Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Real-ID, PriceRitePhoto, RIM
iBill stolen info a framejob? An anonymous reader writes "The database of stolen credit card information recently discussed on Slashdot appears not to have come from iBill after all. From the article: 'Secure Science's Lance James backed away from his conclusion that iBill, which processes most of its transactions on behalf of adult services, was the source of the leak. He says pornography transaction databases may be considered especially desirable to spammers, and that a criminal may have deliberately mislabeled a database taken from another source.'"
First steps towards defying the Real ID act. An anonymous reader writes "With House Bill 1582, The New Hampshire House of Representatives has taken the first steps towards defying the Federal Government on the infamous Real ID act, which last year passed 100-0. This bill does not express disagreement with the Real ID act, it prohibits the state DMV from amending licensing procedures altogether, and it passed 270-84. Several impassioned testimonies were given at the House, and even those against the bill expressed displeasure with the Real ID act. It now moves on to the 24-member state Senate. The afternoon's proceedings can be viewed or listened to via the NH General Court website under the afternoon of March 8th."
Peter Quinn continues his support of Open Source. Stony Stevenson writes "Computerworld Australia reports that former Massachusetts state government CIO, Peter Quinn is fronting the battle for OpenSource. He believes the cost of government is not sustainable in its present form and any technology leader who is not supporting and implementing open standards should resign and get out of the business. From the article: 'Even though the personal toll from state government experience was huge, Quinn said he would not be silenced. "I will remain very vocal and prominent regarding open standards, open source, especially Open Document Format and all aspects of accessibility for the disabled community," he said.'"
Judge flunks lawsuit against spammers. Hawkeye writes "A federal court in California has just created a huge legal loophole for companies who hire sleazy spammers. Kennedy-Western, an unaccredited university (aka diploma mill) has been absolved for outsourcing its email advertising to 'proxy-abusing, header-forging, hash-busting spammers,' according to the story at Spam Kings. The court ruled that Kennedy-Western didn't violate the CAN-SPAM Act because the plaintiff, a small California ISP named Hypertouch, 'failed to provide any evidence that KWU had actual knowledge or consciously avoided knowledge of a current or future violation of the CAN-SPAM Act by anyone who sent the e-mails at issue.' Perhaps not surprisingly, KWU enlisted as an expert witness Jason Rines, an email marketer who once worked with the notorious Sanford Wallace and who has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List."
WinXP on a Mac, round 2. fan777 writes "Slashdot recently posted a story regarding blurry Flickr photos on what may be the first WinXP installation on a Mac. To those who claimed heavy photochopping, narf2006 has finally released a blurry video (Complete with Mirror || Torrent)."
Juniper drops message board suit. It seems that Juniper Networks has finally come to their senses and dropped the suit against several unidentified LightReading message board users. From the article: "What is still unknown is whether or not Juniper ever uncovered the identities of "Does 1-10." The company's complaint cited several messages that got the company riled up, and most those messages allege that Juniper is bribing lawyers and spying on its employees."
Vint Cerf answers TLD questions. netzer writes "CircleID is running responses they have received from Vint Cerf on the questions submitted to him from the community with regards to top level domains."
PriceRitePhoto gets relisted. Thomas Hawk has an interesting blog entry in which he details how PriceRitePhoto, the online retailer who gained so much recent infamy, has been relisted on Yahoo! shopping after only a three month penance. From the article: "What was interesting to me at the time when the PriceRitePhoto story was going on was that PriceRitePhoto had supposedly been delisted a year earlier from comparison shopping site PriceGrabber. What I never could get is how after being delisted on PriceGrabber that PriceRitePhoto ended back on there a year later to try and rip me off. Of course that first delisting didn't get the visibility that mine did, but not to worry, not only is PriceRitePhoto back in business at Yahoo! Shopping, they are back in business on PriceGrabber as well. This after being delisted there at least twice that I know of."
RIM goes on the offensive for patent reform. flanman writes to tell us it seems that RIM has decided to continue the patent reform fight even after giving up their recent court battle. RIM is running full page ads in a number of US newspapers urging lawmakers to change the way patents are issues and managed. RIM also has more details on the Blackberry site.
Normally I would say that PriceRitePhoto was relisted for a simple reason: money...except that in this case, I can't see where _anyone_ would profit from them being relisted. Am I wrong here? Does Yahoo! or PriceGrabber somehow make money from them being relisted? (bribes?)
Look, I'll agree the patent system needs a major overhaul, in fact, most people well versed in patent law feel the same way. RIM did not lose this case because of bad patent law. They lost the case because they made really bad decisions. Their two major arguments (that the Intel processor in the BB was the mobile device, not the BB itself; that RIM's Canadian servers weren't subject to US patent law) were BLATANTLY contradicted by US Patent law precedent and by the U.S.C. (US Code of Law). Not only that, their courtroom and executive behavior was asinine. They infuriated the Judge (District court Judge James Spencer), may have been lying in their testimony (about procedure MANDATED by US federal law!), and filed the SAME motion FOUR TIMES (it was beat 4 times, by the same argument; James Spencer began to wonder if there was something wrong with his hearing). RIM had an easy win, but lack of technical expertise in their legal decisions (lawyers usually know the LAW, not technology) and simple good corporate behavior, and NTP would likely have been sent packing. I also theorize that a critical argument could be made regarding obviousness, but it would require examining the fundamental precedent that NTP used, and judging its usefulness. Alas, that is another topic for another day (and hopefully a scholarly publication for myself, but I digress...). Patent Law would have protected RIM, if they hadn't shot themselves in the foot. Patent law was not the problem here.
I sure would like to know how that was accomplished. Even though the video is interesting it doesn't really tell the tale.
For all we know it could just be a full-screen movie of a Windows XP install/boot that's running. I want some information on how he got XP to talk EFI.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
I was sceptic as well but if you watch carefully he actually turns on the Mac from sleep mode at one point (see teh white Led on the front). I cannot imagine that any computer could wake up and *instantly* playback full screen video. I just doesn't work like that.
For all I can tell this is real unless he managed to hook up the iMac's screen directly to a behind the scenes PC. Even then I would have doubts.
The little windows logo that replaces teh Mac at bootup tells me that this guy did his homework and was able to modify the EFI for it to load some custom bootloader
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
New Hampshire is also home to the Free State Project: I haven't joined the project, but I do admire its proponents.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Turnover in these departments tends to be pretty high. It wouldn't be unusual that whoever approved the relisting has no idea about what happened previously (unless they were alerted, which it appears they now have been).
I suppose one could say they ought to have a blacklist to check or some such, but who knows how the actual department functions or what the internal policies are.
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If you look at the textmode setup screen, you can see there's a 256MB USB key present (244MB storage device). Later after the GUI is booted, you can see under Disk Drives there's a Generic USB storage disk.
I'm willing to bet that what's happening here it that he's managed to copy the NT bootloader onto the USB drive and then boot to it. Booting to USB devices is, I believe, something that Apple supports. I know it's supported by every current BIOS so why should the next generation EFI have fewer features? Maybe if you plug in a bootable USB device, the EFI will boot it instead of the MBR on the primary disk drive...or more likely there's a hotkey to boot to USB devices like how holding "C" I think forces a boot to CD-ROM.
Anyway, the sneaky part is that booting to CD-ROM or USB kicks in all sorts of helpful things. Booting to most CD-ROMs (El Torito spec) creates a fake "A:" drive with the contents of the bootsector binary file. Ironically, you can't acccess the CD-ROM itself unless that bootsector loads a CD-ROM driver. Booting to USB drives, I would guess, creates Int 13 or 80h or whatver it's called...basically BIOS-compatible addressing for drives. This is how funky SCSI or RAID controllers can create drives that you can see in DOS, which has no idea how to access a 32-bit PCI device.
So my theory is that the Mac creates a C: drive and loads the NT installer kernal, at which point the installer loads the right driver to see the IDE drivers (or perhaps he loads the appropriate textmode driver for the actual disk controller). Once the kernal can see the drive, it can put the pointer in the BOOT.INI and format and partition it. Then, the USB drive becomes the boot drive (has BOOT.INI, NTLDR, etc) and the internal IDE drive becomes the system drive (\WINDOWS directory, pagefile, etc).
There are people who know how to boot the NT kernal from USB keys and even read-only media like CD-ROMs. I wonder if anyone has tried using a WinXP embedded bootable CD on an Intel Mac (like BartPE or the official Microsoft recovery one. It's a clever idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the magic step. As a bonus, using the BIOS emulation provided by USB burning would probably bypass all of the trusted computing components since they are not DOS compatible.
Still, talk about making a sow's ear out of a silk purse!
-JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I was sceptic as well but if you watch carefully he actually turns on the Mac from sleep mode at one point (see teh white Led on the front).
What happened to the LED on the front? It shut off once Windows was installed; is this normal? Does it do this when you run Linux on a Mac?
Actually, I think it is more along the lines of this:
:)
EFI looks for a bootloader on certain types of filesystems. On the Intel Mac, HFS+ and FAT32 are supported, nothing else. So what you do is you write your own EFI bootloader which loads a CSM to get BIOS compatibility, and loads the NT kernel and so on. You can also patch the in-RAM copy of EFI with your bootloader to know how to load El Torito CDs to do the install as well.
Once you have a functional CSM and a bootloader that knows how to load the NT kernel, you are pretty much set. However, because of the FAT32/HFS limitations, you still need some sort of small bootstrap partition for your bootloader. In this case, what is better than a USB key? You can quickly change the files under OS X, and reboot straight to it for testing your changes.