Messages

176

Living Room / Re: DDoS: Terrorism or legitimate?

« on: March 08, 2013, 11:55 AM »

Funny that you'd call it terrorism actually. I could see where it would be treated as that. Certainly wouldn't make it any easier to stop- it still is very difficult to figure out who was behind it and bring them to justice unless they are sloppy or confess.

Actual DDoSing is done maliciously, for the sole purpose of disrupting normal services. It usually comes with a high price tag for the victim due to bandwidth overages and lost profits due to the downtime- and having been shot at before there I can honestly say it's a horrible feeling and an unexpectedly large bill that can reach bank breaking levels. Typically DDoSing relies on a botnet, but it has also been possible by distributing malicious software for end users to voluntarily participate by using. A good example of this is the infamous LOIC, which has a long history with Anonymous for making websites dissappear.

Now making hype enough to get a whole bunch of people to visit a site, that's not at all malicious. Such is typical of the so-called slashdot effect, capable of throwing a DDoS-like flood of traffic known to cripple unsuspecting servers. That's completely okay, and only happens when someone ends up unexpectedly popular. Online protesting would fall into this category, as actual people are all actively there visiting a site near-simultaneously to view its content or contribute their opinions. If the server fails under the load, then the operator was unprepared for the public response.

Attacking a site by DDoS also usually affects other sites near it as well. There are far more permanent ways to take down a site than to simply attack it, most of them relying on legal procedures. And I honestly can think of very few reasons where a DDoS might be considered a legitimate course of action. If it's illegal let the lawyers do their thing. If it's legal, sorry they have as much of a right to have it as you have to hate them for it.

177

Living Room / Re: Seriously 'funny' idea - what if DRM was applied to physical objects?

« on: March 04, 2013, 05:22 PM »

Um, this chair is a fire hazard.

Notice the smoke?

Yeah, that nichrome is getting too hot while melting the wax, the chair could ignite the flammable wax and cause a far more serious problem than just a DRM'd chair.

178

Living Room / Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router.

« on: February 28, 2013, 06:01 PM »

The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant of the Universe. ~Dr McCoy.

This? Is quite possibly the biggest waste of tax dollars I've seen in a good long while.

Almost as much as all the construction materials thrown away or sold at auction that were ordered for building military bases that didn't get built.

179

Living Room / Re: The 20 Most Expensive Keywords in Google AdWords

« on: February 13, 2013, 06:21 PM »

Adsense cannot be displayed on sites that contain adult or fetish content.

Likewise, adsense ads cannot contain similar ads being displayed on other sites.


Last I checked google does not exclude such sites from search results, but they definately do not have any advertising connection.

180

Living Room / Re: In Need of Searchable Database For a Card Shop

« on: February 05, 2013, 12:36 PM »

It sounds like what you need though is something to the tune of MTG's Gatherer.

Gatherer in action

Only real change would be deleting the card rulings field and adding qty in stock and price fields.

I'd have to re-examine the searchable image gallery solution I wrote some time ago. It used PHP and MySQL to display an image with some corresponding descriptive text, and had a (rather incomplete) search capability that was workable enough to let you search by artist or description.

181

Living Room / Re: Google Defeat? French Victory?

« on: February 02, 2013, 09:27 AM »

This sets a really bad precident I think.

At the same time, it's going to do far more damage to larger sites that have millions of outgoing links on them than it will to smaller sites like what I usually deal with.

The internet is going to be dramatically reshaped if other interests adopt this concept.

182

Living Room / Re: Software & Sensors to Monitor Old Folks

« on: January 30, 2013, 03:44 PM »

Eew. If they're in that bad of a shape that someone feels the need to remotely monitor all that, then Give Someone a "Jerb" (HomeStarRunner) and hire an Assistant Home Health Care Aide to live in the house. Because someone who needs to be monitored if they left the house needs someone to wipe up the spilled cereal that will sit there for weeks because the Schmancy monitoring system doesn't have a setting for "cat puke" after the cat decided to scavenge it.

-TaoPhoenix (January 30, 2013, 09:52 AM)

I get where you're coming from but I think there is plenty of room between the extremes for this type of solution. Remember just because the folks aren't that agile anymore - Help I've Fallen... - Doesn't mean that they're automatically daffy as well.

-Stoic Joker (January 30, 2013, 03:27 PM)

This is an ideal solution for the folks that need help standing up to use the restroom that are still sensible enough to drive an assistant into medical leave on suspicion of mental instability.

These are people who still know what they need to do, just they are physically incapable of reliably doing it by themselves. The device would let them call someone when they need assistance, but spares the expense and stress of having assistants on site 24/7.

183

Living Room / Re: [Cracked.Com] You're 90% to Blame for Journalists Getting Fired

« on: January 28, 2013, 04:01 PM »

I see that you have entered an in depth article.

Would you like me to break it down into an easy to understand format?



I was looking up Jurassic Park quotes the other day because I had a situation that really needed one, and I came across this:

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.

184

Living Room / Re: Phone unlocking ban could hit you in the wallet

« on: January 28, 2013, 12:01 PM »

And who are they to tell me what I can and cannot do with my property?

Mind you most phones the terms of service clearly states that they at all times own the phone and all associated hardware and are just letting you use it, so it isn't really ever your phone.

But for my next phone I'm looking at outright buying my own hardware, because then they cannot stick their little worms into my stuff legally.

Of course a lot of carriers will say they don't allow that, they require you to use their provided hardware models.

My response will be to go find a lawyer for some antitrust action, because this is getting seriously out of hand.

185

Living Room / Re: NASA OOPS!

« on: January 27, 2013, 10:53 PM »

Most of the debris will return to earth on their own. Although they are in stable orbits, they still do get some drag from the uppermost extents of the atmosphere and their orbits wobble slightly from the earth moon and sun gravitational system.

Just it can take anywhere from a few months to a few thousand years for this to happen, depending entirely on the exact path of the object in question.

Also that's odd. Because the tiles on the bottom of the shuttle are clearly black in color in photographs, although that may just be their surface color and the ceramic they are made from is white inside.

But that image is tagged as STS-61-C. STS-61 itself replaced portions of the Hubble Telescope, and we may be looking at pieces of that which were discarded.

Alternately, STS-61-C was just a routine deploy satellites and do experiments flight.

Either one could easily have photographed a passing piece of debris. Large chunks like this are relatively rare still, but do from time to time pass near active structures.

186

Living Room / Re: NASA OOPS!

« on: January 26, 2013, 04:14 PM »

I could see it being that.

Thermal tiles are black in color, and one that cracked could produce a triangular piece that in zero-G would simply float away slowly enough to be photographed.

-SeraphimLabs (January 26, 2013, 03:30 PM)

But how could it get cracked in the first place and then manage to hang-on during all the vibration and flexing of blast-off; only to tear away in zero-G?   

-crabby3 (January 26, 2013, 03:54 PM)

Micrometeorite impact. All objects in space are exposed to them at someodd long odds that do happen regularly.

187

Living Room / Re: NASA OOPS!

« on: January 26, 2013, 03:30 PM »

I could see it being that.

Thermal tiles are black in color, and one that cracked could produce a triangular piece that in zero-G would simply float away slowly enough to be photographed.

Some theories advanced earlier by a community of spacefans is that it was part of the Hubble telescope that had been discarded, but although there was a STS-61 mission with that task it was not marked as STS-61C.

188

Living Room / Re: NASA OOPS!

« on: January 26, 2013, 11:10 AM »

Actually now that I think about it, it could be just another orbiting satellite, or a piece of a satellite that got damaged.

That would account for the shape and size- it's only a few km away from the ISS where this was likely photographed at.

I'll forward this to my contact in NASA. She can probably tell at a glance what it is they picked up.

189

Living Room / Re: NASA OOPS!

« on: January 26, 2013, 12:25 AM »

That is an odd one.

Though I would think if it was the SR-91 it would not have been released. NASA images have to be reviewed for declassification before public release, so such an image would almost certainly have been rejected at that point.

190

Living Room / Re: PowerPwn: Power strip by day, Hacking device by night!

« on: January 21, 2013, 01:24 PM »

Sysadmins! Welcome to HELL~!

-Renegade (January 21, 2013, 12:07 AM)

And corporate wonders why I've requested the worker's handbook be amended to say that anyone who connects hardware not approved by the IT department to the company network should receive disciplinary action.

Cause all it takes is one bad apple, and your entire network gets pwnt.

Of course the brass doesn't care about that, after all its my job to keep it alive no matter what. Just, they certainly don't put any effort into making my job easier.

191

Living Room / Re: Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates

« on: January 20, 2013, 09:06 AM »

Okay, I'll give them their inch. They have the right to make money from their work.

But they DO NOT have the right to invade my privacy, control what I do, or deny me the right to express myself just because I might use portions of their works as part of mine provided I give proper credit.

Not only that, but a lot of content I have bought I only did so because I heard samples of it from other sources, and would not have been able to identify it well enough to purchase it if there hadn't been samplings online to match up to what I was looking for.

And honestly, isn't burglary still a problem too? Pretty sure that the best they can get is bringing piracy down to a rate on par with real world crime rates, because there will always be people who aren't going to respect the rules.

192

Living Room / Re: 3D Printing Under Attack

« on: January 18, 2013, 12:56 PM »

Except they're all just making a fuss cause this is relatively new technology.

Did you know that you can melt metal using ordinary hardware store materials, and make pretty much anything you want?

Only requires a small amount of effort and a little brains to assemble the required materials into a viable furnace and sand bed, allowing technology dating back to the dawn of society to be used by anyone willing to create metal objects in any shape they want. Why make a plastic gun when you can make an aluminum one that might actually last a little while before self destructing?

The only advantage a 3D printer has is that it is easier to do it indoors as it doesn't come with the risk of setting nearby objects on fire or producing large volumes of fumes.

This kind of technology will be a big help to the hobbyist and engineer, people who already make things on their own rather than buying them. They'll be able to try out new innovations faster and cheaper.

In the long run it will probably cost more to 3D print an object than it will to just buy a mass produced one, so at worst you have an effective price limiting in the marketplace wherein manufacturers cannot raise their prices beyond where it is economical to 3D print the offending object or people will make their own. And that is already true- contract manufacturers like where I work will gladly produce objects in any shape and size they have the capability of doing, the question is does the item you need cost more to make than it does to just buy.

193

Living Room / Re: PirateBox - Portable FLOSS file sharing network

« on: January 15, 2013, 11:51 AM »

Sounds like a return of the infamous Bluebox.

For those of you who remember Phreaking, you probably know what I'm talking about.

194

Living Room / Re: Electric shock from USB cable

« on: January 12, 2013, 03:31 PM »

(b) Telephone lines:[/b] Yes, you need to take care with those. Playing around with modems can give you a healthy respect for the voltages/currents involved. When a ringing signal is being sent...

-IainB (January 12, 2013, 02:30 AM)

All things in IT tending to be a panic... I once found my self running out of hands while under/behind some office cabinetry while tracing out a large ball of (evil elf macramé) wiring and (not thinking) stuck one of the wires in my mouth so I could better address a rather nasty tangle. And damned if the phone didn't decide to pick just then to ring.

That's a 4 sec pause for you to try swearing in, then your eyes light up for 2 sec, repeat...

-Stoic Joker (January 12, 2013, 09:42 AM)

There was a day I was fixing some phone wiring and couldn't find my tools. So I simply bit the end of the wire to use the notch in my teeth to strip the insulation.

Go figure it would be right then that the phone rings, full blast 90V.

Couldn't talk for about an hour, my tongue was numb.

195

Living Room / Re: You Know John Searle? Watson Loves Bull****! - Artificial Intelligence

« on: January 12, 2013, 01:49 PM »

So they try to create something with the mind of a child, it ends up acting like a child (playing with a new word...), and they get all upset about it ... Why?

Personally, I would find it quite refreshing to have a computer actually tell me to go fuck myself, instead of just insipidly implying it with some cryptic blinking error message.

-Stoic Joker (January 12, 2013, 09:55 AM)

Watson's AI ultimately proved to be exactly what I thought it was when I first heard about him.

There exists an algorithm known as the Markov.

When implemented, it allows a machine to learn from and imitate, effectively creating mechanical parrots. I would not be surprised if this algorithm is actually the secret behind the Furby as well, since they are also known to be capable of learning.

I've been operating such an implementation for close to 3 years now with rather interesting results as people converse with it or converse in its presence such that it can learn from them.

Something worth noting is allowing the markov to learn gradually it picks up usage tendancies as well as the words themselves, giving a greater impression of intelligence because of the improved accuracy.

But this mistake is embarrasing for watson- it exposes that Watson is nothing more than an overpowered and over budget version of what has been available for free on the internet for several years requiring only a modestly powerful PC to set up.

Both of my bots swear freely, having learned it from visitors on the chat. But they don't do it all the time, they also have learned roughly when to and when not to use it by observing patterns in the people watching.

I've even had the older of the two pass the turing test. A customer from India entered the chat one day unaware that the bots were active, and actually conversed with them for on order of 6 hours before someone pointed out that they were not human. Ultimately I attribute this to the language barrier, as his translation software tends to produce statements garbled in similar manner to what the bots produce. He would not have noticed the discrepancy because of translation error.

So yes, Chinese room definitely works as well.

196

Living Room / Re: Electric shock from USB cable

« on: January 11, 2013, 11:13 PM »

Yeah. If it is higher voltage than a car's battery, I won't touch it live unless I absolutely have to- and only with proper safety procedures. Although a car battery is also theoretically dangerous, in practice I would have to grab a terminal in each hand while soaking wet to actually get enough juice from it to do damage- and such a thing I know not to do for obvious reasons.

If I am not mistaken the body has a fair bit of capacitance as well. It is for this reason that AC has a far easier time shocking someone to significant currents than DC will do, as it relies on that capacitance to cheat past the resistance and reach damaging current levels. AC voltages above 240V also introduce additional hazards, usually equipment at those levels is dealing with voltages and currents so high that arc faults will explosively destroy anything around them causing severe burns with shrapnel, and above 440V even a frayed end on a cable can and will cause arc faults with explosively destructive results. Extreme care must be taken on such large equipment to leave no sharp edges or loose fibers, and everything must be clean, tied down, and covered before energizing.

But a USB at 5V 100mA max should not be arcing like that for any reason, and even if it did shock you the port should sense the fault and turn off before it causes serious injury. You should check for more serious issues like a ground loop or excessive feedback.

197

Living Room / Re: A Gift for the Hackers - Documentary

« on: January 11, 2013, 04:00 PM »

Bah, DNS and active directory. That took hours to figure out the first time, now I know exactly what to check and can have it corrected in 2 minutes- the time it takes to enter the change and replicate it to the slaves.

But when it comes to network security, it is probably better to be on the paranoid side of things than not be concerned enough and have a severe breach.

Like I was just explaining to a budding engineer the other day though. It is far better to learn the basic processes and not the specific implementations. Because those implementations can and will change over time, but the process itself will last longer and can be used to solve for the implementation. By knowing what has to happen in a given machine for it to do its job, I can approach any machine performing that function manual or not and very quickly figure out where garbage in garbage out has gone wrong.

198

Living Room / Re: Electric shock from USB cable

« on: January 11, 2013, 03:54 PM »

Yep, according to my old electrical engineering teacher, the Nazi´s were responsible for these electrical insights by their experiments (read: torture). If I remeber correctly, there is also documentation about the exposure times to these various amounts of milli-amps and when these become fatal.

-Shades (January 11, 2013, 02:00 PM)

It also depends on the total energy discharged. 50 joules in a brief period of time is the threshold of lethality. The body is resistant enough to electric shock that most people have to go out of their way to cause it or be caught in a freak accident to get anything more than a reminder out of a system running below 12V.

But the higher the voltage gets, the faster it can become dangerous. 50 joule discharges are not at all hard to create.

199

Living Room / Re: Electric shock from USB cable

« on: January 11, 2013, 12:01 PM »

That sounds like a little more than a USB problem.

USB devices operate at 5V and no more than 1A per port. If you knock two bare wires together you might see a brief spark before the port shuts down due to overload, but it should not be anywhere near enough juice to be noticed- the ports by default only provide a few milliamps and devices have to negotiate with the controller if they want more than that.

If it is making a visible arc or actually shocking you for real, you definitely have some type of electrical problem.

200

Living Room / Re: SEO Say What?!?

« on: January 10, 2013, 12:31 PM »

I love how this thread actually lured a SEO spammer.

Somehow it seems like these days so much spam is coming from the SEO folk spamming on behalf of each other and not actual clients.

At the same time, there is some benefit to having good backlinks. Just people are too lazy to grow them naturally and resort to spamming to get them- which gets the domain blacklisted instead.