Who are the hackers? The United States Federal Government (NSA, CIA, etc). No mystery. You're biting youself and getting sick; bruch your own teeth. Seriously, the climate of paranoia and total espianage that is Uncle Sam today promotes hacking everyone, including "youself". If the Pentagon is encouraged to hack the German State Department, why shouldn't it hack the U.S. State department while it's at it? Sure, Germany is supposed to be an ally, and the US is supposed to be an ally, but Uncle Sam hacks allies already. If eveywhere, why not here?

As the pilot yelled to the passengers: Peking! Duck!

I once had two ducks. I wondered what I looked like to my ducks. I decided that I look like a duck. All the extra powers that make me more than a duck - speech, thinking, telphones, etc. - are beyond the duck's imagination. To a duck, I look like a duck.

Then I wondered what an alian would look like to me, a human. I decided that an alien would look just like another human. So I began to wonder what advanced characteristics I couild watch out for. Successful businessman, good luck, healthy long life, mysterious origin, that sort of thing.

I found one. At the time he was my boss. He pretends to be Chinese, but hey, what westerner really knows what Chinese people look like?

They have landed already; and they are friendly. I was friendly to my ducks, and that Chinese family is friendly to me.

I disagree with the headline here. The presumption is that the public merely thinks, but may be wrong, and scientists actually know facts.

Everyone listens to those whom they respect. Some are taught to respect firebrand preachers; some believe any idiot with a PhD. Some look for truth in Biblical quotes, but can't read; others believe in scientific method, but couldn't explain scientific method if you gave them a cheat sheet.

Example: Is the world flat or round? Well, people we respect say that it is round. But how many average citizens have a clue to the evidence?

2014 was the year we learned that the Internet is insecure. Not a library, not a router, not a hacker, the whole Internet is insecure. There are British security experts building it up, and Japanese security experts tearing it down. Putting nude pictures of yourself on any cloud site is just plain stupid. GIving your credit card number at any prompt is just asking for hacking. The NSA reads your e-mail, and if they didn't the KGB would. I can encrypt my e-mail, but very few people have keys, and what back doors are built in to my encryption software?

If I have to send someone a user name and password, I send the user name via e-mail and the password via SMS. It is unlikely that anyone has hacked both.

Face it: the Internet is not secure.

Thanks. Will do. But ,,,
I can use dpkg-query to see the names of the packages which are installed on our server. But how do I tell what component of the package archive that package comes from? What comes from "universe"; what comes from "mulltiverse"? The only thing I know of that tells me that is the Synaptic Package Manager, and of course we have no GUI on our servers.

Thanks.

Thank you very much. I have added your post to our site documantation.

Our company runs our own servers; we run Ubuntu Linux. Our web sites are PHP. All I know is to run apt-get every Sunday and Ubuntu can update whatever it wants to. These are in-company web sites with login user names and passwords. No e-commerce involved; no public involved.

Am I a security export? Hell no. I've been programming for 45 years. My first language was FORTRAN; my first "personal computer" was a 360/20.. If it takes a security expert to code a program today than our industry is fundamentally flawed.

I read this and immediatly thought of my family. We're in rural Thailand. I gave my son an Android tablet and I provide a wifi Internet connection: he watches cartoons all the time. My wife plays with the tablet sometimes. But neither of them have an e-mail address or any social networking presence. And, frankly, I see no reason why they should. When my wife wants to socially network, she steps outside and talks to the neighbors. When my son wants to network, he goes to school. No Facebook, no Google+, who cares?

Most of the world lives happily without the Internet.

I spent an hour trying to figure out what this posting meant. Wikipedia lists lots of meanings for "stringray" but none having anything to do with human body cells. And why would a policeman want to simulate the location of my human body cells? Stimulate, with a T, perhaps, painful like a stingray, but not smulate.

The missing keyword was "phone". I live in Thailand. They're not called "cell phones" over here, they're called "mobile phones". If anyone posts an article about (US cell) phones, I hope they throw in the word "phone" somewhere so that we over here can comprehend it.

Thanks.

In 1989 my colleague, Loranne Dayton, showed me Hypercard. On this Apple computer you had 'cards' (pages), and they could contain links to other pages on that same machine.

I was too stupd to realize the imprtance of what she was showing me. Extent the link with a computer name (from the Internet), and we would have had the World Wide Web, several years before it was invented by CERN. She was years ahead of me.

Did Hypercard die? You're using it's grandchildren, IIS and Apache and Firefox and Internet Explorer, to read this web page today. Hypercard on a global scale.

I'll believe it the day that the chimpanzees show up in court and their lawyers are chimpanzees also. The practical definition of "human" is "anyone who can sue you."

I am responsible for several servers running Ubuntu Linux. My Lenovo Notebook runs Ubuntu Linux. For development, for testing, I want the same OS on my machine as we have on the servers. When I test code on my notebook and upload it to the server I want it to see the same environment. It makes no professional sense to me to develop code under Red Hat and then hope it runs under FreeBSD when a hundred people are watching it crash. I don't need optimization, I need reliability.

I manage a hub server and a backup server. Every 60 seconds the backup server crontab (wget) fetches a 'web page' from the hub server which as a side effect records the callers IP address into a file. Even though the backup srever has a dynamic IP address I can always find it by going to the hub server and looking into that file.

I have a page I can go to on the hub server which checks the timestamp on the file BackupServer.ip. if it is suspiciously old then that web page turns red and tells me that things are cut off. If all is OK the background stays green. You can see it at http://gregor/ServerCheck.php. I check it every time I start my browser.

It would be trivial to support more than one call-in server. It would be easy to add more complex status information. From your notebook computer anywhere in the world you can go to that web page and see that all is OK, or, if it is not, what remove server has a problem.

You are good; he is a monster. In order to devour him you must become a greater monster than he is. After you have consumed him, the world still has one monster in it (you), but it is a bigger monster than the one it had previously. And now, as a monster, you are hungry, and we must play the game all over again. Who will step forward to become a triple-sized monster to devour you?

Share everything you do with the NSA - they are monster killers.