Posts by Jason DePriest
101 posts • joined Wednesday 9th January 2008 21:03 GMT
Great write up
Unfortunately, the people who will read this are the ones who already know about it.
The plebes and proles in the public will still be mislead by the media on what Anonymous is and what it represents.
I like the folks who compare Anonymous to the weather. Sometimes you can predict it. Sometimes you can shield yourself from it. But you can never control it and it can result it good or ill based on tiny manipulations that you can't begin to understand.
KISS my grits
Really? KISS has had maybe two or three songs worth listening to that I can remember.
It was always about the glam-show and Gene's ridiculously long tongue. It was entertainment in the strain of GWAR before GWAR took it to the next level. It was marketing and product placement. It was The Monkees.
But great music? Maybe just a little.
Posted in Sony mulls hacker bounty offer
*hack*
My damnable allergies are acting up again and I'm hacking all day long.
Better call the feds, then...
nom nom
In the interview, she says she can chew up and eat the micro-SD card to destroy evidence if needed. It's harder to eat CD and probably worse on your tummy, as well.
have you considered a Palm?
Supposedly WebOS handles pulling in contacts from everywhere nicely. That's what I've read, but I use an Android phone.
I wanted to go with a Palm WebOS phone since my last few phones were all Palm, but I also wanted a phone that had apps available for it and an actual future.
I could care less
but that would take additional effort so I'll just not care much at all but not learn enough about the whole situation to get to the point where I couldn't possibly care any less.
See the distinction?
Posted in Matrix 4 and 5 in works, threatens Keanu
allow me to retort
Those were all the current "one" and his possible reactions to what the Architect was telling him.
It doesn't matter if WikiLeaks has broken the law
The fact remains that WikiLeaks has been charged with no crime and the companies flipping over for the US government have no leg to stand on.
They are preemptively charging, trying, and convicting a company that, while making the US government angry, has not been brought up on a single criminal or civil charge.
They could just as easily release statements saying they support WikiLeaks until such time as they are convicted of a crime.
I'm a little big large
but even I understand that rides that hoist you up into the air and fly you around have to have weight limits.
There are engineering and cost concerns and, at some point, you have to say, "this is the cut off."
I've a gimpy eye which means I can't see all the fancy new 3D movies in 3D. I don't expect the studios to spend millions coming up with a magic way for me to see their fancy attractions. Just like I don't expect rides to accommodate my rolling gut.
here is an idea
Every time a patent changes owners, the lifetime of it's validity is reduced. That way, every step away from the original innovator costs something and it would take more wrangling for companies to amass huge portfolios.
Posted in Google image search gets facelift
Is Google my decision engine now?
I'm confused.
Google used to be all about a simple interface that just gave you results and did it quickly.
I was pretty sure that worked out well for them.
Time's a' changin'?
Chrome phone home?
When the time comes that I can turn off all of the phone home, automatic update checking in Chrome, I might consider installing it on my Windows boxes.
Kismet, you say?
I'm pretty sure it logs unencrypted "interesting" packets by default.
You can't get at the encrypted data without collecting a statistically significant number of packets of you have the keys.
Posted in Symantec buys PGP and GuardianEdge too
ruined?
It was ruined when McAfee bought it way back in the day.
Never has recovered. Even when PGP Corporation went out and bought it back from McAfee.
Hello. I'll be your title this evening.
I'm waiting for the Nexus Six.
Posted in OpenSolaris devs 'ignored' by Oracle
Does this surprise *anyone*?
I mean, it's Larry Ellison. There is no way this free s**t is going to continue.
No way at all.
I expect OpenOffice.org to lose its corporate sponsor and dry up.
"being a wash"
While I don't know the origin of the phrase, it means that the end is no different than the beginning, that there is no net gain.
Posted in Windows 7's dirty secrets revealed
Mark Russinovich
Hiring Mark was the smartest move Microsoft ever made.
Sysinternals forever!
Posted in Time Warner names day for AOL spin-off
It was more of a merger than a who-bought-who
They formed a new company in the merger called AOL Time Warner and gave each others' share holders stock in the new company.
http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,667602,00.html
Time to upgrade
"You'll be wanting BOOK version 9, then." [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_of_Lost_Plots
Reminds me of OS/2 for some reason
Here's to hoping IBM doesn't lose interest and forget to push their tech.
I imagine it will be another awesome, almost completely finished product that has incredible features and unprecedented power that IBM never gets around to polishing and stops evangelizing so they can go back to hardware while at the same time, other software copies their work (poorly) but manages to sell rafts of kit.
I don't get it
What am I missing here?
Also, what is the IT angle on this?
At AC Re Cody
Why does his hatred of Apple amuse and confuse you?
I don't know. Perhaps it is because in your worldview there is no room for dissident opinion.
I'd love to have a fancy Macbook, but I honestly can't afford one.
The only reason my laptop cost over $1000 is because I paid a few hundred extra for an ATI Radeon video card with dedicated 512MB GDDR3 so I can game on it.
Burn Notice
The television show Burn Notice has used the leave-your-rigged-throw-away-phone-in-the-villain's-lair-and-call-it-as-a-bug-later trick several times.
The virgins supplied in heaven
are *perpetual* virgins. Every night their hymen regenerates so you can have the honor of being their first time every day.
Is it just me, or is it sort of one-sided and unfair that the women has to medically prove virginity while the guy can just shrug his shoulders and say "I am a virgin" whether he is or isn't.
Of course, this would be the same culture that has stoned women to death for being raped.
The United States, for better or worse, keeps blatant Christianity out of political offices. Hence, it is not illegal to have premarital sex, it is not illegal to have an abortion, it is not illegal to commit adultery and it is illegal to force one of your children to marry someone. Although in some places, it is still illegal to do anything other than the ol' missionary (States' Rights for the win!).
Re: Thundarr
If I remember correctly, the moon was split in two and ended up looking much like it did in the less than wonderful, but not quite terrible remake of The Time Machine (2002).
There is a screenshot of the moon here: http://www.renegadebs.com/archives/2006_06_01_archive.html
Best picture of Thundarr's moon I could find in 10 minutes: http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs48/f/2009/156/b/6/thundarr_the_barbarian_by_chachaman.jpg
Posted in 'Stop NASA bombing the Moon!'
I don't think we should be bombing the moon
But not because of "indigenous" peoples or whatever, but because it doesn't belong to the US of A (where I was born and still live).
What gives us the right to blow a hole in the moon? This is a piece of international real estate with a real possibility of being colonized within the next century.
And here we go launching rockets at it and beating it up.
The fact that NASA hasn't had to talk to any other countries with a stake (such as China, India, etc) is pretty sad.
It is like they are saying, "We can get there first, so we get to do whatever the hell we want."
It is arrogance.
Wrong approach
You don't say "We need to protect these desktops from a theoretical exploit that might happen but out network defenses should stop because We Have A Firewall (tm)".
You say, "Man those employees sure do waste time checking personal email and watching stupid online videos (buy a proxy server), installing unsupported, unnecessary software (buy AV, anti-spyware, anti-malware), keeping up with Microsoft's latest gaffe / patch (buy patch management), running local web servers for development / local databases for development when we have perfectly capable enterprise solutions already in place (buy host firewall / IPS)
"If only we had an infrastructure in place to keep the bean counters counting!
"If only we could make sure that everybody could do their job without mindlessly handling tasks that someone else is already being paid for!"
You need to sell it as a way to increase productivity and profitability. That is the only way to get any non-technical C-level executive to buy in (willingly).
It's about time
Although I won't be using it, I think this product is great news.
Microsoft has provided simple firewalling since NT (given a fancy overhaul in XP), added Windows Defender to tackle Spyware and finally have a full anti-virus solution.
This means someone can purchase a Microsoft OEM system that will have a decent set of protection of which *none* is trial-ware that will expire in 60 days.
Users who buy systems can actually be permanently protected out of the box.
This is good news.
I prefer to use a more fully featured suite, but the option to have something supported entirely by Microsoft is pretty tempting for systems I support but don't own.
Posted in Next-gen Trojan rewrites bank statements
@The Original Ash
Bonus points if you have the VM configured to revert to the previous snapshot every time you shut it down.
Completely daft
There are already themes available for Mozilla Firefox that can make it look just like IE7, missing menu bars, combined forward/back button, everything. I can also make it look like Safari on the Mac Aqua interface.
That's the beauty of Firefox. Not only is it themeable, people build themes for it and give them away.
There is no reason for Firefox to overhaul the interface in such a manner if it isn't across the board. Why mess around with cross-platform visual compatibility? As it is now, if I screenshot Firefox running on Windows XP and Linux with GNOME, they look almost identical. That's how it should be. That is what cross-platform apps should strive for.
If they do butcher it down, they should provide a way to bring the menus back like IE does.
PCI compliant not that easy
Being PCI compliant and being *certified* as PCI compliant are two completely different things.
One is cheap and the other is quite costly.
Who cares if you are PCI compliant if you can't tell anyone? A third-party audit is *required* to be compliant. No matter how qualified your in-house folks are and no matter how closely you are following the guidelines, you are required to pay someone to come in and tell you "yep, you're good" before you can say you are actually PCI compliant.
@ an AC
I'd rather have my dog tased than have it shot with a handgun.
Having been on the wrong end of a police officer telling me to get control of my (old, nearly toothless, arthritic) dog or he would have to shoot her, I'd have been happy if he had a taser at his disposal.
A mini-blackhole is still magnitudes larger than a micro-blackhole
Comment required
paranoia
Happiness is mandatory, citizen.
Are you happy?
My first question
was: "What are they selling?"
After reading the report and finding no actionable information, I asked again, "No, really. What are they trying to sell me?"
Seems Trusteer has just the thing to fix the very problem they say nobody else can fix.
Convenient, that.
Posted in Aussie firewall nears death
Designed to bypass the Great Firewall of China
UltraSurf skips around to different proxies allowing you to stay "one step ahead" of the censors.
great day for the rule of law
The correct decision was rendered.
It is sad that we didn't have something on the books that could be used to prosecute an insecure mother for pushing another girl to suicide by impersonating a hopeful suitor and then bashing her. She must have some severe mental issues to believe that was proper behaviour.
While she cannot be "made an example of," she does shine a light on one of the dangers of the anonymity behind which a deranged personality may hide. I can only hope it will cause more people to think twice before believing that profile or email before getting emotionally involved.
tell that to Kerberos
Then why do they make their proprietary version of Kerberos the default for newer Active Directory domains? You never even see the password on the wire (or sitting in memory) at all, just hashes and tokens.
On any NT-based version of Windows, you can't get to the password once you create it. The password is gone; it doesn't exist. You can't pull it back out unless you dump the hashes and run a brute force cracker against it.
The password is never seen again; only the hashes are compared.
Even if you hijack someone's authentication token and are able to impersonate them, you have no idea what their password is.
SQL doesn't need this level of security? Then why bother putting it in the OS? Wouldn't it be easier for Help Desk folks and End Users if an admin could just recover your password and tell you what it is so you don't have to create a new one every time you forget it?
Microsoft is just being a jerk.
Hey SmallYellowFuzzyDuck
A good version of Linux will have a package manager that takes care of most of the heavy lifting most of the time.
Use synaptic or some other apt GUI (for .deb based Linux) and you don't have to type any command-line "gibberish" at all.
RPM and apt do a good job of chasing down requirements and prerequisites for you.
Granted, you have to wait for a package builder to create a package for the app you want and the version you want.
But, once that's done, 95% of the time it should be just a few mouse clicks away.
You don't even need any external media (no CDs).
Why not use multiple Firefox profiles?
Have Firefox set to prompt you which profile to use when it opens and use the ProfileSwitcher add-on to open the other from an existing browser session.
They will have distinct histories, bookmarks, caches, everything.
Something Awful did a Photoshop thread on this
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3191740
Many, many variations. Surprisingly, most are completely safe for work (the site it self is still, sadly, NSFW).
Zune is alright
I bought my wife a 120GB Zune and a raft of accessories for it about six months ago.
While she doesn't like it as much as her Creative Zen, she does like it.
The biggest limitation I've seen is that the desktop software to go along with the Zune is fairly weak. Creative's software gave you much more control over what was and was not sync'd.
For the Zune, it seems, if it is in your library, it gets sync'd. Good thing I went for the 120GB version.
There are also some strange quirks like cutting some songs off after 45 seconds or so.
The Zune is a nice little gizmo. It is unfortunate that after all of this time, it *still* needs some polish.
You've got to give Apple credit for that. If there is one thing they excel at, it is polish.
At least I didn't have to install iTunes.
Posted in Blazing laptop of death claims one
Temp sensor optional?
I have a cheap Averatech laptop. It has sensors to turn the fans on and off.
When I dual-booted it with Linux, I discovered that Linux didn't talk to the fans properly. Therefore, the fans would not come on when the system got hot.
It could still read from the sensors, just not trigger the fans.
When the internal temp reported by ACPI hit about 190°F (88°C), it would power itself off immediately.
That feature saves me from a fiery death and probably cost the manufacturer about 3¢ to include.
Since the laptop in question was subject to a recall, I'm guessing HP also includes such trivial safety devices but that in this case, it was faulty.
XP Mode
XP Mode is exactly what they say it is: a pre-configured Microsoft Virtual PC instance installed with Microsoft Windows XP.
That means an instance of Windows XP boots up with its own BIOS and its own virtualized hardware.
I imagine the default networking mode is to set it up with NAT using a private network between Windows 7 and Windows XP.
From a Windows 7 anti-virus and firewall perspective, all traffic and activity running in Windows XP mode would be coming from a single process: the VM.
You have to treat Windows XP Mode as an OS. It needs its own anti-virus software installed, and its own firewall configured. It will have to be patched separately, as well. Just like any other VM.
It is a dangerous tool Microsoft is handing out. Something that will be a certain target for gleeful malware writers. It is also incredibly useful for end-users to have a method to run applications that otherwise wouldn't work at all.
I hope Microsoft makes changes to Microsoft Update that enhance the ability to keep Windows XP Mode's VM up-to-date.
SSL won't fix it
If the company controls the egress points of the network and controls the systems on the internal network a simple proxy that breaks SSL (MITM) would fix that.
It would terminate the SSL connection on itself, read the contents, re-encrypt the traffic, and send it on its merry way.
Any company that has to deal with US Banking Regulations would be foolish *not* to do this. They have to account for every single communication with every single customer, regardless of medium. This means recording all phone calls, all emails, and all web traffic.
I also doubt a person manually sifts through all the data. That would require an Herculean effort. I imagine a combination of data-loss prevention software, proxy servers, and intrusion prevention would do most of the heavy listing.
It's been happening for years. Now it's just easier for businesses that have paranoia as the reason instead of regulation to afford it.
Dell laptop vs HP laptop
I bought my wife a Dell laptop about a year ago. It came in a fairly large box with a nice carrying handle. It had the laptop nestled in polystyrene, the manuals, and all of the CDs needed to rebuild the system from a blank drive.
I bought myself an HP laptop about six months ago (I wanted an AMD + ATI right for mobile gaming). It came in a much smaller box (really!). There was no polystyrene, just cardboard nooks. That was the pleasant part. It also came with minimal manuals and no CDs. I can get the CDs from HP if I want to pay $12US for shipping. Or I can burn my own set of 3 DVDs directly from the recovery partition on the system. I plan to do that when I have some time to kill. I'd like to recover the 12 GB of space it takes up.
Ew
I find the very concept of the film repulsive and the thought of watching it (or even Hostel) makes me feel a bit nauseated.
However, if some other person wants to watch these films and extracts some entertainment from it, why not let them?
I remember when Faces of Death was all the rage with the kids. I opted out of watching those with my friends, too. And that was back when you had to find someone with a copy of a copy VHS cassette.
This, as long as nobody was actually tortured in the scenes depicted, is precisely the sort of thing freedom of expression is designed to protect.
You don't have to protect the things no one objects to. You only have to protect those things that may "offend" because those are the things that others will ask to have removed "for the children" or "for common decency".
World War Z
The point of the stories surrounding the Battle of Yonkers is that the higher ups were underestimating the enemy. They told their men to wage not just a conventional war, but a showy, flashy war designed to impress the population, not to kill zombies.
The soldiers knew better. They knew they were f'd. They knew a handful of snipers on the roofs would be better than fancy missiles that shower shrapnel and suck the oxygen out of an area.
But the brass didn't care.
It was a slaughter because the men on the ground were burdened with heavy, unnecessary gear and told to use tactics that would not work.
Freetard, they name is Debian
If there were ever a poster child for the word "freetard" it would be the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Not just Debian. You have to include the GNU/Linux or you aren't referring to it properly.
Debian GNU/Linux' philosophy is noble: a distribution (Linux kernel + tools) unencumbered by restrictive licensing. I just think it is getting harder and harder to accomplish while still putting something out people want.
I love Debian GNU/Linux. It is my distro of choice. The first thing I do is add in the non-free repositories and the testing and unstable repositories, set my default to 'testing' and upgrade the heck of out of everything on my system.
Ubuntu takes a philosophy to my own: Debian GNU/Linux is a wonderful base install, but needs a bit more before it becomes something you'd use on your workstation every day.
Ubuntu understands that they need Debian GNU/Linux to succeed. Debian GNU/Linux as a whole doesn't seem to understand how much Ubuntu is helping them just by using their work. This is not time for power struggles or hurt feelings. Debian GNU/Linux should be rejoicing that Ubuntu is as popular as it is.
I understand that Debian GNU/Linux' community may feel slighted by not getting the spotlight since it is their *foundation* that makes Ubuntu as friendly and stable as it is. They have to get over that. It sucks. Life isn't fair.
However, clearly Debian GNU/Linux is awesome because a fancy distro built on top of it is immensely popular. Humility. Humility would let the community know that their work is being respected and built upon because their work is fantastic. This isn't about one group trying to steal the work of another, it is about Ubuntu seeing something wonderful in Debian GNU/Linux, having an idea on how to improve it that doesn't fit with Debian GNU/Linux policies, and taking it upon themselves to create their own way to deliver their vision without clouding up Debian GNU/Linux with philosophical arguments.
Debian GNU/Linux is free to continue being what it has always been. No one has tried to force Ubuntu back down the tree to take over the roots of Debian GNU/Linux.
Upon further reflection, I wonder if the issue doesn't include some jealousy. Debian GNU/Linux developers are doing it for love while Ubuntu seems to be doing it for money. The Debian GNU/Linux devs may feel slighted for not getting paid.
I hope it isn't just that. I'd had to see a schism or an official forking of Debian GNU/Linux (or God forbid the death of Debian GNU/Linux) over something so petty.
