Messages

226

Site/Forum Features / Re: Longtime DC Member JoTo is in hospital again -- address for sending postcards

« on: December 05, 2008, 01:18 AM »

Yikes! that's sad news! I hope he's back with us soon!

227

Living Room / Re: Can someone help with my understanding of TOR (The Onion Router)?

« on: December 02, 2008, 09:04 AM »

Yes, Tor should indeed not be relied upon for 100% anonymity, but then again, pretty much anything shouldn't. I2P and freenet etc, all state the same.

FreeNet is probably the most anonymous of them (but also the slowest, downloading a text file takes about the time of downloading a movie on a normal connection ), but don't quote me on that.

With any one having the ability to run tor proxies and help out their project, it would be trivial to someone serious about SIGINT to run tons of these servers, and combine all the information, and get the real source of a packet 50% of the time or more, or run traffic analysis etc...

In other words, it will protect you from your IP showing up in the casual log files, but it won't protect you if someone is really after you.

I think the vulnerability you're referring to, f0dder, is a method of finding the source of a TOR anonymous server. (which is different from it's typical client usage). And this method is probably feasible for some individual with lots of persistence, without the need of massive resources. I don't know if that one has been patched yet or not, but if it was, it doesn't really matter. I'm sure other holes will pop up eventually, as is the nature of the cat and mouse game in this business.

228

Living Room / Re: Can someone help with my understanding of TOR (The Onion Router)?

« on: December 02, 2008, 12:37 AM »

Sometimes anonymity is more important than speed, so it can still be a useful feature. I'm sure it works fine with downloading text files. BT doesn't always have to be about music, movies, and games, etc...

Routing only your communication to the tracker over TOR is indeed quite pointless.

Running all BT traffic over TOR when downloading anything other than small text files is not only uselessly slow, it's also very unfriendly to your fellow TOR users, and harms the TOR project in general, by consuming loads of very limited bandwidth for no sensible purpose.

One note of warning when using TOR: Never ever never ever ever use TOR for browsing to any websites that require authentication and never have any sensitive information transmitted while using TOR.

Any one can run a tor server, thus any one could potentially be sniffing or MITM'ing your traffic. While they would only get fragments of your traffic, and not know where it came from, you don't want to log into your bank account with tor

Many people don't understand that, since it may seem like a contradiction. They think TOR makes them more secure, while the opposite is true. It makes your traffic anonymous, but it also means that your traffic is readable by guy running the tor endpoint.

229

Developer's Corner / Re: DC loads fast. What is the secret.

« on: December 01, 2008, 07:51 AM »

Yes, of course. the connectivity matters a great deal. Glad to hear all is working so smooth for everyone It's nice to hear the opposite of complaining for a change

230

Developer's Corner / Re: DC loads fast. What is the secret.

« on: November 30, 2008, 08:29 PM »

While the dc website may have an 'old school' look, I noticed that the average page size is not any smaller than your average website, if not bigger.

We average about 3 to 10 requests per second, depending on the time of the day.
Right now, with 10 requests/sec, load average is 0.26, 0.26, 0.2
... So yeah... fancy server
Beyond that it's just tweaking the apache Min/MaxSpareServers,ServerLimit,MaxClients and MaxRequestsPerChild values to match the capabilities of the server and reflected traffic. Though more tuning could be done there. We're just using the prefork MPM for now. But that probably will only affect anything under maximum load.
Other than that nothing special configuration wise, there's a lot more that could be done, and a lot more tweaking to do. But all that takes testing which we're not too keen on doing. ( prefer no downtime over 1ms faster loading page for now )

So it's probably mostly due to the server being a beast.
(dual quad core (so 8 cpu cores total), 4GB ram)

Like mouser said, we rely 100% on continuous donations to keep this place running, so keep donating whenever you can if you want to keep seeing fast loading pages

231

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommendation for Project Management software?

« on: November 27, 2008, 08:55 AM »

Just goes to show that material on the internet usually has a very short life. Good thing we don't rely on it to store all our important stuff.... oh wait..

232

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommendation for Project Management software?

« on: November 26, 2008, 10:32 AM »

The provided link is not working!

-Jamesdany (November 26, 2008, 01:41 AM)

It used to, but then this thread started in May 2006

233

Developer's Corner / Re: GameSetWatch: The Quandary Of 2D Vs. 3D

« on: November 23, 2008, 04:03 PM »

I agree 100%, I find isometric games to feel and look much nicer than 3d games.

However, when I'm developing a game, I can tell you that it's much easier to find tools and libraries for developing 3d games than it is to find tools for developing isometric games these days.

And that's another thing which may be a determining factor, especially if you're a lone developer pressed on time.

I have yet to find a decent Free isometric or even high-level 2D game SDK for C++, but there's plenty of them for 3D games.

234

Living Room / Re: Open DNS is s***ware

« on: November 21, 2008, 03:03 AM »

I'm not sure why people use OpenDNS when there's many good free DNS servers out there (eg: 4.2.2.2-6) Those in combination with rolling your own cacheing server, and you'll have a more stable and fast system then what openDNS provides, and a tad bit more privacy as well, without the ads.

235

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Intro

« on: November 20, 2008, 05:59 PM »

I hereby pledge to create a NANY app this year.

236

General Software Discussion / Re: Tool to make screenshots of web site using command line

« on: November 18, 2008, 10:46 PM »

For the alternative OS users:
http://linuxbrit.co.uk/scrot/

I use this, part of a script that will automatically upload to http.

237

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Intro

« on: November 14, 2008, 09:33 PM »

During summer you'd have to compete with google summer of code...

238

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Intro

« on: November 14, 2008, 01:36 PM »

Urlwolf raises a very good point...
If it doesn't qualify for NANY, then I think we should have a yearly contribute to F/OSS thing too then

239

Living Room / Re: Thoughts on switching to IPv6

« on: October 21, 2008, 05:20 PM »

While we're on the subject, where do MAC addresses fit in the equation?

MAC addresses are tied to your NIC, and are (basically) used for packet delivery on your LAN. DHCP servers also use your MAC when assigning IP addresses.

And remember, just like DNS resolves between hostnames and IP addresses, there is also a mechanism needed to translate IP addresses to hardware (MAC) addresses. That mechanism is ARP

240

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 41 [NEW]

« on: October 12, 2008, 10:31 PM »

Clinging on to old definitions is silly. Does anybody use the original meaning of 'gay' these days?

It's not because anyone you know doesn't, doesn't mean that anyone isn't.

241

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 41 [NEW]

« on: October 11, 2008, 10:32 PM »

s/hacked/cracked/g

242

Living Room / Re: Mouser's new book

« on: October 10, 2008, 04:48 AM »

I tried to buy the book but the website stops responding on the order confirmation page...

-Deozaan (October 09, 2008, 10:28 PM)

 

243

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Synergy: Sharing your keyboard and mouse

« on: October 09, 2008, 05:05 PM »

I use synergy here between 4 computers. 2 running FreeBSD and 2 running Gentoo... works wonderfully well. I didn't find it hard to set up at all. The configuration is very straightforward, you just tell it which screen is to the left/right of which.

244

Living Room / Re: Has the LHC destroyed the world yet?

« on: September 21, 2008, 04:32 PM »

Real live webcams of lhc (not the blackhole joke one )

ATLAS: http://atlasexperiment.org/webcams.html
CMS: http://cms-project-c...ia/CMSeye/index.html

245

General Software Discussion / Re: POP Mail checker

« on: September 21, 2008, 03:52 AM »

I use the mail notification feature in gkrellm on GNU/Linux... Probably no use to you though

246

General Software Discussion / Re: Any Lynx(text based browser) lover-user?

« on: September 21, 2008, 03:11 AM »

This thread in lynx: http://www.linkerror..._09-21-08_040537.jpg
This thread in elinks: http://www.linkerror..._09-21-08_040629.jpg
This thread in links2: http://www.linkerror..._09-21-08_040829.jpg

I still like the lynx version better because it doesn't try to put that column on the left, which really eats up a lot of space in a terminal.I much prefer the way lynx just renders everything full-width.

Note that I couldn't even log into the forum and post with links2.

247

General Software Discussion / Re: Any Lynx(text based browser) lover-user?

« on: September 21, 2008, 03:03 AM »

hehe, wait till Gothic sees this post

Saw it
(making this post with lynx, btw)
Even though links,links2, and elinks have features like better table rendering and limited css support, i find that more sites work correctly with lynx. Lynx has some features that it's clones still lack.
That said, there is still lots of room for improvement. I dream of a text-based browser that can render all pages well and supports websites that use retarded(sorry, i mean modern) technologies. But no text-based browser has that as a design goal. Neither of all the mentioned projects aim to ever be a >full< browser that can support everything. Which is a shame really, but understandable. It would take immense amounts of work, and there's very little interest. That said, sites can be awesome to use when they are designed with lynx in mind. I wish dc had a lynx version It would probably be useful for users of mobile devices too.

248

Living Room / Re: DonationQuote - DonationCoder Quote Database

« on: September 19, 2008, 09:34 AM »

It's cool to finally have a quotes db with an rss feed

249

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 -- ribbons for everyone!

« on: September 19, 2008, 09:31 AM »

I think this new type of interface is a waste of screen real-estate.
Classically these tool bars were on the side of the screen, which makes more sense imo, because a monitor is typically more wide than it is tall.

250

Living Room / Re: Flash Toy of the Week: How Well Can you Differentiate Colors?

« on: September 17, 2008, 01:12 PM »

Scored a 0 without gluing my eyes to the screen..

I wonder what the results would be if you were to compare people using LCD monitors versus people using CRT monitors.