Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Mutuality, Transport, Spyware
Well, while we were switching things around here at the ad agency ... An anonymous reader writes "While looking around on Microsoft's site checking out the new Tablet PCs I noticed something very out of Place. In one of their Flash Demos for the Tablet PC there is an Apple Powerbook 1400! To see it for yourself, the flash is located here (then "Tablet PC Overview Demo," then "Tablet PC," then "Powerful") The first computer is really that Powerbook! Pic here."
What about to the legal brothels? Sacarino writes "Back in April, Slashdot ran a story about the Monorail project Las Vegas was embarking upon. It would appear that things are progressing nicely. "It's ugly" critics will be put to shame, the designers did a great job of making it non-obtrusive. (if that's possible in Vegas) Soon you too will pile off the airplane, trudge onto the monorail, then run into the casino to spend that money....ahh, Vegas."
Out of court, out of mind. Enry writes "SONICblue and TiVo have dropped the patent infringement lawsuits they filed against each other. The press release reads: "We believe our energies are better spent expanding the market for Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) rather than fighting each other. Both sides believe in the merits of their respective positions, but the overall success of the DVR category is what is most important to the companies at this time." Take that, AdAge!"
Sounds like a nice way to watch movies. For those intrigued by a 640x480, QWERTY-keyboard color, clamshell-case PDA as embodied by the Zaurus 5600, patrickoehlinger writes "Just found news and pictures about the new Sharp Zaurus SL-C700 released in Japan. With a 640 x 480 pixel display, a small design and a great keyboard! Golem.de has a article with pictures, but it's in German."
Would the BBC spy on you? An anonymous reader writes "The previous discussion on RedSheriff on slashdot was extremely confusing as well as mostly off-topic. The fact is, the BBC is downloading spyware to your machine when you surf their site. Very disappointing and surprising. I suggest e-mailing them to let them know what you think. The problem and remedies are covered in Google groups: "
If you can sit through the whole demo, there's a second mac. About two thirds of the way through is a PowerMac Desktop I'm gussing circa 1996. I'm no mac expert. Maybe someone else can identify the model?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Monorail from the Airport? Man, that would ROCK HARD. No having to take the shuttles with endless stops or taxis with 20 years of grime built up.
I do feel a bit sorry for the taxi drivers: this is going to kill 80% of them. Apparently the union is not that powerful in Vegas. :) [which is yet another lesson why union's suck and why they tend to retard progress, but that's a rant for another day]
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Slash dot had an article on how to reverse the screen on your apple powerbook duo. The guy used a glue gun and gave step by step instructions on turning your apple into a picture frame.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
But, per the google group discussion, is used my firewall software to block a couple of IP addresses that the java program is based off of. I just visited the BBC news site, and I'm not getting record of a block to those IPs in my firewall logs. It is possible that they already took this stuff down?
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
Or am I missing somthing or is that exactly what is going on?
my experience and understanding with java is that insecure applets cant access URLS outside their source URL, they cant access other open windows (or atleast not anything that javascript cant access), and they cant access any system level communications or your files on disk. Thus they cant be spying on you. And if you leave the site they go poof. I suppose they could be playing frame games making you think you left the site.
can anyone tell me how they are getting around these restrictions?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Any program that is forced upon you is spyware. If McDonald's made you fill out a questionaire as a term for buying a Big Mac, how would you react?
.03% of traffic today, but we are also yanks, and we don't read the stinkin' beeb. (God forbid other voices were to leak through the American propaganda machine.) Over time, I might see this traffic rise up to the 1% area and would have to really start to take measures. (Infact, the .03% traffic originated from only 14 unique IP's out of ~300 for the newsroom alone.)
/.
I simply do not believe that any website author has the right to upload any program on my computer as a condition of viewing content. I don't care what the software does.
That being said, it does not appear that red sherrif performs like most spyware and remains active as a service 24/7 on the resident machine. But for those of us who are security concious, and the Firewall admins out there, this is a big deal. I am an admin for a newspaper. This immediately explained the large amounts of traffic going to the IP's mentioned in the group posting.
Like most businesses, we expense our bandwidth. Red Sherrif Traffic only accounted for
Does that answer your question??
~Hammy
MY Mission: To build the biggest freak list on
I would rather have wanted the IBM Transnote
If the tablet PC should work, it should be cheap since I never really think it would be the only PC you would have. it would need to be thinner than it is. It wouldn't need a lot of fancy features. You could have a dockingstation that would give it more features, option for other graphiccard etc. It would have some very for some things, but bad for others.
my sig
First of all, why are people saying this Red Sherriff stuff is Java-based? Am I missing something here? I can see some JavaScript stuff on the BBC site - is there a Java component too perhaps?
... well ... let's see:
/snip/
u nt?ref='+
/snip/
m en t.write(imgN);" '+'w idth=1 height=2}'+/ applet}')
/snip/
... in this case either a 1x1 or 1x2 pixel image. The information is passed in the request for that image. From what I see above, aside from the colateral stuff like your IP address, a "Customer ID" string of "uk_bbc_0" is passed, along with the "Document Referrer". That is, if you clicked a link on another website somewhere in order to get to news.bbc.co.uk, the URL of that referring website is sent to Red Sherriff.
As for what it's reporting
Excerpt from the source of http://news.bbc.co.uk/:
{!-- START RedMeasure V4 - Java v1.1 $Revision: 1.9 $ --}
{!-- COPYRIGHT 2000 Red Sheriff Limited --}
{script language="JavaScript"}
{!--
var pCid="uk_bbc_0";
var w0=1;
var refR=escape(document.referrer);
if (refR.length>=252) refR=refR.substring(0,252)+"..."
{img src="http://server-uk.imrworldwide.com/cgi-bin/co
refR+'&cid='+pCid+'" width=1 height=1}'
if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Mac')!=-1){docu
}else{
document.write('{applet code="Measure.class" '+
'codebase="http://server-uk.imrworldwide.com/
'{param name="ref" value="'+refR+'"}'+'{param name="cid" value="'+pCid+
'"}{textflow}'+imgN+'{/textflow}{
{/noscript}
{/COMMENT}
{!-- END RedMeasure V4 --}
I'm not a JavaScript expert, but this says to me that the information is passed back to the Red Sherriff company by requesting a "web bug"
The fact is, the BBC is downloading spyware to your machine when you surf their site.
What browser allows BBC to send them spyware without the user's permission? If that really happens, it's a browser security bug. I'm surprised the spammers haven't leveraged this bug with their html mail efforts (if it's really that easy to install spyware on a user's system). I find it hard to believe this claim. Anyone have an explanation?