Sun and NeXT also sold 68k Unix workstations at the time. IMHO, The thing about Amiga was that it was not seen as a business machine. Commodore in general was seen as a home computer, and really one aimed at gaming first. AFAIK they didn't even have computers with the specs to compete with what Sun, SGI, HP, and others were doing.
The Sun and NeXT machines were pricey. Commodore may well have been trying to break into the business market by releasing an affordable business-attractive OS for the Amiga. They were also starting to sell PCs around this time. It certainly tracks with their scattershot marketing efforts late in their history.
There were video and multimedia applications at the time that could ONLY be tackled by an Amiga unless you wanted to pay $10,000 or more for specialized equipment. Besides the Video Toaster, which 'nuff said, Amigas also provided teletext-like TV information services in the USA, such as weather forecasts and the Prevue Channel (a cable channel that scrolled your cable system's program listings). Teletext itself never really caught on here.
Anime fan subtitling was also done almost exclusively on Amiga hardware.
Amiga gained a reputation as a glorified game console in the wider market, but those who knew... knew.
Yes, but when you connect your phone to a Nebula network, and go to http://media-server in your browser, the DNS won't resolve it to your desired node, because the phone client (same on desktop) didn't update DNS of the phone, so you'll have to use node's IP address.
That's what I've read (when evaluating Nebula), at least.
It doesn't automatically update, that's true. But I think the typical way to deal with this is to have a nebula subdomain. www.nebula.example.com instead of www.example.com.
When your nodes are not very numerous, and their IPs are statically assigned, you can just have them in a hosts file, or even served by your normal name server if you're using a split-horizon configuration.
There's no doubt what's happening in Iran is a massacre by a dictatorial regime, but good grief the parallels between the rhetoric now and that of 2003 are impossible to ignore. I thought we had moved past the idea that the US could just bomb a country into a better future.
I don't recall that being any part of the rationale for the US war in Iraq (which, to be clear, will hopefully go down as the least just war the US ever instigated). "We'll be greeted as liberators" was trotted out as a mitigation for how bad occupations normally are, but we were going whether or not that was true. The Iraq war was not a war of liberation against an unjust government. It was a war of choice against a country that happened to have a horrendously unjust government.
The pretext for the Iraq war was that they were involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction.
It absolutely was a large part of the general snowstorm of rationales offered. "Regime change" they called it, remember?
This Guardian article[0] is a wonderful little window into the zeitgeist of the time. You can see that many commentators explicitly cite the "brutal dictator" rationale, notably Salman Rushdie.
Lots of people on both ends of the political spectrum supported it at the time, because Baathism truly was nightmarish, and because almost everyone disastrously overestimated the competence of American war leadership.
But, whatever the rationale amongst the rest of the "Coalition of the Willing" might have been, the core claim of the war's instigators in the US was WMD. Regime change was a mechanism for decisively eliminating terrorist threats.
The "politician's fallacy" (we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this) is at its strongest when it comes to massacres in other countries. Nobody wants to sit around and just watch it continue, and it's really hard to put yourself in the frame to accurately analyze "is there actually anything I can do about this which won't make the problem worse?"
It's a hard problem and I don't know what to do about it, especially since (as a sibling comment mentions), sometimes you can improve the situation. Other times you will make it much worse. And I haven't seen a trustworthy way to distinguish the two (lots of interventionist-minded folks claim they have one; I think they're kidding themselves).
The something in question is bombing. Didn't Israel and the US try that last year?
Maybe the objective wasn't regime, but I doubt more bombs will do that? Not after so many years of sanctions.
Sadly, I don't see any positive outcome, short of the regime gracefully collapsing on itself.
Hardening sanctions won't do Iranians any good, but it will make the country poorer and less able to inflict violence on other countries. Which is guess is the logic.
And following the export of drones to Russia, I doubt Europe, which has previously been in favor of fewer sanctions, will oppose more sanctions on Iran.
If only the US administration had friends, they could do something with sanctions. But I guess useless bombing it is, or maybe just nothing -- this is Trump after all.
Sadly, I doubt it matters either way.
The regime sponsors terrorism, not reason they wouldn't do it at home.
> when it comes to massacres in other countries. Nobody wants to sit around and just watch it continue
Oh really? I was under the impression that the US actually armed and funded for two years a genocidal war on Gaza. (Btw in that case Scott Aaronson, far for being concerned, actually argued that Israelis can and should kill as many people as they need to feel safe).
But unfortunately it does sometimes work, for example in Yugoslavia. And it would have worked in Iraq if we hadn't dismantled the entire civilian infrastructure.
The killing in Bosnia and Kosovo were stopped by Bill Clinton. The bombings were what brought all sides to the table to broker the Dayton agreement. The siege of Sarajevo ended. The peace has held for nearly 30 years now.
Seems clear they were talking about NATO intervention in 1999 and the ouster of Milosevic. Also notable as a military intervention that was at the time widely seen as a "Wag The Dog" scenario.
I doubt there will be a ground invasion this time. The current US administration cannot build a coalition (and logistics without a coalition is hard), not will the US public go for it.
And is there really much you can do from the air that wasn't done already?
Either the Iranians do it themselves or it doesn't happen. Sadly, I don't see any good outcomes for the protestors. But you never know, oppressive regimes appear stable, until they are not.
There definitely won't be boots on the ground and that's kinda the point. Even if we had boots on the ground there's no guarantee that the US getting involved will make things better for the people of the region. We couldn't deliver democracy for Afghanistan after two decades but there are still people who think we'll be greeted as liberators in Iran and we'll be able to claim "mission accomplished" after a few months.
I don't think there'll be boots on the ground either but Iran isn't Afghanistan or Iraq, both of which were essentially failed states with minimal state capacity riven with internal armed conflict and ethnic tension. There's ethnic tension everywhere, including in Iran, but Iran has at its core an extraordinarily functional and coherent society.
There's nothing left in the files, so there's no need to overwhelm it. If there were anything incriminating, it would outlast the weekend news cycle and displace anything short of an attack on American soil. But anything incriminating has been redacted, so it might as well be the weekend news cycle.
This insipid "it's all a distraction about the Epstein files" cliche is so nonsensical. We're talking about massacres here. The weak ass Epstein file "releases" are more likely to themselves be the distraction.
The administration is trying to distract attention from Iran's brutal protestor crackdown with material implicating the president, FED chair nominee, former DOGE head, FLOTUS biopic director, ...
It doesn't matter. If no one prosecutes them (not gonna happen), then it's really not gonna have much impact other than possibly giving Dems more wins in Nov, assuming we're even able to have free fair elections then.
I performed these types of physical pen tests years ago. If we were testing security for something like a courthouse we would've had a card on each of us with the personal cell phone number of the county clerk along with a statement of work that described exactly what we were authorized to do, with signatures. In some cases we'd have a backup contact number for more dangerous stuff. The idea that the emergency contact would not answer the phone would've seemed ludicrous. They were always aware of where we were and what we were doing at all times.
Damaging property was never approved. Drinking alcohol before a test would never happen. The insurance risk alone would've been nuts, not to mention the reputational damage if someone smelled it on your breath. Hiding from law enforcement? I'd need to know more about that. If a cop shows up with a gun you absolutely do not hide. If it's a security guard on rounds and you're waiting for them to move on... sure.
It was often dangerous though. Some security and law enforcement types take it personally that they're being "tested" and do not react well. We always tried to have some former law enforcement or military with us because they were less likely to be targeted for abuse than us hackers/nerds.
> If we were testing security for something like a courthouse we would've had a card on each of us with the personal cell phone number of the county clerk along with a statement of work that described exactly what we were authorized to do, with signatures.
You mean... the thing that they had? FTA:
"Within minutes, deputies arrived and confronted the two intruders. DeMercurio and Wynn produced an authorization letter—known as a “get out of jail free card” in pen-testing circles. After a deputy called one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter and got confirmation it was legit, the deputies said they were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building."
There's also no indication that they damaged property (they used a UDT to trip a sensor to bypass the door). Neither of us were there, but based on the actual reporting it sounds like the worst anyone could accuse these people of being is stupidly unprofessional and bad communicators, which if you worked with pentesters shouldn't seem like an unprecedented aberration.
Read the article further. When the police called the phone number on the document, the person on the other end denied that they were authorized to be in the building.
But I’m responding to the notion that they should’ve had signed documentation with the scope with them. They did. The fact that their own company hung them out to dry by not informing everyone on that list is not the pentesters’ fault.
I wasn't trying to suggest they did or didn't have the right documentation. I honestly don't know. I was just explaining how we normally operated. The idea that the emergency contact wouldn't answer, or even worse deny we had authority seems impossible to me... At least if you're doing things the way we did.
> The idea that the emergency contact wouldn't answer...seems impossible to me
I can’t understand how you think this is impossible if you do things “the right way”.
Phones gets stolen or dropped in the toilet. Your contact has been taken to the hospital. Bad cell service. And so on.
These episodes of Darknet Diaries were my favorite. Very suspenseful. I also always thought the people doing the testing were insane for assuming a piece of paper keeps them from getting dragged to jail or worse.
I mean this is stuff the security people tell you not to do. If you get an email from “your bank” saying “call us at this number”, you're supposed to independently verify by calling the main number, not the number they give you, right?
Those were always my favourite episodes too! Enough to get into a career doing social engineering and physical intrusions. It's very tense! You're right to think it's insane; the nature of these jobs is that unlike most kinds of pentesting, very few people are aware that a test is occurring. We will sometimes bring a fake "get out of jail free" card to test the very thing you mention, whether people will actually verify out of band. I've been on jobs where we've been called out and they've checked our fake details and you see people's whole body language change in those moments between them figuring out you're not who you say you are and figuring out what they're willing to do about it. You absolutely see the thought "Do I need to hurt these guys? Are they going to hurt me?" go through someone's mind. It's never come to anything truly harrowing in my experience, professionalism and good communication skills go a long way, but they also can only go so far. It's much more common to have zero issues though, because as you can surmise, social engineering is extremely effective, so getting challenged at all is pretty rare.
The purpose of the paper isn't to act as a "get out of jail free" card. It's to (hopefully) prevent the handcuffs from coming out while they verify the information. They're expected to contact the appropriate people before letting anyone go. Usually the emergency contact would be nearby and come to the site to discuss the project with their security team.
> Hiding from law enforcement? I'd need to know more about that. If a cop shows up with a gun you absolutely do not hide. If it's a security guard on rounds and you're waiting for them to move on... sure.
According to the article, they were hiding from the police who showed up, not security guards.
Testing the police is undeniably out of scope in a situation like this. If the police show up, the exercise needs to be over. You announce your presence and de-escalate, not try to outmaneuver the police.
These two guys only look like heroes in contrast to the over zealous sheriff. Everything else about their operation ranges from amateur hour to complete incompetence, such as drinking before a job.
I completely agree. Hiding from the cops puts everyone in danger. But to be clear I wouldn't be hiding from the security guards either once they had found evidence of our test. It was really only if they were nearby and unaware anything was happening that we found it OK to hide from them.
The whole point is to test security. Ideally you want to be found because that means that they have reasonable security in place and you can attest to that.
IIRC they had permission from the state court administrator, but not the county. The building is a county building. And, as it does in all sorts of jurisdictions with a similar setups, pissing contests arise over various issues.
As a security dude I spend way too much of my time fixing missing anchors or unescaped wildcards in regex. The good news is that it's trivial to detect with static analysis tooling. The bad news is that broken regex is often used for security checks.
I think it comes down to what you do with the access. Since this is a public repo I don't think I'd be too upset at the addition of a new admin so long as they didn't do anything with that access. It's a good way to prove the impact. If it were a private repo I might feel differently.
That doesn't obviate the practical reality that "nobody trains them on it". Someone can be available to train them but, if that resource is not utilized, then the fact remains that they weren't trained.
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