Since Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program - as concluded by both US and Israeli intelligence agencies (as opposed to their corrupt politicians) - and has every legal right to have its existing nuclear energy program - including full enrichment rights, even to 20% levels - which is fully under supervision by the IAEA, any attempt to attack its program is illegal.

For those seeking the real facts, as opposed to the propaganda crap put out by Fox News, The Washington Post, and the New York Times, go to www.antiwar.com, www.raceforiran.com, www.asiatimes.com and www.campaigniran.com.

In any event, the Gauss malware appears to be targeting Lebanon and not Iran. Some have suggested that it is targets at Lebanese banks which might be handling financial transactions by Hizballah, the Shia national resistance movement in Lebanon. If so, this is likely in preparation for the upcoming Israeli attack on Lebanon, which is scheduled to occur during the upcoming US/NATO/Turkey attack on Syria.

Allow me to explain the purpose of the Syrian crisis...

Back in 2006, Bush and Cheney were pushing for Israel to attack Iran. However, Israeli leaders balked because they believed that attacking Iran would result in
Iranian, Syrian AND Hizballah missiles raining down on Israel, causing Israelis to hide in bomb shelters for most of every day, damaging the economy, and
possibly causing the electorate to vote out the leaders in the next election.

In short, Israel wanted a "cheap" Iran war where they only had to deal with a couple hundred missiles from Iran (if that, once the US air strikes had taken
out most of Iran's missiles or where Iran had used most of its missiles on US assets in the region.)

So Israel decided with US blessing to attack Hizballah in Lebanon, hoping to force them far enough north that their (at that time limited-range) missiles
would be ineffective in an Iran war. As we know, Israel failed miserably due to Hizballah's superior preparation.

At that point, Middle East expert Colonel Pat Lang pointed out that the only way Israel could take out Hizballah in southern Lebanon would be to attack Hizballah
in the Bekaa Valley, which provides Hizballah with "defense in depth".

To do this, however, would require Israeli forces to enter Syrian territory and engage Syrian forces. Not that Israel couldn't do this, but it would result in
Israel forces facing Hizballah guerrilla war in their front while the remnants of Syria's forces engaged in guerrilla war in Israel's rear - not a good
position to be in if you want to minimize casualties and get Israel electorate support.

BUT...IF Syria were ALREADY under attack by the US/NATO/Turkey air strikes for "humanitarian reasons", that would make such an attack feasible because large
concentrations of Syrian forces would be suppressed by air strikes.

And this is why Syria is where it is today. And this is what will happen:

1) The US and NATO and Turkey will find a way to bypass the lack of UNSC Resolution authorization and will attack Syria before the end of this year.

2) In the course of that war, Israel - using the excuse that Syrian weapons are being sent to Hizballah (already floated in the Israel press as an excuse that
Israel "will have to" attack Syria and Lebanon) - will send one armored division into Syria to protect a second armored division which will proceed up the
Lebanese/Syrian border and then turn into the Bekaa Valley, while a third armored division attacks Southern Lebanon as before, in a classic "pincer
movement".

3) IF Israel succeeds in damaging Hizballah enough (which I am not sure is feasible but Israel has to try) and IF the US and NATO can damage enough of
Syria's missile inventory, then in the next year or so Israel and/or the US will attack Iran.

The ENTIRE purpose of the Syrian crisis is to remove Syria and Hizballah as effective actors in an Iran war, and thus to enable the Iran war to proceed.

Bruce doesn't need to decrypt anything - any encrypted item becomes clear text immediately on viewing by him!

sexual desperation is part of hacker culture... :-)

Which leads inevitably to sexual harassment...

The Foundation is nothing but a stock laundering operation. Under SEC rules, Gates can only convert so much of his stock to cash at certain times. By giving it away to a Foundation run by his father, which can then invest the cash into corporations Gates wants to influence or profit from, he essentially "launders" his stock.

If you look at the Foundation's actual philanthropy, you find it was once threatened by the government by removal of its non-profit status because so little of its assets were actually disbursed.

And further, much of its large headline-grabbing PR initiatives are disbursed over a decade or more, meaning the actual amounts disbursed in a given year are much smaller than the overall award.

It's a scam, like most such foundations. It's done for political, economic and social influence, not actual philanthropy.

heh, heh...

Then there's the idea of wearing someone else's fingerprints on your fingers, like James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. How long after this long-range reading technology comes out before some enterprising criminal starts selling other people's fingerprints already built in to some sort of finger covers?

Seriously, this sort of thing should be made illegal - even for cops.

OTOH, it seems to me you'd have to approach someone from the rear because when most people walk, their hands are facing to the REAR or to their sides...So how do you get a decent scan from the front? Or at all, for that matter? Your fingers are usually cupped.

I suspect this technology will prove more than useless once really deployed in the field.

If we're being pedantic, what part of "quasi-SAN" didn't you understand?

And a "shitload of hard drives accessed via iSCSI" IS a SAN. A SAN is nothing but a (special) network card in a PC hooked up via a cable to another (special) network card in another PC with "a shitload of disks" attached to it. If you use iSCSI, you can remove the "special" part...

The fact that the industry likes to make this complicated and expensive is just another example of how screwed up the industry is...

Just to comment on iSCSI a hair.

I have a client for which I set up an openFIler iSCSI box. The box connects to an unmanaged dumb GigE switch. Four iMacs connect to the same switch. Client uses FinalCut to access video assets on two MicroNet 4TB external storage enclosures. Each of the four iMacs accesses two drives in the enclosures configured as a 1.8TB volume.

Been running fine for, I dunno, two years? Box blew a power supply this past month, I grabbed a second box of similar make and model, reinstalled openFiler, attached the enclosures, ran a script someone on the Net created to reload the volumes, and reconfigured the iSCSI. Back in business in a couple hours..

openFiler is great, utterly reliable, In this case, running over the client's regular network has been no problem, since the path is box->switch->clients all on the same switch and his network doesn't really move that much stuff around in normal use since the twenty machines are mostly production machines.

I'm thinking of setting up an openFiler based backup server for the video department - in that case, I'll use a separate GigE network based on separate NICs and a separate GigE switch - although I'm not sure what I'll do about the iMacs (GigE USB, I guess, if there are drivers - someone on the Net has done it). The rest of the department is tower Windows PCs.

A Twitter contact pointed me to this article over at Jaded Security. There's something shady about this guy Karim Hijazi who allegedly was extorted.

Who is to blame for the success of the latest round of attacks?
http://jadedsecurity.net/2011/06/04/who-is-to-blame-for-the-success-of-the-latest-round-of-attacks/

None of whom were harmed in any way, as admitted by just about everyone including the Pentagon.

Good points: if they're working from Asia their labor rates for cold calling are going to be low. And yeah, social engineering in person works better than an online scam.

I wonder if they also use the excuse that "we're from your ISP, we've noticed your machine is sending spam, so we need to clean your machine for you". That would work with a lot of people. Sending emails allegedly from the ISP with "free antivirus software" as an attachment probably would work even better. I haven't heard of that being done but it seems like an obvious approach.

You mean you don't actually install a fake AV, pull half their RAM and leave child porn on the machine as well?

So how evil are you? Eh, not so much.

You're right. Despite claims to the contrary, home users REALLY hate paying for computer repair and only do it when they're desperate - which is why their machines are in such a mess when we get to them.

In fact, corporate users don't like it either. For some reason, there's some myth that all these boxes with moving parts in the drives and high heat output are supposed to be "un-breakable" for the five years or more people keep them.

I got one client still running a ten-to-fifteen year old Windows 95 box, for God's sakes! He absolutely will not upgrade that box because it runs a specific software he needs and he doesn't want to learn anything newer. It's already burned out at least one power supply and he lucked out that it didn't fry his motherboard.

And it's not just scammers charging low rates. I charge low rates and don't scam anyone. There's just a ton of people doing PC repair work and the competition is fierce. Add that customers don't like paying a lot per hour and it's hard to justify higher rates, especially for poorer home users. It's a bad business model but poor people need PC support, too, and just can't afford Geek Squad rates.

"Personally I don't get the drive to be dishonest for these places."

It's simple. There are two main reasons: 1) competition, or 2) the guy is just dishonest by nature.

In the case of competition, there are two reasons: 1) a lot of out of work techies go into computer support - I did - and they charge less than someone running a store with overhead; and 2) the economy sucks and as I've mentioned elsewhere people hate paying for computer repair so it's not that easy to make a decent living fixing PCs unless a) you're very good, and/or b) you have good marketing skills and thus a lot of corporate clients as opposed to home users.

Marketing skills and PC repair skills tend not to go together in the same person - it sure doesn't in me.

In the case of 2), dishonesty is common in every profession. By definition, most of the people in any profession are doing less well than the people at the top of the profession. This tends to bring out dishonesty. The lower down the totem pole you go, the more dishonesty you find. Since basic PC repair (as opposed to more high end computer consulting) is basically a blue collar, low education, no respect type of job, it's no surprise people who end up in it tend to be dishonest.

On Windows, it's called CCleaner.

But it doesn't help if you have ten gig worth of porn in your Documents folder.

Switch his wife to your Web site, obviously. And make sure you note the Web sites and phone numbers of those hookers.

What kind of nerd are you? :-)