Just as an addition to the above post, I stumbled upon this site the other day and was rather impressed by it - http://www.chiptune.com/
It brought back a lot of memories of the Amiga and for those of you who have no idea what Workbench looked like, it's a quick way of playing around without having to install anything.
As opposed to just being different for the sake of being different? Does it really matter what order minimise/maximise/close is? I mean, can you actually give a good logical reason why the order or placement should be anywhere else? If not, then why not just keep it the way everyone else does it?
This might be a really stupid question, but has anyone ever ported any of these UI's (KDE, Gnome, etc.) to Windows?
Now before you tell me off for being stupid, there would be a good reason for it - anyone that prefers *nix and has to use a windows machine (say at work) can at least get some of the familiarity by using their favourite GUI. For those of us, like myself, who have tried to switch from Windows so many times but got cold feet because everything is so unfamiliar and different, it'd be a great way to familiarise with it.
Sure, there's a lot more to *nix than just a different UI, it's almost a different ethos, a different way of working - but every little helps.
I'm very curious about this, because as far as I was aware, the debate on "how much do you need to overwrite data to securely delete it?" raged quite a bit a few years ago, but nobody could actually prove that it was possible to recover data that was overwritten just the once? There was even a website set up, the Great Zero challenge (Which has now been pulled, supposedly nobody ever accepted it) to try and prove or disprove the myth.
Does anyone have any information on where that really stands? Is it actually possible to recover overwritten data by any known means? I realise that the DOD don't see single-overwrites of zeros as enough, but what's that based on?
In those chats, Manning told Lamo that he had “zero-filled” his laptops, referring to a way of securely removing data from a disk drive by repeatedly filling all available space with zeros. The implication from Manning was that any evidence of his leaking activity had been erased from his computers. But Shaver’s testimony would seem to indicate that either the laptops weren’t zero-filled after all, or that it had been done incompletely.
So Manning certainly knew about this kind of thing, but either didn't do it or didn't do it correctly. I wonder how difficult it is to mess something like that up?
"hacker" has the same connotations these days - often it comes from someone either missing the point, or attributing the negative actions from a few people to the entire demographic.
And hey, there's a laundry list of shit they're directly responsible for, like the rootkit, or that lovely little PSN clause which prevents you from taking them to court, or of course the removal of OtherOS and suing of homebrew developers.
Only idiots like you claim that homebrew == piracy. In the very early days of the PS3 CFW hacks, it wasn't actually possible to pirate games. Specifically, Geohot's method of running homebrew was designed to not enable piracy (Current methods of running pirate games on the PS3 involve a modified hypervisor with the PS3's internal BD-ROM emulator - geohot's FW didn't contain the necessary patches), yet the took him to court anyway, along with a bunch of other people who were only working on how to bring Linux back. In fact, the few people they didn't try to sue were the ones specifically doing piratey things.
I'll be honest, as much as I agree that this is the way things work at the moment - once on the internet, it's pretty much guaranteed to stay on the internet no matter what you do (be it lawsuits, takedown notices, etc.), I do feel that we should be able to expect some element of privacy.
Compare it to email - I'm sure even yourself wouldn't say that emails are private and should remain private. After all, if anyone could get to anyone else's emails then it'd be a disaster. Emails are, probably due to their own limitations more than anything else, an area where we can expect a bit of privacy, or at the very least expect to not have your private emails strewn all over the local news. With social networks, it's a bit more tricky because a lot of emphasis is to "share" your content, yet some people seem to think that this means you should expect nothing less than your data to be publicly available to anyone and everyone, even if you only intended to share it with one person. I think that's an unhealthy way to look at it and if we prevent official outlets, such as news agencies, from using anything that was clearly intended to be private, then at the very least it's a small step towards some element of privacy, even if it still doesn't stop your data from ending up everywhere.
Frankly, I'm tired of Sony's bullshit and the more they fuck over their paying consumers, the faster people will realise what a worthless company they really are.
And what exactly is Google meant to do? Hire loads of people to sift through every DMCA claim for validity and potentially end up in court themselves should one of them make a bad call? I'm not saying I agree with the system, but part of that is if Google doesn't comply then they're directly liable. The takedown notices are bullshit, it shouldn't just be taken down without question, rather the person who uploaded it should be informed of the infringement and given the chance to defend themselves, without Google having to get involved (or whoever runs the site in question - this doesn't just apply to youtube, after all). Or better yet, any frivolous and unfounded takedown should be immediately met with a fine that's proportional to the size of the company/person in question that's filing it - so say $100 for your average joe who earns what's on the breadline, yet $50,000 for a record company who is clearly abusing their power. Eventually the frivilous takedowns would stop as people would get wise and realise it's easy to make money, while the actual infringers wouldn't get shit.
I'm curious as to what social engineering technique could be used to find a card number? I have never seen a website that will reveal credit card info as anything other than **** **** **** 1234, nor have I ever heard of a bank that will give out your number over the phone. The only thing they ever do is post you out a new card and disable the current one.
Seriously, phone up your bank and say "Hey it's Mr Smith here, I left home without my card today and I absolutely must buy this cute thingymabob on the internet, I know the last 4 digits are 1234 but that's it - could you help a brother out?" and see what happens. Then there's the CVN which shouldn't be stored in ANY payment system - except maybe the card authenticator themselves (i.e. Visa/Mastercard).
Yes, while no browser is perfect and some IE alternatives are certainly not "hack proof", the number of issues IE6 has is staggaring. All of the above points are completely moot, it just takes one piece of malware and you could potentially be looking at hundreds of compromised machines, having to rebuild every single one of them, having sensitive data stolen, deleted or both. How much will that cost, compared to upgrading the software?
This year has proven that Security is clearly an afterthought for most companies and there's been enough high-profile attacks that nobody has any excuse for not taking security seriously. Just because it costs money and doesn't get any obvious, visible benefit (In that you could have spent $0 on security last year and had no issues, then $1,000,000 this year and had no issues) doesn't mean it should be cast aside for more important things, like executive bonuses.
Where I live, they demolished a bunch of houses that were built in the late 1800's to make way for new builds. Going by your story, this is a tragedy, however the real truth is that these old houses, while still structurally sound, were falling apart on the inside, incapable of being correctly maintained when it came to things like electricity and plumbing and essentially, massively inefficient in terms of how much space they took up. Things like heating costs were a lot higher and fewer people could live in them compared to the "new" builds going up due to things like stupidly high ceilings and windows.
Now, I do agree with you for the most part that today's ideology of building to last just long enough is the wrong way to go about things - but at the same time it is impossible to reliably predict what our needs will be in 50 years time, let alone longer.
Worse, the users all assume that they are experts and KNOW that they could not be infected
Errrrrr no, most users know they know nothing about computers and trust their security to some sort of AV program, or just don't care. Windows is "easy" to target because it only takes a small percentage of vulnerable targets (i.e. people) to get yourself a few hundred thousand victims. Windows is no more difficult to secure than Linux as the practices are the same - don't run as root/admin, keep shit up to date and don't download dodgy shit. Most Viruses and worms require some form of interaction or permission from the user to spread.
In fact your argument of "users all assume that they are experts and KNOW that they could not be infected" applies least to windows and most to Mac and Linux users. Many Mac users to this day expect things to "just work" and most don't run any kind of security software. Many Linux users assume that because they're running linux, they're invulnerable - if anything, Android proves that this isn't necessarily the case (I realise it's an apples/oranges comparison, but the difference is that Android is vastly popular while Linux on the desktop is not).
Please tell me the name of the malware that turns your PC into a seedbox rather than a bot for sending spam, DOS attacks, etc. Because I'm pretty sure you're talking out of your arse.
Does it really matter how information has been obtained, if at the end of the day, the information is the same?
Seriously. If they could make a 3 hour long action film that somehow taught algebra, would you look down on the person who learned it this way, instead of the individual who self-taught by studying an old maths book for a week?
Sony did produce a superior console[citation needed]
Fixed that for you. I see this argument thrown around a lot, but aside from some figures on how fast the CELL is, nobody can really say for sure that either console is "superior". Sure, it has a few exclusives that look fantastic, nobody's going to try and say the console isn't powerful, but the multiplatform games released are either identical, or favour the 360 (sometimes only slightly, sometimes by large degrees), with the odd exception. Sales certainly haven't been "superior", figures released last week show that the 360 basically sold twice as many units as the PS3 in the US (of course, you'll have to take Patcher's word on that one). Half the reason the PS3 caught up is because the Japanese refuse to buy the Microsoft console, but most other markets favour the 360. In any case, if the PS3 was really "superior", it'd have caught up by now. That 12-18month lead isn't really an excuse any more, it has been 5 years and counting - if it was "superior", it'd have trounced the 360 by now.
Now before you get defensive, I'm not actually saying the 360 is better, it's certainly not "superior". It has some features the PS3 doesn't have, like the ability to stream music while ingame (while most PS3 games can't even PLAY music while ingame, nevermind streaming it), but so does the PS3 - Blu-ray, Linux (oh wait, nevermind) and such. The point I'm trying to make is that I think this generation of consoles can easily be classed as a stalemate - a draw, as it were. And I'm fine with that, it means that for once you don't have to own both major consoles to get enough great games through the year (if you're a hardcore gamer, that is) and the best, or at least most popular titles, have all been multi-platform.
Of course, the latter paragraph does fall apart if you mention the Wii, which is easily far more popular but a notably inferior console.
I'm glad to say that I've never had a Hard Drive fail on me, ever. I've had MBT partitions get corrupted, which I thought was a faulty HDD but turned out to be caused by faulty RAM under a specific circumstance, but never a HDD fail.
However, I'm still a firm believer that anything with "Moving parts" will inherently be more likely to break than something without, or at the very least will certainly wear over time and fail eventually. SSD's do seem to have their issues and certainly have their own issues with "wear", but the technology is still pretty young. At the very least, it's possible to negate any wear issues and extend the life of the drive by allocating more reserved space to it. That way, the blocks that start erroring can be ignored, much like we do with Mechanical HDD's today.
By not shitting all over adjacent spectrums. They all operate within the 2.4Ghz range and they can do whatever they want within that range as long as they don't mess up nearby parts of the spectrum. There are other regulations as well, such as power output that are part of the FCC rules but that's it. These smart meters are probably within spec but hogging the whole spectrum all the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as an addition to the above post, I stumbled upon this site the other day and was rather impressed by it - http://www.chiptune.com/
It brought back a lot of memories of the Amiga and for those of you who have no idea what Workbench looked like, it's a quick way of playing around without having to install anything.
As opposed to just being different for the sake of being different?
Does it really matter what order minimise/maximise/close is? I mean, can you actually give a good logical reason why the order or placement should be anywhere else? If not, then why not just keep it the way everyone else does it?
This might be a really stupid question, but has anyone ever ported any of these UI's (KDE, Gnome, etc.) to Windows?
Now before you tell me off for being stupid, there would be a good reason for it - anyone that prefers *nix and has to use a windows machine (say at work) can at least get some of the familiarity by using their favourite GUI. For those of us, like myself, who have tried to switch from Windows so many times but got cold feet because everything is so unfamiliar and different, it'd be a great way to familiarise with it.
Sure, there's a lot more to *nix than just a different UI, it's almost a different ethos, a different way of working - but every little helps.
I'm very curious about this, because as far as I was aware, the debate on "how much do you need to overwrite data to securely delete it?" raged quite a bit a few years ago, but nobody could actually prove that it was possible to recover data that was overwritten just the once? There was even a website set up, the Great Zero challenge (Which has now been pulled, supposedly nobody ever accepted it) to try and prove or disprove the myth.
Does anyone have any information on where that really stands? Is it actually possible to recover overwritten data by any known means? I realise that the DOD don't see single-overwrites of zeros as enough, but what's that based on?
From the first article...
So Manning certainly knew about this kind of thing, but either didn't do it or didn't do it correctly. I wonder how difficult it is to mess something like that up?
"hacker" has the same connotations these days - often it comes from someone either missing the point, or attributing the negative actions from a few people to the entire demographic.
Sony do more than make games consoles, you know.
And hey, there's a laundry list of shit they're directly responsible for, like the rootkit, or that lovely little PSN clause which prevents you from taking them to court, or of course the removal of OtherOS and suing of homebrew developers.
Only idiots like you claim that homebrew == piracy. In the very early days of the PS3 CFW hacks, it wasn't actually possible to pirate games. Specifically, Geohot's method of running homebrew was designed to not enable piracy (Current methods of running pirate games on the PS3 involve a modified hypervisor with the PS3's internal BD-ROM emulator - geohot's FW didn't contain the necessary patches), yet the took him to court anyway, along with a bunch of other people who were only working on how to bring Linux back. In fact, the few people they didn't try to sue were the ones specifically doing piratey things.
Correction:
"wouldn't" should be would.
Apologies, it's early, etc. etc.
I'll be honest, as much as I agree that this is the way things work at the moment - once on the internet, it's pretty much guaranteed to stay on the internet no matter what you do (be it lawsuits, takedown notices, etc.), I do feel that we should be able to expect some element of privacy.
Compare it to email - I'm sure even yourself wouldn't say that emails are private and should remain private. After all, if anyone could get to anyone else's emails then it'd be a disaster. Emails are, probably due to their own limitations more than anything else, an area where we can expect a bit of privacy, or at the very least expect to not have your private emails strewn all over the local news.
With social networks, it's a bit more tricky because a lot of emphasis is to "share" your content, yet some people seem to think that this means you should expect nothing less than your data to be publicly available to anyone and everyone, even if you only intended to share it with one person. I think that's an unhealthy way to look at it and if we prevent official outlets, such as news agencies, from using anything that was clearly intended to be private, then at the very least it's a small step towards some element of privacy, even if it still doesn't stop your data from ending up everywhere.
Good, let them.
Frankly, I'm tired of Sony's bullshit and the more they fuck over their paying consumers, the faster people will realise what a worthless company they really are.
And what exactly is Google meant to do? Hire loads of people to sift through every DMCA claim for validity and potentially end up in court themselves should one of them make a bad call?
I'm not saying I agree with the system, but part of that is if Google doesn't comply then they're directly liable. The takedown notices are bullshit, it shouldn't just be taken down without question, rather the person who uploaded it should be informed of the infringement and given the chance to defend themselves, without Google having to get involved (or whoever runs the site in question - this doesn't just apply to youtube, after all).
Or better yet, any frivolous and unfounded takedown should be immediately met with a fine that's proportional to the size of the company/person in question that's filing it - so say $100 for your average joe who earns what's on the breadline, yet $50,000 for a record company who is clearly abusing their power. Eventually the frivilous takedowns would stop as people would get wise and realise it's easy to make money, while the actual infringers wouldn't get shit.
I'm curious as to what social engineering technique could be used to find a card number? I have never seen a website that will reveal credit card info as anything other than **** **** **** 1234, nor have I ever heard of a bank that will give out your number over the phone. The only thing they ever do is post you out a new card and disable the current one.
Seriously, phone up your bank and say "Hey it's Mr Smith here, I left home without my card today and I absolutely must buy this cute thingymabob on the internet, I know the last 4 digits are 1234 but that's it - could you help a brother out?" and see what happens. Then there's the CVN which shouldn't be stored in ANY payment system - except maybe the card authenticator themselves (i.e. Visa/Mastercard).
One word: Security.
Yes, while no browser is perfect and some IE alternatives are certainly not "hack proof", the number of issues IE6 has is staggaring. All of the above points are completely moot, it just takes one piece of malware and you could potentially be looking at hundreds of compromised machines, having to rebuild every single one of them, having sensitive data stolen, deleted or both. How much will that cost, compared to upgrading the software?
This year has proven that Security is clearly an afterthought for most companies and there's been enough high-profile attacks that nobody has any excuse for not taking security seriously. Just because it costs money and doesn't get any obvious, visible benefit (In that you could have spent $0 on security last year and had no issues, then $1,000,000 this year and had no issues) doesn't mean it should be cast aside for more important things, like executive bonuses.
Where I live, they demolished a bunch of houses that were built in the late 1800's to make way for new builds. Going by your story, this is a tragedy, however the real truth is that these old houses, while still structurally sound, were falling apart on the inside, incapable of being correctly maintained when it came to things like electricity and plumbing and essentially, massively inefficient in terms of how much space they took up. Things like heating costs were a lot higher and fewer people could live in them compared to the "new" builds going up due to things like stupidly high ceilings and windows.
Now, I do agree with you for the most part that today's ideology of building to last just long enough is the wrong way to go about things - but at the same time it is impossible to reliably predict what our needs will be in 50 years time, let alone longer.
Get with the fucking Programme.
Yours,
-The rest of the world
Errrrrr no, most users know they know nothing about computers and trust their security to some sort of AV program, or just don't care. Windows is "easy" to target because it only takes a small percentage of vulnerable targets (i.e. people) to get yourself a few hundred thousand victims. Windows is no more difficult to secure than Linux as the practices are the same - don't run as root/admin, keep shit up to date and don't download dodgy shit. Most Viruses and worms require some form of interaction or permission from the user to spread.
In fact your argument of "users all assume that they are experts and KNOW that they could not be infected" applies least to windows and most to Mac and Linux users. Many Mac users to this day expect things to "just work" and most don't run any kind of security software. Many Linux users assume that because they're running linux, they're invulnerable - if anything, Android proves that this isn't necessarily the case (I realise it's an apples/oranges comparison, but the difference is that Android is vastly popular while Linux on the desktop is not).
Please tell me the name of the malware that turns your PC into a seedbox rather than a bot for sending spam, DOS attacks, etc.
Because I'm pretty sure you're talking out of your arse.
So someone is trying to take network transparency away from me?!
I wonder why people feel the need to "sign" their posts, when their username is quite clearly visible at the top.
-nk
You are correct, of course, FFXIII is one of the exceptions. Shame it was a terrible game, though.
He's behind you!
Does it really matter how information has been obtained, if at the end of the day, the information is the same?
Seriously. If they could make a 3 hour long action film that somehow taught algebra, would you look down on the person who learned it this way, instead of the individual who self-taught by studying an old maths book for a week?
Fixed that for you. I see this argument thrown around a lot, but aside from some figures on how fast the CELL is, nobody can really say for sure that either console is "superior".
Sure, it has a few exclusives that look fantastic, nobody's going to try and say the console isn't powerful, but the multiplatform games released are either identical, or favour the 360 (sometimes only slightly, sometimes by large degrees), with the odd exception.
Sales certainly haven't been "superior", figures released last week show that the 360 basically sold twice as many units as the PS3 in the US (of course, you'll have to take Patcher's word on that one). Half the reason the PS3 caught up is because the Japanese refuse to buy the Microsoft console, but most other markets favour the 360. In any case, if the PS3 was really "superior", it'd have caught up by now. That 12-18month lead isn't really an excuse any more, it has been 5 years and counting - if it was "superior", it'd have trounced the 360 by now.
Now before you get defensive, I'm not actually saying the 360 is better, it's certainly not "superior". It has some features the PS3 doesn't have, like the ability to stream music while ingame (while most PS3 games can't even PLAY music while ingame, nevermind streaming it), but so does the PS3 - Blu-ray, Linux (oh wait, nevermind) and such. The point I'm trying to make is that I think this generation of consoles can easily be classed as a stalemate - a draw, as it were. And I'm fine with that, it means that for once you don't have to own both major consoles to get enough great games through the year (if you're a hardcore gamer, that is) and the best, or at least most popular titles, have all been multi-platform.
Of course, the latter paragraph does fall apart if you mention the Wii, which is easily far more popular but a notably inferior console.
I'm glad to say that I've never had a Hard Drive fail on me, ever. I've had MBT partitions get corrupted, which I thought was a faulty HDD but turned out to be caused by faulty RAM under a specific circumstance, but never a HDD fail.
However, I'm still a firm believer that anything with "Moving parts" will inherently be more likely to break than something without, or at the very least will certainly wear over time and fail eventually. SSD's do seem to have their issues and certainly have their own issues with "wear", but the technology is still pretty young. At the very least, it's possible to negate any wear issues and extend the life of the drive by allocating more reserved space to it. That way, the blocks that start erroring can be ignored, much like we do with Mechanical HDD's today.
By not shitting all over adjacent spectrums. They all operate within the 2.4Ghz range and they can do whatever they want within that range as long as they don't mess up nearby parts of the spectrum. There are other regulations as well, such as power output that are part of the FCC rules but that's it. These smart meters are probably within spec but hogging the whole spectrum all the same.