Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of the problem with our educational system - it has been dumbed down. I am forced to shake my head and ask, "Really?" We have reached a new low that we are willing to reward students with college credit for essentially non-academic work. Well, wait a minute, we are doing that already. Defending Intelligent Design on a hostile website is hardly academic work. Lots of people, myself included, sometimes use a blog to vent frustrations and are hardly a scholarly piece of work. How does replying to someone's blog count as truely scholarly work? Scholarly work is researched heavily and includes the author's own conclusions and ideas and is extensively peer reviewed. Responding to a persons blog is representative of sub-collegiate writing, so my professors would have scoffed.
TV has been basically made redundant by the internet. I can watch all the shows I want via streaming video on the web or buy episodes. I don't really know why I still keep Dish Network other than that I am still in the promotional period. Once this period expires, I will strongly consider dropping them altogether.
AT&T is nothing but a bunch of fascists. I refuse to use them for anything. I wouldn't touch them for internet or cellular service.... if there was nothing else available, I would rather go without the service at all. AT&T stands for all that is reprehensible about a corporation and the way they willingly cooperated with the warrantless wiretapping is inexcuseable. Anyone that uses AT&T is simply helping them become even stronger. Since their terms of service changed, go ahead and run, don't walk, away from these a$$holes.
I have noticed that it is harder to engage in this activity. I used to enjoy wasting as much of these cat's time as possible and then arranging to meet them in London and never show. Then, when I get the response, "I was greatly disappointed to see that you never arrived for our meeting," I would come up with some other excuse like a sick family member or something or other and arrange another meeting. I would do this until I heard from the scammer no more. Might be that these guys share information because my email no longer gets 419 scams. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Ordinarily, I would agree with this statement 100%, the Glory Days of IT are pretty much over. Generally, we work long hours and are not appreciated nor respected. However, in the airline industry, the opposite seems to be true. Much of the infrastructure is very old and needs to be brought, kicking and screaming into the 21st century. This has created new and challenging positions and made IT an in demand field despite the industry's whoas. The industry realizes it can only do so much to increase revenue through a la carte pricing. Therefore, the way to decrease costs (and, thereby increasing revenue)is through automation and there has been a large push towards this. Hence, I have employment almost until the company closes its doors, if that should be the case.
You've rebuilt the windows machines? So, now you can not at all be sure if they were part of a botnet or not.
Chances are they were, and you've done the right thing by rebuilding them.
I think the details about the router with it's default password an no wireless security is a red herring - I've not heard of a botnet that tries to get in to your network by guessing standard admin passwords for common wireless routers. More likely it was a drive-by download from a dodgy web page, or a trojan in some downloaded software that put the malware on the machines.
This is very easy to defend against. Simply disable remote administration of the router and the botnet will be unable to guess at the password.
Your father's computer could also have had spam smtp engines installed and controlled by a botnet. Honestly, I would try and steer your father to using Ubuntu or Linux Mint which is a much more secure computing platform than Windows. You could install and configure it for him. Basically, your dad probably uses the computer for basic office stuff and email so a Linux distro would be better for him. He would have to worry less about a botnet infection.
Given the trend towards open source software, Microsoft really has to come on board to remain competitive. Unfortunately, M$ is slowly losing its own Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt campaign and must ultimately concede that free/open source software is not "un-American." Actually, free/open source software is very much American as it is open and returns control back to the individual. If America was founded on individualism, then free/open source software should epitomise "Americanness" I also don't doubt that it is part of much larger strategy on Microsoft's part but Microsoft has lost a good bit of its dictatorial powers. I still don't see cloud computing as really catching on in the mainstream just yet. Cloud computing is just really a fancy term for a complete 180 degree turn to an era when computing was centralized and people interfaced with the computer via a terminal. Signs of this are already happening for consumers but the business world would be relatively unwilling to give control over its most important and precious applications.
I don't think it is possible to completely make your data vanish. Some of the best computer forensics experts can still get data back even when it has been "government wiped" with random 1s and 0s written to every hard drive sector. This claim is dubious at best.
There will always be people, like me, that will not want to use cloud computing. I don't think we are surrendering our rights to the big corporations. This is needless worry and concern. You don't have to use Google Docs or Microsoft Office (when it goes cloud.) You can still choose to use Open Office or KOffice. If you care about privacy, you will avoid the cloud as much as possible. There will always be traditional developers writing software for the hard core users. Who knows, developers might create a cloud version of Open Office that you can deploy yourself.
Microsoft seems to have set a precedent for itself for being late in the game and then overpowering competition... except for this time. Do you remember when Bill Gates made the pronouncement that no one would adopt TCP/IP as the networking standard? When everyone did, Microsoft hastily added Winsock to its Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Do you remember how Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer made the pronouncement that open source would never take on and never cause any serious competition? Whoops, again, the great bastion of computing was wrong. Now, Microsoft is seeking to overwhelm Red Hat and Novell in Virtualization? I would say the deck is stacked heavily against Microsoft in this arena. Both Red Hat and Novell are using relatively mature virtualization engines when compared with the one MS just open sourced. Why would I choose MS's virtualization engine when Red Hat and Novell have ones that are more mature? What does Microsoft offer that would make me choose it over Zen, VMWare, or KVM? My guess is not much since I have tried their product and it does not perform as well as its competitors.
Is the one developed by the hard working folks at the OpenBSD project whom have been studying spam for well over 5 years. They came up with something that is devlishly clever called OpenBSD Spamd. Spamd is basically a fake smtp engine that sets the TCP RWIN to 1. By doing this, it causes the transmission speed to slow to 1 byte per second. This can cause a backlog or even crash the spam spender. Fight back, don't filter! You can even create a serious of spam trap addresses, publish them, and reverse harvest the IP addresses of the spam senders. Check out http://www.openbsd.org/
said by someone who never had^H^H^Hlived with a cat. *
to grown up male cats, humans are a source of food and entertainment. maybe like a brother. to females, humans are more like ofsprings. that's why they bring in dead and half-dead animals home. they want you - the human - to use that carcass/weakened creature as play toys. this teaches usefull hunting and killing skills.
* humans don't own cats. we live with them in the bast-case scenario. in the worst case, the CAT owns YOU! cue the "in soviet russia" jokes.
This is an astute observation. I have two female cats and they will take turns grooming me much in the same way as they would a kitten. They are methodical and try to cover every inch. They will groom the hair on my arms and legs and occasionally use their teeth like combs as they would with kittens. I am bald so they don't bother with my head. They do, on occasion, bring home food or training objects and look at me as if I am retarded when I don't get down on all fours and start chasing or eating. And the cat really does own you.
OpenSolaris will not be completely dead. The community at large will pick it up and it will take on a life of its own much in the same way as BSD UNIX was when the Berkeley CSRG group disbanded. OpenSolaris is still important and used heavily throughout industry. It is not my intention to start a flame war, but Solaris is even more mature as a platform than Linux. I am a fan of all open source operating systems and software because it takes computing out of the power of the corporation and puts it in the hands of the users.
There are all kinds of ways to alter the spectrum of the light coming from a CFL bulb. For example, just use frosted glass. They even have CFL bulbs with warmer tints to the glass. I find that argument bullshit. Now the mercury factor and "real" wattage equivalency issues are another story altogether. If an efficient way was developed to recycle the bulbs, the savings could still be really good when compared to traditional filament bulbs. I use CFL bulbs on my security lighting and really like them.
Why does that "undocumented feature" scare me? Encryption and access restrictions are certainly not full proof. Even the AES-256 encryption scheme might have a significant flaw as reported in slashdot yesterday. If you are 100% certain that your system is full proof, I certainly wouldn't buy it. Your solution might be good but it might make use of other run time libraries and shared objects with notorious leaks that would let a would be intruder gain, not just access, but root level access. Your over confidence is frightening and is exactly why software like Windows is full of holes.
Both 180solutions and Hotbar were the bane of my existence back in the day. Both these malware items would just keep coming back like persistent, antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. You think you've got every last little registry entry and file removed and lo and behold it would be back. This wouldn't be malware if the company provided honest instructions for the removal of these programs. In some cases, I had heard, the removal instructions simply added code to reinforce the malware. However, because they are being deceptive about its install and automatic re-install, it makes the behaviour unethical. Therefore Zango and its ilk should take the slap on the ass and go sulk in a corner somewhere.
I'd love to take one of these to Alaska in the spring into the early summertime. With the number of mosquitoes living there, I'll bet enough current could be generated to do something more than just power a clock. Mosquitoes in Alaska have been known to be so voracious as to kill a moose that happens upon a swarm. Imagine what millions of these pests could do with this system - bake a chicken or turkey or even provide enough electricity to power a small cabin.
There are no guarantees when it comes to the protocols and the internet.... it is always a "best effort" system. Many forget that it is always a best effort system because the internet has come to the point where for all intents and purposes, there are virtually no failures. I would probably use a tried and true protocol like FTP or maybe even SCP. Both work very well. I would think your best bet is to try to work with the government to improve their "dodgy" internal network. SCP has the advantage of securing the transmission as well as excellent error correction and recovery.
What about the NVIDIA Cuda architecture? They claim it is a super computer for under 10 grand and doesn't require special power requirements. But, I wonder if it will only perform as a super computer for graphics....
Unfortunately, things in the United States really aren't any better. In some ways, freedoms are more covertly taken away. I think if so-called democracy continues to get whittled away, we will be ripe for another revolution. Government is scared of the internet as well. The internet can quickly debunk propoganda. The internet is the single greatest threat to the Chinese Communist Party.
I live in Arizona and love my new adopted state for its scenic beauty and winters that are to die for. But our political structure is just plain nuts. We err WAY to far on the side of law enforcement!! I don't see why we have to be such legal eagles that we have eroded our own rights. Well, the school district is going to get what it deserves at the expense of the tax payer. If the school district weren't such blatant fools and thought before acting or reacting, a debacle such as this would not have occurred. I guess the AZ sun has baked some brains.
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Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of the problem with our educational system - it has been dumbed down. I am forced to shake my head and ask, "Really?" We have reached a new low that we are willing to reward students with college credit for essentially non-academic work. Well, wait a minute, we are doing that already. Defending Intelligent Design on a hostile website is hardly academic work. Lots of people, myself included, sometimes use a blog to vent frustrations and are hardly a scholarly piece of work. How does replying to someone's blog count as truely scholarly work? Scholarly work is researched heavily and includes the author's own conclusions and ideas and is extensively peer reviewed. Responding to a persons blog is representative of sub-collegiate writing, so my professors would have scoffed.
TV has been basically made redundant by the internet. I can watch all the shows I want via streaming video on the web or buy episodes. I don't really know why I still keep Dish Network other than that I am still in the promotional period. Once this period expires, I will strongly consider dropping them altogether.
AT&T is nothing but a bunch of fascists. I refuse to use them for anything. I wouldn't touch them for internet or cellular service .... if there was nothing else available, I would rather go without the service at all. AT&T stands for all that is reprehensible about a corporation and the way they willingly cooperated with the warrantless wiretapping is inexcuseable. Anyone that uses AT&T is simply helping them become even stronger. Since their terms of service changed, go ahead and run, don't walk, away from these a$$holes.
I have noticed that it is harder to engage in this activity. I used to enjoy wasting as much of these cat's time as possible and then arranging to meet them in London and never show. Then, when I get the response, "I was greatly disappointed to see that you never arrived for our meeting," I would come up with some other excuse like a sick family member or something or other and arrange another meeting. I would do this until I heard from the scammer no more. Might be that these guys share information because my email no longer gets 419 scams. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Ordinarily, I would agree with this statement 100%, the Glory Days of IT are pretty much over. Generally, we work long hours and are not appreciated nor respected. However, in the airline industry, the opposite seems to be true. Much of the infrastructure is very old and needs to be brought, kicking and screaming into the 21st century. This has created new and challenging positions and made IT an in demand field despite the industry's whoas. The industry realizes it can only do so much to increase revenue through a la carte pricing. Therefore, the way to decrease costs (and, thereby increasing revenue)is through automation and there has been a large push towards this. Hence, I have employment almost until the company closes its doors, if that should be the case.
You've rebuilt the windows machines? So, now you can not at all be sure if they were part of a botnet or not. Chances are they were, and you've done the right thing by rebuilding them. I think the details about the router with it's default password an no wireless security is a red herring - I've not heard of a botnet that tries to get in to your network by guessing standard admin passwords for common wireless routers. More likely it was a drive-by download from a dodgy web page, or a trojan in some downloaded software that put the malware on the machines.
This is very easy to defend against. Simply disable remote administration of the router and the botnet will be unable to guess at the password.
Your father's computer could also have had spam smtp engines installed and controlled by a botnet. Honestly, I would try and steer your father to using Ubuntu or Linux Mint which is a much more secure computing platform than Windows. You could install and configure it for him. Basically, your dad probably uses the computer for basic office stuff and email so a Linux distro would be better for him. He would have to worry less about a botnet infection.
Prior art has been pretty much done away with. The newest laws are simply the first persons to file.
Given the trend towards open source software, Microsoft really has to come on board to remain competitive. Unfortunately, M$ is slowly losing its own Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt campaign and must ultimately concede that free/open source software is not "un-American." Actually, free/open source software is very much American as it is open and returns control back to the individual. If America was founded on individualism, then free/open source software should epitomise "Americanness" I also don't doubt that it is part of much larger strategy on Microsoft's part but Microsoft has lost a good bit of its dictatorial powers. I still don't see cloud computing as really catching on in the mainstream just yet. Cloud computing is just really a fancy term for a complete 180 degree turn to an era when computing was centralized and people interfaced with the computer via a terminal. Signs of this are already happening for consumers but the business world would be relatively unwilling to give control over its most important and precious applications.
I don't think it is possible to completely make your data vanish. Some of the best computer forensics experts can still get data back even when it has been "government wiped" with random 1s and 0s written to every hard drive sector. This claim is dubious at best.
There will always be people, like me, that will not want to use cloud computing. I don't think we are surrendering our rights to the big corporations. This is needless worry and concern. You don't have to use Google Docs or Microsoft Office (when it goes cloud.) You can still choose to use Open Office or KOffice. If you care about privacy, you will avoid the cloud as much as possible. There will always be traditional developers writing software for the hard core users. Who knows, developers might create a cloud version of Open Office that you can deploy yourself.
Microsoft seems to have set a precedent for itself for being late in the game and then overpowering competition ... except for this time. Do you remember when Bill Gates made the pronouncement that no one would adopt TCP/IP as the networking standard? When everyone did, Microsoft hastily added Winsock to its Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Do you remember how Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer made the pronouncement that open source would never take on and never cause any serious competition? Whoops, again, the great bastion of computing was wrong. Now, Microsoft is seeking to overwhelm Red Hat and Novell in Virtualization? I would say the deck is stacked heavily against Microsoft in this arena. Both Red Hat and Novell are using relatively mature virtualization engines when compared with the one MS just open sourced. Why would I choose MS's virtualization engine when Red Hat and Novell have ones that are more mature? What does Microsoft offer that would make me choose it over Zen, VMWare, or KVM? My guess is not much since I have tried their product and it does not perform as well as its competitors.
That's one small step for man, one giant step for mankind ...... backward
Is the one developed by the hard working folks at the OpenBSD project whom have been studying spam for well over 5 years. They came up with something that is devlishly clever called OpenBSD Spamd. Spamd is basically a fake smtp engine that sets the TCP RWIN to 1. By doing this, it causes the transmission speed to slow to 1 byte per second. This can cause a backlog or even crash the spam spender. Fight back, don't filter! You can even create a serious of spam trap addresses, publish them, and reverse harvest the IP addresses of the spam senders. Check out http://www.openbsd.org/
This is why I normally use and recommend preventive kicking with cats, lest they hypnotize you with their little cute purrrrrrrrs...
I don't find that amusing at all! Hurting an animal is a sign of sociopathy!
said by someone who never had^H^H^Hlived with a cat. * to grown up male cats, humans are a source of food and entertainment. maybe like a brother. to females, humans are more like ofsprings. that's why they bring in dead and half-dead animals home. they want you - the human - to use that carcass/weakened creature as play toys. this teaches usefull hunting and killing skills. * humans don't own cats. we live with them in the bast-case scenario. in the worst case, the CAT owns YOU! cue the "in soviet russia" jokes.
This is an astute observation. I have two female cats and they will take turns grooming me much in the same way as they would a kitten. They are methodical and try to cover every inch. They will groom the hair on my arms and legs and occasionally use their teeth like combs as they would with kittens. I am bald so they don't bother with my head. They do, on occasion, bring home food or training objects and look at me as if I am retarded when I don't get down on all fours and start chasing or eating. And the cat really does own you.
OpenSolaris will not be completely dead. The community at large will pick it up and it will take on a life of its own much in the same way as BSD UNIX was when the Berkeley CSRG group disbanded. OpenSolaris is still important and used heavily throughout industry. It is not my intention to start a flame war, but Solaris is even more mature as a platform than Linux. I am a fan of all open source operating systems and software because it takes computing out of the power of the corporation and puts it in the hands of the users.
There are all kinds of ways to alter the spectrum of the light coming from a CFL bulb. For example, just use frosted glass. They even have CFL bulbs with warmer tints to the glass. I find that argument bullshit. Now the mercury factor and "real" wattage equivalency issues are another story altogether. If an efficient way was developed to recycle the bulbs, the savings could still be really good when compared to traditional filament bulbs. I use CFL bulbs on my security lighting and really like them.
Why does that "undocumented feature" scare me? Encryption and access restrictions are certainly not full proof. Even the AES-256 encryption scheme might have a significant flaw as reported in slashdot yesterday. If you are 100% certain that your system is full proof, I certainly wouldn't buy it. Your solution might be good but it might make use of other run time libraries and shared objects with notorious leaks that would let a would be intruder gain, not just access, but root level access. Your over confidence is frightening and is exactly why software like Windows is full of holes.
Both 180solutions and Hotbar were the bane of my existence back in the day. Both these malware items would just keep coming back like persistent, antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. You think you've got every last little registry entry and file removed and lo and behold it would be back. This wouldn't be malware if the company provided honest instructions for the removal of these programs. In some cases, I had heard, the removal instructions simply added code to reinforce the malware. However, because they are being deceptive about its install and automatic re-install, it makes the behaviour unethical. Therefore Zango and its ilk should take the slap on the ass and go sulk in a corner somewhere.
I'd love to take one of these to Alaska in the spring into the early summertime. With the number of mosquitoes living there, I'll bet enough current could be generated to do something more than just power a clock. Mosquitoes in Alaska have been known to be so voracious as to kill a moose that happens upon a swarm. Imagine what millions of these pests could do with this system - bake a chicken or turkey or even provide enough electricity to power a small cabin.
There are no guarantees when it comes to the protocols and the internet .... it is always a "best effort" system. Many forget that it is always a best effort system because the internet has come to the point where for all intents and purposes, there are virtually no failures. I would probably use a tried and true protocol like FTP or maybe even SCP. Both work very well. I would think your best bet is to try to work with the government to improve their "dodgy" internal network. SCP has the advantage of securing the transmission as well as excellent error correction and recovery.
What about the NVIDIA Cuda architecture? They claim it is a super computer for under 10 grand and doesn't require special power requirements. But, I wonder if it will only perform as a super computer for graphics ....
Unfortunately, things in the United States really aren't any better. In some ways, freedoms are more covertly taken away. I think if so-called democracy continues to get whittled away, we will be ripe for another revolution. Government is scared of the internet as well. The internet can quickly debunk propoganda. The internet is the single greatest threat to the Chinese Communist Party.
I live in Arizona and love my new adopted state for its scenic beauty and winters that are to die for. But our political structure is just plain nuts. We err WAY to far on the side of law enforcement!! I don't see why we have to be such legal eagles that we have eroded our own rights. Well, the school district is going to get what it deserves at the expense of the tax payer. If the school district weren't such blatant fools and thought before acting or reacting, a debacle such as this would not have occurred. I guess the AZ sun has baked some brains.