FUCKING ECONOMY

http://www.scmagazineus.com/Prices-for-stolen-information-plummet/article/119263/

libpcap 0.9.8

Because tcpdump.org is shit, and I had to scour pages to the ends of the internet to find this, I'm putting it here in this easy-to-find location. Enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Download libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz

Broadband Speed and Whiny McCryface

Every now and then one of these stories comes along saying "WAAAAAAAAAAAAH, the United States has broadband that's way slower than everyone else in the world!"

Let's ponder this for a moment. Can you think of a reason why Japan, South Korea, and France have more bandwidth on average?

Maybe it's because, compared to the United States, they're THE SIZE OF A FUCKING POSTAGE STAMP?

I mean, I have a network in my living room that has over fifteen fucking times the bandwidth Japan does. It's called a gigabit LAN, and at this rate it'll take Japan a few millennia to catch up to its "speed." The United States will never catch up, largely because the United States is a big bunch of retarded stupidheads (at least that's the implication in most of these articles). What do we even know about the internet, anyway? Like... nothing. We basically copied it from Japan.

Slippery slope

Today, this.

Tomorrow, kids are downloading and printing handbags, TVs, and cars.

(And yes, I most certainly would steal handbags, TVs, and cars, if they cost 100 times what they should and if I could download them for free with a trivially small chance of getting caught.)

Failing Windows Updates

After installing Service Pack 3 on a Windows XP Pro machine, I needed to download some security updates. After downloading the updates, Windows Update informs me that it cannot install them. I've had this problem before and just reformatted every time it happened, but this time it was personal. It ends up being a simple fix:

Go to Start/Run/cmd.exe

run the following commands:

net stop wuauserv

regsvr32 C:WINDOWS\system32\wups2.dll

net start wuauserv

Finally, run Windows update again.

Have faith in humanity?

Then read this rant at Attrition. They should know what they're talking about; after all, they keep better tabs on data loss than anyone else I've heard of.

I kinda wish one of those incidents would happen to the credit bureaus ("Experian accidentally posts complete credit history of everyone in the world to the Pirate Bay"), and then maybe we could get this silly outdated shit behind us.

A Lighter Ubuntu

To display all of the installed packages in Ubuntu (installed via apt) by size, use the following command:

dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size} ${Package}\n' | sort -nr | less

To uninstall packages completely as if you were making a live-cd, use:

apt-get remove --purge package name

There is a new package called remastersys in the repositories that make creating a live-cd simple.
The howto can be found at:
http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu-linux-mint-livecd-with-remastersys