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User Journal

Journal Journal: Dan Bernstein's crypto pages. 1

Even though the Justice Department dropped it's case against Dan Bernstein, he has not reposted the cryptography resources he once made available on his site.

If anyone happens to know if those pages were ever mirrored and are still available, I'd greatly appreciate a link.

EDIT: I would prefer to find them on a non-US site.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Abu Grahib Torture is typical of DOD and CIA policy... 1

Although I wish that this were not true. according to documents received by the National Security Archive, the types of abuse and torture that have been recently been revealed in the news are described in training manuals produced by the DOD and the CIA. Included in the release is the near legendary KUBARK manual and the CIA's "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual", along with other materials that demonstrate that our Presidential administrations have been aware of these materials for some time now.

It's sort of embarassing to see the military and government scrambling around this issue while the evidence has already been pried from their overly secretive claws. Perhaps if the mainstream press would consider making use of the Archive rather than simply accepting the crapflood that is fed them, the citizens of my country would have some reliable information when deciding for whom to vote.

The documents were released under FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. (The provided link may or may not work, I have been unable to access the DOJ website for about two months now.) More information about FOIA is available from the ACLU and the National Security Archive.

United States

Journal Journal: National Security Archive 4

The National Security Archive is one of the truest examples of how the internet has the potential to change American society and the nature of the citizens involvement in government. Unlike many other conspiracy sites, the National Security archive consists mainly of documents that originated with the guilty parties themselves.

Some nice examples of what kind of collections that are housed there are:

Iran-Contra, where you can read the truth about what Rummsfeld, Cheney, Poindexter, and the rest of the G. W. Bush administration are all about. US relations with Iran are very important to understanding the history of the events in Iraq.

Breifing Book Two, where you can learn how the same Republican administrators who now work for GWB funded terrorist operations through the importing of cocaine to the US, and laundered the money through the sale of arms to the Contras in Central America.

The 1973 coup in Chile, which was planned by and controlled by the CIA, and also led to

the harrassment and murder of thousands of Cilean and US citizens by an "asset" of the CIA, the director of Chile's secret police.

the September 11th Sourcebook, which details the US relationship with terrorism, as well as our policies regarding Afghanistan during and after the Soviet occupation.
and

Documents pertaining to the Reagan Administration's relationship with Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

After learning of the UK's release of classified information to thier National Archives in today's story, I began wondering how many similar collections of material are available on the internet.

Do you know of any collections of FOIA documents, or any documents pertaining to the activities of the US, Soviet, UK, or NATO intelligence agencies?

What are the best and most easily navigated collections?

Has anyone here made a FOIA request? What about and what were the results?

I have found numerous collections of articles and online books pertaining to these subjects, but they are mostly poorly documented (no footnotes, no bibliographies, no possible verification).

Could you help me find more verifiable information than the "traditional" conspiracy site seems willing to provide.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Crash Report

Hi all...

Yesterday my primary HD crashed, but that's not the whole story. This was one of the strangest weekends I ever had. So many coincidences.

Let me start by saying that I live in Israel and am connected via ADSL to my university as an ISP (at home) and have a dorm room with my primary PC (running GNU/Linux) on campus.

Well, on Thursday I come home for the weekend, and lo and behold, the phone company has replaced our nice working ADSL modem with something that looks more like an iron, and it didn't work ofcourse. Well, on Friday morning (after a lot of angry calls and threats to switch to cable) the ADSL was almost online, with several more calls it actually worked (from linux!). I then reconfigured the ADSL script for PPPoE and was happy.

Friday evening the network connection falls. Reason: No connection outside the university (inside works perfect). Well, they fixed that on Sunday morning, but about an hour later the ADSL falls again. I call them and they fix ADSL and the dorms network is down. So, I come to campus only to find out that in addition to all the troubles my primary HD has crashed.
Luckily for me, my nightly backup was OK, so I bought a new 80Gb WD HD with 3yrs warranty and started to reinstall and restore the system.

Then I made a fatal mistake.

I reinstalled the backup script. Which runs rsync --delete. 6 AM comes along. Wham! No backup. Or technically, a perfect backup of a clean system. Luckily for me, I copied /home back, and I have /etc in CVS on the backup HD, so I could restore everything except /var, and I did remember to restore my email before 6 AM, so (almost?) all is restored.
I can't even start to think what would I have done without this backup.

My tip for you all: Backup! It's worth it.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Slashdot Suckage 2

You know I like this site, I really do but this is crap. For a site that preaches about standards compliance Slashdot HTML is horribly noncompliant, full of errors, and coded in ancient HTML 3.2. This is something that the editors don't want you to know. Check out the URL below, you get a 403 forbidden error.

Blah they wonder why nobody will buy subscriptions. Let's see, crap like this, no grammar/spellchecking, no fact-checking on submitted stories, dupe stories, Michael, and numerous other annoyances.

Validation Results
User Journal

Journal Journal: The Most Beloved Slashdot Members 22

Rank | Real name | Occupation | /. nickname | # fans
1) Rob Malda - Slashdot founder - "CmdrTaco" - 975
2) Wil Wheaton - Actor/Activist - "CleverNickName" - 784
3) John Carmack - Programmer, id Software - "John Carmack" - 606
4) Eric Krout - Bucknell engineering major - "ekrout" - 538
5) Bruce Perens - Writer - "Bruce Perens" - 516
6) Josh Marotti - J2EE consultant - "FortKnox" - 381
7) Jeff Bates - Slashdot co-founder - "hemos" - 318

Please notify me of any corrections. Updates: Added Wil Wheaton per AC comment; Added Bruce Perens; Added John Carmack; Moved Eric Krout up one spot to #4 after overtaking Bruce Perens

As it stands, I'm more than halfway there toward gaining more fans than Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. That would be a neat accomplishment and one that I'd be very proud of.

If I can come through (I was on sabatical for a week), I think it would only be proper for Rob to give me some leadership position here at Slashdot. Perhaps I could serve as a liaison between the members and the editors/coders to ensure that Slashdot continues to develop and "scale" with its increasing membership and database size.

Thanks for reading. I truly love you all and enjoy the time I spend here at Slashdot. If I can help any of you with anything (even non-Slashdot related), please let me know. I'm always there for friends (and fans ;-D).

User Journal

Journal Journal: ExtremeTech/My Hatred of Red Hat 1

Well another slashdot submissions rejected, it sat in the thingy for about 3 days I assume for a slashback before being rejected. At any rate extremetech ran a nice series of reviews of 8 linux distros. Check it out Here.

Also, based on these nice reviews I decided to try out RH 8.0 'pysche' - bonus points to the geek who can tell me what it's named after. Now, a little background here. It has been years since I have tried out a desktop linux distro. I pretty much just use debian exclusively for my server and IpCop for my router/firewall/cache. But everyone has been saying how nice these new ones are so.. what the heck - I figured I would give it a shot.

I formatted it off my hard drive in about 3 days. The Good/Bad/Ugly are listed below.
  • Good: Nice, Quick install. Automatically detected and configured my soundcard (audigy), usb devices (Scanner + zip drive), and video card (Geforce4). Very nice and a nice change of pace from the typical 4+ hours required for debian.
  • Good: Wow does the desktop look nice. I mean real nice using KDE. The fonts are the best I've seen in linux in quite some time.
  • Good: Nice set of config tools Red Hat provides for just about everything, including the common server stuff like apache. Would be quite useful for a newbie.
  • Bad: My fscking usb Microsoft intellimouse wouldn't work with the 'wheel' enabled. I mean flat-out refused to work. No reason I could figure out, not even after checking the bug-reports so I had to make do without the wheel which is a major Pain in the Ass
  • Bad:WTF? Why are there 14 submenu's? I mean do we NEED 4 different control menus? Argh. I have always despised this about linux desktops.
  • Bad: I don't want ssh enabled on my machine by default. That is stupid. Repeat: No Good Very Bad Thing.
  • The Ugly: RPM Hell. I have been spoiled with apt-get. I tried to get Opera, my browser of choice, installed. Nope, needed a package. Tried to get some other app's installed. It was about 50% success ratio. This was when I first shut down RH and booted back into Win2k.
  • The Ugliest: NTFS. I still get mad just thinking about this. Red Hat doesn't enable NTFS support by default. Most ditros, like SuSe will auto-mount your NTFS partitions for you. Not RH. Nothing I did could get the NTFS module to load. Nothing. I tried loading into the kernel and everything else it just *refused*. My more geeky linux friends tried it and gave up. I gave up after an hour and formatted the fscking drive. I'm sorry RH but I am not going to spend an hour trying to read my NTFS partitions when SuSe and many others will automatically detect/mount these partitions on install
Games

Journal Journal: Victory at last!

After a long struggle with TuxPuck, I finally beat Arcana, 15-11.

I'm afraid I still can't beat that nefarious Tux, though....

If you haven't seen TuxPuck, try it out....Its quite addictive.....

User Journal

Journal Journal: Karma Rush 7

I want moderation powers. In order to get moderation powers, I will try to get 50 Karma as fast as possible.

I currently have 37 Karma.

I am leaving for vacation Thursday. I want to hit the cap before then.

This means I will be posting responses to everything. Everything I see that I think I can get modded up, I'll do it. And if I have something really insightful, Ill post w/o +1. Its already (at this point) gotten me 4 more Karma. So mod me up already!

Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: Weird. 2

For some god unknown reason I can Meta-Moderate but I have never been able to moderate. Go figure. Anyone have any clue why?

Microsoft

Journal Journal: IE is not a web browser 2

IE is technically not a browser at all. To call something a "web browser" it must at least adhere to RFC 2616. Well, MSIE does not. To quote the RFC:

7.2.1 Type
[snip]
    Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. [snipped]

Thus, a browser MUST adhere the Content-Type if it's given.
OK, now load IE and try to visit this site, or this site (warning: browser will crash). Note that the content type of these sites is text/plain and thus the text should simply be displayed on screen.

Therefore, IE is not a "web browser".

User Journal

Journal Journal: Wow.... 2

Can you believe it??? CmdrTaco lives in the same damn town that I do!!

I think I'll steal his mailbox and then sell it! C'mon...You'd put in a bid, right?

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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