Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Intuit, Telemetry, Meetup
I'd prefer an apology from the IRS. Rico writes "Intuit have spoken out about the CD-protection methods of their TurboTax software. According to them, the protection is harmless to computers and does not erase data. Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product."
Train the dog, then never call the command. Mitch Wagner writes "Barry Shein, subject of this week's /. interview, proposes in "ISP Head Floats Plan To Legalize Spam" that spam is impossible to block, and so instead should be legitimized and regulated, with a central, not-for-profit company charged with collecting fees from spammers and distributing those fees to ISPs that receive the spam. Of course, there have been many other plans for charging spammers to send spam, but those plans mostly have the fees going to the ISP that sends the e-mail, or to the user that receives the mail, rather than the ISP that receives it and has to deliver it to the end-users. I'm the author of the piece I link to in this article."
Make big money as an open source telemetrist! For anyone who missed it in the Science section, there's a great followup to the Linux-based home-brewed weather balloon we recently featured: the OpenTRAC project is looking for help in building an APRS-like protocol. If that's gibberish to you, check out their introduction to the protocol to get an idea of how it's useful. Future experimenters will thank you.
One good deed escapes punishment. Psyiode writes with a link to this story at the Houston Chronicle which begins "Jurors needed only about 15 minutes to acquit a Houston man who was accused of hacking into the Harris County district clerk's wireless computer system in March. One juror, Helen Smith, 62, said she and the other jurors found that Stefan Puffer indeed hacked into the system but they did not believe he caused any damage as the government had alleged."
Puffer was arrested last summer for demonstrating that the county court's wireless LAN wasn't secure, and telling them about it.
Do we need manned spaceflight? Professor_Quail writes "The BBC has a story on NASA's plans for a successor to the Space Shuttle. From the article: Nasa has revealed its first set of mission criteria for the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) - the series of space vehicle expected to replace the space shuttle from 2012. The new spacecraft's primary function will be to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and serve as a lifeboat if the station has to be evacuated."
Or do you have other plans? Finally, rufo writes "For those of you brave enough to weather the elements and meet your fellow geek, don't forget that the Slashdot Meetup is this Thursday at 7PM your local time zone. I've been to a couple and there's some rather interesting characters that show up, and the conversations are quite engaging. Highly recommended if you have nothing better to do on a Thursday evening." Hmmm, must check to see if there's one around Knoxville ...
I think the reason why they are still profiting is that 99% of their customers dont even know what a bootsector (bootsectortrack... whatever) is and consider DRM as something which protects them from all those evil h4x0rs out there..
If it is impossible to effectively block the spam, why does Mr. Shein believe it would be reasonably easy to collect on spam? Spammers are just not the type to be honest. Does he think they are going to start using real "From:" addresses and stop using open relays and throw-away accounts?
The strange part of the article is this:
Key to the success of the plan would be the participation of the major consumer Internet service providers... If those companies banded together and threatened to cut bulk-mailers off from their recipients -- combining that threat with the incentive of easier access to the recipients if the bulk mailers pay a reasonable fee -- bulk mailers would have no choice but to go along with it.
Get real. These ISPs have been cutting bulk-mailers off from their recipients the best they can already. So by the whole premise of spam being impossible to filter, Mr. Shein contradicts the feasability of the idea. We could go after spammers who do not pay if such a plan were enacted. But really, we can go after spammers now in many states and we all know how well that works. Good luck trying to collect Mr. Shein. If I get spam from your ISP because you are tryin a "make it legit" experiment, I will be sure to forward it back to you.
He took a reporter and presumably obtained a DHCP lease on the county's LAN and he's tried as a hacker? Everyone in IT Security knows that nobody does anything unless they are publicly embarrased about it. In the case of Microsoft, sometimes not even then. Taking a reporter also seems like a good way to prove your intentions are honourable.
I guess unless I am missing some critical aspect of the case the lesson here for the patriotic American to learn is that if you see a hole in the country's critical infrastructure, you should ignore it and move on.
I wouldn't want to be this guy. If there is this much fuss over an insecure 802.11b access point I can just imagine the trouble you could get in for walking around Los Alamos.
"Technically speaking, this is far more innocuous than monkeying in the Windows Registry."
Technically speaking, no, it very much isn't. Programs are *supposed* to add information to the registry when they're installed/run, that's the entire point of the registry. This is not true of the boot sector.
Of course Intuit's not showing a hit on profits yet. Most of the people who are complaining already bought the software before they found out about the problems (from someone else if they were lucky, the hard way if they weren't). What Intuit needs to question is what effect this will have on next year's profits, when the people who complained this year buy some other tax software package instead of TurboTax. Of course, by that time nobody will make the connection between declining sales and the screw-up 12 months before