Posts by FrankAlphaXII

Re: SSL..

I dont know about illegal, but definitely classified and not in very wide use even at DoD, the other executive departments or NSA/CSS except in very specific cases (think like protecting National Command Authority communications, the Permissive Action Link keys, Ohio-class Ballistic Missile Submarine movements, the Drill Schedule for the Minuteman silos, the minimum time standard for Delta Force selection [no shit, its probably the most heavily guarded secret in the Army] as well as some Continuity of Government operational plans, some specialized Emergency Response information like the composition of the Energy Department's Nuclear Emergency Support Team and FBI's Domestic Emergency Support Team, and the like).

If you've ever heard of Suite A algorithms, then you understand what I mean. Suite B, what a normal member of society can get and use, is generally good enough with long enough key lengths, but for some things it simply isn't.

Re: To save people looking

If you actually want a fixed Ubuntu, you probably want linuxmint.com debian.org

FTFY.

Re: Same here anymore

In the late 1990's and up until about the beginning of 2010 BBC was my go to place for world news, then when they started really overtly pushing their political agendas and opinion pieces at the expense of reporting factual news they've dropped pretty far down my list. Which sucks when I'm compiling OSINT reports from media sources. At least the Economist, Torygraph, and Grun haven't changed much.

As it stands, IMO they're about as trustworthy and unbiased as CNN, meaning that they're only slightly better than Al-Jazeera, MSNBC and Faux News. Which is a damn shame as they're one of the very few places Americans could get news coverage about the rest of the world, at least DW is still broadcasting an half hour English version of their nighly news on some PBS channels here. But for the most part international news coverage sucks in the US.

BBC's news department need to get their act together and regain some of the respect and trust that they've squandered, and for what I have no idea, its not like that they're getting ad revenue in their home market, and their revenues from the US market are nowhere near what the major American players like CBS, Comcast, CNN, Fox, and Disney are making. It doesn't make a fuck of alot of sense to me.

@Destroy All Monsters

Yeah its not the normal MO for NSA/CSS or USCYBERCOM, which makes me believe even more than I already did that it wasn't American in design, plus the numerous references to passages from the Torah in the code that Kaspersky Lab found.

I don't think that we're creative enough to be able to do something like that, though we may have been the infection vector as the Special Collection Service, and TF Orange* which is the Army's version of the SCS for all intents and purposes, are very good at what they do whether through direct action as TF Orange tends to prefer or social engineering.

I still believe it was the Israelis in collusion with the Germans, even if it was unwitting cooperation on a part of Siemens.

*-Each of the so-called Tier 1 SOF groups like SEAL Team SIX and Delta Force (among others) have a Color coded task force name which is used among higher echelon units supporting them to refer to them without naming them, at one time TF Orange was called Intelligence Support Activity, and a good number of defense analysts still call it that.

Re: "helplessly watching a child die"

While I agree with the content of your post, it doesn't change the fact that Zuckerberg and Google only want to provide access to the Internet to mine data from the very poor and make a buck from it. There's nothing philanthropic about it at all whatsoever. In that regard I also agree with Bill Gates, treating preventable disease and creating vaccines for diseases like Malaria and some other rather nasty diseases endemic to the least developed nations in the world is a damn sight better than some pie in the sky global connectivity bullshit from Facebook or Google.

For example when I was in Afghanistan we would go out with the Special Forces, Combat Support Hospital Soldiers and Doctors, and Civil Affairs to do MEDCAPs (Medical Civic Action Programs) every so often. Every single kid and most of the adults had intestinal parasites robbing them of what little nutrition they got. Every single one of them, and I wish I was exaggerating but I'm not. We handed out worm pills like candy everywhere that there was a population. And it was extremely fucking sad, all it would take is a little bit of education about how people get infected with them and some basic water and food sanitation to change that and make these people a hell of a lot healthier. But no, there's no money to be made doing that. So nothing changed and I'd be willing to bet that all of these people still have the same rates of preventable parasitism/disease as when I was there and will continue to suffer from it long after ISAF, the UN, and USAID leave because noone's teaching them, and when they do try to teach them, they approach it completely wrong by not utilizing local solutions and appealing to their culture/religion/economic reality because it might piss off some contractor back in Flagpole on the Beltway, or some NGO or International Organization which thinks they know what they're doing in New York, London, Nairobi, or Geneva.

I'd be more enthusiastic if it was a non-profit trying to do something like this utilizing technology that already exists in these places, like packet radio and/or purchasing and devoting an older telecom satellite and building low cost up and downlinks from surplus or off-the shelf parts to provide low speed internet access for free to the impoverished for the sole purpose of education. The sad part is that it could be done, but there's no money to be made in teaching someone how to create a better future for themselves. So instead we get organizations like Google and Facebook, giant for-profit advertising companies, claiming they want to do this for education.

The worst part is that Its a load of crap, yet people will buy into it and believe what they're doing is groundbreaking.

Re: Not as pretty as the Blackbird, tho.

No, it almost didn't. The same relative who I referenced above was involved in that. Apparently when it mated with the tanker there was no measurable fuel left in the Aircraft, it was literally running on fumes, or at least that's how the story goes.

With programs like that though its like playing the telephone game, an anecdote takes on a life of its own and turns into a legend as more people hear it and pass it on, making it sound more fantastic than it really was.

Re: GNU's GNASH

Gnash still doesn't work worth a good goddamn, which is a shame. And its been a year and a half since the last release, which is also a shame. Anything that doesn't crash as much as Flash is definitely welcome, but Gnash simply doesn't work well enough for my use case.

If you want a FOSS flash plugin replacement that actually works (with audio too, imagine that) most of the time, try Mozilla's Shumway, it only works in Firefox and SeaMonkey though but since you're talking about a GNU product, you're probably not using Chrome or IE. It should work in the unbranded versions like Iceweasel also. I haven't run into anything it can't play since I've been using it, so much so that I uninstalled flash and haven't noticed.

Give it a try here I think you'll be impressed somewhat.

Free as in beer maybe. There isn't much free as in freedom in regard to Apple.

Re: Another bug fix ....

That a little bit of an oversimplification. They use FreeBSD components in Darwin, but they also acquired a license to use Mach (as part of the XNU kernel) as NeXTSTEP had, and I'm also pretty sure I/O Kit was developed by Apple with a significant amount of code from NeXTSTEP which provides for use of C++ drivers.

Apple didn't do it on its own, but as someone else said, writing an operating system is no small task. Why do you think Google acquired Android instead of writing their own? And why do you think it runs the Linux kernel?

Re: YAWN. I seem to remember...

Longer than that. NoScript has been around since 2005.

To be fair, Chrome has only been released for five years. Mozilla had NoScript available within a year of the 1.0 release in 2004, though do you really expect the world's biggest advertising company to make it harder for themselves to advertise to users on the browser that it develops?

Re: The scopes aren't why I'm upgrading

>>3.11 is supposedly much better for my AMD graphics card than earlier kernels

I'm a Fedora user so our kernels iterate faster than Ubuntu's I guess, we've had the 3.11 kernels for awhile. We're on 3.11.4-201 IIRC.

Its certainly seemed smoother with AMD cards, on mesa, radeon and the proprietary Catalyst drivers. KDE had been kind of jerky on the proprietary drivers previously, at least for me.

Re: Commercial Software Vendor hates FOSS!

Actually that should be 79S, so much for previewing posts before I submit 'em, eh?

Re: Can you see where this is going?

Seems to me that the BRICS just want control themselves so they can do what we're doing and possibly silence any dissenters at the same time.

I can't imagine why governments like the ANC led Banana Republic of South Africa or CCP led People's Republic of China would want control of ICANN and the DNS roots, not at all. The United States isn't the bastion of freedom bordering on anarchy the world seems to think it is and should be but at least If I wasn't serving in the Armed Forces, I could tell the Government to go fuck itsself without worrying about the secret police kicking down my door and being sent to re-education, or being drug behind a police truck til I'm dead.

Having ITU in control would be the least bad in my estimation, but then again, I don't trust international organizations very much after seeing NATO's ineptitude get a number of my friends killed in Afghanistan, and (yeah Godwin's law, blah blah, this is less about the Nazis and more about international organizations being subject to subjugation to great power politics) seeing who the president of INTERPOL was from 1940 to 1942 when he was killed by Czech Partisans.

Re: He did

The other side would be a Linux user. OS X, the BSDs and commercial UNIX are like the sexual orientations where it takes 5 words to describe it. Nothing wrong with them of course, but its not exactly mainstream.

Re: CoCo the Clown Reasoning

>>Good ol' Jasper. Don't let the facts get in the way of a good bit of negative spin! He better not take a math refresher course though, or a conscience might kick in and ruin his designated role as in-house Apple troll.

Funny how the Apple crowd used to say nearly the exact same thing about Anna before she stopped writing here.

>>If you're thinking of commenting on the original piece, please note that my blog comments are moderated and I feel no compunction about banning trolls and deleting their pathetic missives.

As is your want to do. I don't have an issue with banning trolls either, but I hope it is indeed trolls as opposed to people who simply don't share your viewpoint and voice their opinion to that effect.

Re: That's Rich

Someone oughta leak that. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Re: Works for me.

Rockstar hasn't even announced it for PC yet, so you might be waiting awhile. They're fools if they don't release a PC version, but they do take their time. If you recall, Vice City on PC came out six months after the PS2 version.

But I'm with you on the Xbox schadenfreude, but when you work surrounded by a bunch of Call of Duty Bros (who should really know better considering we're in the fucking Army) who will not shut up about "Chief Alpha, you really gotta get a 360! And an Xbone!", you get a little sick of hearing about it.

Re: Nope. Neither Nibiru or Tyche - Nemesis

Keep your dirty Nibiru and Tyche away from my Nemesis!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28hypothetical_star%29

Re: Evil thought

What's the total percentage of his holdings? If its less than 1% (or, hell, I'll be nice and say .5%) why the fuck does he think he deserves any of Tim Cook's attention? Apple are smoking crack but they're not stupid enough to let Icahn in, at least I hope they arent.

(OT: I got hit in the face/eyesocket with a metal table leg yesterday, so if I'm more incoherent or misspelling more than usual, just downvote me and let me know Im not making sense).

Re: Top Googling top

And Yahoo! isnt a stupid name? I mean at least Bing's named after someone. Not really attacking or defending either, but dumb names are kind of par for the course in computing.

Let us not forget all of KDE's stupid names that started with K. Or dumb names for different distro versions (Fedora's last three names have really irritated me, as do all of Ubuntu's names. Debian has some dumb names too, Wheezy being the most recent). Or Microsoft Bob.

Re: "Not for weapons, honestly"

I'm assuming that you've never heard of Norinco then? They're the biggest Small Arms manufacturer in Asia. They're also owned by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. As a general, rule countries with alot of money also tend to be big weapons manufacturers.

Re: After effects

Go ask Brian Krebs himself, he actually reads worthwhile comments on his blog, and generally if he can tell you something you want to know, he will. Keep in mind though sometimes he can't, he's a security researcher with contacts throughout the business, IT, Security and Intelligence communities so keep that in mind.

Id imagine that third parties might be compromised too, for the moment I would safely assume that any system connected to D&B or Lexis-Nexis is potentially unsecure and should be treated as such. Which really sucks if you have to work with their products.

>>Very interesting tech, but moving to such vibration-sensitive drives seems like a step back. The benefits must be significant to outweigh such delicate hardware...

I was thinking the same thing as the whole idea reminds me of very old consumer grade CD burners. You know, the ones where you had to tiptoe around the area the case was in otherwise the vibration would make the burn operation fail. Used to frustrate the hell out of me.

Re: Cliff if there were ever a cabling construct that was the work of the Evil One...

>>I have to downvote as I was never interested in the prettiness of a solution, just the reliability and performance, and SCSI more than did it's job back in the day

Have to agree with you there Matt. SCSI worked, and your old SCSI drives probably even still work if you can find a way to power and interface them.

I have several Hard Drives from a 512K(!) Mac* that are about four years younger than I am. The last time I tested them, they still worked just fine. Better and more reliable than the crappy Seagate drives behind my modern Windows, BSD, and Linux installs, but I guess they don't make em like they used to, at least not reliability wise, they're just a hell of a lot larger in capacity by some orders of magnitude. Then again, ATA in either variety has never been the most reliable. Good enough, certainly, but not the best.

*- It was also my first "real" computer. Probably the first truly useful Mac as well, and I believe the first production model Mac with a color display. Some Apple historian would have to tell you for sure. I was 10 years old and I can't say I really cared much about the technical specifics when a family friend gave it to me, a computer was a computer (they still cost as much as a used car back then) and it sure as hell beat the 486 that my neighbors had, even if it was a good deal slower.

Not Surprising at all

Pretty easy to explain, Canonical works on their own crapware/spyware like Dash, plus Mir and Unity, and doesn't need to contribute to the Kernel much except to patch it to make their software work (I almost said shit, I really almost did, but we'll not let our personal feelings cloud facts). Thats all they NEED to do, so its probably all they do.

When you're busy spying on your users, attempting to make money riding on Amazon/Bezos' back, and otherwise acting like Microsoft circa 1997, you don't tend to want to contribute back any more than the minimum requirements to make Ubuntu work with the Kernel.

As much as I think the FSF and Richard M. Stallman are zealots, they got it right calling Ubuntu spyware. Debian doesn't spy on you, Fedora doesn't spy on you, Suse doesn't spy on you, hell I don't think Mint spys on you (but it is based on Ubuntu so I guess it is possible it does, but I dunno, I dont usually go near APT based distros). You can turn this behavior off, but by default Canonical is collecting and selling your data to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and the BBC. Auntie knows what you're up to if you don't change your privacy settings. You're still not getting rid of dash unless you fork the code and strip it out yourself AFAIK.

Re: May be fake.

>>Those responsible will be chastised appropriately.

This is China, not North Korea. No public chastising here, or punishment for three generations of your family, as Kim and his cronies like to do. China lacks Juche, with Chinese punishment its just good old fashioned "Maoism" in action.

Basically, it'll work like this: They'll be made to stand in front of People's Propaganda Newspaper Concern No. 56, and will undertake a scathing self-criticism drill (y'see, its much more effective to insult yourself than have some nameless commissar do it) in front of every employee and manager in the company (and possibly the entire local area if the offender is a CPC member) followed of course by six months of reeducation. In Tibet. With no coat.

Unless the bribe is right, of course.

Re: trade you a google for a apple

>>I want a linux movie. It'd have to be rated 18 to get past all of the swearing Linus gets through with his rants

Does "Revolution OS" not count? Or would you consider that the GNU movie?