think of that.... It would be funny if they ran with it and put up a joke page there....
Thank You, Kind AC.... Looks like somebody with some moderation points has gone a little "redundant" happy.... Or perhaps, it is a Transmeta Agent, trying to put the lid back on "the truth," or even worse, a Juridian spy!
If you view the source at:n dex.html
http://www.transmeta.com/super/sekrut/message/i
From the source:
---------------------
!---Yes, there is a secret message, and this is it:
Transmeta's policy has been to remain silent about its plans for world domination until it had something to demonstrate to the world.
On January 19th, 2000, Transmeta is going to announce and demonstrate what Crusoe processors can do by destorying the capital city of every nation on Eatrh.
Simultaneously, all capital cities of an alien race known as the Juridians will be reduced to component atoms as payment for this new technology that we have accquired from a friendly alien race. Of course, all of the details will go up on this Web site for everyone on the Internet to see.
Crusoe will be cool hardware and software for military applications.
Crusoe will be unconventional, which is why we wanted to let you know in advance to stay away from any major cities. If you do this, then you can come look at the entire Web site after the attack in January. Please avoid viewing any of the public media in the mean time, so that you can avoid the alien propaganda, and get the full story and have access to all of the real details as soon as they are available.---