Comment Does Crowdfunding Work? (Score 1) 70
Answer: Sometimes.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 747
The fact that he has spoken at length in multiple speeches against this film, without one word in support of the concept that even hateful speech is Free Speech and protected in America.
Untrue. Just last week, during his UN Speech, Obama did exactly that:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/25/world/la-fg-obama-un-20120926
Comment Re:Buy more ram (Score 3, Insightful) 475
Oh man, you have to be trolling, right? Right?
You've obviously never had to troubleshoot issues caused by a bad/mismatched stick of RAM. I feel real bad for the kid in IT who has to investigate why "all of a sudden" this computer is having occasional blue screens, application crashes, or some other symptom which could just as easily be attributed to a dozen different causes. Of course the person who installed the RAM won't own up to it at that point, as the "user" knows what they did is wrong but has probably convinced themselves that installing RAM couldn't possibly have been the cause
I've seen all this happen just because a kingston dimm didn't want to play nice with a corsair dimm, or vice-versa. Sometimes things that, in theory, should never be an issue end up being the cause of my greatest headaches. Users playing DIY don't make things any easier.
Comment Re:Two routers (Score 2) 520
I guess my point is: if the intruder good enough to crack your WPA key, then disabling SSID broadcasting and enabling MAC filtering isn't going to help.
Comment Re:Two routers (Score 1) 520
Spend a little time playing with aircrack-ng http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php and you will see just how little an inconvenience a hidden SSID or MAC filter really is. It's actually a lot of fun trying to break into your own network. It's not a big deal to leave airmon-ng running for a few hours or even days on a netbook attached to a cantenna to sniff out the ssid and a mac, waiting for a device to connect (obviously it's much faster if you can de-auth one). However, using WPA/WPA2 with a non-default SSID (like "dlink" or "linksys") is much more effective, since the SSID is used as a seed in the encryption and thus would require an intruder to generate their own rainbow tables.
From your description it sounds like you never use the wireless network though, so it is really necessary to even have one on all the time? Just toggle the switch on a power bar the router is plugged in to.
Comment Payback? (Score 1) 964
Sounds to me like this guy pissed off the wrong geek, who set out to make his life hell. Easy enough to do if you want the owner of the network to get 'caught'.
Comment Intel? (Score 1) 456
Wouldn't something like the Intel Classmate PC's been a better choice? Not as flashy, but at least the software is built with schools in mind. For example, being able to lock out the kid's screens so they pay attention is a feature I bet a teacher would enjoy. Also being able to push material/content to all of the devices, or view what's being done on the devices, etc ...
Submission + - Pirate Party of Canada Starts VPN for Freedom (slipslurp.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Pirate Party of Canada has announced that it will extend a VPN originally set up to allow people in Tunisia to browse freely while internet censorship was imposed there. Canada may soon be added to that list since the ruling Conservative Party has vowed to introduce a bill hat would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians’ personal communications. So the Pirate Party of Canada has announced it will extend that service to Canadians.
Comment Re:Acrobat (Score 1) 272
Office 2010 can natively "save as" PDF ...
Comment Re:Soon (Score 1) 272
Crap, wrong SP2. That 2nd link should have been:
Comment Re:Soon (Score 1) 272
Or you could just install the patches for Office XP/2003
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=B444BF18-79EA-46C6-8A81-9DB49B4AB6E5
Comment Re:Thorium?? (Score 1) 560
That sounds like an awesome idea, and it appears we Canucks have plenty of Thorium. Why isn't this being done??
Amazon EC2 Enables Cheap Brute-Force Attacks 212
snydeq writes "German white-hat hacker Thomas Roth claims he can crack WPA-PSK-protected networks in six minutes using Amazon EC2 compute power — an attack that would cost him $1.68. The key? Amazon's new cluster GPU instances. 'GPUs are (depending on the algorithm and the implementation) some hundred times faster compared to standard quad-core CPUs when it comes to brute forcing SHA-1 and MD,' Roth explained. GPU-assisted servers were previously available only in supercomputers and not to the public at large, according to Roth; that's changed with EC2. Among the questions Roth's research raises is, what role should Amazon and other public-cloud service providers play in preventing customers from using their services to commit crimes?"
'No Refusal' DUI Checkpoints Coming To Florida? 1219
schwit1 writes "With New Year's Eve only days away, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration expects this to be one of the deadliest weeks of the year on the roads. But now a new weapon is being used in the fight against drunk driving. ...
Florida is among several states now holding what are called 'no refusal' checkpoints. It means if you refuse a breath test during a traffic stop, a judge is on site, and issues a warrant that allows police to perform a mandatory blood test."
Lessons Learned From Skype’s Outage 278
aabelro writes "On December 22th, 1600 GMT, the Skype services started to become unavailable, in the beginning for a small part of the users, then for more and more, until the network was down for about 24 hours. A week later, Lars Rabbe, CIO at Skype, explained what happened in a post-mortem analysis of the outage."
