Posts by Thaddeus Quay

Daily Stormer booted off internet again, this time by Namecheap

My Response to Namecheap on Booting Daily Stormer

https://pastebin.com/raw/LR48LR7m

UK cops cuff suspect after RnBXclusive takedown

T.I.T.L.E.

"As a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged."

Young? Yet another law designed to protect the children. How can we possibly be against that? On a more serious note, here's a pretty good article on the history of copywrong. For the UK readers, there's a lot in there about you. Apparently, you all started this whole mess.

http://questioncopyright.org/promise

Pirate Bay fans: Lay off our neo-Nazi Sugar Daddy

Re: Wow . . .

Microsoft has done some good, but it has also caused misery. Just ask any web developer who has to code a website for the differences between IE 6, 7, and 8. That time and energy could be put to better use.

One reason Gates is giving away so much money to fight disease, particularly in Africa, is simply to make more money. When disease is minimized, the economy can get better. When that happens, people have money to spend on things they didn't want or need before, such as a shiny new computer running Windows.

Between Gates and Lundstorm, I would say that the latter is the greater humanitarian, because his involvement in TPB helped people communicate with less censorship, something which is on the rise online, and which significantly impedes the pace of human evolution. I note that this group of "people" likely involves all races, not just Whites, which makes Lundstrom's involvement here blind to color, and thus even more remarkable.

Finally, I'd like to point out something which many computer-savvy readers here should know. Digital copyright is a sham. A computer file is just a number, which can be interpreted in more than one way. You cannot copyright a number, at least not in the United States.

My British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, is playing with his new toy: a bag of bits. Let's see how long before he chews his way through, and I yell: "There be bits on the floor, matey! Arrr."

Cloudera floats commercial Hadoop distro

CloudyCat

My British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, sits on my lap, and purr-opines that until pricing becomes public, the most useful aspect of Cloudera appears to be the free collection of online training videos and VM-based activities, although he has yet to try the latter, given his preference of spending his precious awake-time tugging on a bit of string, rather than waiting for a VM to boot.

http://cloudera.com/hadoop-training-basic

Helicopter icon because my cat thinks it looks like his favorite tasty treat: a spider tantalizingly dangling from its gossamer.

Firefox 3.1 morphs into Firefox 3.5

FoxySafari StarringIn OperaExplorer

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net

Microsoft may lift VM licensing restrictions next week

On More Than One Level

"Microsoft currently lacks management software of its own for VM transfer magic — but says it's working on it."

Does this mean that Bill Gates' departure was actually the transfer of virtual management software to a new physical machine, the one known as "Steve Ballmer"? I wanted to choose the Paris Hilton icon, but my British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, meowed insistently that there was no such angle here. So, I instead chose the halo version of the Gates icon, because it looks like he is wearing a mind transfer device. I note that something so slim and futuristic must be run by the real, working, usable Vista, the fabulously capable internal version that Microsoft is hiding from the rest of us.

Google unfurls less laughable Wikipedia

KnolonK

"Toilet clogs - Solutions for the most common problems - by The Family Handyman Magazine"

Since when did "The Family Handyman Magazine" become a pseudonym for The Register? This reminds me of how my British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, used to drink out of the toilet, until I showed him The Register, and now he paws at the keyboard all day long. At least his hairballs aren't clogging my toilet anymore.

Did the lot of you know that amanfromMars has a blog, where he copies and pastes all or most of what he writes online? So, if you can't get enough of his writing here, you can check the blog to see what else he has to say, and where. Speaking of, he should copy and paste that entire blog into this Knol thingy, seeing as how Google needs more content to index, on its march to becoming THE Internet. Who knows? Maybe the sheer density of his writing will cause a critical mass to form in the depths of GoogleDom, causing a fusion reaction of knowledge, which will expand and overcome the Internet as we know it, sort of like the ending of "2010", the sequel movie to "2001: A Space Odyssey", except this time it will be Mars, instead of Jupiter.

http://amanfrommars.baywords.com

Lastly, I just went back to the main Knol page, refreshed it, and got an error message. "The Knol service was recently updated. Please refresh the page and try again. We're sorry for the inconvenience." Another refresh gave me the same message. I suggest someone write a Knol about how to use Knol. Paris, because that's where no one will find me after this comment.

Researchers show up deniable file system crypto leaks

Schneier's Job Is To Stay In The News, Not To Actually Do Anything Useful

>>> Schneier, CTO of BT Counterpane, told Dark Reading that although this version will "definitely close some of the leakages, but it's unlikely that it closed all of them". <<<

Why doesn't someone as "awesome" as Schneier simply join the tiny, struggling TrueCrypt team, and help it to close the rest of those pesky leakages? Complain, complain, complain. I've already written a bit about this on here, back on Tuesday, 30th October 2007:

"One major use I have for desktop virtualization, is for creating a high-security environment, for people who have stuff to hide. I put VMware virtual machines inside of TrueCrypt containers, thus getting around the need to use time-consuming products like CyberScrub (which securely erases files and unused disk space). I call this the "box within a box within a box" approach, as the physical computer is the outer box, which contains the safe, which contains the virtual computer. I'm curious as to whether anyone else does this, and I look forward to the conference."

- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/29/desktop_virtualization/comments/

The above is the answer to the leakage problem. The only problem left is how to explain the presence of a multi-GB file on your drive. That's not too easy, but certainly easier than creating your own, perfect version of TrueCrypt, from scratch. For example, write a program which treats the encrypted container as if it were a huge database of real estate listings, and tell the border guys that you sell homes for a living. In other words, write a program which maps the encrypted data to some output resembling data which you wouldn't bother to hide, or which reads actual real estate data that's been tacked onto the end of the file, or which simply pretends to extract such data from the encrypted data. If you do the first one, the solution is related to data compression, where you map one file to another, as you can, theoretically, create a program which transforms any one set of data into another, although this is most certainly the hardest one of the three options. Regardless of which way you go, the idea is to make the TrueCrypt container appear as a huge database for some program you use to prop up your "business".

Of course, if you live in a country where you can be sent to prison for not revealing the password, much less for what the password actually protects, then you have to be very careful about the construction of this program, but going this route is certainly better than writing a conference paper about how we don't have a real, usable DFS. Come on people, get creative. Even my British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, knew this one, and he spends a lot of time licking himself.

Putting a mule on a cloud: one man's battle with Amazon S3

"Cloud Computing" Is The Correct Term

I assume that, in future articles, the author will talk about the full scope of Amazon's cloud computing, but in the meantime, my British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, is meowing quite discontentedly at the above comments. "Computing", regardless of what English language labels and rules apply to it, is definitely a part of the "cloud", although it's not obvious from this story, which covers only S3, the storage portion of the cloud computing services Amazon provides. You can also use EC2, the computing portion, which allows you to do pretty much anything you can do with your own systems. I don't really understand why the author even continues to use his own.

As an example of pure computing, you could create a virtual machine to calculate the digits of pi, provision one of Amazon's EC2 machines to run it, and just let it go, without storing the digits, or even serving them up to anyone. Amazon will charge you for every hour the machine is assigned to you. S3 is billed by how much data you store, and how much you transfer, in and out. EC2 is connected to S3, such that S3 stores all of your virtual machines, which are booted and executed, by EC2, only when necessary. Data transfer between S3 and EC2 is free. Basically, except maybe for backups, you can run your entire business from Amazon, which is the promise that "cloud computing" delivers, today.

Paris, because she's also clueless about the cloud.

Mozilla insists Firefox 3.1 won't hit bum note for developers

I've said it before ...

If you are on Windows, and if you don't have a major need for some fancy add-on, then K-Meleon is likely the best browser, overall. I've been using it since FF1.x, wanted to go back at FF2.x, and again at FF3.x, but after trying those, decided to stick with K-Meleon. It's that good, people. By the way, CSS ad blocking and Flash blocking come standard, as well as lots of other neat usability features.

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net

David Williams: K-Meleon also has mouse gestures. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet support FF add-ons, but they're supposed to be working on it. Although, K-Meleon already does everything I need, so I really don't pine for extras, and that's coming from someone who considers themselves somewhere between an ordinary user and a power user. And no, I'm not affiliated with them. I've seriously tried IE, FF, Opera, Safari and Maxthon, each at different versions, with K-Meleon always really standing out as the one that just gets the basic jobs done, day in and day out, without getting in the way.

Finally, I want to say that pretty much all software is remarkably inferior to just about anything else that's been continuously engineered. It's simply amazing how much work goes into it, and yet so many things break, from one major release to the next. All computer functionality should be in the form of PCMCIA-style cards, that I can buy from vending machines, at 24-hour convenience stores. Or maybe all hardware should be FPGA-based, so that I can simply download some well-tested functionality. In the meantime, I'm sticking with vaccum tubes, because I still don't trust these new-fangled "transistors". My British cat, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, is licking my screen now, which means that he agrees with at least 90% of what I've said. Good kitty.

Opera update fixes stability bugs

K-MELEON

If you are on Windows, and if you don't have a major need for some fancy add-on, then K-Meleon is likely the best browser, overall. I've been using it since FF1.x, wanted to go back at FF2.x, and again at FF3.x, but after trying those, decided to stick with K-Meleon. It's that good, people. By the way, CSS ad blocking and Flash blocking come standard, as well as lots of other neat usability features.

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net

How to be an instant Web me-2.0 developer

WWW = Wait, Web What?

"OpenLaszlo is an open source alternative to Flash." Really? Hmm.

Anyway, Web2.0 is as useful to me as religion, the law, and morals, because all of these things keep the sheep busy, looking the other way, not noticing me, which allows me to work, in complete secrecy, on what's really important: Web5.0. Suckers.

Is desktop virtualization important?

VMware and TrueCrypt

One major use I have for desktop virtualization, is for creating a high-security environment, for people who have stuff to hide. I put VMware virtual machines inside of TrueCrypt containers, thus getting around the need to use time-consuming products like CyberScrub (which securely erases files and unused disk space). I call this the "box within a box within a box" approach, as the physical computer is the outer box, which contains the safe, which contains the virtual computer. I'm curious as to whether anyone else does this, and I look forward to the conference.

http://www.truecrypt.org

Join us for The Register's eSymposium on virtualization

VMware and TrueCrypt

One major use I have for desktop virtualization, is for creating a high-security environment, for people who have stuff to hide. I put VMware virtual machines inside of TrueCrypt containers, thus getting around the need to use time-consuming products like CyberScrub (which securely erases files and unused disk space). I call this the "box within a box within a box" approach, as the physical computer is the outer box, which contains the safe, which contains the virtual computer. I'm curious as to whether anyone else does this, and I look forward to the conference.

http://www.truecrypt.org