DECAF Was Just a Stunt, Now Over 206
An anonymous reader writes to tell us of the de-activation of all copies of DECAF. The creators have announced that the DECAF project was nothing more than a "stunt to raise awareness for security and the need for better forensic tools." Originally DECAF was billed as a tool to stop Microsoft's forensic tool "COFEE" and was covered here earlier this week. In addition to their message of security the authors somehow manage to interject a discussion about religion, so who knows what the real goal was.
Just wow (Score:1, Insightful)
Good luck with that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummmm... Okay? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually downloaded this thing, let this be a valuable lesson. Don't be gullible. This could have been a virus for your computer, instead of one for your mind.
disappointing (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that all but the first paragraph of the article was the religious message its self, I'd say that it is pretty clear what the goal was.
Re:Just wow (Score:1, Insightful)
Religious? yes. Bullcrap? your point of view. Self-righteous? not at all.
I found that last part a little out of place, but then that's their site, so let them post whatever testimonial they want. Is it any worse or more out of place than the testimonials for atheism or libertarianism or whatever-ism found right here in this discussion and elsewhere on this site (which is not anybody's site, but a public forum)?
Re:Just wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I believe I speak for everybody (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously. I read the summary. I read the article. I read the discussion on slashdot about the initial news posting. I still don't get what DECAF was exactly supposed to do, what it actually is doing, and what message the author of DECAF thinks he is sending with whatever his software does.
Worst. Story. EVER!
Lie, cheat, and steal for Christ! (Score:4, Insightful)
You're doing it wrong.
What is it that is bad, exactly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which of these are bad? And why? I've often heard that getting a personal message out via publicity stunts is a good thing (The Yes Men) and now all the sudden it's bad, and we should pay no attention to these reprehensible people whose only method is deceit?
Re:Just wow (Score:3, Insightful)
DECAF was a meta-troll.
Re:Just wow (Score:4, Insightful)
I found that last part a little out of place, but then that's their site, so let them post whatever testimonial they want.
It's their site and their right, but in general using a technical discussion to shoehorn in religious promotion is considered bad form, to put it mildly.
Re:Huh what? (Score:3, Insightful)
a Pun AND a Meme.
This deserves to be a Score:6 comment.
Re:Just wow (Score:4, Insightful)
"deceiving people is against Christian principles. " != "no self-professed Christian has ever deceived anyone"
Re:Just wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Libertarians (Score:5, Insightful)
But why do you hate the ideas? I'm a weak libertarian myself and find that personal liberty is important. Don't generalize and say all libertarians are extremists. We don't all want to abolish the government. I'm curious about your ideas since I feel a decentralized government that helps those who truly need it, while not having ideas to force upon you about religion and ethics (marriage, alcohol, etc) would be the best deal. This is libertarianism for you.
Libertarianism is one of those few ideas that, if implemented and accepted, really would reverse the current trend of ever-expanding intrusive government and the general decline of personal liberty. For just that reason, it cannot be tolerated by anyone who stants to profit from this status quo. Such people include powerful politicians and influential members of the media. These are people who can influence the society and the prevailing opinions of the day quite a bit more than most people would like to admit.
It's no surprise to me that denigrating Libertarianism is another trendy bandwagon. That bandwagon is intended for people who won't personally investigate it and see what it's about on their own. If they did that, they'd quickly find that the Founding Fathers are some of the truest Libertarians who ever lived, except that back then it did not have such a name. They'd also see that throwing out those freedoms for any reason and with them the traditions of this nation is always a mistake, no matter how tempting.
Such people who form strong opinions and beliefs about things they have not investigated are sometimes called "useful idiots." They are extremely useful anytime you want to deceptively campaign against something. They are so useful because they will accept ideas from others and adopt them as if they independently came up with those ideas on their own. Look at the methods used here. The negative portrayal of Liberterianism is based almost exclusively on pretending like its most extreme form is its only form, and so anyone who calls himself a Libertarian is immediately equated with an anarchist or anarco-capitalist. This is a classic example of straw-man or red-herring demagoguery in the media. It's so easily refuted that there can be nothing accidental about it.
Re:heh (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also strange that I didn't hear many reports about it not working. I guess then the question becomes, how do you know if it's working or not? Do you have a pirated version of COFEE to test it out with?
It'd be interesting though if someone were to hook up a sniffer on their line, leave DECAF installed, and see what happens.
Re:Disabled? How? (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe the software never did anything in the first place.
How amazing! (Score:4, Insightful)
In shockingly unexpected news, it turns out that a closed-source alleged anti-malware software was not trustworthy.
Who would have guessed.
Re:Libertarians (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not particularly trendy, it's just given the variety of positions people can take, not everyone will choose a particular one. When Libertarians *cough* assert that everyone would be one if only they would look into it, they're being ridiculous.
I was a libertarian for many years. I eventually changed my positions.
You're very ignorant about the founding fathers. They were by no means posessed of any modern political ideologies - they had different issues, different positions, and radically different ways of framing issues. Do you want to claim both the Federalists (Washington, Adams) *and* the Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson) as being libertarian parties? I assert that neither I nor you could claim either of them.
Re:Libertarians (Score:4, Insightful)
Libertarianism is one of those few ideas that, if implemented and accepted, really would reverse the current trend of ever-expanding intrusive government and the general decline of personal liberty.
Your words seem to be an extension of the no true Scotsman [wikipedia.org] fallacy.
You'd have to start by telling us which version of Libertarianism you think will solve America's ills before we can have a learned discussion on the matter.
As a general comment though, history has shown that time and time again, when ideology and reality meet, ideology usually fails.
A more pointed comment is that America tried laissez faire economics (a principle key of most libertarian ideology) and its own excesses earned it a well deserved death.
Agencies like the EPA, FDA, SEC, FTC, etc were all formed as a direct response to libertarian practices.
Re:Libertarians (Score:3, Insightful)
I know of no tenet of Libertarianism which states that these things are forbidden. Some people who call themselves Libertarians may believe that these have no place in government, but you'd have to take it up with those people, for that is their personal interpretation of the concept.
I can confidently say I've never met anyone who identified themselves as Libertarian who would even *entertain* the idea of Healthcare being a legitimate service of Government. Heck, you're lucky to even get firefighters out of most of them, and about the only more basic government services than that is the army and police.
The only other thing I'll say is that if you study the works of folks like John Taylor Gatto, the assumption that government education is the only effective education is shown to be the farce that it is.
I'm not aware of anyone here suggesting "government education is the only effective education". The point of Government-funded education is so that everyone has *access* to education.
Gatto affirms that it takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and mathematics skills; from that point on, the person is capable of educating themselves.
No, they're not, because they're only going to "educate themselves" in things they're interested in. If you want to see where "educating themselves" leads to, look at Creationists.
In this era of personal helplessness and the decline of self-sufficiency, that sounds unreasonable, though this was the way things were done in the USA until right about the late 1800s.
Personally, I have zero interest in living in the 1800s.
To that I say: live within your means, spend less money than you make, and put away savings.
Sorry, born poor. Only young, so never had the chance to accumulate any meaningful savings, and the hospital bills already chewed through what little were there.
Anyone who does that won't be ruined by an illness or an accident.
Rubbish.
No massive social spending programs are necessary to achieve this. They only seem necessary when conspicuous consumption is our first priority and people refuse to live within their means.
I know plenty of people for whom "conspicuous consumption" is an anathema, and the only reason they (and their children) are even alive is because of "massive social spending programs". Thanks to those, they can actually live some semblence of a normal life, rather than being begging out of a cardboard box in the street, or dead.
People who do this really would need a government to come along and bail them out of their poor financial decision-making.
Most poor people are poor because of someone else's poor financial decision making, not theirs.
Re:Disabled? How? (Score:1, Insightful)
Neither of those two will get it working again, it phones home and breaks if the proper message isn't sent. Of course you can set up a virtual host in Apache and a script to send the message and modify your hosts to point to your local copy, and it will work as before.