Guarantees... not really any guarantees. Microsoft does have a driver signing program and a Quality Labs for hardware that will certify that the driver and hardware meet their standards (take your cheap shot here), but generally won't make any guarantees. So yeah, I can go to Fry's and get a mobo and 16GB of RAM, and find a copy of Windows Server Enterprise or Datacenter, and it will likely work, but nobody's going to gurantee that it works. If I spend the money buying a real enterprise-class server from a real systems vendor, you'll have better chances that the drivers and hardware have been WHQL certified, and they'll generally be of a better quality than the Fry's hardware.

Usually, the higher end you get, MS will start recommending particular hardware profiles known to run reliably. I'd think twice about any vendor that makes any kind of guarantee that everything will work unless it's been a tried and proven configuration.

Two different kernels. With the normal 32-bit kernel, you'll top out at 4GB of memory. Windows loads a PAE-enabled kernel if it sees PAE passed as a kernel argument (much like arguments in GRUB), or you're running on hardware that supports DEP, they system will load PAE-enabled kernel.

By default, on a 4GB system, 2GB is for userland and 2GB is for the kernel. Throw the /PAE switch and the kernel sacrifices a gig for user space. Not all apps can take advantage of the extra memory, but a very memory-hungry app like SQL Server can use the extra memory. Depending on what flavor or Windows Server you're using, you may have to throw /3GB, /PAE or both. Once you get over 16GB of RAM, you're generally looking at using /PAE only in boot.ini and running sp_configure in SQL to configure the use of AWE. MS says that generally you may wind up burning a gig of memory for AWE management. But otherwise, unless you're running an enterprise-class app, you won't get much of anything about of using /3GB or /PAE

Moxie's presentation was very enlightening. Out of all the presentations I saw over the last two days, his was easily the most interesting.

First, he went over his last presentation- that due to CA sloppiness, it is possible for an attacker to issue valid SSL certificates as an intermediary CA. No hack involved.
Second, the null character exploit. This was the bulk of his presentation, and he went into detail why this works, and why Firefox pre-3.5 plus a bunch of other SSL stacks are vulnerable. Dont want to get a cert for every site you want to spoof? Get a wildcard \0 cert.
Third, it is possible to defeat OCSP with the number 3.
Fourth, he demonstrated how, due to these bugs in SSL and OCSP, it is possible to deploy your own "software updates" whenever Firefox or other program attempts to auto-update.

I hope he puts his presentation up sometime soon.

I sat in on his presentation at Vegas, he said that Firefox 3.5 was NOT vulnerable.

I saw his presentation at Black Hat. He was easily one of the better speakers there.

Knowledge of the existence of SIPRNET and JWICS in itself isn't classified. Even the DoE's ESN network is public knowledge. The cat is already out of the bag anway, it's detailed extensively in Wikipedia and other websites. You're really out of the loop. That's probably why they haven't extended their networks to your facility.

You sir, are wrong. You have startling amount of misinformation on sensitive document handling. You scare me.

There is no "Classified or higher". It is either classified or it is not. "Classified" is not a classification.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is unclassified but considered sensitive, and an official incident is filed when there is possibility that PII has been disclosed. There is also Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information (UCNI), which by definition is unclassified but sensitive and subject to the Atomic Energy Act. Plus there is FOUO, SBU and CUI- all "unclassified", but considered sensitive.

If the document was declassified, then there will be a paper trail as to who declassified it an when. Should be easy since there are few people in the document chain that can legally declassify documents.

Why would you want to buy a jailborken iPod?

Hmpf. Looks like someone got a hold of Windows2008.

OK, it's like this: Win2k8 has a nice little Network Policy and Access services that is basically Network Admission control. One of the ways it can be configured is to have an agent on the client's machine verify that that the client is configured according to policy: Automatic updates, firewall, antivirus current, etc... the client is then issued a health certificate and the switch is configured to place you in the normal vlan rather than a quarantine vlan. they may be running an isolation policy further upstream so that only healthy computers can talk to their servers. There's not that many NAP agents out there, and I doubt they've written a custom one.

Overall it's not a bad thing, but some people want to keep the aluminum foil industry in business... So what can you do? Well, likely they have a process for handling non-NAP-capable computers. Or you can run a guest XP OS in VMware, Xen, KVM or what have you, and see if you can run it in NAT mode so the same MAC and IP always appears as the source...

Or you can just not go visiting those websites that make you worried about someone finding out.

Get an Android G1 phone, turn on the GPS and install Pintail on it.

You SMS the phone, it replies with its location. Integrates with Google Maps

I see tons of posts every day here of how censorship sucks and how information wants to be free. People piss and moan whenever they're delayed 5 seconds at the airport, or aren't able to climb on their soapbox whenever they want and scream to the masses. But these same people who cry foul when silenced actually cheer when a group of (unpopular) people are silenced...

You're all a bunch of hypocrites and engineers of your own doom. Freedom means taking the bad with the good. It's not all unicorn farts and rainbows.

How can it be neutral now? They're attempting to silence one side of the equation.

IIRC, one of the methods we use to measure the distance to a pulsar is to look at the effects the interstellar medium has on the latency of the pulse. Assuming the ISM is uniform, I suppose this wouldn't be an issue, but wouldn't this cause accuracy problems if there was an area where the ISM was denser?

I'd rather live on that block than in a jurisdiction where shoddy policy work and disregard for procedure and civil rights are encouraged.

You don't achieve justice by breaking the law.