A lot of people use encryption software. See TrueCrypt's forum. Or, for instance, this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keydrive, it's a story about USB disks, but there's a section that describes encryption software such as
TrueCrypt or Private Disk.
IMHO this attracts plenty of attention, because everyone thinks wikipedia rocks. A couple of days ago my dad told me to "check this cool site out" (and gave me a link to wikipedia):-)
A couple of months ago I was working on a project, and a lot of reading material was needed... I searched thru Answers.com and Wikipedia, and then I've read my colleagues' projects -> they were all copy/pasted from either the first or the second site.
Wikipedia is a trend-setter, if encryption is mentioned there - then people will follow.
people do not like to haveto enter passphrases after they login to access their data.
Man, have you heard of 'multifactor authentication'? There are point-and-click tools that do that, so even grandmas can use them. Example
In fact, it is not stupid at all.
I am sure that the gathered knowledge can be used in many situations. One of them could be "Dealing with leaking liquids in space missions".
Of course, the old problem is still there - the time when this knowledge will be implemented into something useful might be very far away from now.
Is wisptis.exe a Windows thing? I believe it's a part of Adobe, because this task is running only when I use Acrobat7
My solution was to switch to Acrobat5 - it loads FAST, and is very responsive... The only drawback is that I get a warning that says that the doc I'm about to open contains things which are not supported by my viewer. Well, regardless of that, I can still view PDF's, avoid wisptis.exe, and I can't make myself a cup of tea while Acrobat loads:-)
Does anyone have a list of NEW things in Acrobat 7? All I noticed was the amount of bloat, which is directly proportional to the version number; some interface changes... But still, I can do with Acrobat5 everything I was doing with Acrobat7, and the same applies to the good old Acrobat3.
There you go [taken from my inbox, it came a month ago]
Hello,
As we do not yet know each other personally, forgive me for approaching you
in this manner. The circumstances I find myself have necessitated this
correspondence. If you are conversant with the Global scene you will recall
that Yukos Oil, a leading giant in the oil industry in Russia is about to go
under. This is due to sharp/questionable accounting practices and back tax
charges imposed on our company.
The Government indicted and arrested my boss Mr. Mikhail Khodorkovsky who is
also the richest man in Russia. They have also clamped down on Yukos and
halted all activities of the company. I am Mr. Levent Alkan, as a personal
treasurer, we have some funds in our Yukos company account in Gibraltar. The
funds are currently safe in an account in a Gibraltar Bank. My boss Mr.
Mikhail is presently jailed. We are working to safeguard all the cash call
in our Gibraltar branch before the government will have access to freeze the
account like they did to the other Yukos account in Russia. That's the
reason why I need you. We need to access the funds, asap, as all accounts
and assets of my boss here have been frozen.
The biggest advantage we have at present is that the money is safe in the
Bank Menatep Gibraltar and they are ready to assist us once we get payment
approval from Russian. I need to know if you can work with me on this. Just
to update you my boss is battling with them over back tax charges.
Please it is very important that we communicate via email for now due to
security reasons.
this was just an excerpt. Sorry, I don't know what the rate is, so I cannot give you the $-equivalent of the prices given in rubles.
Here's what else the message contains:
Each cd is shipped with detailed usage instructions; technical support available daily, from 10:00 to 19:00.
Fucking assholes, they also sell databases of emails. You know, the funny thing is that for a long time they probably had no market for these things, because I only got spam which promotes email-databases, nothing else [no products, no services, etc].
For those who can read russian, here's the original message (all I had to do was pick a random email from my junk folder)
sorry, but/. doesn't seem to understand cyrillic. Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
few of us liked to say "os cof" in place of "of course" and it didn't affect our communication at all.
This is different, I believe it is a special case, some sort of 'private slang' which only the members of your group understand.
Me and my university colleagues have that too:
while(level) level++; = go to the top level of the building xdnx = something easy to accomplish [coming from the Russian 'xui da nixuia']:-) o! *excitement* a = this is what you say when you're in a car and you feel the acceleration
the point is that all these things are totally meaningless for someone who is NOT a part of our team.
while "o! a!" could be easily understood by someone who knows physics, and "while(level) level++;" is not a problem for someone who knows C, "xdnx" is absolutely meaningless.
What I meant to say is that "os cof" was ok for you and your buddies, but it was not ok for the rest of the global population.
I believe the terrorists of today don't treat Japan as one of their targets.... as the Japanese people and government mind their own business and invest in themselves rather than in military technology and all the stuff it implies.
I tried it several times, once with SuSe, and once with FC3, but there is always something wrong, and it never worked right.
Being a Windows user who wants to switch to Linux [I planned this for a long time], this problem is what keeps me on Win.
Could someone point me to a manual that has screenshots, or mode detailed explanations of things?
Because I've read several tutorials, and all of them stated different things. i.e. one said that USB is ttyUSB00, another one - ttyUSB0. Then I was told that I have to symlink/dev/pilot to/dev/USB0, because it will only work with/dev/pilot, etc. It didn't work.
Currently, I have a system with Win2k and Fedora Core3+ Palm m505. I would love to be able to sync it with Evolution via gnome-pilot... But of course, anything will do.
[wow, it felt just as writing an email to a company's support dept]
I agree with the opinions stated by others.. There's one thing I have to add though - about Microsoft and their support.
Their knowledge base is very well built. Many problems one encounters can be easily solved, provided that the person knows how to use the 'search' button.
I believe that the quality of a company's support is not measured in 'how many calls we handle', but in 'how many calls were avoided due to our fantabulous knowledge-base\forum\FAQ...'
This technique is very efficient, and I use it myself very often. Of course, there is always a more agressive way to reply to an attack. But making things into a joke gives you the _highest_ chance to calm the spirits, and maybe, eventually come to a mutual agreement.
I've been doing this all the time, but only after studying psychology in high school, I became aware of this.
One who can master jokes well, can use them as neutralizers, and as offensive weapons too. This is especially effective against intelligent people [provided your jokes are 'hi-tech' enough to require some brain-resources, i.e. one needs some intelligence to understand them]
Here's the deal: today is the 2nd, I pick May the 1st as the date of the convention and choose a location.
How to choose a location? Since it is already the 2nd, I know that at location-X nothing happened on the 1st, picking that location would be stupid.
What if on May the 1st some group of people had a meeting at location-Y, does that give me the 'right' to choose location-Y?
It will mean that there WERE attendees, but how do we know whether they were future-folk or just our contemporary fellows?
So: if location-X is picked, we have two options: X.1 -> nothing happens, a stupid choice was made. X.2 -> nothing happens on May the 1st, but suddenly, on May 2nd all the news is about an event that never took place. That won't make sense. And I guess there will be a lot of black cats around [this is what happens when they change something in the matrix];-) Plus - the future people must be smart enough to realize that doing wow-things like teleporting and meta-anisotropic-xxxxxxxxing would attract attention and either make the FBI\CIA catch them and hold in captivity [to get secrets about technology, and where the terrorists are hiding, etc...] or start a real war among nations... This will make dramatical changes in history, making it probable that the future they came from won't even exist.
and if location-Y is chosen, things will sort of fit, but this is just as stupid as 'creating' a theory that instead of predicting the output for the given input, looks at the output and 'tells' you what the input was:-)
That's a very insightful remark. I agree.
This is what I wrote in my blog:
Second - the idea is actually very interesting. If the upcoming convention will indeed attract real people from the future, then it means that future-past-present are on the same 'axis' [if I may express myself that way]. If there will be no people who are able to prove their future-origin, it means that:
the event was not promoted well-enough; i.e. the future-people don't know about it
future-past-present are not on the same 'axis'; which means that whenever one goes back into the past, a copy of the universe is created and all the changes occur there, leaving the original universe intact.
This would mean that Asimov's story called The end of eternity is false, because there is no need in people who control the 'forks' that occur in the timeline whenever something is changed in the past.
IMHO both variants are just as probable [about copies of the timeline, or a unique timeline], because we have no arguments that make one of them more credible than the other.
First mistake, having an IT policy that forces users to remember dozens of passwords. Second mistake, telling a user to put their passwords in a plaintext file on the desktop. Third mistake, posting that fact on/. without posting as AC.
yep! 100% correct. And I agree with the last part too.
it can store your key on almost anything (I use my Palm). A watch with a flash disk will do too:-)
some of my colleagues store their profile on the smart card they use to unlock the doors - this is very handy.
you can store a lot of 'profiles' on it, so you can use it for authentication on multiple computers and for different applications
works with Active Directory as well
If you switch to this - their password policy will no longer trouble you, even if they change the pass like 5 times a day %-) IMHO this does not make things more secure, but convincing directors\managers is tougher than just following their instructions...
You need something like Dekart Private Disk, it uses AES-256 encryption, and can be used to encrypt an entire flash disk too. You can read it on any Windows machine without having to install the program itself.
And, as i was told, they have a Mac-version in mind.
I use their software myself. Very small, very fast and very flexible; and they have a very responsive support-team.
P.S.
Using NTFS encryption ties you to:
Windows 2000/XP
The same computer (if i understand correctly, the info is encrypted with a sting taken from the user's account; i.e. you can decrypt only on the same machine you encrypted it on) + If Windows is re-installed - where will the account-data be taken from? Can anyone explain this?
Come on man, when I'm at work, all I have to do is walk out of my office, then go 7m forward, open a door - and there I am, in the heart of RITlabs.
It is _not_ a russian company; the program is _not_ made by russians.
It is true that their developers speak russian... But you don't happen to know the history of Moldova, do you?
[because of the way things evolved.. everyone refers to any ex-soviet country as 'Russia', and to all the ex-soviet citizens as 'russians'. but this is a mistake]
I don't live in Russia, but 99.99% of spam I get is for a russian audience [the addresses, the phone numbers, the prices, and last but not least - the language].
Has anyone been thru 'American Language Center'?:-) That was the most annoying spam-invasion EVER!! Stupid communists...
I disagree.
No, not that they're bad, and their software is OK. I use Usergate [the proxy server], nnBackup, and a few other ones - they all kick ass. Small size, great functionality..
But on the other hand, do you think that is something incredibly special?!?
Come on, its a huge goddam country. When there's so much _quantity_, there has to be some _quality_ too.
However, the _density_ of quality is not that great.
It's like the universe - an infinite thing, and Earth happens to be there. Yet this doesn't mean that the whole universe is full of planets so 'fantastic' as the one we inhabit.
Conclusion - Russia is a huge waste of space.
P.S. Will someone do the statistics part and tell us how many of the great soviet people are native russians? The point is that most of them are from countries occupied by the commies [but I guess slashdotters look for an unbiased opinion]
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me if this is a silly question, but what does Slashdot run on?
A lot of people use encryption software. See TrueCrypt's forum. Or, for instance, this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keydrive, it's a story about USB disks, but there's a section that describes encryption software such as TrueCrypt or Private Disk.
:-)
IMHO this attracts plenty of attention, because everyone thinks wikipedia rocks. A couple of days ago my dad told me to "check this cool site out" (and gave me a link to wikipedia)
A couple of months ago I was working on a project, and a lot of reading material was needed... I searched thru Answers.com and Wikipedia, and then I've read my colleagues' projects -> they were all copy/pasted from either the first or the second site.
Wikipedia is a trend-setter, if encryption is mentioned there - then people will follow.
people do not like to haveto enter passphrases after they login to access their data.
Man, have you heard of 'multifactor authentication'? There are point-and-click tools that do that, so even grandmas can use them. Example
In fact, it is not stupid at all.
I am sure that the gathered knowledge can be used in many situations. One of them could be "Dealing with leaking liquids in space missions".
Of course, the old problem is still there - the time when this knowledge will be implemented into something useful might be very far away from now.
Is wisptis.exe a Windows thing? I believe it's a part of Adobe, because this task is running only when I use Acrobat7
:-)
My solution was to switch to Acrobat5 - it loads FAST, and is very responsive... The only drawback is that I get a warning that says that the doc I'm about to open contains things which are not supported by my viewer. Well, regardless of that, I can still view PDF's, avoid wisptis.exe, and I can't make myself a cup of tea while Acrobat loads
Does anyone have a list of NEW things in Acrobat 7? All I noticed was the amount of bloat, which is directly proportional to the version number; some interface changes... But still, I can do with Acrobat5 everything I was doing with Acrobat7, and the same applies to the good old Acrobat3.
Yep, you're right pal.
:-)
There you go [taken from my inbox, it came a month ago]
Hello,
As we do not yet know each other personally, forgive me for approaching you in this manner. The circumstances I find myself have necessitated this correspondence. If you are conversant with the Global scene you will recall that Yukos Oil, a leading giant in the oil industry in Russia is about to go under. This is due to sharp/questionable accounting practices and back tax charges imposed on our company.
The Government indicted and arrested my boss Mr. Mikhail Khodorkovsky who is also the richest man in Russia. They have also clamped down on Yukos and halted all activities of the company. I am Mr. Levent Alkan, as a personal treasurer, we have some funds in our Yukos company account in Gibraltar. The funds are currently safe in an account in a Gibraltar Bank. My boss Mr. Mikhail is presently jailed. We are working to safeguard all the cash call in our Gibraltar branch before the government will have access to freeze the account like they did to the other Yukos account in Russia. That's the reason why I need you. We need to access the funds, asap, as all accounts and assets of my boss here have been frozen.
The biggest advantage we have at present is that the money is safe in the Bank Menatep Gibraltar and they are ready to assist us once we get payment approval from Russian. I need to know if you can work with me on this. Just to update you my boss is battling with them over back tax charges.
Please it is very important that we communicate via email for now due to security reasons.
Best Regards
Levent Alkan
yeah, very russian name
A great share of it is promoting such databases.
And since i'm in the middle of this war zone, I can help you get a better picture.
This is just one such email
Here's what else the message contains:
Fucking assholes, they also sell databases of emails. You know, the funny thing is that for a long time they probably had no market for these things, because I only got spam which promotes email-databases, nothing else [no products, no services, etc].
For those who can read russian, here's the original message (all I had to do was pick a random email from my junk folder)
Should be "triple double-u"
This is different, I believe it is a special case, some sort of 'private slang' which only the members of your group understand.
Me and my university colleagues have that too:
the point is that all these things are totally meaningless for someone who is NOT a part of our team.
while "o! a!" could be easily understood by someone who knows physics, and "while(level) level++;" is not a problem for someone who knows C, "xdnx" is absolutely meaningless.
What I meant to say is that "os cof" was ok for you and your buddies, but it was not ok for the rest of the global population.
I know this is not on the topic, but I believe /. is the place to ask.
I work with a team of developers who write a program for SIM card management, and we plan to add support for Nextel iDEN cards.
Does anyone know where the specifications of these cards can be found?
I believe the terrorists of today don't treat Japan as one of their targets.... as the Japanese people and government mind their own business and invest in themselves rather than in military technology and all the stuff it implies.
I was clumsy enough to forget to miss an opportunity to tell American Language Center to go to hell!
:-)
Those who know the story, will understand me
I live in an ex-USSR state, leave no tracks on russian sites at all. My primary language is not russian.
:-)
But 99% of the spam I get is in russian. This is outrageous!!
In my entire lifetime, I only got 2 [two] spam emails in romanian - which is my native language.
Eeeh.. still... I think spammers have a very good infrastracture.. because the russian spam keeps coming
I tried it several times, once with SuSe, and once with FC3, but there is always something wrong, and it never worked right.
/dev/pilot to /dev/USB0, because it will only work with /dev/pilot, etc. It didn't work.
Being a Windows user who wants to switch to Linux [I planned this for a long time], this problem is what keeps me on Win.
Could someone point me to a manual that has screenshots, or mode detailed explanations of things?
Because I've read several tutorials, and all of them stated different things. i.e. one said that USB is ttyUSB00, another one - ttyUSB0. Then I was told that I have to symlink
Currently, I have a system with Win2k and Fedora Core3+ Palm m505. I would love to be able to sync it with Evolution via gnome-pilot... But of course, anything will do.
[wow, it felt just as writing an email to a company's support dept]
staying horizontal and sleeping - are not the same thing.
it often happens to me that i sleep in a position which is anything but horizontal...
imho, we shouldn't mix sleep and 'horizontalness'.
I agree with the opinions stated by others.. There's one thing I have to add though - about Microsoft and their support.
Their knowledge base is very well built. Many problems one encounters can be easily solved, provided that the person knows how to use the 'search' button.
I believe that the quality of a company's support is not measured in 'how many calls we handle', but in 'how many calls were avoided due to our fantabulous knowledge-base\forum\FAQ...'
In fact, this is a very good comment.
This technique is very efficient, and I use it myself very often. Of course, there is always a more agressive way to reply to an attack. But making things into a joke gives you the _highest_ chance to calm the spirits, and maybe, eventually come to a mutual agreement.
I've been doing this all the time, but only after studying psychology in high school, I became aware of this.
One who can master jokes well, can use them as neutralizers, and as offensive weapons too. This is especially effective against intelligent people [provided your jokes are 'hi-tech' enough to require some brain-resources, i.e. one needs some intelligence to understand them]
i'm sure you read "The DaVinci Code" ;-)
Perhaps future-folk will NOT show up at the party because they _know_ they would be captured by the feds.
Because this would be impossible.
;-)
:-)
Here's the deal: today is the 2nd, I pick May the 1st as the date of the convention and choose a location.
How to choose a location? Since it is already the 2nd, I know that at location-X nothing happened on the 1st, picking that location would be stupid.
What if on May the 1st some group of people had a meeting at location-Y, does that give me the 'right' to choose location-Y?
It will mean that there WERE attendees, but how do we know whether they were future-folk or just our contemporary fellows?
So:
if location-X is picked, we have two options:
X.1 -> nothing happens, a stupid choice was made.
X.2 -> nothing happens on May the 1st, but suddenly, on May 2nd all the news is about an event that never took place. That won't make sense. And I guess there will be a lot of black cats around [this is what happens when they change something in the matrix]
Plus - the future people must be smart enough to realize that doing wow-things like teleporting and meta-anisotropic-xxxxxxxxing would attract attention and either make the FBI\CIA catch them and hold in captivity [to get secrets about technology, and where the terrorists are hiding, etc...] or start a real war among nations... This will make dramatical changes in history, making it probable that the future they came from won't even exist.
and if location-Y is chosen, things will sort of fit, but this is just as stupid as 'creating' a theory that instead of predicting the output for the given input, looks at the output and 'tells' you what the input was
Try this tool (Dekart Logon) http://www.dekart.com/products/authentication_acc
It can work with biometry
it can store your key on almost anything (I use my Palm). A watch with a flash disk will do too :-)
some of my colleagues store their profile on the smart card they use to unlock the doors - this is very handy.
you can store a lot of 'profiles' on it, so you can use it for authentication on multiple computers and for different applications
works with Active Directory as well
If you switch to this - their password policy will no longer trouble you, even if they change the pass like 5 times a day %-) IMHO this does not make things more secure, but convincing directors\managers is tougher than just following their instructions...
And, as i was told, they have a Mac-version in mind.
See this http://www.dekart.com/support/howto/encrypt-flash
and this (for those with a PDA) http://www.dekart.com/support/howto/Howto-palm-se
I use their software myself. Very small, very fast and very flexible; and they have a very responsive support-team.
P.S.
Using NTFS encryption ties you to:
Windows 2000/XP
The same computer (if i understand correctly, the info is encrypted with a sting taken from the user's account; i.e. you can decrypt only on the same machine you encrypted it on) + If Windows is re-installed - where will the account-data be taken from? Can anyone explain this?
Come on man, when I'm at work, all I have to do is walk out of my office, then go 7m forward, open a door - and there I am, in the heart of RITlabs.
It is _not_ a russian company; the program is _not_ made by russians.
It is true that their developers speak russian... But you don't happen to know the history of Moldova, do you?
[because of the way things evolved.. everyone refers to any ex-soviet country as 'Russia', and to all the ex-soviet citizens as 'russians'. but this is a mistake]
That is sort of correct.
:-) That was the most annoying spam-invasion EVER!! Stupid communists...
I don't live in Russia, but 99.99% of spam I get is for a russian audience [the addresses, the phone numbers, the prices, and last but not least - the language].
Has anyone been thru 'American Language Center'?
I disagree. No, not that they're bad, and their software is OK. I use Usergate [the proxy server], nnBackup, and a few other ones - they all kick ass. Small size, great functionality.. But on the other hand, do you think that is something incredibly special?!? Come on, its a huge goddam country. When there's so much _quantity_, there has to be some _quality_ too. However, the _density_ of quality is not that great. It's like the universe - an infinite thing, and Earth happens to be there. Yet this doesn't mean that the whole universe is full of planets so 'fantastic' as the one we inhabit. Conclusion - Russia is a huge waste of space. P.S. Will someone do the statistics part and tell us how many of the great soviet people are native russians? The point is that most of them are from countries occupied by the commies [but I guess slashdotters look for an unbiased opinion]