Messages

151

Mircryption / Re: Please I need help with blowssi/mircrytpion: 3 problems

« on: July 10, 2009, 02:56 PM »

Re 2) If that's the case, then that should be a very simple fix I'll just add mcps as possible prefix

Re 3)

I installed it as root then found any user can now type irsssi and it will load and also any user can type /load fish so I presumed the same for blowssi .. never assume haha. So no problem there either. I've created the paths and the copies to fix that.

Anything in root's .irssi folder won't affect other users, but if you put blowssi in /usr/share/irssi/scripts it should work with just /root as long as there's proper permissions on the script.

152

Mircryption / Re: Please I need help with blowssi/mircrytpion: 3 problems

« on: July 09, 2009, 05:18 PM »

First of all, blowssi needs lots of polishing yet. That's why the version number starts with a zero, followed by a dot, and ... another zero! One of these days I'm going to have to spend a day fixing the ever growing list of bugs,.... soon(tm).

1) just a minor bug in the command handler. Setting it manually in the config file is the best way for now.
2) Firstly, know that there's a known bug in irssi not ENCRYPTING /me actions etc... What you're running into is something I haven't seen before yet. What software was the other end using? Curious that they all start with mcps.. normally stuff is prefixed with +OK unless there's something else I'm not aware of.
3) The irssi man page only mentions ~/.irssi - a configuration/script folder for every user. It makes no mention of a system wide configuration...

153

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Hard to C -- a blog about programming

« on: July 03, 2009, 05:28 PM »

Nice blog! And nice find on the padding bug discovery there.

154

Living Room / Re: Torrent Giant, The Pirate Bay sold, will go legal

« on: July 02, 2009, 11:09 AM »

First of all, below is personal view, I don't claim any as fact, which is something that should be stressed more often I think...

Piracy (at sea) is a crime.
Depending on where you are, I think downloading copyrighted stuff is not. It's a felony at most, unless something changed recently... (ianal)

Does that mean infringing copyright OK all the time? no.
Does that mean it's OK sometimes? probably.

There's no black and white in this. Only gray. With lots of propaganda from both sides. Gosh, it's just as bad as politics. Then again, most of it IS politics. Stay clear!

I'm just saying it's way too easy to adopt terminology that is carefully inserted by the big players with marketing money to mold opinions of the masses.

It is quite obvious that copyright law as it is, is not in sync with the real world. And the playing field is corporations with big bucks versus people without big bucks (after all, if they had the money, they'd be more likely to pay for the software). It's also quite obvious that there's something wrong with never paying for software by a small independent starving lone developer if you DO have the money to support them (which goes for BOTH payware AND Free software!).

We need people like TPB who, eventhough they might be on the other extreme of the argument, at least stand up for their rights against the giants for the sake of all of us.

And more on topic, the fact that they are donating the money exactly for that cause is probably way better than them getting sued into oblivion.

 

155

Living Room / Re: Torrent Giant, The Pirate Bay sold, will go legal

« on: July 01, 2009, 12:19 PM »

From TPB blog:

Idealism is not dead: The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!

156

Living Room / Re: Security Database Website - Keep up to date on the latest security tools

« on: June 29, 2009, 01:46 PM »

Click under categories in the left menu to get lists of software.
It's kind of a non obvious layout imo, but it has lots of info and nice lists of software on there.

157

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« on: June 27, 2009, 11:05 AM »

What makes it the must-have extension is that there's practically no other reason to highlight text on a Web page except to copy it to your clipboard.

I keep forgetting that this isn't default behavior on Windows The fact that you need an extension for such a thing is really silly...

158

Mircryption / FreeBSD

« on: May 29, 2009, 08:03 PM »

Looks like Mircryption made it into FreeBSD's official port collection at some point or another! It's been in there since 2005.
I was hanging out with mouser and apparently he never knew about it!

 

[ excerpt from developer's web site with modifications ]

Mircryption is a free encryption add-on for the popular irc clients
mIRC and XChat. Features:

- Channel text, Private query windows, DCC Chats, Actions, Topics can
all be encrypted. All crypto-related algorithms used are taken from
published, common, trusted sources. Encryption algorithm is Blowfish
(no known vulnerabilities); encryption keys are themselves stored
in encrypted form.

- Supports CBC mode encryption.

- No need to modify the way you work - text is encrypted and decrypted
automatically; encryption status of conversations is clear but
unobtrusive.

- User-friendly key management routines; menu driven and easy to
temporarily disable & re-enable encryption on a channel, send plain
text quicky, etc.

LICENSE: free without any limitation

WWW: https://www.donation...ircryption/index.php

http://www.freshport...c/xchat-mircryption/

159

General Software Discussion / Re: In need of a server-side email tool ...

« on: May 19, 2009, 07:19 AM »

Usually you can just rm the files out of the maildir for the account in question.
It would help if you tell us what server software you're using (postfix/dovecot/qmail/exim/etc...).

160

Living Room / Re: Flight simulator site avsim.com loses 13 years of community data to hacker

« on: May 15, 2009, 12:46 PM »

It's not a security risk, it's a data loss risk.
Relying on one single backup strategy is what gets most people screwed.
Single point of failure.

That said, I can't blame them. The site was 100% run by hobbyists for fun. None of them were professional server administrators...

Avsim had thousands of custom user-made aircraft, repaints, and other addons for the ms flight simulator series. Only ONE such addon takes the typical user MONTHS of work. This is 13 years of user contributed HARD work down the drain. The loss of work here is very tragic to say the least...

Personally I would have never felt comfortable just relying on server to server backups, when 13 years of user contributed work is at stake. However, not being professional admins, they probably thought their server-to-server backup system was pretty clever.
Server-to-server backup is a good layer to have in a backup system. But it shouldn't be the only one. Not if you have that much at stake...

That said, unfortunately, even with multiple redundant strategies in place, something can and will always go wrong, that you haven't thought of before.

In their defense, backing up such a huge set of data is not that easy. You can't just go download 13 years of flightsim mod development. One simple plane model with textures, effects, etc... can go upto 40MB or more... I can't even begin to imagine the amount of data they had on there... I don't know if it was dedicated or colocated servers, but it seems to me that the only way to do this in full (non/incremental) without killing your bandwidth or waiting for the transfer to finish into eternity is by sneakernet, and if it was a dedicated server, they wouldn't have had access to the datacenter to make a copy of the hard drive(s). The difficulties in making a full backup of such vast amounts of data is probably what made them put it off...

161

Living Room / Re: whats that smell???

« on: May 15, 2009, 12:31 PM »

or could be documenting they were affected in the event a liability lawsuit comes out of it.  Easy way to make some money.

Most plausible thing I heard so far

162

Living Room / Re: whats that smell???

« on: May 14, 2009, 12:44 AM »

If you watch the vid Goth Man, she recently had nasal surgery and can't smell anything.

So? She still inhales, doesn't she?
If it were truly chemicals or spores or whatever (ie, something truly harmful), then she would also be affected.

163

Living Room / Re: whats that smell???

« on: May 14, 2009, 12:16 AM »

I think, just the fact that the person cleaning the fridge wasn't affected; probably means that a lot of people were overreacting :p

164

Living Room / Re: The Geek's "100 things to do before you die" list

« on: May 07, 2009, 12:36 PM »

FPGA == supercomputing? O_o

No, the idea is to build a cluster of FPGA's for specific purposes...

Gothic, how many normal people take on programming?

A lot? but they take on stuff like javascript and vb

Anyway, it's just a general observation that the bar for what is considered geeky is getting lower and lower. Now yuppies that throw money against a bunch of gadgets are geeks too... 

I'm going back into hiding now

165

Living Room / Re: The Geek's "100 things to do before you die" list

« on: May 06, 2009, 11:35 PM »

I don't like 'top lists'... but the bulk of these things are things normal (l)users would do. not geeks.... the first things that come to mind would be inventing a time machine, a warp drive, and stuff like that... then stuff like designing a new computer architecture and writing an OS for it, or do some super-computing with FPGA's. One of the applications are decrypting gsm signals in near-real-time. Grabbing all kinds of stuff obscure digital stuff out of the air with modded radio's is fun too. The GNU radio project has it's own hardware and software for playing with these things... etc... but not any of the stuff on that list Seriously... learning javascript? writing a wordpress theme? Since when is stuff like that geeky? The java syntax is so simple, infants should be able to do it without effort. In fact, learning any computer language I would consider non-geeky, as any self-respecting geek would grok the syntax of any language within a few hours to a day, depending on the language. Really learning the in's and out's of a language is something done by using it every day over the years, which I don't think is what the author had in mind... meh. Ah, and according to that guy, using tinyurl is geeky now too. Aaaaarghjkllllllll.

166

Living Room / Re: Interesting Discovery Involving Rented Servers

« on: May 05, 2009, 12:46 PM »

Hey, they mentioned us nice find

167

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« on: May 03, 2009, 01:27 PM »

Q1: Can humans distinguish between fact and opinion easily? Do they?

Perhaps, question 0 should be, can there be a difference, in practice, between the two?

For example, take the most fact-based community of them all, the scientific one. Earth was flat, earth is round. Light moves in waves, light moves in particles, no it's really both; electricity goes from negative to positive, no electricity moves from positive to negative, etc....

Many of these things were perceived as fact, yet false. The truth is, we never know 100% whether a fact is really a fact. A fact is a really dirty word in my opinion. Our senses, minds, and logic can deceive us, and the minute we think something is a fact, we are being very arrogant indeed.

One could argue that fact is opinion with proof. But then proof can invalidate itself too, just like opinions.

The word 'fact', implies a static universe, where truth can be static, with a non-relative reality. That's simply not how our universe works. (and that being an opinion too, we reach quite a paradox indeed )

So, what I'm getting at is, trying to implement methods to differentiate between fact and opinion is an exercise in futility (in my opinion ).

I'd go even further, and saying that sticking to perceived fact, and tuning out anything else, is diminishing your chances to discover that your perceived fact is incorrect, which is quite damaging to innovation if you ask me

168

General Software Discussion / Re: Rubber Ducky - a small, fun resource monitor

« on: May 02, 2009, 01:16 AM »

Flynn and rubber ducky have been part of gkrellm on *nix for ages.
I still use it daily.

Flynn in gkrellm screenshot (to the left):

http://linkerror.com..._04-29-09_084018.jpg

This one shows rubber ducky in gkrellm (to the right) (not mine):

http://i16.photobuck...6/April_deskapps.jpg

169

Living Room / Re: Interesting Discovery Involving Rented Servers

« on: May 01, 2009, 04:52 AM »

The thought of a windows command that could format windows from inside windows. Can you imagine the support calls?

-mediaguycouk (May 01, 2009, 03:52 AM)

Unfortunately it seems it can only overwrite unused data, so you wouldn't be able to erase windows while running it. (So you probably leave a lot of registry data behind etc)

I'd be interesting if someone were to find a tool to wipe the entire OS. as you're running it, remotely, just like you can on *nix.

So far it looks like a boot disk (eg dban) is the best solution, but usually (but not always) that requires physical access. Softlayer for example, lets you mount remote media, so it would be possible to pull it off there, but I don't think many other hosts offer that feature, and often the budget limits the choices you have.

170

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« on: May 01, 2009, 02:04 AM »

I submit that "New user" could be inferred as deprecatory whereas post count is non-judgmental.

I think they both could be interpreted as either, depending on who is doing the interpreting.

171

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« on: April 30, 2009, 11:04 PM »

Then maybe instead of a post count, there should just be a "new user" tag added under certain conditions. (e.g., if post count is less than 5 and user registered less than 1 month ago).

172

General Software Discussion / Re: Dangerous Adobe Reader Vulnerability In the Wild

« on: April 30, 2009, 06:12 PM »

Gothi[c]: it actually is safer - while it was affected by the JBIG2 issue (used same rerefrence library, I betcha) the crash wasn't code-executable exploitable as with Adobe. You could call this "by obscurity" if you insist, but nobody has shown that FR is exploitable through this bug, afaik. And for basically all the other AR exploits, Foxit hasn't been vulnerable - that would would simply be because of less bugs.

-f0dder (April 30, 2009, 04:40 PM)

Yes, I call that obscurity The only reason nobody has shown foxit isn't vulnerable is because it's not as big a target as acrobat, not because the software is not exploitable.

That said, I would have to agree that adobe has indeed shown incompetence with their slow response times etc.
I can't say they practice bad coding habits (though it may be likely) since the software is closed source. It's not because a piece of software has many heap overflows, that the developers are incompetent. All complex software has those. What is incompetent is their slow patch time and unresponsiveness, but whether or not that is to blame on the coding team or internal politics/management is a different issue.
I don't know what's going on there, and as it's closed source, I can't judge the quality of it, and definitively not the people that have been writing it.

Foxit may have less bugs because it's less bloated and simpler. Which is only natural. I'm not bashing foxit here. I'm just trying to point out the fact that when people say less used application x is more secure because it has less discovered bugs/vulnerabilities than popular application y, they are advocating obscurity, not security, and the fact that the vulnerability is present in both applications is a good reminder of that.

173

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« on: April 30, 2009, 02:58 PM »

I wish we wouldn't show post count either.

-housetier (April 30, 2009, 02:43 PM)

-40hz (April 30, 2009, 02:53 PM)

+2

174

General Software Discussion / Re: Dangerous Adobe Reader Vulnerability In the Wild

« on: April 30, 2009, 02:35 PM »

I don't care because i use Foxit reader for my PDF viewing needs, works pretty well.

Every time there is a thread on an adobe vulnerability, everyone is always quick to say that foxit is better or safer etc...

I hate to break it to you, but it's not. It's just more obscure.

In fact, foxit is implementing JBIG in the same was as adobe, and is also listed as vulnerable.

This nice video explains (and mentions foxit): http://www.dojosec.com/?p=92

Use text-only browsers, email, etc... ! the only way! (And even then there is risk (there have been vulnerabilities in vim, for example)

175

Living Room / Re: how to improve DC's usability: the stackOverflow model

« on: April 30, 2009, 11:01 AM »

I don't think I like the idea of karma and voting or anything that creates 'elitism' or divides members in any way.