... by that standard there aren't many true Muslims in Iran. There are, on the other hand, apparently a lot of people reading that totally non-true-Muslim hadif about how the entire world (like, literally, rocks and trees and stuff) hates Jews:
The day of judgment will not arrive until Muslims fight Jews, and Muslim will kill Jews until the Jew hides behind a tree or a stone. Then the tree and the stone will say, 'Oh Muslim, oh, servant of God, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.' Except one type of a tree, which is a Jew tree. That will not say that.
* hadif: Words of the Prophet Mohammed, as opposed to commentary from other people. Its basically the gold standard for canonical sources. But what do I know, I'm just an infidel.
...just have the mob buy out all pizza chains everywhere, offer $1 million to anyone who gets a late pizza, and ruthlessly annihilate any driver who misses his delivery target by a single second. Plus you get computer hacking ninjas as drivers in the bargain!
Maybe this will finally teach perl programmers to write comprehensible code, instead of treating nearly everything like the Obfuscated C contest? "This is perfectly comprehensible if you grok regex. I mean, this one over here might look like 3MB of ASCII art compressed into a single line of text, but to a Perl programmer its perfectly comprehensible. It just converts English to Spanish. Simple, really. Can't process tildes, of course. No, I don't know how to fix that. Dive into the middle of it? You must be kidding."
The Slashdot Japanese discussion is full of people saying wtf, too. Check here -- well, OK, if you read Japanese. My personal favorite is the folks who are saying "why are they naming it something that sounds like a little child peeing?"
For paying the patent application fee, that is. Assuming you qualify as a small entity (guessing thats pretty easy if you're an open source project with genuinely independent developers, as opposed to the typical major open source project with most of the heavy lifting being done by folks who are paid by IBM et al to do it), thats $75 for each DDOS patent that you file. I think you'll break your bank account before you break the "server"'s capacity.
Now, if you could figure out how to turn other people into robo-zombies who you could direct over IRC to pay the $75 for you, you might actually be able to work things out. Or you could do an algorithmic complexity attack: figure out how the patent office sends claims to examiners, target an examiner in particular, and pre-calculate your patents to just overwhelm him. Of course, thats not likely to be nearly as effective in real life, because the Patent Office (unlike most hash algorithm) can probably load-balance without appreciably affecting the speed of their systems (it helps that hash algorithms are assumed to be fast, and the Patent Office... ha, ha, ha).
... you can figure out a way to make the proposition "completely give up any hope of having a family to get a salary which is significantly less than what you could get at any non-gaming firm with your same degree and a 40 hour workweek, in exchange for the opportunity to work on games you largely don't enjoy" sound attractive for women.
Because the efficiency of sunlight -> sugar -> atp -> electricity is even worse than sunlight -> photovoltaic cell -> electricity to say nothing of coal -> fire -> steam -> mechanical energy -> electricity.
Second Life may not end up taking the world by storm, but it raises some interesting issues. What happens if the total value of goods and services in an online world- its gross domestic product (GDP)- starts exceeding that of, say, small African nations?
Dear Sir or Madam,
My name is Humbert Rumpledunk and I am a successful Real Estate Baron on Second (2nd) Life. Recently I sold property worth One Hundred Million Linden Dollars (L$100,000,000,000.00). However, because of a computer error, I am unable to withdraw the funds properly. If you ingame message me your user name, password, and bank information, I will send your account the money, withdraw it, and electronically transfer 90% to me, leaving you 10% (Ten Million Linden Dollars) as a fee for service. Your discretion is requested.
Shoot, I lied. Forget about a couple hundred K. If you buy that Java is in any way representative of the level of complexity this would require, you can likely do it in a couple dozen K. Quick Google search turned up a Java VM with a memory footprint of 10k.
[quote]The story keeps coming up that Windows, or Linux could be hoisted up into a virtual machine and antivirus software can never detect it - but has anyone thought of the payload size needed to implement an entire virtual machine?[/quote]
I don't know, a couple hundred K? You can get a stripped down Java VM onto a floppy disk (don't laugh! It was originally designed to be an embedded systems language) and RootkitOS could cut that down even farther, since it could afford to cut out all the features that the rootkit wouldn't need.
What does a rootkit need anyhow? One low level socket library for phoning the mothership or botnet, cloaking ability, disk i/o, and then the ability to let the overwhelming majority of host OS operations to pass through unimpeded? Just make it so that the cloaked memory/hard drive space is just not even addressable within the virtual machine. Everything else can be permitted.
Chinese is not a bad call, but don't sell Japanese short. I'm currently employed at a Japanese technology incubator. I speak business Japanese and am a frankly unexceptional programmer -- I'm positive 90% of my programming skills could be outsourced to India for like 1/5th of the sum of money which would get me up in the morning. However, the combination of "speaks English and Japanese" and "can do more than open MS Word" is rare enough to cause serious interest in a lot of people. And by serious interest I mean hearing "Say, are you looking for work?" within 10 minutes of meeting some folks. I'm happy with where I am at the moment, but I've got a envelope in my top drawer labeled "Prospects" and its got a dozen and change business cards in it. Some were interested in having an interface between techs and non-techs who had language issues in addition to that other communication gap, and others (particularly ones from the US) wanted a programmer who was fluent in English and understood that the rest of the world wasn't.
With regards to the racism thing: yep, you can certainly find it. I've been stopped by the cops a number of times over the last two years here for looking out of place, and one of the bosses here makes comments that would get him fired in the US. Oh well. You only have to convince one company you're worth $PICK_A_NUMBER, right? And given that I get $RESPECTABLE_NUMBER for ~35 hours of work a week with a 15 minute commute and a rent check which is less than the cost of a PS2 game (yay local gov't subsidy for foreign IT workers), if racist yahoos want to hassle me I think I can put up with that.:)
Yeah, and imagine how poor off we are compared to the 10% of the French workforce (and something like 25% of college graduates) who can't get work. They get like 345 more vacation days a year than I do!
I will buy this explanation when Google puts a little notification at the top "Displaying results 1-10 of 3,000. 45,000,000 search results blocked by your government. Click here for FAQ"
I could see this working. Is it any harder to tell if a message is, say, depressed than it is to determine if a message is a commercial pitch?* Because pure-"Bayesian" analysis of spam routinely gets 95%+ accuracy, which if we're not talking about the content of any specific message but are trying to measure trends between time periods is plenty good enough. Lets take a particular application: Apple wants to know if their iPods are still the hottest thing on the planet. Simple process: have a team of humans hand-classify 1000 posts on LiveJournal mentioning iPods (just grep for it) as "pro-iPod" or "anything else". Then have your trained classifier slurp up every post that day, discard any that doesn't mention iPod, and classify ahoy. Ten minutes later: "Beep, 87% of 23842385902 messages mentioning iPod (5.3% of all posts in last 24 hours) are mostly upbeat."
* Whether it is or not is not obvious to me, but setting up an experiment to figure out which it is isn't that hard.
I work at a technology incubator in Japan with some very smart people, with a decent command of English, who are freaking terrified of having to get support from non-Japanese Linux geeks. I asked why once. Here's a real gem from a user mailing list for some package: our research asked "Excuse me, wonder how to use [package] with output to USB memory key". Yep, I know, this "sounds funny" and asks a question which is not specifically about the package the mailing list is about, but rather something pretty trivial if you can mount a drive and redirect output in the shell. Goodness gracious, the responses he got back (four of them) would curl your toes (to paraphrase: serves you and you're $#"#$"#$ing outsourcing buddies right, Chinaman / lol n00b keke / etc). Kind of ironic for a project which, last time I checked, owed a wee bit to the non-English speaking world. I can understand "Well, thats not so much a question about our project but really a question about how to mount your USB key, after which you can treat it like any other path on your system. Why don't you take a gander at the man page for your mount command?", but, crimety folks, its hard to sell the decisionmaker on "Say, how about we do the development for this product on Linux? Cheap, the wave of the future, free tech support 24/7 if we need it" when the decisionmaker audibly laughs at that last bit.
At least one officer at my university, and I assume all of them, had a @university.edu email address. The things are given out like candy on most campuses. Failing that, there is always the "call up Facebook, identify yourself as a police officer, ask for their cooperation" option, which is even easier than asking for the subpoena. Or, if you want to make it reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally easy on yourself, call up the university IT department, tell them evidence of a crime has been passed over their network, and you'ld be oh-so-obliged if they'd give you a university email address so you can investigate it.
Pop quiz: how much was Netscape charging for their browser when Microsoft tried to "cut off their air supply?"
Answer: zero if you downloaded it. They decided to focus on revenue from their line of products for servers. Like many, many other.com companies, they found later that their business plan of "Give away our competitive advantage for free" was not really a great strategy. Ahh well, them's the breaks. Turns out there is really no market for a browser, just like there is no market for a calculator program: 99% of all users are perfectly satisfied with absolutely anything, and since at least one element of the set of "absolutely anything" will be free, well there you go.
Slashdot Mirror
* hadif: Words of the Prophet Mohammed, as opposed to commentary from other people. Its basically the gold standard for canonical sources. But what do I know, I'm just an infidel.
...just have the mob buy out all pizza chains everywhere, offer $1 million to anyone who gets a late pizza, and ruthlessly annihilate any driver who misses his delivery target by a single second. Plus you get computer hacking ninjas as drivers in the bargain!
Maybe this will finally teach perl programmers to write comprehensible code, instead of treating nearly everything like the Obfuscated C contest? "This is perfectly comprehensible if you grok regex. I mean, this one over here might look like 3MB of ASCII art compressed into a single line of text, but to a Perl programmer its perfectly comprehensible. It just converts English to Spanish. Simple, really. Can't process tildes, of course. No, I don't know how to fix that. Dive into the middle of it? You must be kidding."
The Slashdot Japanese discussion is full of people saying wtf, too. Check here -- well, OK, if you read Japanese. My personal favorite is the folks who are saying "why are they naming it something that sounds like a little child peeing?"
Now, if you could figure out how to turn other people into robo-zombies who you could direct over IRC to pay the $75 for you, you might actually be able to work things out. Or you could do an algorithmic complexity attack: figure out how the patent office sends claims to examiners, target an examiner in particular, and pre-calculate your patents to just overwhelm him. Of course, thats not likely to be nearly as effective in real life, because the Patent Office (unlike most hash algorithm) can probably load-balance without appreciably affecting the speed of their systems (it helps that hash algorithms are assumed to be fast, and the Patent Office... ha, ha, ha).
Seems to me that lawyers pretty much nailed it... although they only sue each other's customers.
... you can figure out a way to make the proposition "completely give up any hope of having a family to get a salary which is significantly less than what you could get at any non-gaming firm with your same degree and a 40 hour workweek, in exchange for the opportunity to work on games you largely don't enjoy" sound attractive for women.
Because the efficiency of sunlight -> sugar -> atp -> electricity is even worse than sunlight -> photovoltaic cell -> electricity to say nothing of coal -> fire -> steam -> mechanical energy -> electricity.
Or, if you're not reading over the phone, just click the bloody link. TinyURL was MADE for that sort of monstrosity :)
Dear Sir or Madam,
My name is Humbert Rumpledunk and I am a successful Real Estate Baron on Second (2nd) Life. Recently I sold property worth One Hundred Million Linden Dollars (L$100,000,000,000.00). However, because of a computer error, I am unable to withdraw the funds properly. If you ingame message me your user name, password, and bank information, I will send your account the money, withdraw it, and electronically transfer 90% to me, leaving you 10% (Ten Million Linden Dollars) as a fee for service. Your discretion is requested.
... getting your server brute-forced by a Slashdotting.
Shoot, I lied. Forget about a couple hundred K. If you buy that Java is in any way representative of the level of complexity this would require, you can likely do it in a couple dozen K. Quick Google search turned up a Java VM with a memory footprint of 10k.
I don't know, a couple hundred K? You can get a stripped down Java VM onto a floppy disk (don't laugh! It was originally designed to be an embedded systems language) and RootkitOS could cut that down even farther, since it could afford to cut out all the features that the rootkit wouldn't need.
What does a rootkit need anyhow? One low level socket library for phoning the mothership or botnet, cloaking ability, disk i/o, and then the ability to let the overwhelming majority of host OS operations to pass through unimpeded? Just make it so that the cloaked memory/hard drive space is just not even addressable within the virtual machine. Everything else can be permitted.
With regards to the racism thing: yep, you can certainly find it. I've been stopped by the cops a number of times over the last two years here for looking out of place, and one of the bosses here makes comments that would get him fired in the US. Oh well. You only have to convince one company you're worth $PICK_A_NUMBER, right? And given that I get $RESPECTABLE_NUMBER for ~35 hours of work a week with a 15 minute commute and a rent check which is less than the cost of a PS2 game (yay local gov't subsidy for foreign IT workers), if racist yahoos want to hassle me I think I can put up with that. :)
Yeah, and imagine how poor off we are compared to the 10% of the French workforce (and something like 25% of college graduates) who can't get work. They get like 345 more vacation days a year than I do!
I will buy this explanation when Google puts a little notification at the top "Displaying results 1-10 of 3,000. 45,000,000 search results blocked by your government. Click here for FAQ"
... we'll get Dubya to dumb it down for you next time.
Oog have patent on fire! Pay Oog 1000 tusks or Oog hit Ug with club!
* Whether it is or not is not obvious to me, but setting up an experiment to figure out which it is isn't that hard.
So, in sum, you're the snob in the sea of snobs? Welcome to Slashdot, you'll fit right in!
I work at a technology incubator in Japan with some very smart people, with a decent command of English, who are freaking terrified of having to get support from non-Japanese Linux geeks. I asked why once. Here's a real gem from a user mailing list for some package: our research asked "Excuse me, wonder how to use [package] with output to USB memory key". Yep, I know, this "sounds funny" and asks a question which is not specifically about the package the mailing list is about, but rather something pretty trivial if you can mount a drive and redirect output in the shell. Goodness gracious, the responses he got back (four of them) would curl your toes (to paraphrase: serves you and you're $#"#$"#$ing outsourcing buddies right, Chinaman / lol n00b keke / etc). Kind of ironic for a project which, last time I checked, owed a wee bit to the non-English speaking world. I can understand "Well, thats not so much a question about our project but really a question about how to mount your USB key, after which you can treat it like any other path on your system. Why don't you take a gander at the man page for your mount command?", but, crimety folks, its hard to sell the decisionmaker on "Say, how about we do the development for this product on Linux? Cheap, the wave of the future, free tech support 24/7 if we need it" when the decisionmaker audibly laughs at that last bit.
Nothing wrong with only having a 3rd-grade education, so long as your cipher is only intercepted by adversaries with a 2nd-grade education.
Whereas if you make it massively massive and give you stats to grind up doing the (same, repetitive) activity, its hardcore gaming?
At least one officer at my university, and I assume all of them, had a @university.edu email address. The things are given out like candy on most campuses. Failing that, there is always the "call up Facebook, identify yourself as a police officer, ask for their cooperation" option, which is even easier than asking for the subpoena. Or, if you want to make it reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally easy on yourself, call up the university IT department, tell them evidence of a crime has been passed over their network, and you'ld be oh-so-obliged if they'd give you a university email address so you can investigate it.
Answer: zero if you downloaded it. They decided to focus on revenue from their line of products for servers. Like many, many other .com companies, they found later that their business plan of "Give away our competitive advantage for free" was not really a great strategy. Ahh well, them's the breaks. Turns out there is really no market for a browser, just like there is no market for a calculator program: 99% of all users are perfectly satisfied with absolutely anything, and since at least one element of the set of "absolutely anything" will be free, well there you go.