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Comment Re:Additional recommended reading (Score 1) 81

by unfasten (#28601893) Attached to: Beautiful Security

For those interested: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
And a link straight to the book: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/manuscripts/SEv1.pdf

Quote from the author:

My goal in making the first edition freely available five years after publication was twofold. First, I wanted to reach the widest possible audience, especially among poor students. Second, I am a pragmatic libertarian on free culture and free software issues; I think that many publishers (especially of music and software) are too defensive of copyright. (My colleague David MacKay found that putting his book on coding theory online actually helped its sales. Book publishers are getting the message faster than the music or software folks.) I expect to put the whole second edition online too in a few years.

I have a hard copy of this, and while I've only read a select few chapters I have to say I enjoy the book. Definitely recommended to anyone who has a interest in any kind of security, be it information security or anything all the way upto securing a nuclear missile.

Comment Re:um...grats? (Score 2, Insightful) 111

by unfasten (#28540279) Attached to: Yahoo's "Chicken Coop" Data Center Design

...people can be logged into iGoogle, and still block adsense and all the other crap they disapprove of.

You are logged into their servers. They don't need all that fancy javascript and other voodoo to track you. They know exactly who you are because you're sitting there screaming it at them. All they need to do is log it straight to your account.

Sure, AdSense on other sites might be blocked but anything you do on their servers while logged in is easily logged on their end.

Comment Re:Unpopular but interesting. (Score 2, Informative) 473

by unfasten (#28539965) Attached to: On Realism and Virtual Murder

The source is cited but apparently you couldn't be bothered so here you go:

http://www.google.com/search?hq=Marshall+%22Men+against+fire%22

And here's an article that talks about it: http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm/print/

In a squad of 10 men, on average fewer than three ever fired their weapons in combat. Day in, day out - it did not matter how long they had been soldiers, how many months of combat they had seen, or even that the enemy was about to overrun their position. This was what the highly regarded Brigadier General Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, better known as S.L.A. Marshall, or 'Slam,' concluded in a series of military journal articles and in his book, Men Against Fire, about Americaâ(TM)s World War II soldiers. Marshall had been assigned as a military analyst for the U.S. Army in both the Pacific and Europe. The American, he concluded, comes 'from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable... The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly - practically with his mother's milk - that it is part of the normal man's emotional make-up. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him.'

Comment Re:In New York, No Expectation Of Privacy In Your (Score 1) 206

by unfasten (#28535367) Attached to: In Canada, No Expectation of Privacy On the Net

For things in plain view. As in things they can see through your windows. For instance, if they see a pound of weed on your passenger seat then it's fair game.

They can't search the inside of your car or make you open the trunk. That is, unless they suspect you of a crime and are going to arrest you or if you let them (which you don't have to). But in that case they won't ask and they'll just search the car while you're handcuffed in the back of the cruiser.

I realize that means nothing when you're dealing with a cop on a power trip that's willing to lie on a final report. It is good to know though when dealing with most cops, especially the one's who can get very demanding and try to intimidate you.

Comment Re:Didn't notice... (Score 1) 176

by unfasten (#28532531) Attached to: Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike
I think my post may make it look like I'm running a *nix variant, but I'm running Windows. My firewall is set to allow any local network connections out of convenience. I hadn't even thought about blocking port 80 before and if I were just starting to use the hosts file to block ad servers that would be the best way. As of now though, I've come to like the logging part (and my firewall wouldn't make as detailed logs) and will be keeping this setup until I grow bored of the logs.

Comment Re:Format Suggestion (Score 1) 148

by unfasten (#28516993) Attached to: NASA Requests Help With Von Braun's Notes

obviously, bittorrent to distribute the resulting set far and wide.

Well they're off to a good start as they're already running a torrent tracker for their Blue Marble image collections...

Off topic, but this quote from their FAQ is refreshing. They should share it with media companies and ISPs

I thought P2P and Filesharing were illegal!
This is a common misconception. BitTorrent, and peer-to-peer (P2P) are protocols, like HTTP and EMail. It is true that they can be used to share files illegally, but the same is true of HTTP. Our use here is legitimate, however, so you should have no need to be concerned.

Comment Re:Didn't notice... (Score 5, Interesting) 176

by unfasten (#28516319) Attached to: Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike

Indeed. I have a lighttpd instance running on my computer just for this reason. It serves up a single page containing only the following text:

404 - ad fail

And if anyone is wondering why I'm running an HTTP server just for this it's because serving the 404 kills the request much quicker than letting the browser timeout the connection. Lighttpd is very light on resources but also allows me to have access logs, which allows me to get some interesting data. For instance, I split the logs up by month and here are some of the sizes:

  • June (to date): 2.95 MB with 13,550 lines
  • May: 2.87 MB with 11,354 entries
  • April: 2.69 MB with 14,931 entries

I've also written a perl script to import the logs into an SQLite database. Which allows things like:

All hosts blocked with over 1,000 hits (from the aforementioned April to June logs)

req_subd req_domain Total hits

ad doubleclick 14556
www google-analytics 3927
media fastclick 3339
ads adbrite 1920
content pulse360 1692
ad yieldmanager 1158

Comment Re:What other papers? (Score 2, Insightful) 339

by unfasten (#28515551) Attached to: Of Catty Rants and Copyrights

...people need to shun this circulation for its lack of journalistic integrity.

Considering the response the girl and her family received from the town after the rant was posted, I don't think the people in Coalinga care. If anything, the paper was only reinforced in its decision since it caused such reactions.

The response of the residents reminds of the response in the myspace suicide fiasco and yet no one was even hurt in this instance. All she did was rant about how she hates the town.

It seems to me she was right to despise Coalinga.

Comment Re:BAD summary (Score 1) 199

by unfasten (#28473225) Attached to: IBM Claims Breakthrough In Analysis of Encrypted Data

Second, there are multiple ways of encrypting the value 1. This is randomized encryption.

Wouldn't he still be able to value of that specific instance of that number? Given enough queries (or if they're able to figure out the data structure) couldn't this expose a lot of data, even if time consuming?

I'm not stating any of this is true, I'm just geniunely curious if it would work like that.

Comment Re:It's not google, it's the web developers (Score 1) 288

by unfasten (#28444687) Attached to: Has Google Broken JavaScript Spam Munging?

You are aware that both the examples you give (google front page and slashdot) both render with javascript off, right? They function as well. The javascript just adds more, it's not spitting out the main content.

Javascript should not be creating the main content on your site unless it's a "web application", and even then a lot of applications should still be able to produce something usable.

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