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Authentium already broke Patch Guard and hooked the Vista kernel. That pretty much destroys 50% of the unbreakable new security model, as far as I can tell. Microsoft're quoted in that Reg story as saying they'll patch it, but are they holding RTM for that? If not, the launch will be as big a farce as the development process to date...

He does have a blog... if you want to give him some AdSense revenue.

The reason to be afraid of the Zune is simple: Microsoft has a ridiculous amount of money to spend:

http://thingsguyslike.blogspot.com/2006/10/microso ft-home-entertainment.html

$5bn in losses so far, and still no profits at the Home Entertainment division of Microsoft. If they wanted, they could give Zunes away for 10 years. It's hard to compete against that kind of financial muscle.

I still think Sony is a sinking ship. Read : http://iamupsidedown.blogspot.com/2006/10/fall-of- rome-fck-sony.html#links for a good rundown of the reasons.

Actually a lot more needs to be said, but thankfully it's already been said here : http://iamupsidedown.blogspot.com/2006/10/fall-of- rome-fck-sony.html#links

Corporate-Oriented Pain (in the) Ass.

tddoog wrote:

"Too bad for Newyorkcountrylawyer and his blog. I wonder if slashdot interviews would count?"

If those rules go into effect, both of my blogs, Recording Industry vs. The People, and Ohio Election Fraud (formerly "Fairness"), along with my web sites, info.riaalawsuits.us and Ohio Election 2004 would be taken down, as it would be far too costly and time consuming to comply with the new rules. See my collection of articles on New York's rules and the impact they would have on lawyer blogs herej.

Fortunately, though, the various bar associations and other lawyer groups are very concerned about the rules, and are putting in detailed comments explaining how the proposed rules are too overbroad. And the Appellate Divisions have postponed the proposed effective dates, in order to give the legal community and the public at large more time to comment.

Arguably my entire membership in Slashdot would indeed count, since my profile identifies me. It would of course be impossible to comply with those rules, so I might just have to stop participating in Slashdot, which for me would be sad indeed. I have really come to enjoy it here.

Blogs by lawyers are a pretty new thing, but I think they have made a significant contribution. I think it would be a shame if we had to stop blogging just because we're lawyers.

I don't think the proposed rules will be passed in that form, so I'm not too worried.

For those of you who haven't seen the proposed rules, they're posted here.

tddoog wrote:

"Too bad for Newyorkcountrylawyer and his blog. I wonder if slashdot interviews would count?"

If those rules go into effect, both of my blogs, Recording Industry vs. The People, and Ohio Election Fraud (formerly "Fairness"), along with my web sites, info.riaalawsuits.us and Ohio Election 2004 would be taken down, as it would be far too costly and time consuming to comply with the new rules. See my collection of articles on New York's rules and the impact they would have on lawyer blogs herej.

Fortunately, though, the various bar associations and other lawyer groups are very concerned about the rules, and are putting in detailed comments explaining how the proposed rules are too overbroad. And the Appellate Divisions have postponed the proposed effective dates, in order to give the legal community and the public at large more time to comment.

Arguably my entire membership in Slashdot would indeed count, since my profile identifies me. It would of course be impossible to comply with those rules, so I might just have to stop participating in Slashdot, which for me would be sad indeed. I have really come to enjoy it here.

Blogs by lawyers are a pretty new thing, but I think they have made a significant contribution. I think it would be a shame if we had to stop blogging just because we're lawyers.

I don't think the proposed rules will be passed in that form, so I'm not too worried.

For those of you who haven't seen the proposed rules, they're posted here.

tddoog wrote:

"Too bad for Newyorkcountrylawyer and his blog. I wonder if slashdot interviews would count?"

If those rules go into effect, both of my blogs, Recording Industry vs. The People, and Ohio Election Fraud (formerly "Fairness"), along with my web sites, info.riaalawsuits.us and Ohio Election 2004 would be taken down, as it would be far too costly and time consuming to comply with the new rules. See my collection of articles on New York's rules and the impact they would have on lawyer blogs herej.

Fortunately, though, the various bar associations and other lawyer groups are very concerned about the rules, and are putting in detailed comments explaining how the proposed rules are too overbroad. And the Appellate Divisions have postponed the proposed effective dates, in order to give the legal community and the public at large more time to comment.

Arguably my entire membership in Slashdot would indeed count, since my profile identifies me. It would of course be impossible to comply with those rules, so I might just have to stop participating in Slashdot, which for me would be sad indeed. I have really come to enjoy it here.

Blogs by lawyers are a pretty new thing, but I think they have made a significant contribution. I think it would be a shame if we had to stop blogging just because we're lawyers.

I don't think the proposed rules will be passed in that form, so I'm not too worried.

For those of you who haven't seen the proposed rules, they're posted here.

Scans are easy to make legally, as long as it's for eductional purposes.

Ha! Those are kids bikes.

This bike is a man's bike and damn fun to ride. (video)

For New York lawyers who write frequently updated blogs, this could force them to make multiple (and potentially expensive) reports to the New York Bar every single day."

``"Stallman labors mightily to control how others think, speak and act, arguing, in Orwellian doublespeak, that his rules are necessary for people to be "free."" ...

But seriously, that line pasted above is an excellent summary of what I don't like about him. He seems to think that his way is the only way.''

Actually, the "rules" set out by the GPLv2 that people tend to take issue with are not about people being free, but about software being Free Software. This is a jargon term that means the software in question provides you, as a user of that software, with certain rights that cannot be taken away by altering/extending/embedding the software. This last part is different from, e.g., the MIT license, which allows people to make proprietary derivatives of the software. Thus, in a way, these "rules" _are_ necessary to prevent the software from becoming non-free.

Of course, whether or not you actually want to disallow your software to become non-free is another matter. I personally have no objection to it, but perhaps if I had the experiences that Stallman has had, with great work on Lisp machines being appropriated by companies that subsequently went under, resulting in the work being lost to the world, I might have a different attitude.

I wonder if slashdot interviews would count?

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ is one that could be affected as its based out of NY, and is defentlay one that a lot of people pay attention to. This seams a little over the top to be honest

What Google did, sounds ostensically like the sensible thing to do. After all, they shouldn't censor, right. If we would censor them, the chances of getting in a discussion with them would only decrease, and we would hide them from our radar.

This is all true, however this is assuming they are being reasonable in some sense. Well they aren't just look below the saying they won't break the law, if this isn't solicitation to harass those people, i don't know what is. (I am sure other posts are also full of it) I don't understand how they can't see themselves as a hate-group. They even see the German people as discriminated against by the Jews'
I have the distinct feeling that they aren't racist is because they really think it is reasonable, on the contrary, they don't really think about it at all. -Its about belonging in the group, or if it isn't that. About feeling better because you feel like a lesser being inside. Or maybe its about bullying people.
If you want to post about this, be sure to look at the link and read a bit. If you have time, maybe you can send whitty comments to bother them, don't lower your level though. (i mean sensible comments!)

Bleh, forgot the link. http://avoiceofdissent.blogspot.com/

Chacham, To see several (mobile) videos describing how Veeker works, see: http://veeker1.blogspot.com/ Click on the pretty blonde in the white T-Shirt. Hope this helps :-) Veek on!

well IE asleep at the wheel and yesterday Mozilla released new version http://newsfromanywhere.blogspot.com/ FREE MARKET!!!

... but i think that may change soon. A friend of mine wrote an essay that says that maybe public pressure will force the government to adopt RFID at least for passports.

The reason? To make easier to obtain visa to the US.

There's a chance that it will improve again, but currently there's a (grassroots/astroturf?) fear campaign against foreigners, mostly focussed on islamic cultured or coloured people,

I expect you have no idea why there might be some concern, or what is being done?

but americans as well (your current president isn't helping your reputation!).

Oh, please! Back that up, will you? I think you've had a few too many "special" brownies.

Hmm...Interesting Dutch blog...

Picture of Jesus growing on a tree on the whitehouse lawn (blog post complete with map to the "sacred" location) The face is here

Joanna Rutkowska gave a talk about this at Blackhat. Take a program in usermode but with administrative privileges, force the kernel to get paged out, edit the pagefile.

In a recent blog entry, Rutkowska criticizes Microsoft's response to the pagefile attack. Boiled down, it amounts to the problem that as long as a disk utility can run, someone can still edit the pagefile. Her preferred fixes would have been encrypting the pagefile or simply not swapping the kernel. NetBSD's Elad Efrat suggested simply hashing the kernel for integrity checking.

FWIW, I've worked as a school site technician in 3 different school districts and I'm currently a Network Specialist for the local County Superintendent of Schools. I, too, have used and highly recommend Deep Freeze, but it sounds like the person who submitted the question should probably implement some other ways to lock down the computers in addition to Deep Freeze.

security basically consists of a password on the admin account, a subscription to McAfee Security Center, and a free Internet filter.

If you have a filter and you're having problems with students downloading games and music, why not block game and music sites? Take a look at your Web access log and block the sites that are creating a problem. If all computers at your site (not just in your lab) access the network through your "free Internet filter," and if you have a domain,* you might benefit from setting up the proxy filter to only apply to a certain domain account, and then put your lab PCs on the domain and have the students log in via this restricted domain account. That way, teachers etc. can still get into whatever sites they need to, and they won't hate you because of your somewhat restrictive filter.

*Someone else suggested using a domain, and I wholeheartedly agree. I haven't set up a SAMBA domain, but if cost is an issue (which it sounds like it is since you're using a free filter), you might be able to set up a domain with a Linux server, although I admit I have no idea how to go about setting up account restrictions on a Linux domain.

Another great reason to use a domain is that you can set up your student account to be *very* limited; you can specify specific apps that they can't run, or if you want to be *really* restrictive you can even specify apps that they're allowed to run and everything else will be blacklisted by default. You can find some basic instructions in an article at my blog. (Sorry for the indirect link--ironically I'm behind a firewall and can't get the exact URL for you. Please look in the sidebar to find the Active Directory post.)

They have been going in and changing settings, downloading games and music, and generally screwing the computers up during class time, in many cases leaving them unusable. [...] Any suggestions on the best way to lock these systems down?"

Again, the specific music and game sites can be blocked individually, but it sounds like a big issue here is classroom discipline. I can't give you any tips on that. =) But another tech tip that I have is a free program suite: UltraVNC. You've probably heard of VNC before, but this particular implementation is really great for a school lab. You can set it up so there's no tray icon (making it easier to log into a student computer without them knowing or being able to shut down your connection), and you can actually lock down their ability to use the keyboard or mouse on an individual basis. So if you've got some kid that's really screwing around, take away their privilege of being able to use the computer until they decide they can behave. UltraVNC also lets you transfer files between the computers, which can come in handy.

As an aside, VNC also makes it a piece of cake to take screenshots of students accessing naughty sites. Just connect to their screen when they've got something inappropriate up, hit the Print Screen key on your keyboard, and paste into Paint. Save it, and you've got the hostname and IP address of that computer in the VNC Viewer app's header, the current time from your system tray, and a clear shot of what the naughty student was viewing at the time.

One more thing: someone suggested individual user accounts, stating that this was the only way to track which student used a particular computer at a particular time to do something bad. This is not such a great idea, however, for several reasons. To name just a

Take away admin rights, they surely don't need them. Your savings are two fold. 1) You've just mitigated 99.9% of spyware and Viri 2) Less time needed to keep spyware/viri off, as well as keeping your boxes from becoming bit-tortent or other P2P server and or a spam zombie. http://richrumble.blogspot.com/2006/08/anti-admin- vs-anti-virus.html http://clintonforbes.blogspot.com/2006/10/10-pros- cons-of-switching-from-windows.html (read the second to last paragraph of that blog) -rich

Take away admin rights, they surely don't need them. Your savings are two fold. 1) You've just mitigated 99.9% of spyware and Viri 2) Less time needed to keep spyware/viri off, as well as keeping your boxes from becoming bit-tortent or other P2P server and or a spam zombie. http://richrumble.blogspot.com/2006/08/anti-admin- vs-anti-virus.html http://clintonforbes.blogspot.com/2006/10/10-pros- cons-of-switching-from-windows.html (read the second to last paragraph of that blog) -rich

I can say "Fuck Bush" all I want. I don't even have to substitute a letter like you did, to make it seem like I can't (self-censorship). That won't get me arrested.

For anyone interested, on my blog: http://btetc.blogspot.com/2006/10/some-questions-o f-narrative.html

Internet Explorer 7.1 info

(well, within reason, the physical security can be bypassed, but assume a perfect company for discussion).

Yep, have you heard of a Keyghost SX hardware logger? Any person with physical access to the desktop could easily install one of those in seconds, leave it there for a week, retreive it and they have every single keystroke entered by the users who used the computer. Then they would know the correct username/passwords and no-one would be any the wiser. That method can't be used for laptops because the keyboard is built in.

Hackers who would remotely exploit a computer leave an audit trail of an IP address somewhere - this doesn't.

To be perfectly honest a company that cares about the confidentiality of the data they hold wouldn't expect an employee to take data home with them.

If you want an example of how someone can embarrass someone else with the contents of their hard drive you have no further to look than this link.

I was wondering "Since when does anyone have to get permission from the manufacturer to sell a legally bought item?"

But it turns out that the U.S. has a similar policy w/regards to IP.

The reasoning is that the unauthorized sales violates rights held by licensed distributors of the product, regardless of the legalities behind the (grey market) ownership & sale of the items in question.

http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2005/05/is-there- hole-in-first-sale-doctrine.html

The doctrine of first sale only applies to goods made in countries which have such a doctrine. Basically, if Sony has a distributor network set up, you (as a company) cannot circumvent that network. I imagine it isn't a problem if your cousin/friend/other in China or Japan mails you one.

CON: Apple include a hardware DRM chip in all its new Macs. After all... Jobs is a Disney man now, and Mac fans need to be protected from the temptation to ever do or watch anything not authorised by Apple.

It's true.. the fact that it's marketed as an entertainment product and yet there is talk from their developers and the community about possibly turning it into a platform for a new Internet... it's really confusing the brand. IMO, they're just full of it when they say they'll decentralize it some day. It sounds more like placating the concerned users. As mentioned above, it is far too late to change the entire structure of this system. They just hit 1 Million users. A complete re-write would cost them a fortune. Croquet however, is in a better position. You can read my review/comparison here.

As reported by the researcher on the blog, Microsoft's kernel protection scheme is wide open for some classes of malware.

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2006/10/vis ta-rc2-vs-pagefile-attack-and-some.html

A participant (or non-participant, as it turned out), Alex Eckelberry, said "someone at Microsoft accidently sent out the LiveMeeting presentation invites as "presenter", which if you've ever used LiveMeeting, is an invitation to chaos. Realizing their error, the meeting was rescheduled for 30 minutes later, and that didn't all come together, because the meeting had been originally setup to end at 12:30, so we were promptly all kicked off."

So, the system design makes it easy to make a mistake that is an "invitation to chaos," and even though it was quickly caught, the system design either didn't have an easy way to change the end of the meeting, or made it easy to overlook the fact that everyone was going to get "promptly kicked off."

Even if it had been a typo in the URL, that would have said that something in the system design made it easier for a user to re-key a URL by hand than to copy it.

Other networks are in the same fight. I wrote about this two months ago when Variety hit on it and again just now on Newsvine. NBC, ABC, and CBS are all in it with the Guild right now and it's going to come to a head when the contract is up next year.

You assume that the people we have running the US Government are a bunch of power-mad fools, who have no inkling of The Big Picture.

But even the little picture, which you barely glimpse, is important: they're trying to stop North Korea or Iran from sending a nuke into space, or even a big chunk of potentially molten iron to target your roof.

As for the big picture, they know as well as you or I that space travel will be more common in the future. They also know how to negotiate, and it isn't by giving things away before you start. There will be future treaties and international accords on space exploration, and on the militarization of space. Now is not the time.

As I said over at my blog the underlying assumption all through this is that we humans aren't "nature". We're some kind of unnatural soemthing, I don't know what, and what humans do to survive is somehow not "right", unlike, I dunno, a wolf eating a bunny. (Of course, a lot of the same people are the ones who try to put their dogs and cats on vegetarian diets.)

It is, how you say, looneytoons.

I'm a non-gamer, non-TV owner (and no, I don't claim that makes me better than you or anyone else, just the choices I've made)

You can read a lot more stories like that one at the EverQuest Daily Grind. Anytime I feel like I'm getting sucked into gaming too much, to the exclusion of my family or friends, I read a few stories there and get scared straight again.

I've actually been collecting a list of links to sources of non-RIAA music on my blog; I call it "Liberated Music". Any suggestions for additions to the list?

Appears you can disable the spyware with network tricks. A indepth walkthrough of Massive Inc's AdClient software can be found here...
http://wearyman.blogspot.com/2005/08/privacy-lies- and-videogames.html
http://community.rantmedia.ca/node/3394

  Here's how to disable the Spyware
You can create permanant IP routes to "no-where" that will prevent the Spyware from ever connecting to the Massive Inc server.

You need to find an IP address on your network that not in use. (Try your computer's IP address, but replace the last number with "254") Try to ping that IP address and make sure it fails to respond.

Here is the list of servers normally used by Massive Inc's AdClient
        madserver.net (38.119.38.151)
        ad.madserver.net (38.119.38.151)
        imp.madserver.net (38.119.38.153)
        media.madserver.net (38.119.38.152)
So now to create permanant routes in the Windows registory causing those IP address to go to "no-where" to find a gateway for those hosts.

C:\> route -p add 38.119.38.151 10.0.0.254
C:\> route -p add 38.119.38.152 10.0.0.254
C:\> route -p add 38.119.38.153 10.0.0.254

The poly counts aren't that high in the environments....I think. It's hard to tell. But judging SL by the screenshots might be like judging HL based on the screenshots that someone took when it was running on some ancient machine with minimum detail at 640x480

So depending on who took those screenshots and what hardware they were running and what settings would determine how it looks.

For example I have some settings turned up (for avatars) but environments are turned down (mostly) I've got shiny and bumpmapping on but ground detail on low, draw distance set at the minimum and local lighting off.

http://ccslfashionista.blogspot.com/ (yeah I know, yet another SL fashion blog) but that's what it looks like on my Gateway 400SP Plus with integrated graphics. I don't think it's that bad. It'd look better if I turned on local lighting and upped the ground detail.

I've seen builds that look horrible, but I've seen builss that were simply breathtaking. See if you can find images of the 2006 Second LIfe Relay for Life.

I do agree the client needs optimization work and bug fixes.

Right, my first two examples are bogus. I'm just hallucinating when I go to peapod.com and they're selling six different kinds of "fat free" and/or "no calorie" cooking sprays that all consist almost entirely of fat.

All the dozens of other sources on the web that it's easy to Google up who are also complaining about this problem are also hallucinating with me. And the FDA's been allowing this for years despite consumer complaints. Some big companies like Coke, Pepsi, and Kraft are revising their labels voluntarily because of consumer complaints about the misleading labels resulting from the FDA's guidelines.

Can you be more specific as to how this is bogus? Your linked page indicates that the FDA has serving size guidelines for some products. Admittedly, that is part of the problem. But I would think that, for my claims to be bogus, the products I'd mentioned would not be on the market with their lying labels for years, and currently available, despite complaints.

The FDA only suggests serving size information for some foods, and their suggestions are often misleading- like two oz of pasta being a serving. But they don't recommend serving sizes for many foods, and they don't enforce the sizes for foods for which they have guidelines, and their guidelines lead to plenty of misleading labels on their own. But while the serving size guidelines are wishy-washy, they're perfectly clear on the point that if there's less that .5 grams of fat "per serving" in a product, they can call it fat free, regardless of how much fat is in the container.

For an even more obvious example, check out most commercially available bananas

Yes, by all means do: "The common banana found at breakfast tables all over the developed world is in peril. Both pests and disease are threatening to make it extinct. The banana most familiar to us, and most in danger, is the Nanica variety of the Cavendish cultivar group. All Nanica banana plants are more or less genetically identical. Since the cultivar is sterile and seedless, it is spread by clippings, creating clones instead of offspring. It was adopted more than 50 years ago when the previous Gros Michel variety was killed off by a blight. The chief hazards to today's banana are pests, Black (and Yellow) Sigatoka fungi, and Panama disease." (emphasis added.)

Monocultures are susceptible to disease, and the case of bananas is empirical proof that monocultures do die off from disease. Widespread use of artificial insemination in cattle production already means that most beeves in North America are the offspring of a relatively small number of bulls. There is already a concern within the veterinary community regarding inbreeding and genetic homogeneity. Cloning has the potential to make this problem worse.

(Link is to random blog. Actual article was in the Wall Street Journal and is presently available online on a subscription-only basis. Random blog reproduces a portion of actual article, however.)

Also, cue complaints about how they just destroy these potatoes instead of giving them to hungry third-world countries or stuff like that.

According to the blog entry, they're partnering with EI Solutions. It doesn't really say if they create the actual products, or if they're just responsible for the implementation.

I had JUST read this on Google's blog, and when I clicked back to Slashdot, boom: deja vu on the top of the front page (and not from a dupe! :P). Google blog article.

Coincidentally, version 1.6 of KOffice was released today, with a lot of new major features for Krita.
Check it out here: http://koffice.org/announcements/announce-1.6.php

Development has certainly been active lately. Cyrille Berger has a blog where he talks about some of the new features that have gone into Krita lately. http://cyrilleberger.blogspot.com/