woodman

Are millennials so desperate for whats-old-is-new content that they're now reaching back to the 19th century for nihilism?

What possible use for the additional information is there except for an appeal to authority (which isn't useful in technical discussions)?

It sounds like you'd like a signal that allows one to more quickly switch off their brain, like network television prefixing party affiliation to politician's names. "Oh it is a R talking? Well as a D I can assume that everything said is wrong, no need to evaluate individual points."

Stress can really put the zap on even those at their reproductive peak. It is a very common experience for men going through USMC bootcamp to not have a single erection in the 3 months they're there. Same story during combat operations. I fought in Fallujah for 7 months and I can tell you that sex was near the bottom of my list of concerns. Sure the number of opportunities were low, but even pornography held no interest. The tales of sex on deployment occur in very low stress environments: Navy ships and mega-bases, between personnel who don't see combat and have ice cream socials...

I imagine a Martian outpost would initially be pretty stressful. Once it becomes safe enough, and the stress levels decrease, sex won't be a mission-success/safety concern any longer. That isn't to say that there shouldn't be a plan in place, but it isn't as big a deal as folks make it out to be.

> Have you changed your mind about that?

No. Unlike a rootkit, context really matters in the case of a backdoor - not so much the implementation means. BO is no more a backdoor than vnc or sshd. Now if Dell decides to secretly package BO in their product line, then it is a backdoor.

> ...backdoors should only be describing intentionally weakened security.

I can't think of a backdoor that does not meet that description, do you have anything in mind?

I think that we're as close as we'll get to agreeing - the main contention being the "attacker" part. I'd describe Symantic's data protection product as a rootkit, regardless of who installed it. I'd say the same for the LKMs that I've installed in honeypots.

> ... whether added by the designer or by someone else.

Your exception seems to hing on the word designer. I'd describe the individual responsible placing the backdoor as the designer. So if you place a modified version of /usr/sbin/sshd, then you've designed the backdoor for that system. I see no redefinition.

Well I do appreciate you trying, but I disagree with you that it is pedantry that doesn't matter. This conversation is the best possible example of why we can't allow the corruption of previously well defined words - it causes confusion for no good reason.

A backdoor doesn't need to be remote and the user isn't necessarily an attacker. It is simply a secret method of access that the designer put in place, it isn't designed for end-user use. It is almost always security through obscurity, and it is always a bad idea. It can be activated in a variety of ways: port knocking, hardcoded passwords, preinstalled remote software, shorting ground to some magic pin, an undocumented serial terminal, etc.

A rootkit doesn't need to be remote and the user isn't necessarily an attacker. It doesn't need to have any functionality for user interaction - which means no "escalation" occurs (It could simply scan memory for passwords and log them to a file). It runs above user space, and can therefor be completely hidden (but it isn't always, see DTrace). It runs with the same privileges as the OS that it is part of. That is important to keep in mind, the rootkit becomes part of the running OS - that could mean any of the OSes running in your tower (CPU, HD firmware, BIOS, etc).

Your definitions work fine in a vacuum, but they quickly fall apart in real world usage. For example, by your definition: a remotely accessible privileged service is a rootkit, because an unprivileged internet user can interact with it - accessing data and executing code in the service's privileged context. 'sudo nginx' is not a rootkit.

Well I guess we won't come to an agreement, because it seems that whatever reason you prefer a very loose definition. For example, you just couldn't help yourself in confusing the privilege escalation point: "...context with escalated privileges." The rootkit isn't escalating anything, in the same way that LKMs, bootloaders, tracetools, or drivers don't escalate - it executes at or below its own privilege level.

> A rootkit may require a root permission to install...

This sort of phrasing is misleading. If your OS restricts security sensitive kernel functions to the root user (hint: 99% of OSes do), then it isn't "may" - it is "must". Are there wrapper scripts that run privilege escalation exploits before installing the rootkit? Yes. Doesn't that make the exploit part of the rootkit? No, they are two very different things performing two different functions and are capable of operating independent of one-another.

> ...the purpose is the same: To provide the attacker with root permissions.

No, it is to allow code to run at the same privilege level as the kernel itself. Unrestricted loadable kernel modules. Think that is a distinction without a difference? OSX disagrees, as does Windows.

A rootkit isn't for privilege escalation - you need root before you can install the rootkit. This is typically obtained through a privilege escalating exploit, the rootkit is for maintaining access and masking the attack.

No, that is really wrong. Rootkits aren't for privilege escalation, see the paragraph immediately following your quote:

"... an attacker can install it once they've obtained root or Administrator access."

Calling BO a backdoor is a major corruption of the word, as you loose the only word for describing intentionally weakened security - so that you may describe a thing which already has several more explicitly defining names: malware, trojan, dropper, etc.

No more weird and arbitrary than the motion of the pendulum itself. I think you're underestimating the human intelligence component of the system. Include in the dataset an additional variable for rope length, record the data for multiple lengths - there, you've just isolated a variable in the equation and it is no longer arbitrary. The scientific method still works, but now you're working on a much more tightly bounded problem.

Eureqa uses (used? I haven't touched it in years) symbolic regression. Symbolic regression can certainly produce weird results, especially with low quality data, but I wouldn't rate it anywhere near classic ANNs in black-boxiness.

Also, science is unfortunately full of magic numbers - but it is pretty amazing when you feed in pendulum motion data and the resulting equation ends up being Newton's second law: http://phys.org/news/2009-12-eureqa-robot-scientist-video.ht...

If you find a bottle of water to be that great an encumbrance, then you were never really going to walk or cycle anywhere. There are plenty of good reasons to drive somewhere, but cupholders isn't one of them.

Good luck with that line of thought, few people want to be treated like a baby.

> Where's the evidence...

In the court filings described by the previously linked stories, one of which I quoted in the comment you just responded to. What do you think they were charging people with, intent to download cp.jpg? Are you having such a hard time believing that the USG would distribute CP that you are mentally blocking all the evidence available to you? Because I have bad news for you, they've done much worse than that.

I don't like that I'm paying the salary of people that spy on me, I'd really not like it if they were paid more than me. The USG dedicates very few resources to actual IT defense, the vast majority of the funding goes to attacking and intentionally crippling our own infrastructure.

So you didn't read any of the stories linked in the comment you replied to? First one, top of the page:

"...including more than 9,000 files that users could download directly from the FBI. Some of the images described in court filings involved children barely old enough for kindergarten."

Well shoot, you keep producing plausible explanations: so now he might be so narcissistic that he thinks the reason he can't find capable subordinates is because people are intimidated by his awesomeness.

> ...and then kept the site online so they could make further arrests of people who viewed the site.

> That's a massively different picture...

No, it isn't. The USG treats every instance of child pornography as a separate occurrence of a crime against the child. That is the way they've structured it so that they can convict as many people as possible, not just the individuals responsible for production. In this case the USG, by their own standard, committed an untold number of crimes against these children by keeping the site up and acting as a distributor. There is no difference between this and them setting up a honey pot full of CP.

Wow, that is a stretch and reads like an advocacy of Bible skip code or Nostradamus predictions. So the best case scenario is that he doesn't understand conversational context? Well I stand corrected: he is either a liar, suffers from a mental disorder, or isn't a native English speaker.

There is no way that he doesn't know what the phrase means, nothing has ever not happened more than that story.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

-- Mark Twain

Ok, and then ten of your football hooligan buddies jump in. You are making a mistake in looking at it from a scenario based perspective - one can easily craft any scenario to fit their argument. Also, a ten cop dog pile could certainly kill someone.

> which country...

Any country in which overwhelming nonlethal police force is not unfailingly on hand everywhere... so every country. Consider it from the state's perspective: lose control of the population or kill an unsympathetic troublemaker? History shows us which option is most frequently selected. Good on England for showing restraint, but that doesn't change the fact that every command is suffixed with "... or else I'll kill you."

Not on a large scale. Imagine what would happen if you ignored a cop's orders, and failed to recognize his authority as he continued to escalate force.

>> Force is, ultimately, lethal violence.

>I think you're overgeneralizing...

The threat of violence only works when it is credible, and it is only credible when consistently applied. Cops will kill you if you frustrate them in their escalation of force, they have to - otherwise the jig is up and law enforcement gets very difficult. There are cases where the state will intentionally look the other way so long as it remains low profile, because the price for publicly maintaining the status quo is just too expensive.

Beadm first appeared in Solaris, long before it hit FreeBSD (and then PC-BSD) - so the idea had been around for a while. The issue is fit and finish. Solaris had it tightly integrated and made full use of it. I haven't used PC-BSD for a very long time, but I don't remember it coming anywhere close to Solaris in that regard.

Yeah, out of the box FreeBSD just barely scratches the surface when it comes to ZFS - there is a lot of untapped potential. Same story with jails and vnet.

> ... I couldn't care less if it existed on my desktop OS.

Then you either don't know about snapshots, don't care about data integrity, or have a backup system in place and don't want to replace it with:

  zfs send zroot@snap63 | gzip > /mnt/remotebackup/snap63.gz

> you seem to be confusing Microsoft with "the government"

Actually, thanks to the third party doctrine and the regularity with which the government subpoenas tech companies, there is little functional difference - they are part of the spying apparatus.