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If that is the case (it probably isn't lets face it) then it won't stay that way for long - checkout http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-10164745-78.html.

good luck getting flashblock working on your new phone!!!!!

For Internet firms, the quandary is this: The mere provision of e-mail, electronic storage, cloud-computing services, and social-networking sites could be viewed as an act that "facilitates access to" illegal content, especially if the provider knows that some users in the past have been less than law-abiding. (And the threat of arrest, indictment, and imprisonment makes them unwilling to hope prosecutors interpret the language conservatively.)

Theoretically in some states both the girl and her boyfriend could be charged as adults since they are 17. and since they are 17 they could both be charged with statutory rape since neither is 18. and thus could both have to register as sex offenders for consensually having sex...

You mean like these two Florida teenagers?
Teens prosecuted for racy photos

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10168642-38.html RIAA, MPAA, Time Warner, et al.

The American laws may be better than the UK's train wreck, but they are far from sound. The reality is that if I stumbled upon something illegal through clicking the wrong link on Slashdot (for example), I couldn't necessarily report it without fear of prosecution; unlike ISPs, I don't have any guaranteed protection under the law. In fact, there was a reporter that got several years for investigating child porn a while back, so even the investigative media doesn't have protection from prosecution.

See also: Larry Matthews

Sound? Hardly. The laws are a disaster, the courts' interpretation of them doubly so.

The lack of financial accountability didn't appear to matter in Europe. Neither did the privacy concerns.

European Union Data Retention Direct (EUDRD)

In addition, British Telecom was contracted by the UK gov to monitor their down stream partners. This monitoring will be done at the UK taxpayers expense. I thought that's why we had the NSA here in the US.

While it isn't possible for someone to upstream monitor the DHCP assignment made through my home WiFi router, they could fairly easily know I was using one.

From a privacy perspective, it may not matter as much whether personal WiFi devices need to maintain logs if ISPs must. Although the "last mile" would button this up a bit.

From a financial perspective, the proposed legislation, unless there was grandfathering of existing devices, would require a massive outlay to upgrade almost immediately, not to mention the ongoing expense. At least there wasn't the suggestion that we log directly to some gov't file store.

IANAL, but from a legal liability perspective, the "shall retain" piece could be interpreted to reply that just attempt to log and failing wouldn't be an adequate defense. Given the requirement of "shall", what happens with faulty logs, old devices that now can't be thrown away and the rampant misconfigurations that are sure to happen? This isn't "commercially reasonable" or "best efforts".

We all want to protect the children from bad people. This isn't really an effective prevention technique as much as it is an after-the-fact method of facilitating prosecution, which is sufficiently fungible to be used for more nefarious purposes by less altruistic members of our government.

Take a moment and let your congressperson and senator know how you feel. I certainly will.

Google has 23.7% online market share. In what way is 23.7% close to a monopoly?

Re-read what I said, and then re-read the reference you provided, and see if you can spot the disconnect. Hint: "search" for it.

In what way is 23.7% close to a monopoly?

In the way that 23.7% has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

Google search in US: 70%
Google search in Germany: 88%
Google search in France: 89%
Google search in the UK: 90%
Google search in Europe overall: 80%

70-90% is fast closing in on monopoly territory. In the US, for exampe, Google captured 90% of all growth in search, meaning, it is is steadily increasing its market share.

Doesn't it suck when you throw out unsupported allegations...

I accept your apology.

Cites:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/jun/10/googleukclosesinon90mark

http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/articles/search-engine-optimization/search-engine-market-shares-europe.php

http://lab.77agency.com/marketing-analysis/google-leads-the-search-engine-industry-holding-80-of-the-european-market-share-485/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9991866-93.html

Wouldn't it be even funnier if they weren't a monopoly?

By your logic Microsoft is not a monopoly either.

I don't know what the GP's threshold for monopoly status is, but it's apparent he thinks it's more than 59% market share. You are the one with faulty logic to then reason that because he doesn't think 59% is enough that he must not think 89% is enough.

My biggest gripe about these black hat papers is that they aren't as useful to non-black hats; there are no proposed solutions or workarounds.

I think the most important trick in the paper is that first one you mentioned, of MITM translating server-side SSL to client-side plain-text and assuming the reader won't notice (or care). The easiest workaround is to get Firefox to return the yellow background. You still have to train users to mentally require it, but it's a step in the right direction.

On to the second hack you noted. The article specifically mentions that .com and several other top level domains (TLDs) are purposefully punycoded (see page 90). However, the logic is still sound and the actual TLD doesn't matter. The example Moxie used was *.ijjk.cn.

A solution proposal (from the top of my head): In the specific case of IDN-valid characters that approximate slash and question-mark, the simple solution is to propose a feature in firefox that recognizes them. Specifically, anything that appears to be forging a protected TLD, so punycoding IDN domains matching a regex like \w\W+(com|net|org)\W (and perhaps additionally a search for any of the proposed confusing characters), would cover a lot of ground. In the meanwhile, you could put the domain up in firefox's blue SSL box.

The final vulnerability discussed in the paper (the first one in the paper's ordering) was that of standard certificates acting as intermediate certificates in the chain. This has an obvious solution and the paper even implies (but doesn't verify ... freaking black hats) that Firefox already has it implemented.

My biggest gripe about these black hat papers is that they aren't as useful to non-black hats; there are no proposed solutions or workarounds.

I think the most important trick in the paper is that first one you mentioned, of MITM translating server-side SSL to client-side plain-text and assuming the reader won't notice (or care). The easiest workaround is to get Firefox to return the yellow background. You still have to train users to mentally require it, but it's a step in the right direction.

On to the second hack you noted. The article specifically mentions that .com and several other top level domains (TLDs) are purposefully punycoded (see page 90). However, the logic is still sound and the actual TLD doesn't matter. The example Moxie used was *.ijjk.cn.

A solution proposal (from the top of my head): In the specific case of IDN-valid characters that approximate slash and question-mark, the simple solution is to propose a feature in firefox that recognizes them. Specifically, anything that appears to be forging a protected TLD, so punycoding IDN domains matching a regex like \w\W+(com|net|org)\W (and perhaps additionally a search for any of the proposed confusing characters), would cover a lot of ground. In the meanwhile, you could put the domain up in firefox's blue SSL box.

The final vulnerability discussed in the paper (the first one in the paper's ordering) was that of standard certificates acting as intermediate certificates in the chain. This has an obvious solution and the paper even implies (but doesn't verify ... freaking black hats) that Firefox already has it implemented.

And then there's MIRO .

Along with this article with step by step instructions for having Miro seek out via RSS the programs one is interested in, Torrenting them, and waiting for one to watch them. (FYI, the article leaves out one important step in setting up the RSS feeds, this is addressed in the comments.)

It's a damned poor video card and monitor/TV that can't connect via at least ONE port or another.

As Miro runs on just about anything, even an old 1Ghz G4 Mac, as long as it has a decent video card, can easily process and display "content" on a monitor or TV.

Stick a TV tuner card in an empty PCI slot, plug in an antenna of some sort, and with some more free software and the TitanTV website , and maybe an IR Blaster in one of the USB ports for your cable box if you have one, you have an over the air/cable DVR. (at least in the US.)

Hell, given how cheap halfway decent computers are these days via eBay and Craigslist, you can wind up easily spending more on video and tuner cards than for the actual computer itself.

TV as we have known it is dieing. The easier the media conglomerates make it for us to watch their products, the more likely we are to accept some commercials. Be dicks about whole thing, and we'll watch your stuff commercial free. And considering how easy it is to watch commercial free RIGHT NOW, I don't think there's a whole lot they CAN do to get us to watch their commercials under any circumstances.

I think they just may have begun to sharpen that razor that will cut their collective throats from ear to ear, and that razor will be wielded by their own hands.

if what you're saying were true, we ought to expect to see OS X's market share decrease after the clones were killed; the inverse is true. the primary reason for PowerPC's failure to remain competitive on performance in the desktop or laptop markets is that it simply wasn't the focus of the main designer and manufacturer, IBM.

No. The PPC clones were killed way before OS X even came to the market. Apple continuously sent mixed signals and screwed Motorola and IBM over to the point they figured out it wasn't worth the effort. Mac OS Classic was stale at that time anyway, its a wonder how the machines even got sold. Even Windows 95 was better.

I bet few here know that the famous RFC 1149 has actually been implemented.

RFC1149 has been around for awhile now. Get out much? It was based on the older military protocol involving homing pigeons. See? A great deal of tech has a decidedly military bent to it! Brilliant!

I try to use carrier pigeons, smoke signals, semaphore flag towers, and the telegraph whenever possible.

I bet few here know that the famous RFC 1149 has actually been implemented.

I'm working on a writeup for a semaphore based system. Still not sure how to handle bad routes due to German invasions.

He's made some very good pledges about openness and anti-corruption measures, so now's the time for him to live up to them.

Here's some background on Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10110922-38.html

Intellectual property piracy: "This is theft"
Less ambiguous were Holder's arguments for aggressive enforcement of U.S. intellectual property laws. In 1999, he joined the president of Adobe Systems at an event in San Jose, Calif., to announce that digital piracy had become a real problem and would become a "real priority" for the Justice Department.

"This is theft, pure and simple," Holder said at the time.

The Business Software Alliance, which counts Adobe Systems and Microsoft as members, applauded Holder's nomination this week. "He's smart, he's dedicated, open minded, he's very tenacious in pursuing the goals of the department," said BSA president Robert Holleyman. "We're very enthusiastic...He's a first rate choice."

Do not expect any change from the previous administration's stance on IP matters. It's going to be pretty much corporatist justice, if not more so.

They tried that already, by trying to buy a small island (tried twice actually), and starting their own country. Neither attempts succeeded.

I'm by no means up-to-date on the laws of all ~260 countries or whatever, but I don't think there is anywhere that is entirely "safe", there may be a few where it is legal, or at least not illegal to do what they do, but that same country probably wouldn't be the best place to do their business for other reasons (mobs, poor internet, low food, weather, etc), or is easily influenced by anyone with money, status, popularity negating any "safeness" there may be.

I'm Canadian, and we have some of the laxest laws regarding P2P:
File sharing legal in Canada
Canadian Police Tolerates Piracy For Personal Use

And Torrent sites such as IsoHunt, moving to Canada... however, on the contrary:
Court in Canada Shuts Down Torrent Site

And it seems to be leaning more and more in that (downward) direction, so what may be "safe" now, may not be in 6 months.

Personally, I have zero problem with TPB, MiniNova, Demonoid, or any of the rest... they are by far the wrong targets to be going after, you may as well go after Google, Yahoo, or even Microsoft (Windows XP Torrent) as they all contain links to torrents to copyright/illegal torrents as well, and much like Torrent servers, they do not contain the actual files, but just the torrent, which is basically a glorified network file shortcut, and although I hate to say it, targetting Axxo, FXG, etc would make more sense, but still far from proper sense.

Fix the pricing, and "artistic/personal use" limitations, and everyone would pretty much get along fine, even though there will always be "illegal" torrents/files on the interent, no matter how many ways you try and stop them.

The clearest examples, of course, are the "hardball" ones: code releases where the person in question did not want to release the code for their derived version, but was forced to do so as part of the settlement of a GPL-violation lawsuit. For example, Monsoon Media released their source code only after being sued by BusyBox developers. It seems pretty clear that had BusyBox not been copyleft-licensed, Monsoon Media wouldn't have released their code.

Sarge really was the source of these endless jokes. Almost three years, on a Linux that was considerably less mature than it is today was forever...

Sure, the release time from Woody to Sarge was funny until you realized that even with the umpteen thousands of packages included with Sarge, the Debian team still beat release times between Microsoft's bare-bones desktop OSes Windows XP and Vista.

Not to troll anything, but under the Bush Adminstration (BushCo), much of the government's computers were running an outdated version of Microsoft Windows. (Like Windows ME.) Computers crashed, things didn't work. Thus when the Obama Adminstration showed up, they were floored that the country that is suppost to be this technologically advanced nation was still using CRT monitors, hadn't updated any of its software, and many computers weren't being used.

Now comes word that Cuba is working on its own Linux distro. Cuba, whose nationalized education system seems to have florished unless you do a search for "dissent", is gaining up on us since Mexico, Canada, and just about every other Latin American country does not have the trade restrictions that we still have here in America. What the hell were we doing protesting about US-Columbian Free-Trade Restrictions the same way the Cubans have critized the U.S. on many of their websites over five prisioners we are holding? It says to me, Bush was still feeding his crack habit.

The use of the word Free Trade is definitely not the same as Free Software.

America has been resistant technologically for over a decade. Still messing with Coal, Nuclear, Oil, Television, and Microsoft. Entities that have fought to keep the world in the 1980s where greed and drugs florished. We are now closing the first decade of the third millenium, where Wind, Solar, Hybrid, The Internet, Google, and Linux MUST REPLACE the archaic and destructive entinties that are now obsolete and are devistating our livelyhood.

The naysayers will have their marketing misinformation and obsolete disinformation, telling us that the new technology "is not as profitable" as the old technology or "is not selling so it is not popular". You can't sell hybrids if they are twice as expensive as the gas guzzler. You can't sell us alternative energy when it is used in an area where there is overconsuption of energy rather than neighborhoods or schools.

We can not afford to be lied to by the naysayers. Let's get this done!

Sooner or later, transponders will simply get integrated into license plates, and those will be a lot harder to clone.

Like the tags in passports have?

The coverage on Wired and CNET suggests at least *some* of this audience is interested: * http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/bookworm-gives.html * http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10161617-1.html And while we're thrilled to get the attention, this is more about supporting an important standards-based open-source project than about generating buzz.

Does TPB make millions from advertising? Is there any point advertising to pirates?

http://rixstep.com/1/20060708,00.shtml
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9814504-7.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/the-pirate-bay-makes-4-million-a-year-on-illegal-p2p-file-sharing-says-prosecutor/

Yes, they do, and yes, there is. Apparently.

Also, I am not sure getting cats to stop cable-chewing rats is such a good idea!

Who told you that OSS is less safe than closed sourceWho told you that OSS is less safe than closed source?

A representative of a company who wants to sell!

MS is known to have used a business tactics known as Fear, Uncertainty and Disorientation

Facts are:

MS source code can be obtained by Hackers/Crackers through illegitimate channels - the availability of source code is not an argument.

Thousands of experts monitor OSS source code and vulnerabilities are discussed in the open. Hackers recognizing vulnerabilities in MS source code are not to publish it, but to write exploits!

Number of successful attacks on MS and other closed source products in comparison to OSS products speaks for itself.

Average workload consumed per machine for remedy of exploitation coed ( malware removal ) was per Windows machines 20 manhours, for Linux machines 0.01 hours at a company running 5000 PCs

You can offer security tests and penetration tests to your costumer !

The largest institutions and companies where security is an issue use Linux

• DoDs http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3846976086.html http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/20/cz_eb_0620linux.html
• NSAs even created SE linux http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/
• IBM - you know IBM?
• DHS http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?position=limited&host=dhs.gov
• FBI http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?restriction=site+contains&host=fbi.gov&lookup=wait..&position=limited
• Navy http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?restriction=site+contains&host=navy.mil&lookup=wait..&position=limited
• Air Force http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?restriction=site+contains&host=airforce.com&lookup=wait..&position=limited
• Amazon http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-275155.html
• Google just google Google about use of Linux

• Contraindications - or failures of MS installations in the media:

• French http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Computer_virus_grounds_French_fighter_planes/articleshow/4094774.cms
• British http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/15/royal_navy_email_virus_outage/
• US http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/38384

the countires adopting Linux in the first place are rthose where people cannot afford the price of retail Microsoft software [...]

You don't read much news, do you?

I find this rather ironic considering that up until May of 2008 it was illegal to own a personal computer in Cuba and even now, almost a year later, the prices remain out of reach for ordinary Cubans. This excerpt from a CNet article at the subject really sums it up nicely:

"don't expect to start surfing Cubans' blogs about what it's like to collect a state monthly salary of about $20 anytime soon; most of these PCs will not be allowed connections to the Internet, according to the report. Only trusted officials and state journalists are allowed access to the Web."

What good does it do to have the opportunity to purchase a PC that costs a several times your annual salary and has no Internet access? The only Internet access available to most Cubans will probably be through government controlled public Internet cafes which require ID, have round the clock surveillance, and heavily filtered access at high (although perhaps barely affordable) prices on public PCs. If the failure of socialism ever needed an example then Cuba would be it. I would rather take my chances with expensive health care (thank you very much Michael Moore) then live in ass backwards country like that.

So making a law will somehow keep this from happening?

Seeing as Feinstein's would kill net neutrality it would allow this to happen.

Right because this unregulated net has resulted in that already, not like i can't do BT or gaming on my big evil comcast subscription. whoops, i guessi still can.

Only until ISPs start throttling, as Comcast does.

And how about just letting the free market work it's magic.

Yes, if there were a free market however there is not one. Most of those people who have access through Comcast can only get broadband through Comcast. If there were a free market then there's be a number of different choices, I could choose Broadband ISP1, Broadband ISP2, Broadband ISP3, or another broadband ISP. Most people, at least in the US do not have that choice.

Falcon

here's TFA: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10162077-76.html

Looking into this, I found:

http://news.cnet.com/Create-an-e-annoyance,-go-to-jail/2010-1028_3-6022491.html

Which seems particularly relevant to the case in hand (Assuming this law is still on the books).

What I really wanted to look up was the laws on impersonation. If they do 'catch' you posting on-line as someone else, you could be busted for impersonation as well. From what I found, anyone using another person's identity while committing a crime or eliciting benefit from the name could be liable for impersonation. Your Bob Dylan reference as funny as it is could put you in hot water; Unless of course that is your real name =)

How to setup Miro for automatic downloading of your favorite shows. I've been doing this for a couple of years now. Grab your feeds from tvRSS.net. Use the filters properly and will d/l only the episodes you want. Enjoy.

Yep, picking up the FUD campaign again. Maybe due to this?: M$ New PR Guy.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-5083458.html China has access to windows source code. Legally.

It might be better to say that several large internet entities who employ the top people in tech obviously have a preference for Linux.

And then all you need to do is some large company name-dropping. Pointing out all the ways someone has already used Linux personally (without knowing it) would also be a help.

Here's one that comes to mind:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-275155.html

I turned my iTouch into an iTouch phone by simply duct-taping a second cell phone that I already had to the back of it. Okay so it's not as thin as an iPhone and I'm probably in violation of some patents of the Samsung Upstage, but hey it has better signal reliability than any of them.

I'm not making excuses for Linux. Fact is is marketing, which Linus distros do little of, has a big impact of what people buy. If advertizing, part of marketing, didn't have an impact then businesses would not spend a lot on it. And yes, businesses do spend a lot on marketing. pharmaceutical companies [pdf warning] spend more on marketing than on research.

Ubuntu is not as a good as a desktop operating system as Windows Vista. It's just not.

Ubuntu may not be good to you but it is to plenty of other users. And there are plenty who do not like Vista, if people liked it then OEMs would not offer a downgrade path from Vista to XP. It also offers competition, and without competition things hardly improve.

Falcon

Where is the beef? Broadband is as much a delivery 'pipe' as these strategically important networks:

Electric Grid.
Interstate Freeways.
Railways.
Air Traffic Control.
Rivers and Canals.

The $10 billion investment will *not* bring about the degree of change possible if broadband networks do not get treated as a strategic asset with equal access. A government/private-sector non-profit consortium should be given the money and tasked to bring this about. There are many ways of achieving a policy objective. Now that there is money to do something, it should be put to use defining what will bring about the biggest bang for the buck, and then putting the investment there. It has to be a deliberate and coordinated effort, and not some relatively vague destination this $10 billion has taken.

The policy can direct the implementation of 1gbps connections, as Japan has set out to do, with the consortium tasked to determine how to bring it about. At an extreme, what can be achieved today is demonstrated by the world's fastest Internet connection. http://www.thelocal.se/7869/20070712. At 40gbps it blows away my puny 10mbps fiber connection. I'll be satisfied with 1gbps to match my wired home network.

The broadband private sector will likely 'rant and rave', to the degree this effort will be labelled 'socialism', ignoring the fact that it is quite the opposite - a 'capitalist' investment designed to bring about much bigger and better markets. Socialism tends to restrict free and open markets, which at times is the private sector's indulgence and delight. Philosophically, companies resistant to the idea are, by this definition, the 'socialists'. They do not see the bigger profit and are therefore of disservice to their shareholders.

As an example, Comcast has become the free marketer's laughing stock by deciding to 'close the runway to certain kinds of aircraft' http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9800629-38.html - instead of taking the more sensible approach of promoting and lobbying for the coordinated research, development, and adoption of higher bandwidth technologies in order to eliminate the bandwidth issue. A broadband network outside Comcast control eliminates this kind of inevitable private sector 'gaming'. Your SUV cannot be blocked from the freeway because Comcast objects to it carrying Firefox T-Shirts.

If you really hate the new "awsome bar" that much, turn it off!

Firefox 3 is both faster and has a lighter footprint than ff2. I used opera as my main browser before, but with ff3, I could finally use it day-to-day on my ancient computer.

Geeks like us have already dominated the server-side of the Linux equation, now fools will win the desktop for us.

Huh? http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-6041804.html

I really don't know why you think Linux on embedded OSes will help it in other markets; I know my cable box runs Linux. That has no impact on me though and my desktop OS. I doubt I'd change my desktop due to what my phone runs, or what my Zune runs.

While partial encryption strategies for sensitive data may be a good idea, whole-disk-encryption is largely a bad idea. Most users don't really need to encrypt stuff like temporary files, os files, program files etc. It's just the sensitive user-created stuff that may need protection.

Especially, some researchers have found that whole-disk-encryption is fairly easy broken (pure software solution) for any machine that has had it's keys in ram (not wiped) up to the last 5 minutes or so. (I.e. in ACPI Standby).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9876060-38.html
http://www.itpro.co.uk/170304/disk-encryption-easily-defeated-research-shows

I go with similar suggestion as some others here mentioned, focus security on home-directories, possibly removable media (although be careful about user education, ALL removable media should of course not be encrypted). Above all, focus on a strong practice and security around putting stuff in networked storage. That can also help keeping backups, versioning and have other positive side-effects.

Although I tend to disagree with the not a lot. Size is one of the big things here, and 16 vs 4 grey shades is a big improvement. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10159612-1.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Crave

Fox news says you can hack a computer wirelessly. I believe a trusted news source way more than a nerd like you.

Ok so this is flame bait, but really, you can hack computers wirelessly :(

http://news.cnet.com/Apple-Macs-vulnerable-to-Wi-Fi-hijacks/2100-1002_3-6118245.html

And its on OS X :( Doh.

All that involves is getting someone to connect to an access point. Of course no one would ever connect to an unsecured access point called linksys, and it's not like your computer won't auto connect to previously used AP.

This is an example and obviously fixed, however I'd be willing to bet that other bugs that work in a similar manner on all OS's exist (or will exist shortly.)

1/ Using someone's computer without their permission is a criminal act

First there's the upfront sponsoring of criminal acts. Those supporting MS products are sponsoring anti-competitive and often illegal business methods. Second, Windows can be said to, in effect, be designed to make these takeovers easy, we can extend that observation: running Windows while connected to the net is a criminal act.

• 20 minutes - 2004
• 12 minutes 2005
• 5 minutes - 2008

Now those are from unpatched systems. However, many remote exploits are available for years before Waggener Edstrom / Microsoft even acknowledges their presence. Remember a bug exists, and can have published exploits, whether or not the company acknowledges its existence.

What I would really like to know is who at Nvidia thinks this is a good idea? Do we really need another x86 supplier? Are they going to aim for the low end or the high end? If it's the high end, I thought that Nvidia contracted out their manufacturing. http://industry.bnet.com/technology/1000386/nvidia-chip-problems-might-be-warning-for-everyone/ Maybe that explains why the company has had trouble with some of its graphics chips in the last year or so. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13554_3-10020782-33.html

Personally, I'm a little tired of companies contracting out their manufacturing to Asia to cut costs, and then not owning up to manufacturing defects when they come to light. It has kept me from buying an Xbox 360, and it will keep me from ever buying an Nvidia CPU. Of course, I don't drink Kook-Aid, so I'm obviously not the potential customer here.

Some will be expired, but the technology employed on the current chips (state of the art and previous generations) are covered by more recent patents, and if NVidia wants to produce anything more advanced that the good old 8086, they will have to negotiate.

Check this and this articles. That shows the heavy politics involved between the big processor companies in order to be able to produce our beloved processors.

While I'm not holding my breath there are actually devices that would make this charging obsolete. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9667152-1.html A wireless charging pad that actually charges devices without having to standardize the technology, making it cost efficient for manufacturer's and efficient for consumers. Best part is that it would be backwards compatible for products without the standardized plug.

I feel so torn. On one had here is a chance to be paid to work on netbsd. On the other hand the job is with Microsoft.

Time to stick a fork in it, it's done. Sidekick is gone and it's time to move on. Sure it could linger on and slowing languish taking a few good developers with it on the decent into obscurity. But face it, it's owned by MS and the official policy is to stomp anything that does not promote lock-in to Windows/Office. Look at the warning example of Foxpro and see what happens to a good product that MS can't compete with on quality but was too popular to shutdown outright.

Even if the offer is legit, which it probably, isn't, just wasting invaluable developer resources porting Microsoft Useless Widget from Windows CE to NetBSD is a human resources denial of service attack taking developer time away from something useful. An extreme version of that tactic was used against Borland and others. NetBSD is small enough that it is comparable in size to small companies, and taking out enough developers to sink the project is a realistic goal if some NetBSD developers, or potential developers, are naive or weak enough to turn quisling.

Face it. Sidekick is gone, M$ has it, and its now time to finish your mourning, face reality and move on. Start a new company.

There is a compromise between running as Administrator and limping along as a peon: use DropMyRights to run major internet-facing apps without full administrator access. (You patch the icons and Start Menu entries for the apps to run DropMyRights which then runs the .exe.) It's not a 100% solution, but it does help.

The main weakness of this approach is that Windows has dozens of ways to launch applications, and it's impossible to get DropMyRights to intercept all of them. There's a related tool, StripMyRights, which gives you two ways to make any .exe always run with limited rights, but I haven't tried it yet.

Hey hey, everyone forgot about the September 2005 CNet interview with Kurzweil, when bragged about how his algorithmic driven hedge fund would be " in the position of being the house in a casino ". So how is that hedge funding doing today in today's economic turbulence where hedge funds are getting redeemed and some might not make it? So now he's going to take people for $25K ride to make up for his probably flailing hedge fund that's flapping in the wind? I smell megalomania!

Here's the trip down memory lane:

http://news.cnet.com/Ray-Kurzweil-deciphers-a-brave-new-world/2008-1082_3-5885116.html?tag=mncol

You said at a speech last week in San Francisco that you were working on a project with former Microsoft CFO Michael W. Brown that'll result in a hedge fund. Can you tell me about that?

Kurzweil: It's been a major project for about six years. It's applying my field, detecting subtle patterns, and using technology forecasting. Six years ago the project wasn't fully feasible because we didn't have rapid access to all ticker data for stocks. You really couldn't place trades very effectively online. The technology wasn't there--it can't take two weeks for the computer to make a decision that needs to be made in five seconds.

(My system) doesn't make perfect predictions. But what we can do is predict them substantially better than chance. That puts us in the position of being the house in a casino. It places lots of bets, some win and some lose, but it consistently makes money. We haven't had a down month yet. It makes 80 to 100 percent returns a year.

Actually, for the longest time, MS was going to move the Sidekick over to WinCE- they were even gearing up for it. Unfortunately, after many months of this (A year ago, in reality...), they have announced that they're doing it with a *BSD core and they're HIRING *BSD devs for it.

If you're doing what you're claiming, you don't spend 12 months doing it that way and then gear up for the other OS that you don't sell...doesn't look good to investors to spend 225 billion or so on someone to do something like this. ;-)

That's not all that looks bad for investors. WinMo 7 is coming out in 2010, a year behind schedule, which is an eternity with the Palm Pre coming out in 2009, Android gaining traction, and of course the iPhone and Blackberry all out-selling it with next-generation smartphones that are either iPhone-like or otherwise more stable and powerful devices than WinMo/WinCE.