Posts by Destroy All Monsters

More and more tiresome

"I personally think that those who assert discernible man-made influences on climate are arrogant in their belief about man's importance."

Why are so many first-graders in this forum? Are the scools all closed, yoofs on the street, profs on strike or what?

Or is Andrew's Global Warming Satirorama attractive to deniers?

"Whoever the next President of the US is, I hope he's not a pussy."

You may not have gotten the memo.

McCain - certified sociopath with bad impulse control, know-nothing and xenophobe: PUSSY

....followed by Palin - fundamentalist ultra-nationalist sociopath with end-times mentality and a knowledge based on Post-It Notes with Repuke Soundbites: PUSSY

Obama - the only change you can believe in is that he transforms into President Klingon without the philandering: PUSSY

Nader - Duh?

Ron Paul - Wuh?

Who would have thunk it?

Webster Phreaky doesn't like Bill "Der Stürmer" O'Reilly? I would have imagined him to be one of the leaked ones. Maybe Billy said something nice about Apple once.

Flee to Mootxico, man!

"And it's only a matter of time before Republicans claim the hack was part of a secret Democratic operation."

Secret operation which posts a tell-all to quadchan. Might be plausible to voters who know that the Internets are full of terrists and offensive language.

Anyway, here's hoping the "secret operative" is not shifted to Guantanamo at once or that the "terrorist" adjective does not appear in his indictment, adding years and years at Club Fed.

Selling Uranium to Iran is against NPT?

Pure neocon faggotry. Nothing in the NPT forbids one NPT signatory to sell Uranium to another NPT signatory. Deal with it.

Well, it happens at railroads

I hope the guy contacts his union on the double to claim his cruelly-exploited, thus-overly-tired-and-no-longer-responsible-for-his-own-actions worker status. He can then be reinstated after having been given a suitable monetary compensation for emotional distress.

"Anonymous is a Group of Cyber Terrorists"

On the contrary - Anonymous delivers!

I want the old icons back

I think I remember that paper, I actually tried to read it. Well, it's just "IEEE Software" and not everything in there is usable (plagiarism or not). Some articles/opinion pieces are pretty good and give you a few ideas or nuggets of wisdom to take away, some papers may apply to your real-world problems, some may not but may still be readable and some may be so far out of bounds that you might better spend the time reading a book on ... uh ... effective field theories. Lesson: If some inner voice says "WTF?" within the first 5 paragraphs, make a rude gesture, then skip & jump.

"Bullfighter" give the quoted paragraph a Flesch Readability Value of 10/100: "You like to hear yourself write. (...). Seek help." although the Bull Diagnosis is Good: "Congratulations - you rely upon standard words to explain concepts." Well, yeah.

All conspirators shall post their nefarious plans on Wikipedia (you hear, Ollie North?)

"At any rate, the murders by anthrax are far less interesting than the demonstration of cognitive bias by the confused people who are contending government conspiracy."

You sadly fail at armchair psychology. The priors for "government conspiracy" are pretty elevated, so these people may not be that confused, just applying Bayesian Reasoning correctly. You don't need many people or complete secrecy, just people with self-censoring attitude and a press trying to be "serious". Hell, "the government" is "low-level conspiring" (taking decisions in hush-hush style within a single office) every single day. Comes with the territory.

More like managing partner at hurlstorm

-- "In the era of social media where 100,000 people can be directed to an article within hours publishing without a valid time and date at the top of the article is highly irresponsible," writes Patrick Altoft, managing partner at Blogstorm. --

What a crock. This must rank as the bestest "Blame the Messenger" ever. If the story had been about a dog biting a man, no-one would have cared. The fact that financial yoof^H^H^H^Hyuppies think they have to push "enter" before even having independently verified the story just proves that in this new "era of social media" people cannot even be arsed to google independently. Gas!!

But in the end, no harm done right? No-one cares what the actual share price of United is except the speculation echo-chamber. Or are the Saudis looking at a new hostile bid?

Paris, evidently. Dating and all that.

You are off mass shell

"The Higgs Boson is supposed to be the "thing" that gives other particles their mass, begging the question... where does it get its mass from? Some other particle?"

Simple:

http://www.phy.uct.ac.za/courses/phy400w/particle/higgs1.htm

Complex:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0703280

Can't remember whether the neutrino masses are included in there or not. Also, most of the mass of hadrons (protons, neutrons, mesons) comes from their bound energy, namely the supposedly massless gluons gluing the quarks.

Clintonisms.

Hurray for the judge. Of course, as a consequence, contracts will now see additional paragraphs bolted onto them explicitating in details the meanings of the work "or" and "application".

Also, injecting lanthanoids into fuel? Aren't these like, radioactive?

Neural breakdown.

"you sub-optimize the innovation and creativity"

Truly a confused child of the 21st century.

Overtime pay!

Yeah, higher-ups figure there's a problem with the network. Go fetch a couple of pizzas, we will finally be able to play Defcon tonight. And bring me one of those forms for the overtime tallying, thanks.

Well, well....

For those not afraid of writeups in papery form, please check out this one at the Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.4268

Subtitle is wrong.

"D'Oh! Cough, please" should evidently be "Cough! Dough, please"

Amerifail

Well, I hear Chertoff (yes, that Homeland Bureaucratic Security dude) thinks that the USA infrastructure is decaying and needs about 1 trillion dollars pronto to get a much-needed refresh operation. Factor in the missing 3 trillions for Iraq, a few hundred billions of bail-out operations for failing banks, an imploding automobile industry, a recession, pumping up Georgia and the 'tans with a few billions, a super-expensive missile-defense system with spare Patriots thrown in, rebuiling the 5th fleet to impress the Carribean rubes, saving Israel from committing suicide, maybe an influenza outbreak and a few floods etc...

...where can one find the spare change for a viable space program during the next administration?

Happy face because "Always look on the bright side..."

LOL@Webster

Michelle Malkin wants your Children, I'm sure.

Gerry Anderson got it all wrong. Moonbase Alpha should have been Red Chinese!

"We have left Earth orbit and are no longer in contact with the party! Immediately call a meeting of all surviving comrades!"

Keep those Universal Darwin Awards ready.

NOT AGAIN THIS DISCUSSION!

Nobody cares if the whole universe goes kablooie if some dude at the arse end of the Galaxy (that is, here) can make it happen with a measly 17 TeV collision in an underground facility.

If that happens, THEN THE UNIVERSE BLOODY WELL DESERVED IT.

Survival of the fittest, I say.

...course, Born-Again Xians might be pissed off somewhat as this new-model-rapture will come in a bit heavy for their tastes. Tough.

So basically...

They are re-implementing a process model on top of the OS process model, add their own security model, then wire these processes' output all up into the GUI? Next thing you know, they then can get rid of the OS, leaving just the browser window. Sounds nice and easy in a comic strip, but there is bound to be problems, because this well-trodden path goes through the valley of implementation pain. And to be useful, in Beta stay it cannot.

The bureaucratic reflex

Implement arbitrary security theatre via the logic of

(1) not wanting to think too hard about the actual problem

(2) wanting to be seen doing something

therefore

(3) shutting down everything through red tape

I hope some top animals will see their doctor unable to provide the required isotopes. Guess they can still check into a Russian clinic.

Hmmm....

> there is absolutely no guarantee that RAID10 will outperform RAID5

These are sad times when RAID5 is still on the table. See here:

See here: http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/BAARF2.html

> NONE of them use SATA due to performance implications

I hear the performance implications are not big. Would it not rather be the case that they do not care about any price difference and just go for the true and trusted SCSI storage. After having been wined and dined by the marketing man/woman of course.

Apart from that, this story is about as exciting as bored philosophers arguing about Boltzmann Brains.

@Ryan - "In our shop"

"we keep a record of the three-digit security #"

You may be asking for trouble. Do I hear a landshark wolfpack?

http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/step3c.html says:

"Storing sensitive credit card data such as the full magnetic strip track data, CVV and CVV2 is prohibited under PCI DSS."

We know that testing for primality is in P

...so how many operations does it take to test this extra-large number? Or will testing be done probabilistically?

It's like with that Tom Cruise Mars movie. Inside-out microwave, man.

"....is all that I need some foil on the walls, ceiling and floor, a surge protector on the mains (my UPS should do this) and to receive internet only via a fibre link?"

Err... no

According to http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/emp/toc.htm

you need a "layered sheet-steel wall built with two thin layers of steel separated by plywood or other core material". However calculations are hairy. Just add more steel, get rid of the ventilation shafts and cut those cooper power lines.

I thought Bush wanted to go to Mars? What happened?

"So IMHO, McCain is 100% right here. What would you do when Putin grabs middle asian states and the price of gas and oil quadruples? If Bush had been smarter in picking and choosing his fights, this is the fight to have, control of Georgia."

Oh yeah, rich idea.

No standing. No money. No army. And dumb kids in the State Department. "Situation excellent, I shall attack." (as Foch once said)

I guess I have finally lived long enough to see random retards (which includes most of the Mainstream Media) bloviating about going up against Russia when they have no idea of what living with Mutual Assured Destruction was like.

What?

"I'm still absolutely adamant this is a problem system administrators should have handled a long time ago,"

I suppose the problem in question would be keeping the weak SSH keys around, right?

Of course, the problem instead might be people from userland trying to ring up the BOFH or the Boss giving out clue-depleted orders etc., all of which can be handled.

(And why "still absolutely adamant"? Might there be reasons to make him less adamant or un-adamant later on, given a re-assessment of the situation?)

Let Freedom Ring!

...at least it's not a dialer.

Ok, now...

1) That "Journalist's Impression" must have been made with Heavy Afghan Resin. An asteroid like that would be the size of France and the impact would most certainly not look like a plume from a depth charge with a kind of shockwave around.

2) Breaking up a 'roid with "electromechanical devices" is going to take some serious energy I would imagine. I hope that idea does not come from the corner of the crowd who want to to break up the Earth with a device Tesla invented in 1910 and which feeds on two car batteries but produces "resonances".

3) Otherwise the Mylar idea sounds interesting, you have to wrap the object early enough to get good leverage though.

Very nice, very nice....

<---- Is this a memory stick in your pants or you just glad to see me?

I will make this "suggested reading" in our small informatics group, including the thread. Maybe I can get past the "gallic shrugs" this time 'round.

Agent Orange for this crowd, please.

We start with a dumbass anti-Apple rant, see some put-downs of anyone daring to spare a good word the Jeebus-Phone, have a Webster Phreaky post pushed into our faces and get to admire the sad spectacle of "I can has hate too" felchposts exuded by random soapboxers.

These Apple-baiting articles really attract a lot of flies.

Known problem, very difficult to manage w/o strict control

Poisoning the software supply chain

Levy, E.

This paper appears in: Security & Privacy, IEEE

Publication Date: May-June 2003

Volume: 1, Issue: 3

On page(s): 70- 73

Abstract

To the indiscriminate and opportunistic attacker, breaking into a software package's development and distribution site and waiting until unsuspecting users install it is more efficient than locating and hacking into users' systems individually. Starting in 2002 and continuing in to 2003, we've seen new emphasis on this type of attack. All the recent activity has showcased the trend that attacks against open-source software distribution sites are increasing. The author looks at how softwares distribution-both open source and proprietary-can invite attacks.

[...]Some open-source vendors have adopted technology comparable to that of proprietary vendors. For example, the RPM Package Manager (www.rpm.org), which RedHat introduced, lets the package creator cryptographically sign the package; Debian’s package format has analogous functionality. Unfortunately, the signatures in these packages merely tell who packaged the software and whether it has been tampered with since then. Because of the nature of open-source software and Linux distributions, in which most of the software is authored by someone other than the packaging vendor, these signatures tell you little about

the packaged software’s integrity.

In fact, many open-source projects fail to provide the minimal information required to verify the software’s integrity. Several projects don’t even provide cryptographic hashes of their software packages. When they do, the hashes usually are stored along with the software packages in the same distribution site, where an attacker easily can replace them while also replacing the software with a

tampered version.[...]

@Ruairi

We read:

Were i in a position to make decisions on monitoring the general public, and had myself been subject to the invasions of privacy and harrassment routinely carried out by the British tabloid media, I would be very much inclined to say "fuck 'em, see how they like it".

That would mean INSTAFAIL at being a politician and hopefully bring about the political death penalty.

1) You would have not standing at taking a stab at retribution and collective punishment

2) Two wrongs do not make a right

3) The cattletrucks are lying in wait - for the next time. This thinking enables the next time.

Shows exactly what's wrong with the current approach at "usability"

...as there is no way for a standard user to differentiate between legitimate operational messages coming from the system and spoofed ones coming from some low-life application. Nor is there a way for a user to know whether the "OK" for some system operation he just gave will actually be sent to the system or to said low-life application instead.

Microsoft could have forced the industry to take the approach of a "Windows" key that really, on the hardware level and in visually clear style, "opened up" the innards for repair and maintenance. Instead ... we have a Windows key that opens up a Start Menu .... oh and hardware-mandated copy protection .... and see-through window borders or some equally retarded shite (btw. KDE4, I'm also looking at you)

Appalling...

So when exactly will Congress roll over on this one? Immediately -- or after a decent mourning period of a month?

"When there exists a legitimate public interest in the disclosure of the information."

Hints, leaks, winks and nudges and "unnamed government spokespersons"...

What passes as "legitimate public interest" these days?

Well, there was a "legitimate public interest" in the disclosure of any information in the passport file of Gov. Bill Clinton's that could be used to make the people "connect the dots" into thinking that he might morph into a dirty commie bastard once elected president.

There was a "legitimate public interest" in the disclosure that Bruce Evins, now being railroaded as The Lone Anthrax Man, had a private P.O. box in which he received photographs of blindfolded women. This obviously relevant info is used to make the people "connect the dots" into thinking that he might be a pervert psycho bastard obviously keen to brew up those potent anthrax letters, so useful in justifying hot bomb, bomb, bomb action.

etc...

Ashlee ... nooo!!!

You know where you are going!! If the new (Ed) comes in and says he has this super-duper-scoop about weapons-grade enriched uranium with an Al Qaeda return address found under a Mullah's apartment in downtown Tehran and wouldn't you want to give the IT angle on that...

Just refuse!

Otherwise, good neo-conning!

And stay away from that Markoff dude. I hear he's unsavory and will burn hackers just to get front page.

Obviously - coat.

A foot! Quick - Shoot!

Well, traditionally a weak currency was seen as meaning less imports (due to relatively higher prices), but more exports (coz your locally produced wares are relatively cheaper).

In software, it means less imports and less exports (maybe because the exported goodies are produced in Bangalore in the first place and there is just a markup on them when the "Made in America" logo goes on the box).

With the economic outlook worsening here too, price hikes are going to result in increased customer interest, I'm sure.

Hmmm.....

Guess this is good companion reading even if itapplies to the US:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson222.html

@You just have to look at

"Tales of Georga invades Russia?" (sic)

You get first marks for total fail. FYI, South Ossetia used to be part of the territory of Georgia. After aggravated bear-baiting action, this is of course history.

Yeah, yeah....

"Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida-based democrat who is a major advocate for Nasa, has publicy acknowledged that Russia’s increasingly aggressive stance...."

What increasingly agressive stance would that be, then?

"agressive" == "unhappy about being repeatedly rogered by the USA"

Hands up those who have ever seen a test system running in shifted time...

...it just doesn't make sense to do that. Takes up a server, which may be Big Iron (thus costly), it won't run all the production stuff anyway and then what kind of bugs is one supposed to catch? And would one even recognize them? One might as well test the CPU adder circuit.

Hell, anyone who has been through a Y2K planning session knows the glazed look across the room when the questions "so what are we looking for" and "so what is the test plan and where are the people to implement it" comes up. And in that case, the exact moments of interest were actually known.

It's alien...

Germinal!

"That is why IBM is DROPPING the wages of their factory workers by 20% after attaining RECORD PROFITS!"

That is deplorable and bad for the factory workers but due to the structure and goal of shareholder companies this is not at all reprehensible (if true). IBM is not a commune. And the tendency to ruthlessly exploit workers Metropolis-like is clearly counteracted by the predictable results you get when paying peanuts.

"the company regularly scans gadgets for malicious code"

Somewhere in that statement, a Fields Medal (and subsequent total algorithmic takeover of the future light-cone) has been buried.

Except if they mean that the result is not necessarily successful or relevant.

Silly guy....

Instead of blackmail, he should have just gone to one of those 'chans, posted the first pics and asked "any more of her?" Instant gratification may have occurred.

Mine's the long, dirty one with a pedobear logo.