Posts by Ru

Give up?

"The guy has a head on collision with a bus, doesnt pack in biking and then mentions he goes racing. Someone who cant miss a bus shouldnt be on a ractrack."

Because I'm sure he just drove blindly in to it. Consider the possibility that motorcyclists can be involve in accidents which are not necessarily their fault.

Back in my day,

We all knew that you should never use electrical weapons whilst swimming, unless you also had a handy pentagram.

"Although we hope this kid should have known better, the level of parenting these days means that if there is not a game that revolves around killing baddies so that you don't get electrocuted via a water based conductor, then why should the kid know."

I blame the lack of lightning guns.

So...

By way of punishment, he is required to purchase products from Microsoft? That's a rather nifty way of gaining new customers.

Um, can chinks actually gape?

I always considered a 'chink' to be a fairly small hole. A large security hole might be better named 'gaping hole', 'huge crack', 'chasm', 'wound', 'maw' or perhaps 'abyss' depending on required levels of hyperbole and FUD.

I'm sure no-one has ever thought about all these issues.

How do you lay a smokescreen if you are in a plane? The smoke will end up behind you.

Maybe you could use smokebombs or smoke rockets or something? Ahh, exactly the sort of things that this weapon would be designed to counter.

And as for mirroring, perhaps you should think for a little bit about how you'd make a smooth, spotless mirrored surface over the whole of a aircraft. Including the engine exhausts. I don't imagine for one moment that this would be easy to do with an artillery round or mortar bomb either, given the stresses inflicted on them by firing, and that's even before we start worrying about making some kind of ultra reflective, super insulating laser armour which is yet still compact and lightweight.

Sure, lasers won't be terribly useful against ground vehicles (easier to armour, smokescreens etc), but if you read the article that was never the intention of the system anyway.

And whilst i'm ranting, you won't find x-ray lasers out of the lab (though people have though about it... see the good old SDI) but UV lasers do exist, in the near ultraviolet range at least.

Careful,

Some kind of vigilante botnet, or something else controlled by the 'good guys', is a bit of a tricky tool to use properly. You'd have to ensure that you never got spoofed, and attacked the wrong person. You'd have to ensure that your counterattacks didn't affect legitimate users sharing a network with a machine triggering the attack. There are so many lawsuits waiting to happen here, I wouldn't even want to consider implementing such a thing.

And as for trying to use up a botnet's resources, that's a tricky one. A big net would have a colossal amount of bandwidth available, and triggering it without affecting other non-honeypot machines and networks would be similarly tricky, no?

So,

How would you ensure you'd gotten your hacking toolkit from a 'trusted' source? As opposed to dealing with someone who turns out to be in law enforcement, or perhaps someone who has carefully tweaked it to add backdoors to all the little trojans it produces? I would be in no hurry to go and buy a copy.

Details over email?

How do you think google got their customer's email address in the first place, hmm? Probably not via email.

Quite frankly,

'whitecoat' doesn't sound as good as 'boffin'.

Happily

They can't close off existing xen code, nor would it be convenient to improve the code without returning those improvements to the community, etc etc. Cos it is all under a nice license, right?

Internet users pretty intelligent?

Ahh, if only.

I think the key thing with spamming is that the investment (time, materials) is so small that there is no incentive *not* to spam if you know how to do it properly. When you can target so a vast number of people, even if only a fraction of a percent respond you've done okay.

Fine particles

The difference between, say, fine sand particles and fine toner particles (or indeed the fine soot particles you find in diesel exhaust, for instance) is that sand is generally fairly inert, and toner (and soot) is reactive and carcinogenic.

The former would just give you a bit of a cough. The latter would mean your chance of getting lung cancer is increased.

Phalanx

Using projectile systems results in an awful lot of spent rounds falling to earth, in a potentially bad way for anyone underneath.

Also, antiship missiles tend to be quite large things in comparison to mortar or artillery rounds.

Evolution.

Meaning change over time. So yes, in that sense, your sandwich did indeed evolve.

Re: Only In America?

Yes, you could move your broadcast setup overseas. But you'd better move yourself overseas and block all US systems from accessing them (in as much as that's possible) too... remember what happened to all those online gambling company executives who visited the states?

<acronym>. Or possibly <abbr>

If I hover my mouse pointer over the acronym (handily underlined with dots), I am enlightened.

In the mean time

I've found greylisting to be highly effective in stopping spam. I'm sure I'm not the only one. So long as spammers concentrate on finding more ways obfuscate text and less on fixing SMTP implementations in spam distribution software, greylisting will continue to be a very handy tool.

Anyone ever read Iain M Banks?

Sounds like the Effectors he thought up. Clever stuff.