Posts by Old Handle

Re: A bit ironic, really.

I don't know about either of those particular devices, but often gadgets with a one-button interface can be turned off directly by holding it down longer than normal. Worth a try if you haven't done so already.

Re: Second Life? Men and their appendages

You haven't actually played SL, have you?

Not sure what you're referring to specifically.

Did Chrome claim to be immune to nasty plug-ins or something?

Re: Good effort but misdirected

Until Windows 8 I'd have said you were right. But now Microsoft is trying to bring an iPhone-style appstore monopoly to the desktop, complete with content restrictions and all that crap.

Yes non-ARM versions will still support traditional applications, but it's really obvious Microsoft would love to drop support for them, they just know that can't get away with it yet.

Re: Change of plan

I think a relay is still pretty safe, assuming that unlike David Hicks, it's the legal risk and not damnation that you're worried about. There have been one or two cases like this one where exit node operators wound up (temporarily) in legal trouble, but I've never heard of a relay operator getting in trouble and it's difficult to imagine a situation where they would, unless Tor itself were illegal where you live.

If you run an exit node, it looks, at least initially, like any traffic "exiting" there is coming from you. With a relay node there should be no such confusion.

Re: Keyboard only..

Another reason might be that many alternative input methods like speech recognition or even those single-button interfaces for nearly paralyzed people can simulate keyboard input easily enough, but controlling a mouse pointer is much harder.

Re: The sky is falling! the sky is falling!

I think some of you missed Sky-Is-Falling's main point: For the internet, one million is not a big number. For instance Google Image Search returns 1.7 BEELION results for "cat". And that's not counting results for "gato", "kočka", 猫, etc; which return millions of results each.

So actually, compared to some claims about the child porn "industry" you hear thrown around, this one is entirely believable.

Re: Free the light bulbs

While that's a bit silly, obviously the intent is simply to repeal the light bulb law. The "unless xyz" part was just tacked on to make it sound more moderate.

Re: Wrong picture

I have to say that does look more like something that belongs in a "lair".

Re: Some models even advertise their MAC address on the case of the device!

Yeah... I thought that was a bit of a silly complaint. Some routers also allow you to attach a wired network device with no authentication! Protecting a system from someone with physical access is damn hard. I think they did the sensible thing by not trying.

The part where the password can be derived from the MAC address on the other hand... not so smart.

I've always hated that adage, but I'm sure both incompetent and malicious people love it.

Re: There is a dilbert cartoon about this...

What you say is true, but it doens't exactly apply to this situation. They're not claiming speakers were drawn randomly, they're claiming they picked them on merit. Okay "merit" can be a bit hard to define, but it's at least plausible that I could look at your picks and assess whether they really represent the "best" people on the lest, or only the best of the Mohammeds.

Joke or not, I'm inclined to agree.

While it's clearly the diametric opposite of a blinking carnival, I'm not sure there's a good thing. I feel like it doesn't give anything for my eyes to "latch on to", like I have to read a good portion of it just to get an idea of what kinds of information it contains. Would it kill the guy to at least use headings larger than the body text?

I was also negatively impressed that such an incredibly simple site would still partly depend on javascript (for the search).

I suppose as long as the cats were sterilized that idea has some merit. Although they would kill alot of endangered critters too. Then again, I'm not convinced the poison won't.

Re: I am disappointed in Google ...

They don't really have a choice, at least in copyright related claims. I don't know the full legal details, but to comply with the DMCA, they basically have to assume any claim is valid unless or until the other party disputes it.

Re: ????

I think the idea is that using a VM provides a stronger layer of defense between an attacker (e.g. a malicious website) and the part of the system that forces connections to go through Tor.

I'm not as familiar with Liberte Linux, but Tails runs Tor and other applications run on the same OS, albeit as different users. It's probably no coincidence that the browser is still relatively locked down, e.g. no Flash or Java. A worst case scenario malware attack could potentially gain access to the settings that force traffic through Tor. This would provably require some kind of privilege escalation exploit, but these things happen.

If I understand right, the idea here is that no matter what happens, the virtual machine can't access a direct connection. So malware would have the additional daunting challenge of breaking out of the VM before it could reveal your identity. Still not impossible, but it's another layer of security.

There have been some. For instance the standard Bitcoin software now has a wallet encryption option built in. But most Bitcoin thefts do no target the software itself. Either they're investment scams (which of course never happen with traditional currency) or third party "banks" that some people relied on instead of actually running the Bitcoin software.