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http://slashdot.org/articles/08/02/11/1316209.shtml per discussion here and linked article here http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1267

~ Gabbi

Microsoft recently released KB940510. Here is what it does. I've read it detects the Paradox BIOS emulator and the timerstop crack.

US Air Force blocking blog access

and ...

US Air Force accepting questions about recruitment, cyberwarfare etc. on the oldest and largest blog of all, slashdot.

Care to comment ?

I don't know if you've heard of this judicial world premiere; a 26 years old Moroccan engineer was kidnapped, tortured and thrown out in jail for creating a Facebook profile using the name of the king's brother. He was charged with "villainous activities" although the only thing he did with the account was send a smiley.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080310/lalami
http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=545

Anyway, Facebook denied handing out his data to the Moroccan government, but in this so-called "terror-age", I don't buy that for a second.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120424448908501345.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news

RAID-5 is EVIL! Never Ever, EVER use RAID-5, You will LOSE DATA! RAID-1 or RAID-10 only for production use.

If you are thinking about Raid-5, forget it, just stripe your drives in a RAID-0 and enjoy the performance benefits and keep frequent good backups and test your restores.

Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009
Why aren't disk reads more reliable?
End of Raid 5

finally, BAARF - Battle Against ANY Raid Five BAARF

HTH, HAND, don't cry.

Using Google isn't resourceful? Then what's this all this about in making "google" a verb?

Why would they bid against themselves?

If MS were to big higher they'd be bidding against Yahoo!'s board not against themselves. As for whether Yahoo! made a counter offer, TFA you link to provides no details about any such offer. It says "team Microsoft sources scoff at Yahoo's $40 counter-offer" but offers no details such as when it was given. Looking at the date on your TFA it's dated 12 February 2008, however this one dated 14 February says "Yahoo Inc's second-biggest investor urged Microsoft Corp to raise its $42 billion bid for the Web pioneer and warned Yahoo it has few options left, raising the pressure on them to seal a deal." Week in review: Microsoft the magnanimous? dated 22 Feb'08 also says nothing about a counter offer.

I don't agree. Microsoft IS trying to make Windows the best FOSS platform. The goal is not to be nice to FOSS, but to try to damage Linux. It's not me who says it, but Mary Jo Foley (who got it from a Microsoft), one of the most journalists experts in microsoft, if not the best. Quote:

"Microsoft is looking at open-source software (OSS) as just another flavor of independent software vendors (ISV) software. Microsoft's goal is to convince OSS vendors to port their software to Windows. But Microsoft doesn't want OSS software to just sit on top of Windows; the company wants this software to be tied into the Windows ecosystem by integrating with Active Directory, Microsoft Office, Expression designer tools, System Center systems-management wares and SQL Server database.

In cases where customers and software vendors want/need Linux to still be part of the picture for some reason, Microsoft will suggest they use Hyper-V, its forthcoming virtualization hypervisor, to run Linux and Linux-dependent applications.

Microsoft's OSS strategy makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. It's another way for Microsoft to try to make Linux obsolete, and not look as obviously ruthless doing so. And for OSS vendors who are selling a lot of their software on Windows -- Ramji repeated a couple of times that more than 50 percent of JBoss' business these days is from software running on Windows -- Microsoft's OSS push isn't a bad deal, either.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told Internet service providers to restore access to the site after the removal of what it called a "blasphemous" video clip, authority spokeswoman Nabiha Mahmood said.

There are several rumors out there that Pakistan's actions caused a world-wide "blackout" of a Youtube:

Pakistan 'sparks YouTube outage'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7262071.stm

Pakistan takes out YouTube
http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=546

Pakistan removed from the Internet
http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=548

Just hilarious.

There are several rumors out there that Pakistan's actions caused a world-wide "blackout" of a Youtube:

Pakistan 'sparks YouTube outage'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7262071.stm

Pakistan takes out YouTube
http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=546

Pakistan removed from the Internet
http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=548

Just hilarious.

No, Morocco never blocked YouTube. However, they do block plenty of sites - the most notorious of which is Google Earth. The country is essentially an absolute monarchy with no oversight whatsoever.

In the first instance ever, a 26 years old engineer has been abducted, tortured till he lost consciousness on several occasions and sentenced to 3 years in jail (plus fine) this Friday. His crime? Creating a Facebook profile of prince Rachid, the king's brother. The kid was convicted of "villainous practices". Now, I have no sympathy for people hanging out on Facebook, less for an alleged IT guy who can't cover his tracks and much much less for plagiarism or usurpation, but this case is simply outrageous. I was hoping people would spontaneously create thousands of similar profiles in solidarity, but nothing. Everybody's cowering in the hope that they stay below the radar of the infamous police state that is the Makhzen.

Richard Stiennon picked up the story: http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=545
BBC coverage:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7258950.stm
Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fouad_Mourtada

P.S: This is the first time ever that I post as AC.

Actually, to nitpick, capitalism failed spectacularly a while back, at least once, being one of the first methods to fail during the 1900's. Yet it gets propped up again and again. The last centuries have shown us that no single model works. However, there is strong evidence to show that the best pieces of several models can be combined and used together as a sort of Middle Path.

Microsoft is a good example of a company that takes profit from the "loopholes" of capitalism.

Be that as it may, no system can do well with the kind of abuse the MSFT movement is dishing out. The economic damage caused by MS has spread far beyond the IT sector and into nearly every branch of business and government.

By using lock in to their proprietary formats and bundling IE and WMP in the OS, they've achieved to keep for a long time more than 90% of market share on a wide range of products, to force people to upgrade and pay them more money, and all that without innovating (if you really look at their products, you'll see that in the last 5 years they didn't introduce any new feature worth buying, mostly cosmetic changes only). All that just using dirty tactics by making sure no one could create programs compatible or interoperatable with theirs.

I do believe in a free market, but this market we have with Microsoft is anything but free. And I do think governments have the responsability to level the playing field here.

Governments do have the legal responsibility to level the playing field. It's been tried in 1996-1998-2008, 1999-2004-2007, to point out two of the ongoing legal threads, but so far the governments have been all bark and no bite.

The end result from national and local government intervention to-date: nothing but delay.

We have twenty years of governments not being able to force the MS movement to do anything, so it's unlikely to happen now. The situation is unlikely to improve until software users, especially larger customers, vote with their wallets. Until then they are just feeding money into making the problem persist and even grown. Not that a lot of MS 'revenue' doesn't come from buying / selling / issuing its own stock, but adding to it through using the products and services doesn't send a message of disapproval.

In a weird development, someone copied my Slashdot posting above, changed the intro so it looks like a "Wikileaks press release", and sent it to some news outlets via e-mail. It was published by Global Integrity Commons and ZDnet as if from Wikileaks. Someone took out the first sentence about Cringely and put in "Wikileaks has discovered". After the second line, the supposed "Wikileaks press release" matches my text word for word.

I have no connection with Wikileaks, and have no idea who's behind this hoax.

This is a table via zdnet showing the bitrates for these "HD" movie download services. Yeah, that HD download service picture will look great.

Source Resolution Bit-rate
Blu-ray 1920×1080 40
HD DVD 1920×1080 28
ATSC HDTV 1920×1080 19.39
Digital cable 1920×1080 ~ 16
Video on demand 1920×1080 15
DISH HD 1440×1080 10
DIRECTV HD 1280×1080 10
Xbox Live Video 1280×720 6.8
DVD 720×480 8
Apple iTunes 1280×720 4
Web "HD" 1280×720 1.5

That's the worst analogy I've ever heard. What they are doing isn't traffic shaping, it's a criminal offense. How about:

Your honor, they are breaking criminal law. It's as though Comcast were mailing bombs to their customers with fake return addresses on the package.

Why are Vuze's lawyers lobbing softballs? The Associated Press documented spoofed IPs. Someone at Comcast should go to prison.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=75

Apple even altered the firewall software on Mac OS X to hide the fact that iTunes phones home.

And the source on Darwin was closed. They refused to release code required to compile and run Darwin. They refused to release code that was part of Darwin.

You need to check your facts.

I didn't think Apple hardware was all that bad...

They seem to have a bit more software these days as well.

Have they done anything about the crappy font smoothing yet? I had someone insist I'd broken their monitor when I gave them a new Mac.

People often gush over how pretty things look on a Mac but font rendering on current Apple offerings can't come close to my humble linux box.

Microsoft has not confirmed I think. Mary Jo Foley Confirmed, and shes barely creditable..

If you don't believe me, check her write up on WWDC. http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=505 , in which case, she obviously never researched the features properly, and obviously didn't bother to research them, even while doing a follow-up on it, because the forums were full..

I think she just spoke to some guy at Microsoft, they said "yeah, its pretty much the same", and she goes "yeah, they are the same, they just changed the version".

What you will notice, is that nowhere, has she actually done anything to research that (ie, no comparison shots of changed files). Don't trust any info on SP1 at the moment. All the leaks I've seen have been proven fake thus far (ie, modified refresh 2's where it was hexed, but they forgot to change all the versions, or just refresh 2). I've even heard some idiots who base whats real or not on the filename.

Either way, until someone official from microsoft on MSDN says it, I'm not going to bother even trying SP1, otherwise, you may be stuck with a beta which wont upgrade to SP2, and I suggest everyone else do the same. Its only 2 or 3 weeks now until we know for sure

I'm sure he's doing all right on ad revenue, considering the fact that ZDNet picked him up.

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5206-10533-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=44087
He killed his laptop and couldn't use his desktop for a couple of hours.

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5206-10533-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=44087
He killed his laptop and couldn't use his desktop for a couple of hours.

Now, don't get me wrong, *any* protection is obviously better than none

Undersea cable damage is hardly rare--indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems. But last week's breaks came at one of the world's bottlenecks, where Net traffic for whole regions is funneled along a single route.

-FL

It doesn't sound like an anchor anymore, the ship responsible would've been spotted days ago. I doubt it is volcanic or tectonic activity either. A force strong enough to break all those cables would've shown up on seismographs around the world. Could drifting fishing gear do this? That would be hard to imagine but it is a possibility. Maybe the dolphins are getting back at us for all of those tuna nets.

Medsphere calls itself the "leading provider of open source software in the healthcare industry". However it sued its CTO (Steve Shreeve) for 50 Million dollars after he released code to the open source http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=858 Eric Raymond and I attempted to help negotiate a "peace agreement" to no avail. Recently this lawsuit was settled in such a fashion that it leaves the validity of the release up in the air. Thats troubling when you consider the details involved. Remember that *none* of these facts made the release valid in Medspheres eyes. * Steve Shreeve was the Medsphere CTO when he released the code. In a best-world scenario, that is who you would want to get to sign your papers. If you merely got your boss to sign off on your release, what is to stop your company from saying that the two of you collaborated to rip off the company? * The CEO claimed in the lawsuit that he was not informed, even though he had received an email about the release several months before hand. Just because you "tell" the higher ups means nothing, you must be able to "prove" that they released the code. * Medsphere says it is an "open source" company, your company is a proprietary company. If Steve Shreeve cannot get a fair shake at an open source company what hope do you have? * Medsphere claimed that the Board of Directors should have been informed about the release. Under this logic, even your CEO is not enough. Strictly speaking this is not legal advice. If your company is loyal to you, then you do not need to worry about any of this, the problem is that companies are rarely loyal to their employees. The issue becomes not "how do I avoid legal problems" but rather " how do I put the company in a position that a legal attack would be laughable". Here is what I suggest. * do not use your company email for proof. Use a personal email address so that you will have access to the emails if your employment abruptly ends. * Get something in writing signed by at least two different people who are both above you in the organization. * Make a public announcement that you will be releasing the code and make sure that your boss and others see the announcement before making an actual code release. Of course you will have to prove that they had knowledge of this announcement. HTH, -FT

Well, you might not be far wrong.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-529826.html

The NSA were developing submersibles with fibre splicing abilities. If it went wrong it would either sever the cable, or screw the voltage (running through the cable to power the amplifiers.)

Actually the "network/audio QoS" bug you talk about is not fixed in SP1. More tech details:

As explained in your link to Ed Blott's blog, although SP1 fixes lots of things, it still doesn't fix the MMCSS-related network throughput drop that was highly publicized 6 months ago ("slow network transfers when running Media Player").

Mark Russinovich, the MS developer who gave a very detailled explanation of the bug in his blog, never published a follow up to this bug, as he said he would when it will be fixed. The unanswered comments in his blog also confirm the issue is unfixed in SP1 [1].

In fact, the list of notable changes in Vista SP1 [2] mentions that the only thing they did appears to be a hack to manually hardcode the throttling behavior:

""" In SP1, PC administrators are able to modify the network throttling index value for the MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduling Service), allowing them to determine the appropriate balance between network performance and audio/video playback quality. """

Since Russinovich said the underlying problem is a high CPU usage caused by the DPC calls made by the network driver to receive the network packets, my guess is that they have to work around all those crappy Windows network drivers that don't implement standard interrupt mitigation techniques (like NAPI under Linux).

Meh. Just one more example of why closed proprietary drivers suck :)

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx
[2] http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/005f921e-f706-401e-abb5-eec42ea0a03e1033.mspx?mfr=true

The drivers still do hardware tampering check....the "tilt bit". If the driver detects anything screwy with the hardware (voltage fluctuations, etc), it resets the machine. Even when running non-protected content, this is being checked, which reduces performance and makes it possible that the machine will reboot at arbitrary times. http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12558-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=28793&messageID=537882&start=26

Time to do some FUD-busting ;)

Everything you've read about Vista's DRM is wrong:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=304
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=309

The nutshell version. If you're mad at Vista for including HDCP support -- Leopard, the PS3, or any HD-DVD or BluRay player on the market has it as well. Get pissed at the entire industry or don't bother getting pissed at all.

Time to do some FUD-busting ;)

Everything you've read about Vista's DRM is wrong:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=304
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=309

The nutshell version. If you're mad at Vista for including HDCP support -- Leopard, the PS3, or any HD-DVD or BluRay player on the market has it as well. Get pissed at the entire industry or don't bother getting pissed at all.

Time to do some FUD-busting ;)

Everything you've read about Vista's DRM is wrong:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=304
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=309

The nutshell version. If you're mad at Vista for including HDCP support -- Leopard, the PS3, or any HD-DVD or BluRay player on the market has it as well. Get pissed at the entire industry or don't bother getting pissed at all.

Everyone seems to think that it will either be the best of times, or it will be the worst of times ... why can't it just be a different time?

Worst Of Times: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1962
Best Of Times: http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9862772-16.html

You're not thinking outside of the tin-foil box.
These are obviously failed attempts to tap internet traffic.
The NSA has long been rumored to be able to live splice
undersea fibre optic cables.

I never understood why GPS is considered such a good feature in a cell phone. On the contrary, it is possibly a bad thing, given the number of cases of wire tapping, cell phone eavesdropping (even when turned off). We already have enough privacy concerns given that triangulation can already tell a close-enough location of a cell phone user.

Your argument assumes Moonlight competes with Silverlight, but is appears false.: Microsoft engineers have collaborated with those from Novell to improve Moonlight, and Microsoft has officially recognized Moonlight. Such a thing would of course never happen with Wine or Google Docs, because those in fact are competition.

Tell you what, Microsoft: You come up with an OS that outperforms XP Pro SP2, has some useful new features, is efficient, compatible, maybe even costs less, and then blow me, and I'll give your new OS a try. How's that sound?

Networking (Pre SP1)
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/2070

Raw CPU Use
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/xp-vs-vista-uk,review-2067-5.html

Gaming Performance (Especially after the Beta Driver Releases in Jan - Check out reviews from June to now - Drivers are faster than XP 99.9% of the time)
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page9.asp

Even Early Drivers (Beta Even) put Vista at only a few FPS behind XP, and this is pure RTM code, no optimizations:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page11.html

DirectX10 REALLY does need Vista
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/14/7060
The GPU scheduler and GPU RAM Virtualization are just two major aspects of what DirectX10 expects to be present, and if you run the DX10 libraries on XP, you will never get these features.

Vista is faster than Mac on own Hardware
(Didn't have link in my folder, but do a search, especially with Leopard and Boot Camp. From casual user reviews of Vista loading faster and being snappier than Leopard and Tiger to reviews that take native compiled applications or games for both Intel based codesets, Vista easily out performs OS X in raw application performance and ESPECIALLY gaming like Quake or WoW or other native apps that run under both OSes.)

Beware of Idiot Reviews
-Most Online and 'tech' reviews are conducted by iditors or people that don't have a clue what they are doing.

The main things you will find is that they use a first day installation of Vista, where Superfetch has had no time nor performed any optimizations on the system to increase applications load times, Vista itself has ran no optimization for prefetch, file placement as there is no data to base it on for the applications or games yet, and especially the intelligent SuperFetch optimiations make a massive difference in gaming where you have a tons of textures and levels being queued into the game.

Another signs of a bad test - They turn of Aero, which on modern Video cards is faster than turned off. They also go out of their way to turn of Search Indexing and other performance assisting tools like Superfetch. (In fact with Aero on and WDDM's scheduling handling the GPU in Vista, even a single game will usually run faster 'inside' a Window instead of Full Screen - something that is the opposite of XP or other OS models.

You can find a ton of reviews that fall into these categories.
Here is a recent one for Example:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=797

The majority of the problem with Vista is just like this article mentions 'perceived reality', and also the 'missed advantages' Vista does offer to everyday users as well as gamers.

Gamer example: run several high end games in a Window at the same time, notice you barely lose FPS in any of the Games even though they are running on the screen at the same time, or even in Flip3D (or a 3rd Party Expose' Mimic utility). Not only would this choke XP, since Vista DOES the GPU scheduling and is not application yield based like you find in OpenGL based OS designs, this is something that is nearly impossible to do on anything outside of Vista. And yes there are people that do this, just find almost any MMO player than has more than one account or playes more than one MMO, and they are usually running

NT (like OSX) has a microkernel, but the operating system isn't just the microkernel. Most of OSX (for example) actually runs on UNIX which runs as a single application of the microkernel. NT also has an enormous number of kernel-entry points which means that it too is a monlithic-kernel-based system that happens to run on a microkernel.

A real microkernel-based system will have a lot of the userland facilities designed to take advantage of message passing and will probably look more like HURD or Squeak than it will like NT or NeXT. QNX and VxWorks are the only successful microkernel-based systems that I'm aware of, and frankly both of them are losing big to Linux, so we might have to say were the only successful systems in the future...

In the summer of 2005 the undersea fibre optic cable to Pakistan, a branch of the SEA-ME-WE3 line, was cut, disrupting Internet access to that country for weeks and crippling its nascent high tech sector.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4630457.stm

Now with the cut to this critical Mid-East cable, the possibility comes to mind that the U.S has undertaken a program to tap into all telecom lines running into the Muslim world. An egregious violation of sovereignty if its true. The disruptions could be due to mistakes while installing the taps, or they could be purposeful because the repairs would be an opportunity to slip in monitoring equipment.

This 2001 article discussed the NSA tapping fibre optic cables
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-529826.html

In short its not easy, but it can be done, and capabilities can have only improved in the past 7 years. The USS Jimmy Carter is the prime suspect. The cost was estimated at $2 billion a year, an amount which can easily be hidden in the intelligence budget.

It would not be the first time. In the 1970s the Pentagon tapped into Soviet copper cables on the Siberian coast.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9904EED6123EF93BA35752C1A96E958260

There he was, Steve Ballmer, the Secretary of Homeland Security, up on stage in all his resplendent glory, skipping around...

"I...love...this...country...yessssssss!"

I found this quality comparison of different HD sources (Cable, FIOS, Blue Ray, etc...) to be interesting:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=962

http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/security-news/1689-microsoft-convicted-fine-1-52-billion.html

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/48409524/m/3850972554

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=361048

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/19/why_microsofts_eu_concession/

http://search.zdnet.com/index.php?t=4&s=0&o=0&q=screwed

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/visualbasic/dotnet/archives/infoq-fire-and-motion-what-openxml-means-to-ibm-and-lotus-notes-14187

I don't know, man, do a little Google search - it's not hard to track down.
As head honcho, the responsibility for corporate crime rests on the CEO's shoulders, even if current legal practice doesn't actually make them pay for their surrogate criminality.

It's not true :

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12558-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=43385&messageID=803908

Jeremy.

What is the danger of these formats if this is true: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1121

No, I have never had any IE update remove basic functionality from the OS that the only remedy was re-installing the OS. IE can be rolled back to previous versions simply by uninstalling the updates. I have had updates from MS that have broken things before, sure - but never to the point where and entire re-installation of Windows was necessary, and that was my point.

At least you have a choice as to whether or not you want to upgrade when Apple releases an update. Unlike Microsoft.