Is it surprising that a small percentage of Arabs eventually decided to react to violence with more violence? Is it surprising that Arabs don't like being killed?
Only the simpleminded could simplify such a complex situation into such a simplistic statement.
Yes, that's right, I'm calling you simple.
Backing one group against another is only a problem when you back the losing side. When the US backed one group of Europeans against another group of Europeans in WW2, it turned out fine because they backed the winning side. Ditto for when they backed South Korea against North Korea and China. Unfortiunately, the Middle East situation is a wee bit more complex, and the approach that they took was half-assed, all over the place, and therefore ineffective. There have as yet been no clear victors, and since US policy in the middle east has been flopping around like a fish out of water they've managed to piss off the majority of militant groups.
In short, it has nothing to do with "arabs not liking to be killed". It has to do with decades of a weak and inefficient foreign policy.
My view is that neither England or America are democratic societies. You can't really speak your mind and if you do you're investigated.
The Brit is a famous critic of the US-led war in Iraq and has dubbed President GEORGE W BUSH a "terrorist" - but he was baffled to be hauled in by authorities.
Heh. Am I the only one who thinks this guy is an idiot?
It seems it's getting more and more popular to criticize the US and accuse them of being a totalitarian faschist state, yet any time they do anything even remotely in line with those accusations the critics act shocked and distraught. Here's a tip: pick your viewpoint and stick with it. As any Chinses citizen will tell you, if you live under a totalitarian state it's usualy not a good idea to publicaly criticize them. They have a nasty way of making you dissapear. So if you truly beleive that the US has become one, it might behoove you to either STFU, or move away and criticize them from a distance.
On the other hand, if the US is still a free and open democratic society, you sure would be an asshole if you went around making accusations that even you don't really beleive in.
The FBI new about it before hand, at warned them to stop it. [msn.com]
--MarkusQ
From yournewest post:
The documents provided to the ACLU also contain acknowledgment that the FBI was aware of allegations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq before they came to public attention.
Nice back-peddaling, but you're not getting away with it that easy. First you claim that the FBI knew about Abu Gharib while it was happening, and told them to stop it. Then when you realize that you're a retard who read the article wrong, you back-pedal and point out that the FBI found out about Abu Gharib before the media. Well OFCOURSE THEY DID! That's their fucking job. In fact, it's quite clear that the government knew about it before the media did; it was the government that released the info TO the media. But that doesn't show that they knew about it WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING, as you implied. It could mean they found out about it 5 minutes before it hit the papers, or 5 weeks before. Or it might mean they knew about it while it was happening and did nothing about it. But your article doesn't provide any evidence for ANY of those possibilities. So you'll get your apology when pigs fly.
Most of today's holywood releases are plagued with warning screens, trailers, advertisements, and prohibited user operations, plus they're region coded so you can only play them in certain areas. A pirated DVD has all that stripped away. You can play it anywhere, and once inserted you can go straight to the menu, and from there straight to the movie. So there's a BIG incentive to go for pirated movies, even if you don't care about the price.
Every movie I have ever bought, I have had to decrypt, "clean up" with DVDRemake, and then burn back to a disc. Sometimes I wonder why I don't just skip the proccess and get pirated versions in the first place.
I don't need a "serious refutation" untill you can offer a serious argument. Just to refresh your memory, all you've offered so far is articles which have very little to do with the point you're trying to make. You'd have the same degree of relevancy if you linked to articles about McDonalds finding out that their fries have more fat than previously thought. And then claimed that Bush knew and lied about the "high fat situation".
While we may hold the "chief executive" responsible for the actions of subordinates, we certainly do not do so when it is clear subordinates were acting against the directions given. Otherwise we'd never get anything done because nobody in their right mind would ever want to be in charge of anything. The training given to military on everything from racism prvention to rules of engagement, the geneva conventions, and the escalation of force model, far outweighs anything you'd ever see civvie side. Every member of the military is at all times fully aware of how much force he or she is authorized to employ, and in what fashion. Claiming that Bush should be held responsible because some ass-clowns did what they KNEW was wrong is just ridiculous. You may as well hold him responsible when some grumpy old Sgt. goes home at the end of the day and beats his wife. Don't be stupid. Unless you can prove that the personnel in Abu Gharib were authorized to do what they did, you have no case.
And while we're at it, your inability to research anything, or understand points of view which you disagree with, becomes readily apparent in your response to "the chap above". Reading his initial post, it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that the man was exaggerating. He never intended to claim that Gore literaly flew over to the middle east, got off the plane, and started telling people to come here and kill us.
"Hey, how's it going. I'm Al Gore. I want you to go kill Americans!"
No, that aint it. What "the chap above" was attempting to say is that Gore's actual actions have pretty much the same effect. Like if you walked into a Biker Bar, wearing a shirt that said "Bikers are Queers". Well, you're not literaly saying "hey guys, I want to die!", but your actions will have much the same effect.
So the average soldier can carry about 100lbs on an ongoing basis. Once, many moons ago, the rifle, ammo, water, and a change of underwear added up to about that ammount. Then some egghead came up with plastics, nylon, and composite materials, and all of a sudden the same ammount of kit ended up weighing 80 lbs instead. So what happened?
Well....someone somewhere said "wait a minute...the average soldier CAN carry 100lbs on an ongoing basis....". So on to his kit pile they threw a collapsable shovel, a high-speed whistle, two changes of underwear, and whatever else they could add to get up to the 100lb mark.
Ofcourse, the proccess has been repeating itself over the centuries, with the result that today the average soldier has more items (and as a result, mpre pockets) than he knows what to do with, and ends up looking something like a gypsy caravan. Yet despite all the improvements in technology, the extra gizmos, the new training, etc, he's carrying the same weight, and still doing largely the same job.
Moral of the story? Whatever sort of technology we come up with, we're going to keep pushing ourselves to OUR limit. The technology isn't there to make things easier, and in most cases it actually makes things more complex; it exists only to boost productivity and effectivness.
the comapny which figures out how to build in space. why transport a space station in pieces using boosters which you're going to toss back in to the gravity well. Instead, weld the ends shut on the boosters, throw in some control and life support equipment, and you've got a low cost space station in orbit.
In other words, you're making a wild guess based loosly on semi-related events. Nice attempt to dodge, but you're still in the crosshairs. None of the articles you linked make any claims which support your conclusion. You're like one of those clowns who claim that because so few jews died durin 9/11, it's proof that "they" must have been responsible for it. Nonsense. Correlation is not causation. People like you are why poorly supported theories can often get passed off as "the truth". All it takes is some good publicity and a plauisible-sounding theory.
This is now known to be false; the treatment was in fact authorized (by redefining torture) and Bush has yet to recant his position. It looked for a minute as if McCain had cornered him into showing some sense, but his signing statement makes it clear that he still endorses torture. The only thing that clearly wasn't authorized (and what the Bush administration has actually objected to) is taking pictures of the torture and leaking it to the media. The "perps" who have so far been charged are (last I heard) only the low level grunts who got caught.
Ah yes. You must be one of those people who has "conclusive proof" that the moon landing was faked. Ofcourse, yor evidence is almost non-existant, and whenever anyone challanges whatever little evidence you DO have, you simply ignore them and continue saying that your point of view "has been proven". Right?
Well that's easy then. By your logic, the US can start slaughtering people in, say, Ohio and Kentucky, just for kicks. Followed by invading Canada and Mexico because they're neighboring countries, AND Canada is a NATO member, therefore the US has the "legal obligation to maintain the law" within it's borders, right?
The USSR had no right even to prevent members states of its own union from seceding (and was ultimately unsuccessful in doing so), let alone to interfere within the borders of neighboring states. Only a true lunatic could declare that it's ok to invade bordering nations, but not ones half the world away. By your logic, Germany did nothing wrong when it attacked its neighbors in the 1930's, and the US and Canada were the aggressors in WW2 because they had to cross an ocean to join in the fight.
In short, you're a whack job. Sit down before you fall down.
As over 90% of the worlds Oil is found in and around middle east
What the hell?
North America 16.48%
Central & South America 8.00%
Western Europe 1.16%
Eastern Europe & Former U.S.S.R. 6.13% Middle East 57.52%
Africa 7.94%
Asia & Oceania 2.78%
Sorry, but you're wrong. The US has never "remotely attacked other countries", all opperations involved personnel on the ground. If you're talking about total number of wars, I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's deffinitely not the US. Russia/USSR makes a good showing. Here's a (incomplete) list:
Latvian Partisan War 1944-49 Lithuanian Partisan War 1944-52 Kurdish Mahabad Republic 1945-46 Berlin Blockade 1948-9 East German Uprising 1953 Hungarian Revolt 1956 Stanleyville Secession: Congo 1960-1 Berlin Wall Crisis 1961 Prague Spring 1968 Sino-Soviet Border Clash 1969 Lithuanian Students Revolt 1972 Soviet Occupation: Afghanistan 1979-88 Shooting Down of KAL007: 1983 Osh Riots: Kyrgyzstan 1990 South Ossetian Rebellion 1990-92 Soviet Intervention: Latvia 1991 Moldovan Civil War 1991-92 Georgian Civil War 1991 Abkhazian Rebellion 1992-93 Tajikistani Civil War 1992-4 Georgian Civil War 1993-94 Russian Communist Revolt 1993 Chechen Revolt: Russia 1994-6
But the initial poster WAS a doofus. The UAE is an ally, and space-shuttles are rather expensive things to be lobbing at appartment buildings.
Defend it from what exactly? Do you realize that something like 800 civilians are killed every month by these "proud defenders of Iraq", while civilian casualties inflicted by US troops sit at a small fraction of that?
"To save the villiage, we had to burn the villiage" comes to mind.
The only ones defending their homeland are the ING and the IP. The "freedom fighters" we hear so much about aren't fighting to protect their homeland, they're fighting to protect a regressive culture and their own power over others.
You know, I wanted to make a post about how wrong you are....but ironically enough, the fact that you could beleive/say something like that is a good indication that more funding for education may not be such a bad idea.
Locals know to make allowances for foreigners. Think about it, if you're talking to a brand new immigrant who speaks english just well enough to get by, and has a horrible accent, are you going to care about his "non-verbal cues"? Or will you appreciate the fact that he's making an effort to communicate in your language, and listen primarily to his words instead of tone and body language?
The guy's website reads like any other vaporware marketing scheme. Instead of wasting $750 on this "storage technology", hop on over to Alex Chiu's website, and get yourself some eternal life!
Screw backing it up on DVD-R. My first move would be to dump all of my DVD's on to this thing, and then junk the whole lot of 'em. No more scratched discs, EVER! If I were really worried about crashes, I'd just buy two drives and mirror 'em.
Yes, but the problem with LANMAN is that it makes even complex passwords simpler. I don't know your exact background so I'll simplify and explain: LANMAN makes passwords longer than 14 characters impossible, and gaurantees that even with a 14 letter password a brute force atack only has to try combinations of up to 7 characters. So let's say you have an 8 letter alphanumeric password. If it only takes me 6 hours to generate the appropriate LANMAN hash, it would take me up to 156 hours to do the same thing if it were encrypted using a different method. If the password were 9 letters, I'd STILL only spend 6 hours with LANMAN, but up to 4056 with another method. And so on. Since my passwords go as large as 40 letters, this makes a big difference to me.
And while you're right in stating that all systems that store a password will have to use some sort of hash, there are easier solutions to this problem than trusted computing or remote authentication. Either:
a) Implement a dual password system, with the first password being used as a seed to generate the hash for the second. While this system will still allow the passwords to be guessed, it becomes much more difficult to do so. Primarily because it will almost gaurantee that the combined password length will be longer than if the user is asked for only one password, but also because of the approach that would have to be taken in guessing the passwords.
or
b) Don't store hashes at all, instead use the password to encrypt the user directory, or in the case of windows, to encrypt the registry. This forces an attacker to decrypt a large ammount of data on each attemt before even being able to CHECK wheter the guess was succesful or not. That alone would massively slow anyone attempting to brute-force the password. And since there's no way of knowing exactly what the data in the directory/registry should look like, it's almost impossible to implement a brute force attack in the first place. You'd need to have your program sift the data for key words or phrases on each attempt, which slows things down even further.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not picking specificaly on windows, although whoever thought of the LANMAN encryption scheme DOES deserve an extended pink belly session with a frozen snow shovel.
First off, the constitution was made to be modified specificaly because it's creators understood that they could not predict all future situations. They certainly could not have forseen individuals being able to hide evidence of their crimes by shuffling around electrons. Obstruction of justice was made a crime a LONG time ago, and encrypting evidence certainly falls under the same category. If neccesary, an amandment can be made to specificaly prohibit hiding evidence by encryption.
"Who says we're talking about kiddie porn? We might be talking about the "seditious" emails that you sent out when you organized a protest. We might be talking about perfectly legal documents in the possession of a government whistleblower. We might be talking about almost anything."
That's a bunch of conspiracy theory mumbo-jumbo. You're not in China, so you're not going to be arrested for organizing protests.
If you're a whistleblower with legal documents, anyone attempting to get rid of those documents won't bother trying to decrypt them. They'll just thermite your whole damn box.
And if, at some point in the future the eeeeevil government decides to start persecuting people for "dissention", being charged for encrypting data is going to be the LEAST of your worries.
That's absolutely right. I have a feeling they won't "ditch the backword compatibility" though. And even if they do, I beleive that NTLMv2 hashes are also stored in the SAM file (someone correct me if I'm wrong). While NTLMv2 IS more secure than LANMAN, it can be cracked in much the same way, it just takes longer to run through all the permutations.
The biggest problem is still, ofcourse, the use of weak passwords. Even LANMAN hashes take quite a bit of time to crack if the user employs 14 characters, and extended characters in the password. A similar password encrypted with NTLMv2 would stump all but the most dedicated amongst us. However, in the end, the SAM database is still the bigest weakness when it comes to windows filesystem encryption, and it's the main reason why I use third party software to encrypt my personal files. I know that I can make windows more secure by fucking around with the registry, however it's never going to be as secure as TrueCrypt, so why bother.
Chill man. This whole article is about what may be in the final release of Vista. My statements were obviously based on the (lack of) security in the current version of windows, which would be XP. No, I don't know that the same weakness will exist in Vista, however, considering that the same basic problem has been present since NT 4 (and possibly earlier), my guess is that it will be in Vista as well. They've made minor improvements between versions, such as implementing a "system key" to encrypt the SAM database, however, the same basic flaw has been present for something like 10 years now.
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Is it surprising that a small percentage of Arabs eventually decided to react to violence with more violence? Is it surprising that Arabs don't like being killed?
Only the simpleminded could simplify such a complex situation into such a simplistic statement.
Yes, that's right, I'm calling you simple.
Backing one group against another is only a problem when you back the losing side. When the US backed one group of Europeans against another group of Europeans in WW2, it turned out fine because they backed the winning side. Ditto for when they backed South Korea against North Korea and China. Unfortiunately, the Middle East situation is a wee bit more complex, and the approach that they took was half-assed, all over the place, and therefore ineffective. There have as yet been no clear victors, and since US policy in the middle east has been flopping around like a fish out of water they've managed to piss off the majority of militant groups.
In short, it has nothing to do with "arabs not liking to be killed". It has to do with decades of a weak and inefficient foreign policy.
My view is that neither England or America are democratic societies. You can't really speak your mind and if you do you're investigated.
The Brit is a famous critic of the US-led war in Iraq and has dubbed President GEORGE W BUSH a "terrorist" - but he was baffled to be hauled in by authorities.
Heh. Am I the only one who thinks this guy is an idiot?
It seems it's getting more and more popular to criticize the US and accuse them of being a totalitarian faschist state, yet any time they do anything even remotely in line with those accusations the critics act shocked and distraught. Here's a tip: pick your viewpoint and stick with it. As any Chinses citizen will tell you, if you live under a totalitarian state it's usualy not a good idea to publicaly criticize them. They have a nasty way of making you dissapear. So if you truly beleive that the US has become one, it might behoove you to either STFU, or move away and criticize them from a distance.
On the other hand, if the US is still a free and open democratic society, you sure would be an asshole if you went around making accusations that even you don't really beleive in.
From your earlier post:
The FBI new about it before hand, at warned them to stop it. [msn.com]
--MarkusQ
From yournewest post:
The documents provided to the ACLU also contain acknowledgment that the FBI was aware of allegations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq before they came to public attention.
Nice back-peddaling, but you're not getting away with it that easy. First you claim that the FBI knew about Abu Gharib while it was happening, and told them to stop it. Then when you realize that you're a retard who read the article wrong, you back-pedal and point out that the FBI found out about Abu Gharib before the media. Well OFCOURSE THEY DID! That's their fucking job. In fact, it's quite clear that the government knew about it before the media did; it was the government that released the info TO the media. But that doesn't show that they knew about it WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING, as you implied. It could mean they found out about it 5 minutes before it hit the papers, or 5 weeks before. Or it might mean they knew about it while it was happening and did nothing about it. But your article doesn't provide any evidence for ANY of those possibilities. So you'll get your apology when pigs fly.
Most of today's holywood releases are plagued with warning screens, trailers, advertisements, and prohibited user operations, plus they're region coded so you can only play them in certain areas. A pirated DVD has all that stripped away. You can play it anywhere, and once inserted you can go straight to the menu, and from there straight to the movie. So there's a BIG incentive to go for pirated movies, even if you don't care about the price. Every movie I have ever bought, I have had to decrypt, "clean up" with DVDRemake, and then burn back to a disc. Sometimes I wonder why I don't just skip the proccess and get pirated versions in the first place.
I don't need a "serious refutation" untill you can offer a serious argument. Just to refresh your memory, all you've offered so far is articles which have very little to do with the point you're trying to make. You'd have the same degree of relevancy if you linked to articles about McDonalds finding out that their fries have more fat than previously thought. And then claimed that Bush knew and lied about the "high fat situation".
While we may hold the "chief executive" responsible for the actions of subordinates, we certainly do not do so when it is clear subordinates were acting against the directions given. Otherwise we'd never get anything done because nobody in their right mind would ever want to be in charge of anything. The training given to military on everything from racism prvention to rules of engagement, the geneva conventions, and the escalation of force model, far outweighs anything you'd ever see civvie side. Every member of the military is at all times fully aware of how much force he or she is authorized to employ, and in what fashion. Claiming that Bush should be held responsible because some ass-clowns did what they KNEW was wrong is just ridiculous. You may as well hold him responsible when some grumpy old Sgt. goes home at the end of the day and beats his wife. Don't be stupid. Unless you can prove that the personnel in Abu Gharib were authorized to do what they did, you have no case.
And while we're at it, your inability to research anything, or understand points of view which you disagree with, becomes readily apparent in your response to "the chap above". Reading his initial post, it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that the man was exaggerating. He never intended to claim that Gore literaly flew over to the middle east, got off the plane, and started telling people to come here and kill us.
"Hey, how's it going. I'm Al Gore. I want you to go kill Americans!"
No, that aint it. What "the chap above" was attempting to say is that Gore's actual actions have pretty much the same effect. Like if you walked into a Biker Bar, wearing a shirt that said "Bikers are Queers". Well, you're not literaly saying "hey guys, I want to die!", but your actions will have much the same effect.
you're getting your prisons confused. the article you posted talks about gitmo, not abu gharib.
So the average soldier can carry about 100lbs on an ongoing basis. Once, many moons ago, the rifle, ammo, water, and a change of underwear added up to about that ammount. Then some egghead came up with plastics, nylon, and composite materials, and all of a sudden the same ammount of kit ended up weighing 80 lbs instead. So what happened? Well....someone somewhere said "wait a minute...the average soldier CAN carry 100lbs on an ongoing basis....". So on to his kit pile they threw a collapsable shovel, a high-speed whistle, two changes of underwear, and whatever else they could add to get up to the 100lb mark. Ofcourse, the proccess has been repeating itself over the centuries, with the result that today the average soldier has more items (and as a result, mpre pockets) than he knows what to do with, and ends up looking something like a gypsy caravan. Yet despite all the improvements in technology, the extra gizmos, the new training, etc, he's carrying the same weight, and still doing largely the same job. Moral of the story? Whatever sort of technology we come up with, we're going to keep pushing ourselves to OUR limit. The technology isn't there to make things easier, and in most cases it actually makes things more complex; it exists only to boost productivity and effectivness.
the comapny which figures out how to build in space. why transport a space station in pieces using boosters which you're going to toss back in to the gravity well. Instead, weld the ends shut on the boosters, throw in some control and life support equipment, and you've got a low cost space station in orbit.
In other words, you're making a wild guess based loosly on semi-related events. Nice attempt to dodge, but you're still in the crosshairs. None of the articles you linked make any claims which support your conclusion. You're like one of those clowns who claim that because so few jews died durin 9/11, it's proof that "they" must have been responsible for it. Nonsense. Correlation is not causation. People like you are why poorly supported theories can often get passed off as "the truth". All it takes is some good publicity and a plauisible-sounding theory.
This is now known to be false; the treatment was in fact authorized (by redefining torture) and Bush has yet to recant his position. It looked for a minute as if McCain had cornered him into showing some sense, but his signing statement makes it clear that he still endorses torture. The only thing that clearly wasn't authorized (and what the Bush administration has actually objected to) is taking pictures of the torture and leaking it to the media. The "perps" who have so far been charged are (last I heard) only the low level grunts who got caught.
Ah yes. You must be one of those people who has "conclusive proof" that the moon landing was faked. Ofcourse, yor evidence is almost non-existant, and whenever anyone challanges whatever little evidence you DO have, you simply ignore them and continue saying that your point of view "has been proven". Right?
Hah. Right. That's like saying "Linux Sucks, just ask any Microsoft employee".
Some of them will be educated enough, intelligent enough, and ballsey enough to admit the truth.
The rest will tow the party line, hoping that some day they'll be rewarded for it.
:D
I only wish I could mod your post "funny".
Good day sir.
Well that's easy then. By your logic, the US can start slaughtering people in, say, Ohio and Kentucky, just for kicks. Followed by invading Canada and Mexico because they're neighboring countries, AND Canada is a NATO member, therefore the US has the "legal obligation to maintain the law" within it's borders, right? The USSR had no right even to prevent members states of its own union from seceding (and was ultimately unsuccessful in doing so), let alone to interfere within the borders of neighboring states. Only a true lunatic could declare that it's ok to invade bordering nations, but not ones half the world away. By your logic, Germany did nothing wrong when it attacked its neighbors in the 1930's, and the US and Canada were the aggressors in WW2 because they had to cross an ocean to join in the fight. In short, you're a whack job. Sit down before you fall down.
As over 90% of the worlds Oil is found in and around middle east
What the hell?
North America 16.48%
Central & South America 8.00%
Western Europe 1.16%
Eastern Europe & Former U.S.S.R. 6.13%
Middle East 57.52%
Africa 7.94%
Asia & Oceania 2.78%
Try again?
Sorry, but you're wrong. The US has never "remotely attacked other countries", all opperations involved personnel on the ground. If you're talking about total number of wars, I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's deffinitely not the US. Russia/USSR makes a good showing. Here's a (incomplete) list:
Latvian Partisan War 1944-49
Lithuanian Partisan War 1944-52
Kurdish Mahabad Republic 1945-46
Berlin Blockade 1948-9
East German Uprising 1953
Hungarian Revolt 1956
Stanleyville Secession: Congo 1960-1
Berlin Wall Crisis 1961
Prague Spring 1968
Sino-Soviet Border Clash 1969
Lithuanian Students Revolt 1972
Soviet Occupation: Afghanistan 1979-88
Shooting Down of KAL007: 1983
Osh Riots: Kyrgyzstan 1990
South Ossetian Rebellion 1990-92
Soviet Intervention: Latvia 1991
Moldovan Civil War 1991-92
Georgian Civil War 1991
Abkhazian Rebellion 1992-93
Tajikistani Civil War 1992-4
Georgian Civil War 1993-94
Russian Communist Revolt 1993
Chechen Revolt: Russia 1994-6
But the initial poster WAS a doofus. The UAE is an ally, and space-shuttles are rather expensive things to be lobbing at appartment buildings.
Defend it from what exactly? Do you realize that something like 800 civilians are killed every month by these "proud defenders of Iraq", while civilian casualties inflicted by US troops sit at a small fraction of that?
"To save the villiage, we had to burn the villiage" comes to mind.
The only ones defending their homeland are the ING and the IP. The "freedom fighters" we hear so much about aren't fighting to protect their homeland, they're fighting to protect a regressive culture and their own power over others.
You know, I wanted to make a post about how wrong you are....but ironically enough, the fact that you could beleive/say something like that is a good indication that more funding for education may not be such a bad idea.
Carry on.
Locals know to make allowances for foreigners. Think about it, if you're talking to a brand new immigrant who speaks english just well enough to get by, and has a horrible accent, are you going to care about his "non-verbal cues"? Or will you appreciate the fact that he's making an effort to communicate in your language, and listen primarily to his words instead of tone and body language?
The guy's website reads like any other vaporware marketing scheme. Instead of wasting $750 on this "storage technology", hop on over to Alex Chiu's website, and get yourself some eternal life!
Screw backing it up on DVD-R. My first move would be to dump all of my DVD's on to this thing, and then junk the whole lot of 'em. No more scratched discs, EVER! If I were really worried about crashes, I'd just buy two drives and mirror 'em.
Yes, but the problem with LANMAN is that it makes even complex passwords simpler. I don't know your exact background so I'll simplify and explain: LANMAN makes passwords longer than 14 characters impossible, and gaurantees that even with a 14 letter password a brute force atack only has to try combinations of up to 7 characters. So let's say you have an 8 letter alphanumeric password. If it only takes me 6 hours to generate the appropriate LANMAN hash, it would take me up to 156 hours to do the same thing if it were encrypted using a different method. If the password were 9 letters, I'd STILL only spend 6 hours with LANMAN, but up to 4056 with another method. And so on. Since my passwords go as large as 40 letters, this makes a big difference to me.
And while you're right in stating that all systems that store a password will have to use some sort of hash, there are easier solutions to this problem than trusted computing or remote authentication. Either:
a) Implement a dual password system, with the first password being used as a seed to generate the hash for the second. While this system will still allow the passwords to be guessed, it becomes much more difficult to do so. Primarily because it will almost gaurantee that the combined password length will be longer than if the user is asked for only one password, but also because of the approach that would have to be taken in guessing the passwords.
or
b) Don't store hashes at all, instead use the password to encrypt the user directory, or in the case of windows, to encrypt the registry. This forces an attacker to decrypt a large ammount of data on each attemt before even being able to CHECK wheter the guess was succesful or not. That alone would massively slow anyone attempting to brute-force the password. And since there's no way of knowing exactly what the data in the directory/registry should look like, it's almost impossible to implement a brute force attack in the first place. You'd need to have your program sift the data for key words or phrases on each attempt, which slows things down even further.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not picking specificaly on windows, although whoever thought of the LANMAN encryption scheme DOES deserve an extended pink belly session with a frozen snow shovel.
First off, the constitution was made to be modified specificaly because it's creators understood that they could not predict all future situations. They certainly could not have forseen individuals being able to hide evidence of their crimes by shuffling around electrons. Obstruction of justice was made a crime a LONG time ago, and encrypting evidence certainly falls under the same category. If neccesary, an amandment can be made to specificaly prohibit hiding evidence by encryption.
"Who says we're talking about kiddie porn? We might be talking about the "seditious" emails that you sent out when you organized a protest. We might be talking about perfectly legal documents in the possession of a government whistleblower. We might be talking about almost anything."
That's a bunch of conspiracy theory mumbo-jumbo. You're not in China, so you're not going to be arrested for organizing protests.
If you're a whistleblower with legal documents, anyone attempting to get rid of those documents won't bother trying to decrypt them. They'll just thermite your whole damn box.
And if, at some point in the future the eeeeevil government decides to start persecuting people for "dissention", being charged for encrypting data is going to be the LEAST of your worries.
about which part?
That's absolutely right. I have a feeling they won't "ditch the backword compatibility" though. And even if they do, I beleive that NTLMv2 hashes are also stored in the SAM file (someone correct me if I'm wrong). While NTLMv2 IS more secure than LANMAN, it can be cracked in much the same way, it just takes longer to run through all the permutations. The biggest problem is still, ofcourse, the use of weak passwords. Even LANMAN hashes take quite a bit of time to crack if the user employs 14 characters, and extended characters in the password. A similar password encrypted with NTLMv2 would stump all but the most dedicated amongst us. However, in the end, the SAM database is still the bigest weakness when it comes to windows filesystem encryption, and it's the main reason why I use third party software to encrypt my personal files. I know that I can make windows more secure by fucking around with the registry, however it's never going to be as secure as TrueCrypt, so why bother.
Chill man. This whole article is about what may be in the final release of Vista. My statements were obviously based on the (lack of) security in the current version of windows, which would be XP. No, I don't know that the same weakness will exist in Vista, however, considering that the same basic problem has been present since NT 4 (and possibly earlier), my guess is that it will be in Vista as well. They've made minor improvements between versions, such as implementing a "system key" to encrypt the SAM database, however, the same basic flaw has been present for something like 10 years now.