Posts by jake 26682 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
... what skeletons Matthew Green has in his closet, and why he sent them via email in the first place. Didn't this supposed computer literate person know that one shouldn't put anything into email that one wouldn't shout from the roof-tops? Once it's sent, it is gone, and completely out of your control.
Here's a little story, written in common UNIX terminology:
gawk, grep, unzip, touch, strip, init, uncompress, finger, find, route, whereis, which, mount, fsck, nice, more, yes, umount, head, expand, renice, restore, touch, whereis, which, route, mount, more, yes, umount, ping, make clean, sleep
Presumably you are planning on making this kind of thing impossible, right? No? Then what's the fucking point? And who is going to pay for updating all the technical documentation and textbooks, world-wide? Just to appease a small handful of hand-wringing namby-pambys who find insult around every bush, even (or especially!) if it's not there.
What a fucking waste of time. The mind absolutely boggles.
"I am surprised that there's apparently nothing on t'net that describes the construction sequence of the Arecibo Radio Telescope"
This might help: https://www.naic.edu/ao/photos ... takes a while to load, but it has some good pictures that might help people visualize the scale of this thing. It is not a toy. Scroll down to see B&W pics of it being built.
For the lazy, clicky-clicky.
... the very first thing a Security Professional reaches for in an emergency is something endorsed by Microsoft.
Honestly, the mind boggles .. They can't write secure code, so they expect all of us to trust some hardware dingus that they endorse? Fuck that. I have better things to secure my systems with. And yes, that's a sight unseen statement. I have history on my side. Microsoft has NEVER been able to get security right. Only a fool would trust them at this point.
Apparently some 60,000 voters ticked his box nation-wide. This is a statistical anomaly, at best. People ticking the adjacent box to the intended one (lack of reading glasses? beer goggles?) could account for most of it.
Seems there's hope for the GreatUnwashed after all.
Not familiar with L0phtCrack, I take it? He was also a fan of the buffer overflow, like most of the skiddies of his era.
Not so much an actual hacker as the subset known as a social engineer. That's why he's where he's at now.
"and DARPA, where he was responsible for the creation of at least three Department of Defense cybersecurity programmes."
Are we to believe that his third effort was successful while the first two were not? Would he have been given a fourth shot at it? Was somebody else? How about a fifth? (No, not the one in the Program Director's bottom drawer ... ). So-called "Cyber Security" ... the non-existant gift that keeps on giving.
As P.T. Barnum never said "There's a sucker born every minute".
As someone who prints his own checks, the magnetic ink is easy to come by. I bought a 1 kilo can of the stuff from Valley Litho for 80 bucks about a year ago. Should last me a decade or so, like the last one. And the one before that.
Letterpress numbering machines are available on the used market if you don't want to spring for a new one. They aren't pocket change, but if you print a couple rounds of extremely customized checks for friends/family, a used unit will pay for itself pretty quickly. (Ask around! You'll be surprised who will pay for this kind of thing ... they'll spend even more money on matching personalized stationary, business cards & the like. Yes, even today.)
A usable Heidelberg "Windmill" printing press can be had on the used market for four or five grand, as-is, where-is. Hint1: You are NOT qualified to verify it is functional. Hire a pro to put it through it's paces before shelling out cash. Suggestion: Hire a professional to relocate the press. Just trust me on this (hey, I was young once ... ). Hint2: They look easy to run. They are not. Take a course. Again, trust me on this.
Something similar happened in the late '60s or early '70s in Palo Alto. Most people laughed, threw away one of the bills & paid the other. They were obviously duplicates, probably the fault of that new fangled computer at City Hall, and so it was obvious that only one needed to be paid. My Dad was one of the few folks to call in and report it (or so they told him) ... mostly to offer his services, should they need help fixing the problem. They didn't, but he & I got a free tour of the new computer system out of it :-)
"Remote viewing of security cameras"
I've had that at home, for cheap, since the CROMEMCO Cyclops came out in 1975.
"adjusting thermostats in areas that are intermittently occupied"
My greenhouse's "smart thermostat" has been running for over a third of a century. It maintains the temperature to within 2 degrees either way quite nicely. I can set it from anywhere I have Internet access.
"limiting access to people who have legitimate current access needs"
Realestate agents (and others) do this with little lockboxes for the actual key. Change the code for the lock boxes to suit, and Bob's your Auntie.
Remind me again why any of these solutions need to go through goophabet servers?
Near as I can tell they are yet another group of do-gooders, out to protect us all from ourselves because they know what's best for all of humanity.
Read their proposed norms ... Sounds like something a "modern" "progressive" school might draw up to keep forms 4RW and 4DC from constantly feuding over whatever 4th year kids have been feuding over since the year dot ...
A friend of mine was pleasantly surprised when I re-introduced him to the concept of non-computer controlled washer and dryers. Here in the United States, look up Speed Queen.
Speed Queen are the folks who make bullet-proof laundromat coin-op equipment ... but they also make home machines, sans the money slot. Hand made in the US, and the price reflects it, but they last forever in a household environment. And no fucking computer to go TITSUP[0] on you after getting blasted by static from the dryer. Most of the machines here at the ranch have been abused and battered for well over a decade with no sign of slowing down. Recommended.
Likewise, for kitchen appliances go to your local restaurant supply store. Most are open to the public, and offer pretty much everything you'll ever need in a household kitchen, but at a price that department stores can't come close to ... and they only sell the heavy-duty models of small appliances. Without a fucking computer to get in the way, or break at the most inopportune time. Just make sure some of the larger kit will actually fit in your oven or on your range before purchasing it ...
[0] Total Inability To Select the "Unmentionables" Program
Relax.
Consider that Jaybus is from one of the three states that have a "BMV", and then consider the voting records of those states. I think we can extrapolate that it is a product of it's environment and merely parroting what it has heard. Far easier to squawk than to actually think for yourself. This applies to ANY side of ANY issue ... which is easy to observe first-hand, if you attend your nearest friendly neighborhood rioting peaceful protests.
Humans. Willing to expend tons of energy screaming at/about "others", but completely unwilling to sit down and have a simple quiet conversation with each other. Go figure.
"So do we put Biden's choice of Harris down to senility or psychosis?"
Neither. It's simply political expediency.
In the current climate, he had to select a black female or he wouldn't have become elected. She is, quite simply, mostly harmless, and thus perfect for the VP position at the moment. Yes, I said it. She is a token black woman. She can thank the BLM movement for the return to tokenism, and will forever wonder if she would have been offered the position on her own merit.
I type the above as a Californian living in the Bay Area who has watched her political career since the year dot. She NEVER brought up her heritage in any meaningful way until she set her sights on Washington, everybody just treated her as YetAnotherCalifornian (as they should) ... However, one wonders why her handlers never point out that her mum was from India, and her dad was a British Jamaican.
"It would be an opportunity for NASA to put a black woman astronaut there"
Are you suggesting NASA should subscribe to this new, ultra-fashionable Tokenism? What would that gain anyone? I think Malcolm X might have had something to say about that ... maybe something along the lines of “What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism — three or four Negroes in a job, or at a lunch counter, or on the Moon, or as Vice President, so the rest of you will be quiet.”
Appointing people because of the colo(u)r of their skin is not a valid answer. All it is is a bandaid (plaster to you Brits) on a bullet wound.
Why did you need a script to do a simple mail merge? Most reasonable MUAs (and a few unreasonable ones) have been able to do that since the early '80s, at least. The fact that your colleagues were planning to induhvidually send emails suggest to me that they be removed from computing devices until they have received at least a little bit of remedial training ...
Or the rare occasion I use a webcam, I use a greenscreen to set my background. The live background is variously the hog pen, one of the ponds, a very long distance shot of the Golden Gate (from a friend's place in the hills above Berkeley), my IBM 1401, PDP-11 or other old iron (depending on what is fired up and doing work at the time), a shot between a couple rows of tomatoes or grapes, one of the fish tanks, one of the many CalTrans traffic cams or cell tower cams, a street view of Sonoma's Plaza, or anything else that catches my fancy at the time.
One company I consult for apparently has a private minecraft server that is partially used for meetings. I declined the invitation to participate, citing a couple of quick telephone calls being a much more accurate and concise way to send and receive information.
The MW vs mW mistake was pretty common once laser pointers became a mass-market item. Let's face it, graphics designers making labels for consumer goods to be sold in other countries have never exactly been known for their technical ability.
It probably wasn't anywhere near 5mW either, when you think about what it was.
If FTP is the only tool available, the users will learn it. Trust me, 14 year old boys searching for pR0n figured out how to use FTP in a hurry. It's not like FTP is difficult to use or anything. Even setting up an FTP server is pretty painless.
Even MeDearOldMum uses FTP to move pictures from her computer to our friends&family server, all by herself no less, and she's one of the most computer illiterate people I know.
The removal of FTP from browsers was a daft political move, nothing more.
"Otherwise we'll be back to where we had an internet connection but no programs to download anything."
Actually, we had the programs to download stuff long before most of us had Internet connections. For example, FTP existed in 1971 ... but the TCP/IP Internet didn't exist until about 10 years later.
Trumpet Winsock was released in the summer of 1992, over a decade after that.
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