A lot of people might, dumbass. Where I live, I can't get more than 1 meg up for home service (under $70/mo), so using my home connection as a general purpose VPN forwarding point would suck ass on many sites.

Also, since the issue here is about the Facebook population... the intersection of Facebook users and SSH port forward capable people is probably a very small percentage of Facebook users.

Luckily I don't have a geek card to turn in, and if I was forced to have one I would gladly turn it in, since the more self-identified geeks and hackers I meet in recent times, the more I come to the conclusion they're mostly idiots at this point. Ever since "geek" became some kind of shibboleth, it's been all down hill.

Fuck being a geek. There is no virtue in being capable in one area to the detriment at all others. It is indeed possible to dedicate one's brain to both number theory and cryptographic fundamentals, and still be able to solve simple cost-benefit problems.

No one remembers CIH??? And that was such a HUGE thing for a while. Of course, it only turned the machine into a brick. But the concept is the same. CIH wasn't even the first, but notable because it wasn't a buried in the back pages thing either. CIH was the impetus for the dual copy "BIOS protector" that I think still marketed on some motherboards to this day.

You're not that smart, or ahead of your time at least, cause CIH was the talk of the town over 10 years ago. EFI sucks balls for sure, but it really isn't what makes this shit possible.

Finally, I think this story is being a little inaccurate for my tastes and kind of conflates hardware with software (and I will admit the line can be very hazy).. but there is a practical and economic difference between a ROM with a backdoor that relies on the "trust" of the host to execute its code, and a backdoored piece of hardware that handles data (say a CPU or a disk controller) that spies passively or actively affects data that it is entrusted with.

The key difference in what is "trusting" what, and what mechanisms are failing. To a systems designer there is a difference. Moreover, even if you say to this, well I'll just audit my ROMs for backdoors (prevent untrusted ROMs), you are still screwed, because how the fuck can you trust the CPU in the box. How do you know the CPU (or GPU as people have mentioned), don't execute what they want despite what you tell them? The ROM problem is really just the software trust problem moved into a chip... the latter is different, and something that has been talked about for years. Read the old Gutmann papers from 20 years ago on secure deletion. Not new.

If they don't do something retarded, like make the torrent a single zip file (and even that is not the end of the world), since it is a torrent, you could selectively download portions. It all depends on how they catalog the files in the torrent. HTML file level granularity would definitely not be feasible (or smart), but there are other methods that would be a good compromise.

So no, if the people are not complete retards, then you wouldn't have to download the whole thing.

Considering that these people are putting effort into preserving geocities, I don't know about the retard bit though. We'll see.

I wonder what Jason Scott would think about this. Personally, textfiles is one of my favorite places. But this doesn't feel the same.

I think a well written easy to use parsing add-on that simply sniffed facebook data and displayed it would have made a pretty big stink. Firesheep just knocks it out of the park.
Your MITM safe cookies would not solve the eavesdropping.

But of course, none of this is new stuff to even a retarded networking person, its just the presentation and packaging of firesheep that makes it so surprising to some.

Exactly. Microsoft is not IBM, I never meant to insinuate that. The point was that IBM is a successful company without having much of a consumer brand.

Also, I claim Microsoft was never much of a consumer brand, from a marketing standpoint. Microsoft Windows has share because it comes by default on commodity machines. That is a bit of a special case. The Xbox is a better example, but when you place Xbox in a room with *all* the consumer goods Microsoft has launched in the last 20 years, it is a pretty sad picture.

And IBM was the same way. Like Microsoft, over their company history (you can look back to the 1940s and see some of their attempts), they tried to break-out and failed for a number of reasons, both technical and marketing and brand-related.

The PCjr was not intended as a business machine, nor was the PS/1 series. IBM even started an online service, and numerous software products. Earlier, IBM tried to sell consumer market typewriters, and were barely moderately successful. IBM got smart and said fuck it. I assume IBM will be back in the game when the next round of executives with no history lesson and a "this time it will be different" mentality comes on board.

But, like IBM, I still think that Microsoft can do pretty well, and possibly grow without upping their game on quality very much in the commercial markets they already have good brand equity in. And fuck the consumer markets. Other than the cash-cow of commodity desktop OS, they have been mostly unsuccessful as a consumer company. The Xbox was an anomaly. Most of Microsoft's forays, especially in the 90s were complete failures. So much so, that barely anybody seems to remember them.

If their consumer brand continues to erode like this, they might end up with the likes of IBM, which as we all know is not a very successful company.

Really? So because you have a PhD in software engineering and 25 years experience you judge a person impolite because they construct a run-on sentence?

I have a 13" penis and an IQ of 170. I suggest you learn to be less lame.

It's a good thing that in all of American history, no Americans have stooped so low to engage in industrial espionage and that all of the American accomplishments in industry were due entirely to American hard-work and ingenuity on American soil.

Nothing more, nothing less.

It is odd that Chinese people would set such a precedent and open up a dark chapter in civilization. Fuck them. Fuck the Chinese....

Ok... well this has been fun but I gotta go take my meds for being a fucking moron.

Fuck you, buzzword hating bitch. Be warned, in 2030 you may well find yourself left-behind after the Singularity rapture.

Nanobots are the way and the life. If you don't believe in them, may your puny brain turn to goo.

And yet none of the technology to implement this is ground breaking or terribly new, and its just integrating a couple things. It's just another feature on the datasheet that any programmer given a decent OCR system (something anybody could buy for years, let alone Canon) and an OS capable of sending email could implement in a few minutes.

I expect the general population to be wowed by this magic.

I also like how this becomes Evil once a large company decides to put a price on it and make whoever wants it pay for it.

The best part are some of the sites that try to "improve" the situation by having you choose your own security question, and then punish you for picking something decent.

I recently signed up for a service, and put in a question and answer, as required, only to find out that my account was locked out for some problem. I call the 800 number to find out that my security question is the problem. Apparently it was too obscure (I picked something that was near nonsense to anybody but me, but pretty easy to remember). So, I simply set it to "What's your pet name" and left it at that.

Lucklly it doesn't matter, because it is just an e-postage account, and I don't plan on using it much anyway, if at all, in part due to the fact that the company (which will not be named here) seems to be run by retards and their implementation of one their main products (selling postage online) sucks ass (they are forever down for maintenance).

Fuck you Endicia.

fuckyou69

If Facebook is now an example of "genius", what word shall we now use to describe actual genius?

And yes, I'm aware that Zuckerberg gets more ass than I ever will, and probably has more than 100 lifetimes of my wealth. My dick doesn't work that well anyway. Question still stands, IMHO.

Having for years been a virtual black-man with a huge dick at the recent TED conference, fucking virtual previously tight-cunt bitches, I must say I don't find this racist. However, WhiteFi??? Really. It just sounds like something baked up at stormfront.org.

In any case, why shouldn't white nationalists have the freedom to develop their own communications standards? There was an article on here recently about Indians creating their own OS, and people didn't seem to start some anti-nationalist crap about that.

AGNOSTIC ETHNIC-JEW POWER