Recent Posts

4701

Living Room / Re: RFID Tracking IDs in Schools - Non-compliance = Exclusion

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 10:13 AM »

Local school here requires finger prints to use the lunch service (and they take both thumbs - just in case you lose one!).

-Carol Haynes (October 10, 2012, 10:03 AM)

Lunch?

Well, considering how "pizza" and "ketchup" are vegetables in some schools now, I have a hard time seeing any compelling reason to let your kids eat a school lunch. Brown bagging it gets around that problem, and is bound to be healthier for the kid.

4702

Living Room / Re: An Odd DoS Attack

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 09:19 AM »

Okay... I'm just having a bit of trouble with the "massive" 4% part. Sure on a tech news site 4% of what size pipe would be reflexively factored ... But this is the financial section of NBC news. 

-Stoic Joker (October 10, 2012, 08:47 AM)

It wasn't 4% of network traffic - it was 4% of orders.

It's like if you run an online shopping mall and 4% of all orders come from 1 person, and they're all canceled. No amount of bandwidth adjustment or additional bandwidth changes that it was 4% of all orders. Bandwidth is an entirely separate issue.

And it was 4% from a single source.

So, imagine whoever does that sets up a few more accounts... How many would a spammer have? A few hundred to start anyways.

You then go from 4% with 1 account, to something like 400 accounts making up about 94% of all transactions.

THEN bandwidth and all that gets funky fried chicken time with heart-stopping gravy butter-balls of doom.

4703

Living Room / Re: US judge orders piracy trial to test IP evidence

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 09:06 AM »

If you had installed a phone out on your front lawn - and somebody used it to repeatedly make threatening phone calls - after a certain number of times (like maybe 6?) you'd likely get into some sort of legal trouble for not making it difficult for a passerby to just walk up and use it. And few would argue that was an unreasonable standard of responsibility.

-40hz (October 10, 2012, 08:30 AM)

Muahahahaha~! ^o^

You know where this is going!

The few. The proud. The RENEGADES~! (Defending anything from whatever!)

How is being generous and opening up your phone for others to use unreasonable? Shouldn't the police be tracking down the real criminals, rather than pursuing those kinds souls that try to reach out and do good by their fellows? It's YOU that's the victim here, and being victimized for your kindness no less! Do we punish people for kindness and generosity?


But, aside from pointing out the obvious and sinister criminality of things like sharing, caring, kindness, growing a garden, etc. etc., I think you right.


I think I need to atone for my sins of happy kindness today. Not sure whether I should strangle a puppy or drown a kitten...

Then again, I could probably atone for an entire month by axing one of those vile kindergarten teachers that are always teaching kids to share! Wonder if blowing up the Sesame Street set and crew would get me a month's worth of penance... And how much would Mr. Rogers be worth?

Mr. Rogers in a spoiler for a reason

Continued...

Hmmm... Maybe not so much...

Kids should be learning games like this!

There's enough legal precedent under the attractive nuisance doctrine that it could be fairly easily and logically extended to owning and operating an unsecured wireless access point...

...In a criminal case, just owning the means used to commit a crime would not necessarily be a criminal act even if you were careless or irresponsible about who had access...

...And all it would really take to settle this nonsense once and for all is the passage of a law that legally requires owners to know they need to secure their WAP - or face possible legal consequences...

-40hz (October 10, 2012, 08:30 AM)

That sounds well like it could be the beginnings of the criminalization of incompetence.

We don't condone/permit driving by incompetent drivers (or mostly anyways), but just to surf and email? What's next? Licensing people to use the Internet? (Kind of like how TVs are in the UK...)

While that may sound a bit ridiculous now, can anyone see how at some point in the future, it would begin to seem more "realistic". (I hate to use the word "reasonable" there.)

If the MAFIAA is involved, nothing will turn out well.

4704

Living Room / Re: New captcha system uses empathy to block bots (and sociopaths)

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 07:58 AM »

Thanks for the link, Renegade. VERY interesting reading. Makes me glad that I come from a rural area and never wasted too much time on 'higher' education.

-Fred Nerd (October 10, 2012, 07:06 AM)

Glad you found it interesting!

However, I should warn you, I put that in a spoiler for a good reason.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

-Aristotle

There are extremely few "educated minds" out there, and if you mention that link/essay/author, people will FREAK OUT on you and start accusing you of all kinds of things, like being a sociopath (gotta get a word in from the title to stay kind of on topic ). Do be careful when talking about it or mentioning the author's name.


As for "higher education", sometimes I think you've got to be high to think that it's actually education.

4705

Living Room / Re: An Odd DoS Attack

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 07:50 AM »

I'm cynical, and going by what the article linked to said:

“My guess is that the algo was testing the market, as high-frequency frequently does,” says Jon Najarian, co-founder of TradeMonster.com. “As soon as they add bandwidth, the HFT crowd sees how quickly they can top out to create latency.” (Read More: Unclear What Caused Kraft Spike: Nanex Founder.)

-The article

(emphasis mine)

Now that seems to rather clearly imply that this type of behavior is not uncommon ... So why all the hubbub about this particular instance?


It's nice to think that Criminals follow rules... but it doesn't really alter the fact that once one goes past a certain level of power. There really aren't enough folks around to watch/prevent one from stretching the rules out just enough to accommodate whatever little project(s) is/are deemed "necessary". Because fear (as always) does a fine job of keeping the underlings in line.

-Stoic Joker (October 10, 2012, 06:57 AM)

I think it was because it went on for an entire week and accounted for a massive percentage of the total trade order volume.

4706

Living Room / Re: Major ISPs to implement "Six strike" rule

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 07:46 AM »

Said it before, I'll say it again: Boycott.

The only way to win this battle is to reject big media's content and pursue alternatives to it - not try to find ways to get around their blockades and rules. Once they feel the hit to their pocketbook, their attitude (of necessity) will change.

-40hz (October 10, 2012, 07:09 AM)

OH! OH! OH! OH! I know the answer to this one~!



Watch amazing documentaries and videos from authors that WANT you to share them and ENCOURAGE you to share them! There are lots out there!

http://www.youtube.c...g?feature=CAQQwRs%3D

Lots of good viewing there.

I have gigs and gigs and gigs of videos like that.

While I don't always buy the film, I do quite often. I also pass them around for other people, just like they ASK me to.


Like seriously... these people put out some fantastic films and make so much available for FREE! Then POLITELY ASK YOU TO SHARE IT!

Other than a browser, a YouTube video downloader and a torrent client are all you need to stack up on enough videos to keep you busy for a llllooooonnnnnnggggg time. (Lots of good videos on Vimeo as well, and more on Blip.tv.)

A lot of the time you're encouraged to burn CDs or DVDs of videos and pass them around!


If you can't find anything interesting to watch for free, you're either not looking, or... well... let's just leave it at that. No need for me to get all cynical now, eh?

4707

Living Room / RFID Tracking IDs in Schools - Non-compliance = Exclusion

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 05:40 AM »

Big Brother wants to know where your kids are. And if he doesn't know, well, then they just won't get to play.

http://rt.com/usa/ne...ol-id-hernandez-033/

A school district in Texas came under fire earlier this year when it announced that it would require students to wear microchip-embedded ID cards at all times. Now students who refuse to be monitored say they are feeling the repercussions.

Since October 1, students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonia, Texas have been asked to attend class clasping onto photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification chips to keep track of each and every pupil’s personal location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to relax the rampant truancy rates devastating the state’s school and the subsequent funding they are failing to receive as a result, and pending the program’s success the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.

...

To Salon, Hernandez says subjecting herself to constant monitoring by way of wearing a RFID chip is comparable to clothing herself in the “mark of the beast.” When she reached out to WND.com to reveal the school’s response, though, she told them that she was threatened with exclusion from picking a homecoming king and queen for not adhering to the rules.

"I had a teacher tell me I would not be allowed to vote because I did not have the proper voter ID," Hernandez told WND. "I had my old student ID card which they originally told us would be good for the entire four years we were in school. He said I needed the new ID with the chip in order to vote."

Mark of the Beast indeed. Big Brother = 666?

Well, maybe not "Big Brother"...



But definitely "Bigg Brother":





(For those that want to play with numerology, the program above is here, but the site is NSFW.)

4708

Living Room / Re: US judge orders piracy trial to test IP evidence

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 01:08 AM »

The landline doesn't really matter. The assumption is that most people use wireless Internet at home. Wired landline to the router/modem, then wireless to the computers. If it's not secured, anyone can use the connection. Just drive up to the place within wireless range, connect, and there you go. Kind of like what Google does.

4709

Living Room / Re: Major ISPs to implement "Six strike" rule

« Last post by Renegade on October 10, 2012, 01:03 AM »

It's not too bad. It depends on a lot of factors, so there's no real number that I can give you.

From SpeedTest.net:

With VPN:
Down: 1.61 Mbps
Up: 0.54 Mbps

Without VPN:
Down: 7.66 Mbps
Up: 0.83 Mbps

Now, a 7.66 Mbps speed is total bullshit. I NEVER see anything remotely that fast. At BEST, I've seen 1.2 Mbps or so. Usually less. The connection here is pretty sad.

But, it gives a ballpark. The UP speed is probably a better indicator.

4710

Living Room / Re: Major ISPs to implement "Six strike" rule

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 10:01 PM »

I'll vouch for Privacy.io. Very good. I've been using it for quite a while, and it's been very good. The OpenVPN option is very nice as well. (If anyone wants to use it, please use my referral link here. I could use a free month or whatever they have. I posted a bit on VPNs here.) I recommended Privacy.io to a friend who is using it now, and he's similarly had no problems. You will have a slow down in speeds, but that is simply the nature of using a VPN. (I've used others as well, and Privacy.io is at the top of my list of the ones I've used.)

The Torrent Freak link there is excellent. Great article.

As for this 6-strike business... sigh... I wish the MAFIAA would just get with the program and pull their asses out of the last century.

4711

Living Room / Re: An Odd DoS Attack

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 07:50 PM »

^^ Are you saying that they understand the concept of "plausible deniability"? (Still cynical...)

4712

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 07:24 PM »

Mind-numbingly stupid...

Funny in a masochistic way.

4713

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 06:54 PM »

A Stephen Hawking quote from page 14 of The quantum physics of chronology protection:
 (see attachment in previous post)
I think all potential time-travelers are turned in zebras, but someone from the year 2100 said that was nonsense. I don't argue with zebras, what do you think?

-Arizona Hot (October 09, 2012, 05:56 PM)

Nonsense! Visitors from the future inhabit the 5th and 6th dimensions and infect the consciousness of humans to observe our time. Some are malicious entities, and the only protection is to guard your brain with tinfoil~! Hats seem to work pretty well.

4714

Living Room / Re: Why Can't Germans Say 'Squirrel' ?

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 06:28 PM »

While I don't speak German, I speak Korean, and can comment in general on the issue.

The article does a decent job of outlining some of the issues.

STEP 1:
At the core, you have different consonants and vowels in different languages, and even in different consonants and vowels inside of a single language (dialect or accent).

For English speakers, try saying these 3 words:

1) Mary (the name)
2) Merry (as in merry Xmas)
3) Marry (as in get hitched)

The a/e there will sound the same to some, while sounding different to others, depending mostly on where you are from. You may hear 1, 2, or even 3 distinct vowels.

As another typical example, Americans typically pick out Canadians by the way they say "about".

STEP 2:
Next, you have different combinations of those vowels and consonants.


And that pretty much sums it up. Different combinations of vowels and consonants condition you with motor skills (very much like muscular memory, if not exactly that) so that when you go to step "outside" of those "rules", things can tend to get weird.

Again, for English speakers, try to pronounce this as a word:

Ng

If you can at all, chances are that you slaughtered it because the initial "ng" sound doesn't exist in English. Again, while that is a real word, it is used in other words as well, e.g.:

Ngoc

Which again, is very difficult for English speakers to pronounce.

There are tonnes of examples out there of sound patterns that don't exist in different languages, so "squirrel" in the mouth of a German speaker isn't very surprising. Though it may be entertaining!

4715

Living Room / Re: An Odd DoS Attack

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 06:07 PM »

...Because it's to much like trying to charge someone with rape at an orgy.

-Stoic Joker (October 09, 2012, 11:55 AM)

Hahahah~!

It probably would help if it was written as DoS (Denial of Service), but I'm really not sure if that is the proper form.

-Stoic Joker (October 09, 2012, 02:51 PM)

Fixed.

Sounds to me like some recent change made to somebody's automated trade robot had a coding error in it, and it took whoever owned it a week to notice it (or more likely get called by whoever was watching it to see what it was up to) and finally pull the plug. That might also explain why no criminal investigation was conducted.

It's not like they don't know who's program caused it. From the sketchy news it doesn't look like the program tried to stealth its identity either. Which makes me less suspicious as to its "motives" since you can't place a stock order anonymously. You need to sign onto an account before you can do that. A genuinely malicious program would have come at them from hundreds of different directions under thousands of different IDs.

Nope. Definitely sounds more like a big brokerage or investment fund had a bad program slip the leash on them. (CNBC often seems to looking for an "enemy action" story lately - even when there isn't one.)
 

-40hz (October 09, 2012, 04:12 PM)

Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but it seems to me that Wall Street *is* malicious intent.

The program accounted for 4% of all trade orders, and all of those orders were bogus. That's a huge volume of fake orders.

Like, who the heck wakes up and says to themself, "I think I'll enter 200 million fake orders this week!"

A genuinely malicious program would have come at them from hundreds of different directions under thousands of different IDs.

Not so sure about that. This seems to me to be more about gaming the system. That's what I meant by "an odd DoS" attack. It's not DDoS, but rather simple DoS. The aim doesn't seem to be to bring the system down, as you would expect with a DDoS, but rather to create latency or to simply clog up the system.

I don't know exactly how latency would affect the system, but then again, we're talking about the same criminals that thought up a way to give massive number of mortgages to anyone and everyone that could sign on a dotted line, then package up and securitize those mortgages, con some corrupt ratings people into labeling them as high-grade investments, fraudulently sell those off to different firms, including retirement funds, bet that those investments would tank, wait for the entire bubble to burst, then con the government into bailing everyone out for gambling, and walk away with trillions of dollars in their pockets.

What does that say about that crowd?

They're smart. Damn smart. They know how to take advantage of things. Their intelligence is only exceeded by their criminality.

So, I have a very hard time believing that any kind of manipulation there is "innocent" or "just testing the waters". If they are testing, I think it would be naive to assume that they're testing in the same way that we would test some software -- they're testing to see if they can move in for the kill.

But then again... I *might* be cynical...

4716

Living Room / Re: Build Your Own Flying Saucer

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 12:09 PM »

Bleh, it's just the Avrocar.

-SeraphimLabs (October 09, 2012, 12:03 PM)

I don't think anyone actually expected the US govt to really reveal anything remotely interesting. They dusted through an old shoe box, and pulled out a faded black and white picture of a polar bear in a blizzard.

Still, it's kind of fun.

4717

Living Room / Build Your Own Flying Saucer

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 11:57 AM »

Grab your screwdriver!

http://blogs.archives.gov/ndc/?p=426

Recently declassified records from the Aeronautical Systems Division, USAF (RG 342 – Records of United States Air Force Commands, Activities, and Organizations) reveal some surprising, perhaps never-before-seen images:

The above illustration was discovered in the pages of a document titled “Project 1794, Final Development Summary Report” (d.1956) The caption reads “USAF Project 1794”. However, the Air Force had contracted the work out to a Canadian company, Avro Aircraft Limited in Ontario, to construct the disk-shaped craft. According to the same report, it was designed to be a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) plane designed to reach a top speed of Mach 4, with a ceiling of over 100,000 feet, and a range of over 1,000 nautical miles.

Anyone remember old Popular Science articles about underwater cities and flying cars?

Here's one retro ad:

http://io9.com/58508...ying-saucers-by-1965

4718

Living Room / An Odd DoS Attack

« Last post by Renegade on October 09, 2012, 11:30 AM »

Well, this is a bit of an odd DoS attack:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49333454

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.


The program placed orders in 25-millisecond bursts involving about 500 stocks, according to Nanex, a market data firm. The algorithm never executed a single trade, and it abruptly ended at about 10:30 a.m. ET Friday.

“Just goes to show you how just one person can have such an outsized impact on the market,” said Eric Hunsader, head of Nanex and the No. 1 detector of trading anomalies watching Wall Street today. “Exchanges are just not monitoring it.”

The attack chewed up 10% of all available trading bandwidth, and never completed a trade.

If that's not a DOS, I don't know what is.

As it's on Wall Street, of course no criminal charges were placed. Go figure.

4719

Living Room / Re: Promised Land

« Last post by Renegade on October 08, 2012, 08:30 PM »

Ah Keynes... As long as there are trees for paper, there's always money to be had!

Too bad the aliens found the Keynesian economists first when they landed... Otherwise they may have thought that there was intelligent life on Earth.

Ben Bernanke goes to a pizza restaurant. The waiter asks him if he'd like his pizza sliced in 6 or 8 pieces. Bernanke says, "8~! I'm really hungry today!"

4720

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by Renegade on October 08, 2012, 09:53 AM »

^ yes!
I didnt mean to be disingenious there, I should have said that too. Was literally just wondering about the cost of production.
(Obviously if higher value coins were made with valuable metals, that factor would be a relatively small percentage.)

-tomos (October 08, 2012, 09:34 AM)

Oh - sorry -- I was pointing the finger there at the Wikipedia article quote. Not you.

And yes -- when minting higher value coins, like silver dollars, the production costs are disproportionately far lower compared to face value and real value.

4721

General Software Discussion / Re: Seeking: Media Player with Playlist and Auto Pause / Auto Stop between tracks

« Last post by Renegade on October 08, 2012, 09:39 AM »

I have used xmPlay for this purpose in the past, but it only handles audio NOT video, so is no good this time around.

-Ampa (October 08, 2012, 07:54 AM)

Check the Un4seen page with a list of software that uses BASS. There's a video component for BASS, and I'd guess that there are some players out there like that. It's been around for years. One of them might do it.

4722

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by Renegade on October 08, 2012, 09:28 AM »

^ you can get drunk on gold too, cant you?
_______________________________

Precious metals only have an intrinsic value within a system too. They're not directly consumable. They need to be refined, assayed, and agreed upon by whomever. They need both a market and an exchange before they become valued. So I'd like suggest they don't have much 'intrinsic' value outside of the society that assigns such value to them. And once you get outside a technological society, the far more common metals and alloys (iron and steel) are much more valuable (i.e. useful and usable) than the more precious variety which are used in less advanced societies primarily for decoration - if they are used at all.

-40hz (October 08, 2012, 06:24 AM)

I think that's pretty clear.
If precious metals were just valued for their industrial worth, I wonder what they'd be worth (probably impossible to estimate).

_______________________________

Re the metal in coins, I wonder what it actually costs to make a coins?
I wouldn't be suprised if the smaller nominations cost more than their worth - yup -

As of 2012, it costs the U.S. Mint 2.41 cents to make a cent because of the cost of materials and production.[4]

http://en.wikipedia....nited_States_coin%29

-tomos (October 08, 2012, 09:17 AM)

There's about $0.005 worth of materials in a penny. The majority of the cost is production. They're being a bit disingenuous there by calling it "materials and production" as it's almost entirely production costs.

4723

Living Room / Re: Open Dyslexic Fonts

« Last post by Renegade on October 08, 2012, 09:22 AM »

Yes, very good idea, very neat and no doubt very helpful.

(Note that I didn't fall into the rtap of making a koje.)

-joiwind (October 08, 2012, 08:44 AM)

I'm not sure how a Rural Transit Assistance Program can be use to create a small island off the south coast of South Korea that is mostly renowned for shipbuilding, bars, and hot women that are ready to take your money...

Sgih... cna't seem to mkae a fnnuy tehre.

A friend of mine is dyslexic, and when he finished university, you can imagine he had a party for it. I think he went on to become a successful drug dealer... kind of lost contact with him a few years ago...

Another friend is doing extremely well with his dyslexia. He suffered from it extremely badly. Today, he's posting on Facebook regularly, which is leagues advanced from how he used to deal with things, i.e. not read period.

It's pretty common, but very often people feel ashamed, and hide it.

4724

Living Room / Open Dyslexic Fonts

« Last post by Renegade on October 08, 2012, 08:28 AM »

This seems pretty nifty - Open Dyslexic fonts - fonts to help people with dyslexia.

http://dyslexicfonts.com/



And at Github:

https://github.com/a...ngoist/open-dyslexic

It sounds like a interesting approach.

4725

Living Room / Re: World of Warcraft cities hacked

« Last post by Renegade on October 08, 2012, 08:13 AM »

(I don't play Warcrack either.)

It's very funny and unfunny at the same time.