Posts by null

Great Aussie firewall claims first victim

"Corporatism"

"Jason, they're not spreading democracy, they're spreading corporatism. 'Democracy' is the butter on the enema."

You might want to learn what a word means before you use it, you dunce.

MS coughs to hokey-cokey IE8 option in Windows 7

Clever...

This is a clever way of doing things because you're still getting the software, now it can just be disabled. Therefore you're still PAYING for all the shit you don't want but now you can "turn it off." When is MS going to get it through their think skulls that we want a minimalistic OS with less shit AND WE DONT WANT TO PAY FOR THE EXTRA SHIT.

Pirate Bay prosecutors get jiggy with charge sheet - again

English please...

What does this mean?

“All components are necessary for users of the service are able to share files with one another.”"

I assume that it's supposed to say "All components are necessary for users of the service in order to be able to share files with one another." But what are they talking about? Context?

Or perhaps it's "All components are necessary. For users of the service are able to share files with one another." This doesn't make much sense to me either.

Anybody?

Obama says his new chopper is 'procurement gone amuck'

Not Protectionism

"take note everyone, US protectionism is on its way.

but then a nation that large doesn't really have an option, does it ?"

While there certainly is a protectionist element in this country which lobbied hard to give contract to Sikorsky, I don't think this particular case has much to do with protectionism. We're talking about a helicopter that's going to cost $400 million per unit (two times the initial budget) and we plan to buy TWENTY EIGHT of them. Do you have any idea how expensive that is? As Lewis pointed out, EACH UNIT is more expensive than Air Force one. The US could buy THREE F-22 Raptors for the price of each helicopter and, by the the way, helicopters are much more expensive to maintain than fixed-wing.

The specifications that make this helicopter so enormously expensive don't seem to be publicly available. I would very much like to see them, as I cannot see any possible way to justify a $200 million dollar transport helicopter, let alone $400 million. For some perspective, the CH-47 Chinook dual-rotor helicopter runs around $10 million per unit. The Apache Longbow, which is the most sophisticated and heavily-armored helicopter is around $16 million.

The best argument I've heard so far is that it's the limited production run that's making this helicopter so expensive. I cannot see why this wasn't taken into account when they were thinking up the contract. Why couldn't they just modify an existing helicopter to suit the president?

I'm all for buying out of country so long as the military is getting the highest quality product for the lowest price (like the EADS deal on the KC-X for instance). In this case, the taxpayer is getting screwed.

North Korea announces missile test sat launch

Of Course

Of course they'll be using the missile to launch a satellite. Afterall, the requirements necessary to launch a satellite are the same required to launch a re-entry vehicle. I highly doubt that North Korea has mastered the complex and precise manufacturing process required to build the re-entry vehicle and the warhead. Furthermore, launching a satellite gives them plausible diplomatic cover. It's much easier and safer to launch some crude Sputnik-style satellite.

Do Western governments have reason to be concerned? Sure - it was only 2 years after launching Sputnik that the Soviets fielded their first ICBM. Of course, North Korea doesn't have nearly the manufacturing and scientific ability of the Soviet Union, nor the ability to test their weapons.

Wanted: £160k-a-year Twittercrat

Jams

A quick Google turned up this:

https://www.collaborationjam.com/

Minister trashes ex-spook chief's liberty warning

Tom McNutty

Good bye Wacky Jacqui. Hello Tom McNutty.

Navy glovepuppets minister in carrier battle against RAF

Seriously?

People in the UK really want to abandon aircraft carriers? Haven't they been proven to be one of the most useful platforms in a military since their inception? The West has made use of aircraft carriers in every major conflict in the past 70 years to great effect - WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Falklands, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan. Even in a war where where you've got good air force basing, the ability to come ingress from different angles and, in most cases, completely bypass the front lines make carriers a valuable resource - not to mention providing air superiority over blue water naval fleets. Also, modern navies are reliant on aircraft for their ASW duties and over-the-horizon reconnaissance. How do they intend to replace that?

Apple sued over iPhone smooth scrolling

Software Patents Are A Joke

"The entire concept is trivial. There is no way they spent millions developing it. You get any software engineer, posit the problem, and they'll come up with a similar solution."

This is the problem with ALL software patents. Programmers define a problem and program the solution. If you give 100 programmers a problem, 90 of them will will come up with a very similar solution. Software patents patent the problem, not the solution, as the patent holder doesn't release the source code in the patent. If they did patent the solution (the code) it would be obvious to all that copyright law is enough to protect their work.

Frankly, I think software patents are bs. They're no different from patents on mathematical formulas.

Wanna see how to use Win 7 UAC to pwn a PC?

Bullshit

"Thomas Kristensen, CTO at security notification firm Secunia, explained "This isn't a major issue; after all it requires that the user already downloaded some executable code and decided to run it. No matter which security features have been built into the operating system, then the user should never run code, which they don't trust in the first place. Untrusted code should only be run on dedicated test systems." "

This type of apologism is ridiculous coming from a supposed security professional. Then what the hell is the point of UAC anyway? The whole point is so that users can't run malicious code destroy their system. There's no such thing as "trusted code." Even if you get your binaries from a trusted source there's no guarantee that they haven't been altered by a third party. The privileges system on *nix does the job brilliantly (as evidenced by the lack of malware). If you want to root a *nix box you need to find a privilege escalation vulnerability (which is generally patched pretty quickly). You can't just bypass the whole system and do whatever you want. Why can't Microsoft make it work?

Quick Question

Does this vulnerability require the user to be logged in as an admin? If it does than it just bypasses the extra baggage of running as admin on Vista. There's really no reason to prompt for permission on an admin account as the user should only be logged in as admin to perform administrative tasks in the first place.

Brits find accommodation a little uncomfortable

This is good

"The reasons? Yup, you guessed it: Text speak, reliance on spellcheckers and general bone idleness are about to consign our beloved mother lingo to orthographical oblivion."

How? Our current reliance on text based communication is good for the language in my opinion. People who would never have written a letter 50 years ago now find themselves writing every day. I know that I for one probably wouldn't be writing .1% of the amount I do if it weren't for the internet. Furthermore, it encourages non-readers to read. The fact that people are motivated to use spell checkers and electronic dictionaries instead of just not caring is a good thing. Imagine if people weren't using these facilities; you'd see corruption of the language on an unprecedented scale.

Nvidia to power Dark Knight on Vista netbooks

Huh?

This seems kinda counter-intuitive to me. Aren't netbooks called netbooks because they're only powerful enough to perform some basic tasks like accessing the the web? Wouldn't they be better off making it less powerful and selling it for a lower price? Are gamers really going to buy a netbook to play Medal of Honor? Why would you want to run Vista, that bloated pig, on a netbook? (I'm running it on a mid-range notebook and it's clunky enough). I'm confused.

Hackintosh maker leaves web doors unlocked

Newsworthy?

This is hardly newsworthy. This information is pretty low risk. It just reveals a few paths and function calls. A lot of the time these kinds of error pages will at least reveal a user name, which is a good deal more useful to a hacker than just a path. That doesn't seem to be the case here. A quick google will reveal about 5 pages like this that have been cached.

Ah yes, my coat....

Newsworthy?

Also, I've got to add that this statement is pretty stupid:

"The discovery exposes the dark side to a free and open source software movement that often allows webmasters to deploy extremely powerful packages without the guidance of support people to make sure best practices are being followed."

Most web applications are open source by their very nature because they're written in interpreted scripting languages. Virtually all of them, free or not, require the webmaster to edit the configuration files. Contrary to popular belief, us webmasters are mere mortals. We make mistakes.

"Next up, obscuresite.com/obscurepath/obscurescript.asp?obfuscatedparameters gives an ADO Error 265805 message. News at 11."

US lawmaker injects ISP throttle into Obama rescue package

RE: Disgusting

You can write a letter or e-mail to your senator so one of their staffers can gloss over it and throw it in the trash.

US bandwidth gets new caps

This is absurd.

Just about a month ago I was commenting on how great my ISP is. Time Warner was just fine in my experience, with good speeds, decent prices (considering their local monopoly power), and no caps. Well, FUCK them. FOURTY GIG cap for my top tier plan? That's ludicrous. 5g for the lower tier? Unbelievable. Just the other day I was thinking to myself "Ya know, Time Warner owns AOL. I wander when they're gonna pull some shady shit." Well, here it is. Frankly, I don't know what I'm gonna do cause we don't have FIOS in my area. :-\

Most Americans without broadband don't want it

Found Money

And as everybody knows, this money's just going to fall from the sky so that ISP's can sell their service in areas that are not profitable to people who don't want it. Makes perfect sense to me... Government efficiency at its finest...

Countdown to Conficker activation begins

Huh?

""We haven’t seen this type of advanced worm in many years,""

The other day I read that the worm was thrown together by some script kiddie using the metasploit engine and published exploit code. Ho hum. I too would like to know how the worm can infect *patched* machines through a shared drive. I understand that removable drives with autorun enabled is a vector but how could a shared drive infect a patched machine unless the user found the executable and ran it? Doesn't make sense....

Penguin cause this worm couldn't spread through with linux and nfs vulnerabilities.... Oh wait, yeah it could.

Obama unfurls master plan for US cybersecurity

What I'd Do

If I were president, I'd make it mandatory for all public schools to start teaching basic computer courses starting in elementary school. Students should be taught computer science along side their math courses. I don't just mean "This is how you use a mouse" or "This is how you write a document in Word" either. All students should be taught how computers work on a low level and the fundamentals of programming. It's as fundamental in the real world as math and science and it's only going to get more important with time. Just as you often hear teachers say "name one job where you don't use math" soon it'll be "name one job where you don't use a computer," if that isn't already the case.

It's impossible to understand security unless you know how the system fundamentally works, which most people don't. As long as the general public doesn't understand the tools they're using, we're going to be dealing with botnets, data theft, massive spam, etc.

Ubuntu's Shuttleworth praises Windows 7, welcomes fight

W7 on a NETBOOK?

Has anybody here tried installing the W7 beta on their netbook? I run Vista on my laptop (P Dual Core with 1GB RAM) and it runs, but it's a hog. I can't imagine running Vista SP3 on a netbook... Let us know.

Visual IDE

"'d like to see a genuine Linux threat to the desktop market. If OO can start to be a completely viable option to Office (which its becoming) and more 3rd party app developers develop for Ubuntu (the Linux flavour with the most minstream potential) then there will be a genuine fight on our hands and that can only be a good thing."

OO is a great app, comparable to Office in every way and better for some things. What linux really needs though is a visual IDE like Visual Studio. Emacs and vi are sufficient for seasoned programmers but the reality is that the majority of developers in the Windows environment program with Visual Studio in general, and quite a large portion code in Visual Basic. What these guys lack in quality they make up for in sheer volume and a lot of business applications are coded in Visual Basic (like cash register apps and database front-ends for instance).

Chrysler turns on Circuit at Detroit Motor Show

A Step In the Right Direction

This is exactly the kind of car I envision to be the next generation. It'll use an alternative fuel source and be information-centric. I'm really not sure an old dinosaur of a company can pull it off though. I was expecting a few start-ups on the premise of building a next generation car with next generation manufacturing processes and without the bullshit cost of running union shops. Oh, how'd I'd love to see the UAW finally put out of business. We'll see what happens.

Security boffins attempt to freeze out cold boot crypto attack

@AC

By removing the RAM modules and putting them in another computer, of course.

EU says Microsoft violated law with IE on Windows

Make the browser a component

I don't see anything wrong with MS bundling IE with Windows. The real problem is that IE is so entangled with Windows that you can't get rid of it , which is complete bullshit. Ironically, they did this to thwart anti-trust litigation. MS needs to untangle the browser from the OS so that we can uninstall it when we upgrade our browsers. Everybody should stop coding around IE with their little HTTP_USER_AGENT tricks and just put a blanket statement on their site that it wont work under IE and they need to upgrade their browser. If enough big sites did this, like YouTube, IE would be history.

Retired army generals: Spend Trident money on the army

Sauce?

"'Our' Trident missiles can not be fired without US-supplied codes which can be changed by the US without notice 24/7."

Do you have a source for this?

Could the Airbus A380 be the new Air Force One?

Enough Protectionism

The KC-X deal which would have outfitted the Air Force with the A330 as a tanker platform instead of the 767 was a step in the right direction. For all too long the US government has been supporting US manufacturers that produce inferior products at higher prices on the premise that it "creates jobs" (codewords for "repays campaign contributions"). Sure it might support the ludicrous system that allows college drop-outs to make $30/hr. to turn a screw or push a button, but in the end it's the tax payer that gets shafted.

I think its WONDERFUL that the US Government is finally growing the balls to hold competitive bids. If the US continues to procure second-rate equipment at mint from US corporations at ming, what message is that sending the industry? They're encouraging inefficiency. We need a couple big deals like this one and the KC-X deal to show these corporations that in order to earn the tax payer's dollars they need to be COMPETITIVE.