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 ...
It keeps reminding me that I STILL have to do my taxes, why can't I read slashdot when I get home and can remember it there.
I guess I just have to much to do at home and not enough to do at work, or is it that my priorities are out of whack?
moo.
I bet everyone is very corteous, civilized and good-manered. Nobody says "fuck you" or tells you you're a "dumbass" while hiding under a table. No asbestos suits are used or otherwise present. They all shake hands in the end and promise to send postcards.
Then on Monday it's open warfare again.
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..
I emailed their PR contact, and posted their reply to both the original slashdot story and my journal.
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.
Just a thought... I'm a student at Carnegie Mellon. We have /. meetups every day...they're called "class". ;)
This idea to let ISPs charge for spam is preposterous. Shein is just looking to make money out of our discomfort. He argues that charging is a better solution because you can't stop spam - but if you can find a spammer to charge him then you can just as easily find him to stop him and make him pay a fine.
Red alert everybody, if he gets enough industry support behind this idea and throws enough money at Washington, we'll *never* see an end to the spam.
Even with ISP charging, spam will always be cheaper than traditional mail and most other forms of advertising, and if legalized in this way I strongly suspect that we'll see the quantity of spam increase rather than the opposite.
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.
While I understand that selecting a successor to the Space Shuttle is an important task, there is a much more important issue at hand: where will NASA get its next generation of visionary rocket scientists, to take us to Mars and beyond?
Many current NASA astronauts, scientists, and technicians first became interested in space exploration as a result of the "Space Race" in the 60s, and, later, grew and maintained their interest thoughout their adolescence by participating in the hobby of model rocketry.
After the space race ended, model rocketry started to decline, but the emergence of high power rocketry in the 80s and 90s revitalized the hobby, and brought back many "Born Again Rocketeers", or BARs, into the hobby; these are people who flew model rockets as kids, and rediscovered the hobby later in life. Many of these BARs are now introducing the hobby to a new generation, and passing on their inspiration.
Now, in the middle of a resurgence of interest, the hobby is in danger of being killed by overzealous overregulation. Due to a combination of misclassification of the most common hobby rocket propellant (Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant) as an explosive (instead of a flammable solid) by ATF, and background checks being mandated by the Homeland Security Act for any employees of companies that ship explosives, shippers like UPS have decided to stop carrying "explosives" altogether, meaning that rocket motors are now virtually impossible to ship, even by UPS ground.
Bottom line, this, and other similar regulations, are leading to the demise of rocketry as a safe, educational hobby. The next generation of rocket scientists will simply not exist.
However, there is hope. Efforts are underway to push a bill through Congress to explicitly exempt the materials used in the hobby of rocketry, when they are used for rocketry (i.e.: non-weapon) uses.
What is needed is a groundswell of support from concerned citizens, supporting this effort. There are complete details on this effort at http://www.space-rockets.com/congress.html, along with a number of talking points you may wish to incorporate into faxed letters to your Senators.
The bill hasn't been introduced yet, but should be this week some time. If you decide to join in, and send a letter, please wait until the notice is posted on http://www.space-rockets.com/congress.html before doing so. That way, the messages will have the most effect (and your senator may have some idea what you're talking about, as there will be a bill on the subject up for debate...).
If you want to help keep the dream alive, I encourage you to read the background info at that site, and join in this worthy effort.
Thanks,
- Rick "Rocket Geek" Dickinson
Some years ago, at 1 AM on a weeknight, on a back-country road on the south side of Austin, I saw the most incredible traffic jam I've ever seen.
I live in Dallas. I've driven in Los Angeles. I've seen some traffic jams.
What made this incredible is that it was also the politest traffic jam I've ever seen. Everyone was having a good time, no one was arguing, no horns were honking.
That road ran by Bergstrom Air Force Base, by the ramp. The Shuttle transporter 747, with a Shuttle on its back, was sitting on the ramp overnight. Everyone in that traffic jam wanted to see the Shuttle.
I wish I'd taken some pictures of the crowd, to give to the people who MISTAKENLY believe that "nobody is interested in space." There sure were a lot of "nobody" out on that road at 1 AM that night.
"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.
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup.
Just how do you manage to restore data that never gets backed up?
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
If you want to be brutally practical, the ultimate reason for space exploration is simple: survival of the human species.
Species are able to survive disasters that strike their ecological niches by the simple expedient of being elsewhere. When a flood wipes out all of the creatures living in one particular meadow, the creatures in the next meadow over carry on as though nothing had happened.
Given the fact that, on a sufficiently long time scale, the odds of a worldwide ecological disaster (such as a "planet killer" asteroid, or a nuclear war) eventually approach certainty, it's absolutely imperative for the survival of "earthlings" that we start working towards a goal of spreading out, and taking steps to move beyond this one rock.
Disasters do happen, however infrequently. As every good sysadmin knows, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
Let's plan for the big one, and set up a RAIL (Redundant Array of Independent Lifeforms).
We are not going back to the "original plan." A hell of a lot was learned from the Shuttle fleet. One of the most important payoffs from flying the Shuttle was the experience gained in reprocessing reusable vehicles. This information will be integrated into OSP and all other future reusable spaceflight vehicles.
OSP would suffer from many of the Shuttles' problems if we had built it in 1975 and stacked it on top of Saturn Vs. We'd now instead be discussing when we were going to replace the expensive and risky OSP.
By the way, in case anyone is confused, OSP was planned before we lost Columbia. People have been discussing this for the past year, and the proposal went to Congress in the Fall.
I'm completely fed up with IT weenies on Slashdot pontificating on how the space program should be run. Most don't know shit about space exploration beyond what they've read on Slashdot, CNN, and in Discover. Not only do they not understand how to evaluate courses for the future, they don't actually understand what the planning failures were in the past!!!!
All the uninformed bull on Slashdot is really starting to drive me crazy.
No, but some of the guys will have some nice breasts.
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
Ignoring the fact that other people probably do use the full boot sector area of their disks, there's an obvious reason why Intuit shouldn't do it: standards. Standards have defined the boot sector not as a DRM tool, but as the first place on the disk that gets executed at boot time. It's a critical piece of every (AFAIK) operating system's core design, and needs to be very reliable, because it's hard to fix if you can't load your operating system, and even harder without rescue media handy.
This is the same as all of the CD-ROM copy-protection schemes out there that write special "bad" sectors or mess with the table-of-contents in a non-standard way. Plenty of people have CD drives that are unable to use those forms of copy-protection, and some of the manufacturers end up patching the game to remove it. Anyone who wants to actually copy the game, of course, can easily download a utility to get around the problem. It only hurts unknowing consumers.
Microsoft frequently plays the "embrace and extend" game and has been called to task for it. So should Intuit, Sony, and everyone else who tries to violate a standard instead of playing by the rules.
--Elentar
Footnote: Consider that a laissez-faire economy results in prices that rise to what the market will bear. If, then, a piece of software is regularly pirated, copied, or used once and returned, doesn't that indicate that the price is too high, according to the market? Corporations should listen to the message consumers are sending and reduce the cost of their software, not impede upon the rights of consumers to use their own possessions.
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
Everyone I know who has bought Turbotax has done so before they knew about the full pain in the ass that this copy protection is. To these people, I have evangelized TaxCut, which I have used for my taxes this year. Most people's hangup is that they think that TaxCut can't bring in their previous year information from a TurboTax file, but it can.
As far as the protection itself is concerned, I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that writing any kind of information to the MBR other than the day you format a disk or install a bootloader is a big no-no. Inuit is deluding themselves if they think this won't affect them in the long run.
-R
In reading that NASA is going to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to build a new space shuttle that does even less than the current space shuttle I'm left shaking my head. Is this all NASA can manage, spending more and more money to do less and less. I appreciate the new mini space shuttle may be cheaper, simpler and safer than the space shuttle but it also can't carry any cargo and all it will do is ferry people to and from the ISS which is already recognized as a dead end a giant waste of money in space.
NASA may as well pack it in if this space plane and the ISS is their vision of manned space flight for the next decade. They talk about the ISS as crucial to the trip to Mars but I just don't see it.
If NASA wants to do something to stay relevent they need to pour their resources into:
- Cheap heavy lift launchers to get big cargos in to low earth orbit
- Innovative interplanetary propulsion like the ion drive starting initial tests
- Innovative means to protect againt radiation on interplanetary space flight, cowering in low earth orbit in the ISS wont help.
- Serious closed biosystem research. The ISS is a joke because it requires constant resupply of water and food.
- Continued discovery of the resources available on Mars and figure out smart ways for colonists to tap them when they get there.
If we want to get to Mars stop planning for a round trip. Round trips make the mission MUCH harder and make it in to the same dead end that was Apollo. We need to start designing one way missions that send people to Mars as colonists and not visitors. There would be no shortage of volunteers for a one way trip as long as they have a fair shot at long term survival. If I were a little younger I would be at the head of the line. Throughout history there have always been exceptional individuals that want to explore new frontiers. At this point, short of exploring the oceans, there simply aren't any frontiers left here to explore. Spinning around in low earth orbit sure isn't a new frontier any more. Create a new frontier to explore on Mars and will capture the imagination of the world again and NASA you really, desperately need that if you dont want to wither away as poinless bureaucracy.
Its an absurd waste to have to try to get a ship to Mars that has to get back to earth. The round trip scenario has led to the massive NASA fixation on long duration zero gravity research which is about all the ISS is good for.
A far more rational apporach is a fast one way trip for colonists with periodic cargo flights before and after they arrive to insure the colonists have the resources and equipment to create permenent habitats, raise food, find water and survive.
We should be doing research on how people cope with 6-9 months in zero G en route to indefinite periods at the %38 Martian gravity. Going from zero G to %38 is a lot less of a problem than spending years in zero G on a round trip and ending up back in Earth's gravity.
Please NASA, start designing fast propulsion, biospheres and Mars colonization missions. Please stop reinventing the space shuttle and wasting money on dead ends that are relatively easy for you to do but pointless. Please do things that are hard but worth it.
@de_machina