...Novell announced it would support the new standard immediately for Suse Linux's next live DVD iteration. In a related announcement, the new minimum memory requirement to run it will be increased to twelve terabytes.
Re: Star Wars
It takes less space for it after Jar Jar is edited out, not more. This format is overkill.
Re: chaotic standards
Why don't they just apply single or dual layer standards to larger discs instead of cramming ever more into a smaller disc where a single scratch wipes out a hundred times more data than ever before? Yet, ever more, we get farther from caddies which would be safer to keep this dense storage in.
Boot a Knoppix CD. Now install it to the HD. Without prior techie experience, with nothing more than the directions in Knoppix Hacks. Go on.
As great as the book is, as helpful as it is, most non-tech people aren't going to be able to make the leap from playing around in a live CD to installing, configuring, and using Linux.
Now if the desktops are on a massive multi-user server remote from them, with paid techie admins, and they simply log in remotely and use it that way, well a lot of these people do that at their corporate jobs every day with Citrix and MSTermServ.
It's like testing a fully functional SUV versus buying it, and having to put part of the engine together and reinstall the sound system and rotate all the tires yourself before you can make any use of it. Why do that when you can get an econobox ready to roll?
Linux-based MSPs might be a good way to get Linux desktops in front of users, but other than that...
Why should we be surprised at kids' attitudes?
on
Johnny Can So Program
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· Score: 1
Kids naturally take to things that are hard only if doing it means they can stick something in the faces of adults and authority in general. Other than that, without the motivation, they don't bother.
Who can blame them? Today's kids face amazingly difficult technology embodying a "confusing and difficult is beautiful" mindset most strongly held by the *nix community. Compare the assembly code of earlier processors to the current Intel/AMD lineup. Compare Dartmouth BASIC to PERL or even worse, C++.
Counterintuitive is not a strong enough word for the way things work now. Seriously embedded techies may look at the deeper issues and say, "but it works so much cleaner this way" but it isn't easier for the human mind to grasp it. Old structured assembly on a 6502 could be easily compared to the methods of counting with pencils and coins that kids learned in kindergarden. It was familiar. Introduce segmentation and how do you get that across? (Break half the pencils and put them in an old cigar box is not an answer.)
I know, the object oriented faithful will scream bloody murder and insist to their deaths that learning OOP first is better, but the basics of life itself aren't OOP-based. They're structured, step-by-step, and they're easier to relate to old fashioned structured programming. No language full of brackets and unexplained whatever.this.that style anything is going to be easily penetrable. Kid would first have to learn and fully grasp old style report outlining to even begin to get it. "Oh, what does hi-rarky mean?"
I have yet to see one Dummies, 24hr, etc., book that adequately tells anyone what to do step by step, why each step is being done, and help them learn the inferences regarding how they will interact with each other in a different way. The first step for kids to learn programming is for them to imitate, experiment with variations, learn why they work, etc.
Today, tech in the PC/Mac world is so inpenetrable once you get beyond the glitz, with poorly or totally undocumented everything and no rationale given as to why something does something or what forms it can take, forcing you to work to learn about something four degrees off from the simple question you wanted a simple answer to... Is it any wonder why we have a society of people who can graduate college with technical course and still not understand how to fix a simple Windows registry error or install Linux to a hard drive on a brand new computer much less write an app in any language?
Johnny can so NOT program. Not their PC, not an X-10 controller, not even their cell phone. Heck, their VCRs have to have automatic time on them or else they can't figure out how to stop them from flashing 12:00.
Well given that I know not one person who I actually take seriously that uses a Blackberry, what's left?
Microsoft cannot possibly give it a name that makes anyone want to buy it except the dumb, drunk, and half-asleep crowds. Microsoft Orgasmatron. Microsoft Raspberry. Fark, no, I can't think of anything. Something pharmaceutical like Microsoft Amitricin. No...
Even numbers are no good after 2000, 2003, XP. Microsoft MCXVII. Microsoft 0111001001010. Microsoft AE21B19A. Bleah...
Magneto is just too stupid. Either purposely or accidentally matching a villain from a comic well known to geeks. Referencing something from electromagnetic and electrical engineering? To what end? Okay, bad question with MS.
No way I can see that there's any way to market it but use it in a media player and call it M-Pod. No, not even that.
Okay, so if coolness isn't happening, then does it have anything that we can't already get by stripping down a Linux distro and fiddling with it?
Apparently not.
So the point of them even bothering with this is... what?
Actually, it was Dell, Farmer In The. Mike is probably hedging bets and placing markers, the business equivalent of Johnny Appleseed farming. In the end, there's hope for it to be remembered, for RH/FC coders to support Dells, goodwill towards Dell from the RH/FC crowd for the future when Linux is offered as an alternative to Windows on their business and family desktops...
I usually see XP BSOD if Linux does something to an NTFS file that it doesn't like or if I change the partition it sits on and on reboot from the BSOD, it runs chkdsk and then goes back to normal. Other than that, rarely.
1. It's hard to take a dual P4 Xeon workstation into the john to study a PDF.
2. See #1
Seems to be about that easy.
Okay, sight gags aside, it would be acceptable if we had head-up displays and PDAs with voice-activated readers that moved around HTML-based help files. Then you can fix the router going nuts and not have a PC around to read the PDF.
I do of course agree that PDF is a bad bad file format to use for manuals. There's really no excuse for it. However, that being said, while HTML is a lighter way of doing it which can even include snazzy visuals for the attention impaired, it is still only as good as the writer's job on it.
So a few new rules: mostly text HTML, text whose content is full, broad, and relevant, and no more letting programmers write their own manuals. I'm a better tech writer than I am a coder any day which is why I don't write the docs to my stuff myself and don't work on code on anything I have to document. Cleavage is important for clarity and broad POV in thinking out how the casual user will see it instead of what I thought they would see.
Can everyone shut the fuck up and compromise? With a single flash card, all the memory a phone would ever need to expand to all the functions you could ever download would be a snap. No card, just simple texting, simple dialing, simple text phone book, that's it. Like the cheap Panasonics that AT&T gave as their free phone not long ago. You power up with the memory card in and you get all the features you can pack into it.
Why is it so hard to give us something that works like a PC whether Windows OR Linux?: a phone that only does what we install and nothing more.
Cool. I can refuse to help set-up e-mail on yet another unsupported handheld and console the Blackberry people with the line, "well, it's not just you, we don't support the Microsoft mobile devices either..."
...is there any way this works to the advantage of keeping fire under the rear ends of the Debian people to move forward at something other than their historical snails' pace?
Also, do we need to have SF vs. OSL flaming? Either way, we have repositories for the OSS world to work with. Most of the stuff I use is over at SF for both Linux and Windows. However, if something is homed at OSL, that's cool too.
I think we need to make this well known to the representatives and senators of all the other states by auto-forwarding all of our Florida-originating spam to their e-mail boxes. We'll stop doing it when you stop the Florida delegation from sleeping, eating, f*cking, etc. until they get results back home in the FL state capitol. They use peer pressure to get us to comply with their dictates, let's use it to get FL to comply with our most simple one: SPAMMERS WILL BE FED TO ALLIGATORS. PUBLICLY. IN ORLANDO. PRIME TIME TELEVISION.
It seems like over time, we are getting more and more wound up in an us vs. them (whoever we or they actually are at the moment) battle every day. The biggest ongoing one is the one of the people at large vs. the government which is inextricably tied to the people at large by blood and friendship, neighborhood and planet.
Government is in all cases mob rule. Whether the mob is leashed by a king in a monarchy or stumbling like a mass of drunken sailors on shore leave in a democracy. Mobs don't think well. It's a testament to our perseverance and dedication to what's best in and for ourselves that the democratic republics we in the west live under work as well as they do. So I have to take that as a bright note of hope for the future.
Nevertheless, not thinking well, government fears o'ermuch as they once said, and overreacts. So we ratchet up the infringements as much as the courts will let them get away with and the people fight a subversive war both against the unnecessary intrusions of the government and their misbehaving brethren whom the government is overreacting about in the first place. It can get so bad we wonder if the cure isn't worth the disease and the law enforcement worse than the criminals.
That being said, we still make it work somehow so I am not worried about incrementalism taking us to the world of 1984. We're not given to simple jingoistic rhetoric and propaganda, being increasingly disaffected, estranged, and cynical by turns. And we the people at large are somewhat given to superstitious overreaction and propaganda amongst ourselves as well. Our governments are in the end reflection of our own natures. Given that we continuously put into power a succession of people that cold logic and experience tells us flatly will be not the best and brightest, we easily override our intellect and vote with our emotions, largely those based on the idea of "what have you done for me lately?".
And so it goes...
I would just add that acoustic scramblers have been used for point to point phone communications for years by businesses and governments long before the digital age. So will we fear so much as to fit such things into face-masks and be only intelligible to those with proper headsets we choose to give the codes to? I wonder how the governments we put in power will overreact to our overreaction...
It can and often will break your machine's current state and render multiple applications inoperative.
I've had a lot of Windows patches kill applications. Most notably Adobe Premiere, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, and a load of older third party shareware/freeware apps. Often enough a reinstall of the application fixes it, sometimes... not.
The biggest problem isn't a lack of patches being applied although it is a big problem. The biggest problem is that people still insist on using e-mail as a way of conveying web-like information without regard to its origin or nature. I know a lot of people, some family, who would never ever visit shady porn sites and the like who nevertheless, display all their e-mails in full HTML format with Active X, Javascript, and the rest turned on full blast. Then they select each e-mail in turn, opening it by default in the preview pane of MSOE and just to make sure it really is spam, will also click on the attachments as well.
Of course, I was seeing this same thing more than seven years ago in corporate offices never mind home PCs. Absolutely nothing has changed. Any time a user allows code to run, they take the chance that code will be designed to undo their protective shields including anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall services. Those services are not designed to act like viruses themselves and resist deactivation (with the exception of NAV which acts that way by an idiot structural flaw rather than purposeful design) at all costs. Oops.
What Microsoft could do is create a bootloader that worked from a separate partition and scanned the as yet not activated main OS partition for rootkits and viruses and removed them before the OS could be started along with them. Problem is, we can't ever know that MS didn't fark the system up with spyware of their own to check that DRM wasn't messed with, that we weren't using warez'd MS products, or even working on behalf of the *AA agencies to root out and destroy MP3s and so on.
Another solution is to make all web applications including and especially MSIE work only inside a virtual machine within Windows where it was quarantined from outside system interaction and had to pass a fine-grained security checkpoint to interact in any way with the outside short of mere audio-visual output. In other words, scripting that was doing something with a web page would generally work, something that wanted to browse the file structure would have to be signed, the user would have to constantly say yea or nay and enter a password. Anything to slow down the interaction, log it, control it.
Anyone who's worked a digitizer/scanner, especially a slide model knows how insane this is. Even at current film resolution, you can't get endless detail.
There's no combination of Photoshop or any other app filters that can with any sharpness accurately resolve anything past the basic level of maximum resolution.
You can't create detail where none exists. Now then, consider how many American viewers actually own cheap USB scanners that go to 2000+dpi and who will try maxing them out on a old photo to try it out, and then consider how few of them ever connect their results to what they see on TV. Like with exploding cars, they never seem to. Maybe we/. type people just have a harder time suspending disbelief, but the level of average network viewer intelligence in this regard is astoundingly low. "I guess his flatbed can do that. Funny, I couldn't make out the tattoo on the stripper in that old pic from my sock drawer and he can tell the size of her pores and compute the time to fatality of a contact point mixed with a vasodilator. Oh well."
Oh dear yes. Why do we see a never-ending procession of programs with displays that look like Windows, but aren't actually Windows? Licensing and so on likely, but come on. Microsoft would likely kill for someone to actually show a real recognizable Windows desktop on the screen running a real recognizable app of theirs.
Laughable more is that most seem like boxes drawn in basic VGA graphics in DOS using QBasic. If I see a *nix prompt, it is almost inevitably a phosphor terminal to an unidentified, but quite often Xenix, machine. I call for shooting the budgeting people who insist on keeping these dinosaurs alive in the corner under eight inches of dust as an aside.
"I can trace his traffic across the network. It's ATM from him to-" WHOA! He can see layer 2 traffic without having access to the ISP/NSP routers between the client and the far end? Let me know how this trick works because I need five different usernames and passwords to do it as part of my ISP job and it takes thirty minutes to gather it all from every router and then another thirty to make coherent sense of it in a proper bulletproof result sense.
"His password will be hard to crack but I think I can do it." (five seconds pass) "Yeah, I got in." Was it password by any chance? L0phtcrack takes longer with a two digit password.
"He's got all sorts of pictures on his hard drive showing the area of the crime." This from a workstation at the PD, supposedly secretly "hacked" in to the suspect's PC. Let me guess, Linksys router set up as promiscuously as possible? File and print sharing full on? Well known trojans running?
If you did a mathematical/statistical attack on the problem of what they are actually typing during shooting based on relative position of fingers visibile in the shot and the keyboard size, you'd probably get, "i have no idea what i am doing"
On typical example is using statistics to predict exactly when and where a specific event will occur.
Such as where and when the sun will rise, where Orion will appear in the sky, and when Jupiter will be in Aquarius?
Oh, you meant really useful events. I wish they'd predict when I'm going to get to see a really entertaining episode where I don't feel a need to strangle Kirsch.
Going over old notes from late-night sessions of coding graphing programs makes me glad that I don't get this anymore.
We've done science, forensics, now math. What's next? A hardcore squad of geek detectives solving crimes with Netcraft and Nagios?/. prominently mentioned every other episode?
I've almost forgotten when a crime show was actually about crime and police and stuff.
There's aftermarket process monitors that can be had which will not be fooled because they aren't expected to be on the machine and so they don't code against them. I've used them in the past to kill hidden items on family machines.
Simplest solution is to do your AV and anti-spyware and anti-rootkit scanning from the exact same OS, installed in minimal configuration on a partition hidden at boot to the main working partition and OS copy. If the code ain't running, it can't defend itself against your measures very effectively.
...and it comes under the heading of "phishing-user intervention required".
Trojans both keylogging and not, some as much as the core VNC code in a not-so-clever wrapper and some far worse and some in between, are already well documented.
Tacking them onto phishmail is just another tactic, no different than using interesting spam. The majority of infections these days are in people using Outlook Express with preview pane active and e-mails being allowed to display in full glorious security-farked HTML, Active X, and so on. The rapidly competing second for me are people who click every other freaking pop-up and that too can be a kind of phishing.
I've said the same thing before and get slapped as a troll. I wasn't and neither are you. You are in fact right. The sheepulace we have will choose between getting everything they want for cost and getting almost everything they want for free and guess which they will choose.
Government run Internet is a very very very bad idea. It's the equivalent of the government offering free postal service use as long as no packaging or envelopes are used and everything is open to the USPS inspection at any time for any or no reason. They're free to deny whatever they want. People will inevitably choose to use it and accept the censorship and only use paid services for stuff they know will get nailed otherwise and how long does it take before we get to the next step...
"What have you go to hide? If you have nothing to hide, why can't we control the flow of your nothing? Hmmm?"
That's because if you have nothing to hide, it is still your nothing and you are under no obligation to use the censored official service over the one that guarantees a measure of privacy and freedom contractually with real consequences for not living up to it. I don't want to see a country where we eventually are under social/peer pressure to go with the free and compromised or come under suspicion as people already are if they use anonymous mailer systems and proxies. That's where this is headed.
then they belong wherever the fantasy land is that the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and so on generation languages are. As soon as I saw that named, I nearly fell over on my keyboard. ARS is not a 4GL, it's a tool of psychological torture more fiendish than making one listen to Abba records played backwards for eternity.
Come to think of it, when an AI language app writes its own language to communicate with humans all on its own, then we'll have a 4GL.
Oh good, I thought it was just the cold medication making it seem that frigging slow on my brand new machine. Though the real question is, will it be on the supported list for Duke Nukem?
It's the New York Times! What dope is being smoked and by who? New York Times. If the best defense you can make of a broken clock is that it is right twice a day, then this isn't even a broken clock. The last time I tried reading it, my head hurt from the psychic whiplash. It makes the leftist rag The Hartford Courant look like it was ghostwriten by R. Emmet Tyrell, Jr.
My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw the prices quoted. If we go by this as a yardstick, then access to just the headers of Slashdot stories should be $50,000 a pop. Heck, Something Awful is more informative than the NYT.
Slashdot Mirror
...Novell announced it would support the new standard immediately for Suse Linux's next live DVD iteration. In a related announcement, the new minimum memory requirement to run it will be increased to twelve terabytes.
Re: Star Wars
It takes less space for it after Jar Jar is edited out, not more. This format is overkill.
Re: chaotic standards
Why don't they just apply single or dual layer standards to larger discs instead of cramming ever more into a smaller disc where a single scratch wipes out a hundred times more data than ever before? Yet, ever more, we get farther from caddies which would be safer to keep this dense storage in.
Boot a Knoppix CD. Now install it to the HD. Without prior techie experience, with nothing more than the directions in Knoppix Hacks. Go on.
As great as the book is, as helpful as it is, most non-tech people aren't going to be able to make the leap from playing around in a live CD to installing, configuring, and using Linux.
Now if the desktops are on a massive multi-user server remote from them, with paid techie admins, and they simply log in remotely and use it that way, well a lot of these people do that at their corporate jobs every day with Citrix and MSTermServ.
It's like testing a fully functional SUV versus buying it, and having to put part of the engine together and reinstall the sound system and rotate all the tires yourself before you can make any use of it. Why do that when you can get an econobox ready to roll?
Linux-based MSPs might be a good way to get Linux desktops in front of users, but other than that...
Kids naturally take to things that are hard only if doing it means they can stick something in the faces of adults and authority in general. Other than that, without the motivation, they don't bother.
Who can blame them? Today's kids face amazingly difficult technology embodying a "confusing and difficult is beautiful" mindset most strongly held by the *nix community. Compare the assembly code of earlier processors to the current Intel/AMD lineup. Compare Dartmouth BASIC to PERL or even worse, C++.
Counterintuitive is not a strong enough word for the way things work now. Seriously embedded techies may look at the deeper issues and say, "but it works so much cleaner this way" but it isn't easier for the human mind to grasp it. Old structured assembly on a 6502 could be easily compared to the methods of counting with pencils and coins that kids learned in kindergarden. It was familiar. Introduce segmentation and how do you get that across? (Break half the pencils and put them in an old cigar box is not an answer.)
I know, the object oriented faithful will scream bloody murder and insist to their deaths that learning OOP first is better, but the basics of life itself aren't OOP-based. They're structured, step-by-step, and they're easier to relate to old fashioned structured programming. No language full of brackets and unexplained whatever.this.that style anything is going to be easily penetrable. Kid would first have to learn and fully grasp old style report outlining to even begin to get it. "Oh, what does hi-rarky mean?"
I have yet to see one Dummies, 24hr, etc., book that adequately tells anyone what to do step by step, why each step is being done, and help them learn the inferences regarding how they will interact with each other in a different way. The first step for kids to learn programming is for them to imitate, experiment with variations, learn why they work, etc.
Today, tech in the PC/Mac world is so inpenetrable once you get beyond the glitz, with poorly or totally undocumented everything and no rationale given as to why something does something or what forms it can take, forcing you to work to learn about something four degrees off from the simple question you wanted a simple answer to... Is it any wonder why we have a society of people who can graduate college with technical course and still not understand how to fix a simple Windows registry error or install Linux to a hard drive on a brand new computer much less write an app in any language?
Johnny can so NOT program. Not their PC, not an X-10 controller, not even their cell phone. Heck, their VCRs have to have automatic time on them or else they can't figure out how to stop them from flashing 12:00.
Well given that I know not one person who I actually take seriously that uses a Blackberry, what's left?
Microsoft cannot possibly give it a name that makes anyone want to buy it except the dumb, drunk, and half-asleep crowds. Microsoft Orgasmatron. Microsoft Raspberry. Fark, no, I can't think of anything. Something pharmaceutical like Microsoft Amitricin. No...
Even numbers are no good after 2000, 2003, XP. Microsoft MCXVII. Microsoft 0111001001010. Microsoft AE21B19A. Bleah...
Magneto is just too stupid. Either purposely or accidentally matching a villain from a comic well known to geeks. Referencing something from electromagnetic and electrical engineering? To what end? Okay, bad question with MS.
No way I can see that there's any way to market it but use it in a media player and call it M-Pod. No, not even that.
Okay, so if coolness isn't happening, then does it have anything that we can't already get by stripping down a Linux distro and fiddling with it?
Apparently not.
So the point of them even bothering with this is... what?
Actually, it was Dell, Farmer In The. Mike is probably hedging bets and placing markers, the business equivalent of Johnny Appleseed farming. In the end, there's hope for it to be remembered, for RH/FC coders to support Dells, goodwill towards Dell from the RH/FC crowd for the future when Linux is offered as an alternative to Windows on their business and family desktops...
Come on, it could be...
I usually see XP BSOD if Linux does something to an NTFS file that it doesn't like or if I change the partition it sits on and on reboot from the BSOD, it runs chkdsk and then goes back to normal. Other than that, rarely.
Why would we want to use paper?
1. It's hard to take a dual P4 Xeon workstation into the john to study a PDF.
2. See #1
Seems to be about that easy.
Okay, sight gags aside, it would be acceptable if we had head-up displays and PDAs with voice-activated readers that moved around HTML-based help files. Then you can fix the router going nuts and not have a PC around to read the PDF.
I do of course agree that PDF is a bad bad file format to use for manuals. There's really no excuse for it. However, that being said, while HTML is a lighter way of doing it which can even include snazzy visuals for the attention impaired, it is still only as good as the writer's job on it.
So a few new rules: mostly text HTML, text whose content is full, broad, and relevant, and no more letting programmers write their own manuals. I'm a better tech writer than I am a coder any day which is why I don't write the docs to my stuff myself and don't work on code on anything I have to document. Cleavage is important for clarity and broad POV in thinking out how the casual user will see it instead of what I thought they would see.
Can everyone shut the fuck up and compromise? With a single flash card, all the memory a phone would ever need to expand to all the functions you could ever download would be a snap. No card, just simple texting, simple dialing, simple text phone book, that's it. Like the cheap Panasonics that AT&T gave as their free phone not long ago. You power up with the memory card in and you get all the features you can pack into it.
Why is it so hard to give us something that works like a PC whether Windows OR Linux?: a phone that only does what we install and nothing more.
Cool. I can refuse to help set-up e-mail on yet another unsupported handheld and console the Blackberry people with the line, "well, it's not just you, we don't support the Microsoft mobile devices either..."
X-Men jokes go here.
RIM job jokes go here.
...is there any way this works to the advantage of keeping fire under the rear ends of the Debian people to move forward at something other than their historical snails' pace?
Also, do we need to have SF vs. OSL flaming? Either way, we have repositories for the OSS world to work with. Most of the stuff I use is over at SF for both Linux and Windows. However, if something is homed at OSL, that's cool too.
I think we need to make this well known to the representatives and senators of all the other states by auto-forwarding all of our Florida-originating spam to their e-mail boxes. We'll stop doing it when you stop the Florida delegation from sleeping, eating, f*cking, etc. until they get results back home in the FL state capitol. They use peer pressure to get us to comply with their dictates, let's use it to get FL to comply with our most simple one: SPAMMERS WILL BE FED TO ALLIGATORS. PUBLICLY. IN ORLANDO. PRIME TIME TELEVISION.
It seems like over time, we are getting more and more wound up in an us vs. them (whoever we or they actually are at the moment) battle every day. The biggest ongoing one is the one of the people at large vs. the government which is inextricably tied to the people at large by blood and friendship, neighborhood and planet.
Government is in all cases mob rule. Whether the mob is leashed by a king in a monarchy or stumbling like a mass of drunken sailors on shore leave in a democracy. Mobs don't think well. It's a testament to our perseverance and dedication to what's best in and for ourselves that the democratic republics we in the west live under work as well as they do. So I have to take that as a bright note of hope for the future.
Nevertheless, not thinking well, government fears o'ermuch as they once said, and overreacts. So we ratchet up the infringements as much as the courts will let them get away with and the people fight a subversive war both against the unnecessary intrusions of the government and their misbehaving brethren whom the government is overreacting about in the first place. It can get so bad we wonder if the cure isn't worth the disease and the law enforcement worse than the criminals.
That being said, we still make it work somehow so I am not worried about incrementalism taking us to the world of 1984. We're not given to simple jingoistic rhetoric and propaganda, being increasingly disaffected, estranged, and cynical by turns. And we the people at large are somewhat given to superstitious overreaction and propaganda amongst ourselves as well. Our governments are in the end reflection of our own natures. Given that we continuously put into power a succession of people that cold logic and experience tells us flatly will be not the best and brightest, we easily override our intellect and vote with our emotions, largely those based on the idea of "what have you done for me lately?".
And so it goes...
I would just add that acoustic scramblers have been used for point to point phone communications for years by businesses and governments long before the digital age. So will we fear so much as to fit such things into face-masks and be only intelligible to those with proper headsets we choose to give the codes to? I wonder how the governments we put in power will overreact to our overreaction...
It can and often will break your machine's current state and render multiple applications inoperative.
I've had a lot of Windows patches kill applications. Most notably Adobe Premiere, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, and a load of older third party shareware/freeware apps. Often enough a reinstall of the application fixes it, sometimes... not.
The biggest problem isn't a lack of patches being applied although it is a big problem. The biggest problem is that people still insist on using e-mail as a way of conveying web-like information without regard to its origin or nature. I know a lot of people, some family, who would never ever visit shady porn sites and the like who nevertheless, display all their e-mails in full HTML format with Active X, Javascript, and the rest turned on full blast. Then they select each e-mail in turn, opening it by default in the preview pane of MSOE and just to make sure it really is spam, will also click on the attachments as well.
Of course, I was seeing this same thing more than seven years ago in corporate offices never mind home PCs. Absolutely nothing has changed. Any time a user allows code to run, they take the chance that code will be designed to undo their protective shields including anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall services. Those services are not designed to act like viruses themselves and resist deactivation (with the exception of NAV which acts that way by an idiot structural flaw rather than purposeful design) at all costs. Oops.
What Microsoft could do is create a bootloader that worked from a separate partition and scanned the as yet not activated main OS partition for rootkits and viruses and removed them before the OS could be started along with them. Problem is, we can't ever know that MS didn't fark the system up with spyware of their own to check that DRM wasn't messed with, that we weren't using warez'd MS products, or even working on behalf of the *AA agencies to root out and destroy MP3s and so on.
Another solution is to make all web applications including and especially MSIE work only inside a virtual machine within Windows where it was quarantined from outside system interaction and had to pass a fine-grained security checkpoint to interact in any way with the outside short of mere audio-visual output. In other words, scripting that was doing something with a web page would generally work, something that wanted to browse the file structure would have to be signed, the user would have to constantly say yea or nay and enter a password. Anything to slow down the interaction, log it, control it.
I seriously doubt we will ever see it of course.
Anyone who's worked a digitizer/scanner, especially a slide model knows how insane this is. Even at current film resolution, you can't get endless detail.
/. type people just have a harder time suspending disbelief, but the level of average network viewer intelligence in this regard is astoundingly low. "I guess his flatbed can do that. Funny, I couldn't make out the tattoo on the stripper in that old pic from my sock drawer and he can tell the size of her pores and compute the time to fatality of a contact point mixed with a vasodilator. Oh well."
There's no combination of Photoshop or any other app filters that can with any sharpness accurately resolve anything past the basic level of maximum resolution.
You can't create detail where none exists. Now then, consider how many American viewers actually own cheap USB scanners that go to 2000+dpi and who will try maxing them out on a old photo to try it out, and then consider how few of them ever connect their results to what they see on TV. Like with exploding cars, they never seem to. Maybe we
Same goes with shooting a car or having a car crash explode, how many major car crashes explode on impact the way the do on the movies?
Exactly. The Pinto hasn't been common on our streets in forever.
Oh dear yes. Why do we see a never-ending procession of programs with displays that look like Windows, but aren't actually Windows? Licensing and so on likely, but come on. Microsoft would likely kill for someone to actually show a real recognizable Windows desktop on the screen running a real recognizable app of theirs.
Laughable more is that most seem like boxes drawn in basic VGA graphics in DOS using QBasic. If I see a *nix prompt, it is almost inevitably a phosphor terminal to an unidentified, but quite often Xenix, machine. I call for shooting the budgeting people who insist on keeping these dinosaurs alive in the corner under eight inches of dust as an aside.
"I can trace his traffic across the network. It's ATM from him to-" WHOA! He can see layer 2 traffic without having access to the ISP/NSP routers between the client and the far end? Let me know how this trick works because I need five different usernames and passwords to do it as part of my ISP job and it takes thirty minutes to gather it all from every router and then another thirty to make coherent sense of it in a proper bulletproof result sense.
"His password will be hard to crack but I think I can do it." (five seconds pass) "Yeah, I got in." Was it password by any chance? L0phtcrack takes longer with a two digit password.
"He's got all sorts of pictures on his hard drive showing the area of the crime." This from a workstation at the PD, supposedly secretly "hacked" in to the suspect's PC. Let me guess, Linksys router set up as promiscuously as possible? File and print sharing full on? Well known trojans running?
If you did a mathematical/statistical attack on the problem of what they are actually typing during shooting based on relative position of fingers visibile in the shot and the keyboard size, you'd probably get, "i have no idea what i am doing"
On typical example is using statistics to predict exactly when and where a specific event will occur.
Such as where and when the sun will rise, where Orion will appear in the sky, and when Jupiter will be in Aquarius?
Oh, you meant really useful events. I wish they'd predict when I'm going to get to see a really entertaining episode where I don't feel a need to strangle Kirsch.
"10001111011101101! AF320043B2C1? Ha ha ha."
/. prominently mentioned every other episode?
Going over old notes from late-night sessions of coding graphing programs makes me glad that I don't get this anymore.
We've done science, forensics, now math. What's next? A hardcore squad of geek detectives solving crimes with Netcraft and Nagios?
I've almost forgotten when a crime show was actually about crime and police and stuff.
There's aftermarket process monitors that can be had which will not be fooled because they aren't expected to be on the machine and so they don't code against them. I've used them in the past to kill hidden items on family machines.
Simplest solution is to do your AV and anti-spyware and anti-rootkit scanning from the exact same OS, installed in minimal configuration on a partition hidden at boot to the main working partition and OS copy. If the code ain't running, it can't defend itself against your measures very effectively.
...and it comes under the heading of "phishing-user intervention required".
Trojans both keylogging and not, some as much as the core VNC code in a not-so-clever wrapper and some far worse and some in between, are already well documented.
Tacking them onto phishmail is just another tactic, no different than using interesting spam. The majority of infections these days are in people using Outlook Express with preview pane active and e-mails being allowed to display in full glorious security-farked HTML, Active X, and so on. The rapidly competing second for me are people who click every other freaking pop-up and that too can be a kind of phishing.
Nothing new here...
I've said the same thing before and get slapped as a troll. I wasn't and neither are you. You are in fact right. The sheepulace we have will choose between getting everything they want for cost and getting almost everything they want for free and guess which they will choose.
Government run Internet is a very very very bad idea. It's the equivalent of the government offering free postal service use as long as no packaging or envelopes are used and everything is open to the USPS inspection at any time for any or no reason. They're free to deny whatever they want. People will inevitably choose to use it and accept the censorship and only use paid services for stuff they know will get nailed otherwise and how long does it take before we get to the next step...
"What have you go to hide? If you have nothing to hide, why can't we control the flow of your nothing? Hmmm?"
That's because if you have nothing to hide, it is still your nothing and you are under no obligation to use the censored official service over the one that guarantees a measure of privacy and freedom contractually with real consequences for not living up to it. I don't want to see a country where we eventually are under social/peer pressure to go with the free and compromised or come under suspicion as people already are if they use anonymous mailer systems and proxies. That's where this is headed.
then they belong wherever the fantasy land is that the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and so on generation languages are. As soon as I saw that named, I nearly fell over on my keyboard. ARS is not a 4GL, it's a tool of psychological torture more fiendish than making one listen to Abba records played backwards for eternity.
Come to think of it, when an AI language app writes its own language to communicate with humans all on its own, then we'll have a 4GL.
Oh good, I thought it was just the cold medication making it seem that frigging slow on my brand new machine. Though the real question is, will it be on the supported list for Duke Nukem?
It's the New York Times! What dope is being smoked and by who? New York Times. If the best defense you can make of a broken clock is that it is right twice a day, then this isn't even a broken clock. The last time I tried reading it, my head hurt from the psychic whiplash. It makes the leftist rag The Hartford Courant look like it was ghostwriten by R. Emmet Tyrell, Jr.
My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw the prices quoted. If we go by this as a yardstick, then access to just the headers of Slashdot stories should be $50,000 a pop. Heck, Something Awful is more informative than the NYT.