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: "
Well, it's unfortunate but a lot more sites are doing that, as far as I can see. I always get gator popups here at sparknotes for example and it's a pain to click no all the time.
Well, I guess my 2 cents wont get very far =/
I'm all for that thing - Actually I think EVERY CITY IN THE WORLD should have a monorail and then we should have monorails connected by super fast trains - then I won;t have to fly anymore. I HATE flying, not because of terrorists - I just don't have wings and don;t like being flung around in a giant metal bird.
Ave Molech Setting
Here is a link to Redsheriff's privacy policy, cached on google (just in case).
Hello, Vegas? Give me 100 bucks on red... D'oh! All right, I'll send you a check.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Not quite.
The Apple PowerBook 1400 ships with a 133MHz proc., 16MB of DRAM, and a 750MB hard disk drive.
In the Flash movie on Microsoft's site, it's shown running Windows XP, which simply wouldn't happen on a box with such meager specs.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
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
Well, while we were switching things around here at the ad agency
And in doing so, it got a front-page link on Slashdot, direct to the Microsoft Tablet PC demo / info page. Thanks, Slashdot!
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.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't trust technical "facts" from people that don't know the difference between downloading and uploading. That's like hiring a plumber that asks you what room the bathroom sink is in.
its a java applet, called RedSheriff. check your firewall logs. i found the google discussion group to be quite informative. and ad-aware dosnt find it, so says the googel discussion that was posted with the story.
good luck.
"Humanize war? You might as talk about humanizing hell!" -- British Admiral Jacky Fisher
Mono! D'oh!
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
What bothers me most about spyware and insecure windooze programs(outlook etc) is that you can secure your PC by tweaking the right knobs, but then the time comes for that 1/2 year re-install and you have to start all over and remember what to turn off where etc.
:)
Installing a Windooze pc and connecting it to the internet requires so much work before you can say it's secure. And then there is all the spyware that comes with "great" shareware programs, so you really need a seperate partition to test the programs on first before installing them on your primary installation. Then you need programs like Ad-Aware and a personal firewall to keep track of programs that likes to phone home(have even seen programs with no network functionality all of the sudden wants to contact a server on the net).
Oh, and let's not forget antivirus software etc etc.
So I installed a Linux dist, not because I think that it's impossible to infiltrate it, but because the focus on all that Crap-ware has not yet turned too bad there and I feel more in control over what's going on under the hood. Now if only they would make the fonts look right, they are getting better, but not 100% yet.
I thinking about those 90% of the people with a connection to the internet, who does not have any clue to what's going on. And the great concept with Windooze was that they shouldn't need to know everything about computers to use them. These days they don't, but they do get their pc 0wned in a mild way.
We are beginning to see ISPs offer secure/firewalled connections to the internet. So that might be a new feature(income) for them, firewalling,spam blocking, blocking "bad" ip's. I have seen advertising for it, but I haven't looked into it.
my sig
Thanks. The spyware is called RedSheriff. It's a Java applet and its the first spyware that I've identified as running as Java.
Step one: Unclick "Java" in Preferences
Step two: There is no step two! There is no step two!
sulli
RTFJ.
The BBC mentions their use of RedSheriff in their privacy policy. RedSheriff have their own privacy policy.
Ok, I guess I'll probably lose a load of karma for this cos it sounds like I'm sticking up for spyware but what the hell... having looked at RedSherriff's website all this java applet really does is allow them to get around the problems that proxies and caches cause for people that want to find out how many page hits they got - is that really spyware?
PS - sorry for not jumping on the bandwagon.
I don't understand what this java applet is supposed to do. Is is supposed to stay in memory and watch you as you surf other sites? I don't see how it can. Java applets embedded in web pages only run while you are at the page. There are java applications that can do more stuff, but they have to be signed and I think you need to click Yes on a security dialog. What is it that this java applet actually does?
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
They seem to work for a lot of people...
Founded in 1996, RedSheriff is an industry leader in interactive measurement technologies and market research. We provide specialized products and services that enable you to accurately assess your company's performance in the constantly evolving digital environment.
RedSheriff measures in 37 countries through regional offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Brisbane, Singapore, Tokyo, London, Copenhagen, Milan, Los Angeles, San Francisco and headquarters in New York. We also have strategic partnerships with several major industry players including the AGB Group, Taylor Nelson Sofres Gallup, and Video Research.
Our client base includes key global players such as BT LookSmart, Excite, Excite@Home, News Interactive, F2 Interactive, Scandinavia Online, Monster.com, MTV, NineMSN.com, Virgin Direct, Virgin, Genie Internet, Asia World Online, Charles Schwab and Telstra.
Our strategic investment partners include Deutsche European Partners, Ericsson-Deutsche Technology Fund, WPP, Australasian Media and Communication Fund, and Equity Partners.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Here's the home page of the new Zaurus model (Japanese only)
m l
http://www.sharp.co.jp/products/slc700/index.ht
I surfed around, looks like this unit has cool GPS maps available, that's the most interesting app I found.
From reading the USENET commentary on Google Groups, it seems like RedSheriff only works on Microsoft's broken virtual machine that ships with Windows. It appears that, if you install Sun's JVM, the problem doesn't arise (or at least alerts the user). This would also seem to suggest that Mozilla is immune, since they have their own JVM, yes?
Yet another reason to avoid IE, I suppose.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If I walk into someone's store, the store is permitted to have someone follow me -- either in person, or by video camera. I'm on private property, and the property owner is entitled to watch what I am doing.
...move right along, please.
When you surf on a site, you are accessing someone elses server. They are the property owner, and they have the right to a report to see what you are doing.
There is nothing that I can see that RedSherriff becomes resident on your machine and watches you elsewhere. It just uses cookies to provide enhanced site stats to, in this case, the beeb.
Nothing to see here...
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
Sorry, you'll just have to drive out to the ole ranch there ya city slicker!
Ah, you must be talking about that toy monorail that goes between, what is it, caesars and bellagio? It actually is more like a cable car, gets pulled back and forth on a fixed cable....
It doesn't stay in memory. It just loads up on every page of the site that is using it and sends back details like referers and time spent between pages back to Red Sherrif. Red Sherrif are basically an Internet market research company.
So, while it does track usage on the BBC site as well as any other Red Sherrif client sites, it isn't the same as something like Gator which will hang around on your PC and do other nasty stuff in the background.
There is another company that do it (although maybe they have merged now) called IMR Worldwide.
Learn to Improvise
They're not.
It's a Java applet that's like a cgi traced image. It's used for user tracking. It's not any more sinister than WebTrends or any of the other post-processing tools.
Caveat: I worked for the company that wrote the first version of this software that was used by Red Sheriff.
Step 2: Insert random Apple Powerbook 1400
Step 3: Report "slip up" to Mac centered websites
Step 4: Report that "over 20% of page views on the new tablet PC pages are from Macintosh computers." to interested third party vendors.
So now they've got ammo for a real switch campain...
I was in Las Vegas this past summer. Whoever designed that monorail was completely incompetent! The doors and cars were too small, so when a handicapped person (and there's a lot of those in Las Vegas) got on, attendants had to go in and move seats around. This took about 20 minutes, which is ridiculous. And then the thing starts moving, and I keep waiting for it to speed up, but it keeps plodding along at snail pace. I could have walked to the one destination stop in less time. Thanks for wasting my time, monorail designers.
The Disney World monorail is so much better.
Hmmm...then you weren't on the actual monorail, but the crappy shuttle. The current monorail uses Bombardier Mark IV monorail cars that were actually acquired from Disney World.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The software used to be called WebMeasure, and now to maintain corporate branding it's "RedMeasure"
This stuff has been around for just ages. I was part of the company that wrote this software for them originally. It has been around since 1997/98 however it's just started to be used by more people It's nothing more than a slightly sophisticated cookie, and if you don't trust my word for it, download it and decompile it.
I just looked at the Beebs source code from their home page and it's exactly the same as it was back then.
Anyway, here's the source code. Check for yourself. (Thanks to DJ's decompiler) It's doing nothing more than sending the duration of the time on a particular page.
For the non-appleted amongst us, start() occurs when the page is loaded, stop() occurs when the page is left.
Grrrrr, frigging lameness filter stopped me from posting the source. Anyway, get it from here.