@RoryAlsop GoT as a show is, from where I'm sitting, pretty well done. Even if you had started from the beginning it's just hard to get into. The story is supposed to be largely court intrigue stuff, which ends up being freaking dense. Hard to translate that into video.
@RoryAlsop On the plus side, about 5 minutes into the first episode you'll see Lena Heady getting ploughed doggy style. So yeah. That happened.
@RoryAlsop I have to disagree on LoTR. The depiction of the balrog makes the movie worth it.
@RoryAlsop Eh, just wear an eyepatch under the 3D glasses. It will bring back all the 2D niceness. Also, if the movie is so bad as to turn viewers blind, well, it will save you one eye.
Whilst on vacation the wife and I saw The Hobbit in 3d, was a first for each. Except for some cases where the action was too fast, and occasional blurriness around the periphery, I thought it worked out well.
@LucasKauffman Note that the first version of the law was ruled unconstitutional, so the actual 75% tax will have to come back in a few months, and it has been announced that it might not be 75% after all.
@ScottPack Peter Jackson still has some taste, and he used the 3D with the required lightness.
The 48 Hz frame rate was a bit disturbing at times: it made the picture sharp, like a documentary instead of the smoothness which is usually encountered in movies.
@ThomasPornin By and large, yeah. There was one scene in particular that was, in my opinion, completely unnecessary and only existed as a cheap play for tension and to wow you with things coming out of the screen.
I had forgotten that it did have the uber-frame rate.
@ThomasPornin I think it's just the fact that your mind expects the 24Hz (NTSC) / 25Hz (PAL) / 30Hz (digital film)
your brain has gotten used to interpolating, so it feels completely smooth. add in all the extra frames, and your brain still tries to interpolate - it just feels wrong until you get used to it.
@ScottPack yeah, there is that. Plus, if you wait long enough, you'll get to see almost everybody else plowed doggie style, too. Including many of the males.
@ScottPack wow, that's... special.
Should we introduce him to andrew? Or do you think its his sockpuppet?
it amuses me that the US censors make a huge deal out of any scene where a woman is shown using the toilet, but they're pretty happy to broadcast a man-on-man rape scene.
apparently they refused to broadcast the "Lincoln Lover" episode of American Dad, not because of the ridiculous borderline-offensive gay stereotyping, insinuation that the founder of America was gay, drug references, or the copious man-on-man kissing, but because there's a scene where Stan is stood in the bathroom whilst Francine is taking a dump.
you'd expect them to pander to the whims of the hyper-Christian right-wing anti-homosexual nutjobs.
but instead they're worried about a woman having a shit.
@Polynomial The viruses are transmitted by fecally-contaminated food or water.
Really? How many times have we told you, NOT to drink from the toilet!
This is a great pic of some of the flooding going on now in Tel Aviv area:
seems the rains we've been having are considered quite a bit heavier than usual. I guess that's some consolation for all the leaks I'm discovering around the house....
I guess that's the story. I never did understand how there is so much flooding every few years... It's just a little rain!
the drainage is not "3rd world" (at least in most neighborhoods), and usually is sufficient. But I guess there are 3 days every couple of years that are above the supported rainfall.
I was about to ask a security question but this looks like more fun... My 2p's worth is everyone building stuff on flood plains. "Hey, no-one built on this big bit of land for the last 1000 years, must be a great place for a housing development!"
hahahahaha - generally no. We don't tend to have big drainage pipes at all, except possibly in a couple of cities, as we have lots of rivers and absorbent soil
So I'm participating in my first CTF at the moment, the biggest challenge is getting a good team together. CTF's contain multiple challenges which are often too much for one, two or three people.
So I was wondering if people were interested in forming a Security Stackexchange CTF team. Nothing ...
ahh - that explains that. It is quite a wide topic, which is why a question just asking 'what do I need to prepare for to get into CTF's?' won't really work. So chatting here with experienced CTF'ers is definitely your best bet
@Lucas: I am participating for the first time, I have a pretty good understanding of the cryptographic and networking principles. But CTF is entirely something else I guess. So what are the skills that would help me and how to acquire them??
participate in CTF's and see that you can hop on board an experienced team or tag along with someone else. The best thing to do is to check out the irc channels for the ctf as there will be users looking for buddies
or you invite yourself to a team if you can offer them something
the skills needed depend on what you want to focus
you can't be good at everything, I consider myself reasonable at web (so attacking web applications) but I suck at exploitation
@ThomasPornin I assume we're on the hobbit? I find it odd that we're still so low on film frame rates. If I drop below 50 in a game I start to feel it, and it's pretty unbearable.
if you havent done a ctf before, there are plenty of sites offering hack challenges, it's best to start there because you will find writeups for some of the challenges
@bobbyaldol if you're wanting to learn the web side of things, I can't recommend this highly enough hackthissite.org particularly the 'realistic' challenges. They take you through all the basics from XSS, injection, cookie stealing, XSRF etc etc.
@bobbyaldol or just go dark-side and start google-dorking :P
I'm starting a project using embedded linux in an ip-connected security camera (we are developing it based on a reference dev system), coming from an embedded-C background I am an ip/linux n00b and wondering where to start reading... any guidance appreciated (yes a very broad question I know!)
On a slightly different tack, what would be the most common issues/vulns with a small network-connected device? (As opposed to server/website/database)
Networking is complex, there are a ton of low-level attacks that all the popular platforms already deal with. Rolling your own you'll be starting over, and have to reimplement all the protections against all those attacks...
It's running Linux 2.6.37, existing web-server is Boa 0.94, it will be streaming video over RTSP & have a web interface for config - but currently nothing clever like PHP,SQL as it's relatively low-powered (think Raspberry Pi kinda specs)
I've read enough to know rolling your own anything is To be Avoided
@JohnU okay, so perhaps not so bad as all that - but if there is any custom networking, or hooking, or whatever, make sure you take a close look at that.
Yeah, I know... I just mean anything serious running server-side, as it doesn't have the computrons to spare for the usual stuff one might do to secure a server
Securing the web interface will be a bundle of joy, the example s/w that comes with the dev kit uses a really nasty ActiveX object which pretends to be secure but just does HTTP auth, it's naaasty
@AviD - we can modify the source, run a different server (lighttpd for example), we could build PHP or .cgi's etc. but it's got to be very lightweight compared to what you could throw around on a full-fat system.
@LucasKauffman - any particular Dave?
Perhaps a starting point is how we work out the resilience of what we've got - if the base OS is secure, if the server stands up to abuse, etc., any advice on the basic toolkit for trying to break it so we can fix it?
In relation to our system, there will inevitably be a certain degree of responsibility on the end user to secure their network, or the part that their security system uses (for obvious reasons) so hopefully we don't have to defend against the entire internet. Having said that, I realise that doesn't really change or reduce the job at hand.
@AviD one of my banks use the whole '3rd character 8th character etc' protocol. so...for me its a real pain to have a random password for that one. in that particular case i use a 'typable' password. its the only one i do use though...
On many servers providing files for download, there is a file on which checksums are provided for each download. Example1 Example2
I understand that these checksums can be provided in order to check that the download succeeded (file not corrupt). File downloads over HTTP or FTP are quite reliabl...
Consider this. Many websites with software downloads also make available MD5 or SHA1 hashes, for users to verify the integrity of the downloaded files. However, few of these sites actually use HTTPS encryption or digital signatures on the website itself.
So, if you're downloading a file from w...
@RoryAlsop So what you're telling me is that now we have to talk about the implications to confidentiality of drinking a rum&coke with Rory in a baconkini?
@AviD Hrm. Maybe if we let SEI know, they'll actually do something about it finally. I mean, he is a mod/pro-tem on a few sites. So, the compromise wouldn't be entirely insignificant.
How bad would that look, though? Mod on Sec.SE, of all SE sites, is the one to get Firesheeped.
well, the questionnaire itself is from the UK's Cyber Security Challenge team, but I got the link through Proprius Recruitment group (I know, but they seem to understand the industry so they are on my shortlist of 3 recruiters)
@lynks I remember my first visit in 1990 on a random drive from Munich (was planning on going to Amsterdam with mates for the weekend but saw a sign for Prague and thought - beer)
I spent just over a fiver the entire weekend
and had steak and champagne most meals
took t'wife there for an anniversary a few years ago and it wasn't much more expensive
you can walk most of the interesting places, so don't need a car
@RoryAlsop hehe, reminds me of northern china. i read somewhere that most drugs are legal, including things like cocaine. not my thing, but is that true??
@RoryAlsop You know, I'm not sure I've ever seen a drunk Scotsman. Or, at least, I've never seen a Scotsman that I could single out as being drunk rather than sober.
@RoryAlsop How's that working out for you? Last I used OpenOffice (I remember the product - not just the site - being called OpenOffice.org) it still had some compatibility issues with MS.
@RoryAlsop Writer seems fine to me, but Calc always leaves me wanting more. Really the only times I ever use Excel is when I want to format as table and use the magic filters.
@RoryAlsop The first of which doesn't exist, that I can find, and the second sucks.
@RoryAlsop Usual problems are with font sizes. Transfer the slides from Office to OpenOffice or back, and boom, font sizes have changed, text no longer fits and line breaks appear in weird places.
I'd like to ask a question regarding the first step of file carving: data preservation and a byte-by byte transfer. Other than making an .iso I'm not familiar with other techniques or approaches that might be used. Does this sound like a suitable question? I don't want it to sound like I'm looking for tools or haven't done any initial research. Most things I've come across on the web are extremely high level and not very helpful if I want to practice/actually learn.
Consider this. Many websites with software downloads also make available MD5 or SHA1 hashes, for users to verify the integrity of the downloaded files. However, few of these sites actually use HTTPS encryption or digital signatures on the website itself.
So, if you're downloading a file from w...
