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Hey there Kevin, how does US Attorney cock taste?

Anybody with any sense knows you're a plant, not a hacker, and your hacking charges were laid there by the US Attorney to give you cover to turn on real hackers. Wired has been part of the compromised media from the day they published anything written by you.


Can we have a civil conversation?


EvilLook might be interested to know, if he hasn't realized it yet, that he has been shadowbanned.


>So why should the prosecution get a free pass, if they are using cell phone records to prosecute the the other men but don't have any to tie Brown to the area they should be able to just assume his guilt.

Welcome to America where you are not allowed on a jury if you even hint that police officers are human and therefore capable of error or dishonesty.


That's not completely true. I was on a jury once, about two years ago, and during the voir dire I admitted to having been arrested before, but pointed out that the charges were later dropped. Now, if you get arrested, but they drop the charges when you go to court, that implies that somebody in the system - possibly a cop - made a mistake. But the prosecutor didn't bounce me, and I wound up jury foreman.

That was actually a really interesting experience. I've been meaning to write it up, but haven't taken the time to do it yet. I wish I'd done it sooner when the details were more fresh in my mind, but I think I still should at some point.


TAILS is actually now done by the Tor Project, so I think they have a vested interest in vetting it before it is released.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/projects/


And Debian doesn't have a vested interest in making sure a central security component isn't weakened?

Also, how do you know that Tor and Tails aren't infiltrated by the enemy (for any value of "enemy")?


As we can see in Japan because no true Japanese person lets their work take away from their family life.

We can also see this in Foxconn assembly lines, the home of the work/life balance in China.


Hurray for the DMCA!


It's probably harder to create a "unit bundle" key with Valve for Steam if you're only going to sell this bundle once and never in the future. You don't need any coordination with Valve to give away Steam keys. You only need coordination with the game developer.


I hope step one is making your site work on tablets because your site doesn't work on the Kindle Fire browser.


These seem like such basic errors. Not validating responses because you trust the software you interact with to behave is such a basic mistake that you'd think the people that work on the X server from X.Org would have learned not to do that long ago.


It sounds like these errors predate X.Org qua X.Org. A lot of people have had some responsibility for this code at some point without noticing this.

Bear in mind X11 is pretty old, and these are some of the oldest libraries in the whole X constellation. That isn't an "excuse", but it's a reason.


And when the stuff was originally written, this was probably not considered to be a "security boundary" in the sense that the client will have higher privileges than the server. As the email notes, this happens rather rarely.


Actually it was more common back then. Remember, "client" and "server" are backwards in the context of X. A "thin client" actually runs an X Server, and you remotely launch an xterm on the central server as an "x client", exported to your display.

However, as the email states, this only gets you the same access your user already had on the remote system, unless it's a setuid program. The canonical example and only one I can think of off the top of my head is xscreensaver or xlock. There are now GUI versions of su/sudo that would also be targets, but I don't think variants of these were used back when this topology was common.


This is a good read about how jwz coded xscreensaver to be secure and the pitfalls of using GUI toolkits:

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html


I'd wager that many of these errors predate many of the commenters on this site. X is pretty old.


I was an X.org hacker a few years ago. X predates me.

X is (very) roughly the size of GCC. It's massive and it's nearly entirely C, with a few modern Python scripts to generate some of the more onerous tables. There are many old libraries, and they are horrifying. Eldritch, cyclopean, etc.


A lot of the libraries listed are relatively new though.


An macros to rival, but not beat (they can't be!!!) Perl's!


The reason that the blame is shifted toward "hackers" is that being proactive with security, while the right thing to do, costs money and time. In a market where software from different vendors is usually only determined by price and update frequency spending additional money and time is a competitive disadvantage. However, if you can push your security failings off onto "hackers" not only do you minimize costs but your customers, if they're not sufficiently savvy to this game, think that you're the better vendor because you're able to "beat hackers at their own game".

Nowhere is this mindset more prevalent than in the anti-virus software field, which of course is another can of worms itself.


I'll agree with you and take it one step further.

Windows is a better desktop for consumption of media. All of the major music, television show, and movie stores run there. Virtually all of the gaming digital download stores run there. Almost all of the file sharing applications run there. All of the TV tuner hardware works there. If you want to consume media the Windows is ideal. Even though Windows is an ideal desktop for the consumption of media there is something much more important.

Windows holds the lead as the top desktop for the production of anything creative: code, graphics, music, videos, and games. While certain parts of this may not be without frustration (I'm looking at you, Visual Studio) the support provided is generally superior to what you find in the Linux world (there is no Linux parallel to MSDN). Photoshop has no peer in the professional image manipulation world, though GIMP could fill that role for an ambitious amateur. Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premere or Sony Vegas are in no way threatened by any free software solution. While Ardour is amazing, Cubase and Pro Tools make it look like a joke in a professional environment.

Linux excels as the platform that ties the Internet together. Windows, by and large, sucks as a server. Any of the major free software mail transfer agents (sendmail, postfix, exim) blow Exchange Server out of the water for email (not counting all of the other things Exchange Server does). IIS is a sick joke compared to Apache, lighttpd, and nginx. Nobody can look me straight in the face and say FileZilla Server outclasses vsftpd or proftpd.

Now, the gaps are closing little by little. I think that the Windows consumption market is going to be cannibalized by Windows RT on tablets. I think that free software production tools are going to get better and better and eventually beat out their professional counterparts on Windows. I just don't think that day is today. Or next year. Or the next ten years.


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