Or they're running log analyzing software on both the web page and the ad server. When a client requests more HTML pages than ads, he's obviously using a blocker software.
However, such a software can easily be countered by loading ads and then not displaying them, which would hurt online advertising much more than today's blockers...
If you're talking about applying the reverse of various well documented steganography algorithm on an image (or an mp3-song, for that matter) and then looking at the result, you're wrong.
All you will get is a random stream of bits. And without the private key to which this message was encrypted, you have no possibility to know whether these random bits really are some supersecret data, or just random noise introduced by the digital camera, the image processing software or the compression algorithm.
Ahem.
The point of stenographic images is exactly that you can't differ whether an image contains hidden data or it's just a plain normal image.
Otherwise you could as well be posting plain binary encrypted files.
Also, some of the more advanced stenography methods can even withstand printing out the image, and scanning it back in.
Due to a process called Hawking Radiation they tend to "evaporate" rather quickly. The time it will take depends on the size of the black hole, and the density of the surrounding material. The exact formula is rather complex, but for average environments, a black hole has to be more than a 1000 tons at creation to be of any danger. Considering that particle accelerators never handle material heavier than a few atoms, we are quite a bit on the safe side...
The problem isn't the market itself, but its consequences.
There are already enough lowlifes to worry about in normal online games (take Counterstrike as an example). However, when there's the possibility to win real cash in a game is where the bottom feeders really begin to show up and ruin everyones fun.
In Everquest, this has lead on some servers to a total cornering of the item market by ebay-sale-guilds. If you wanted a rare item, you had no choice other than to buy it for cash, since all the important places in the game had been occupied by them.
This had such a profound impact on most people's gaming experience that (as mentioned in the article) sony's lawyers approached ebay and were able to shut down the sales.
In Diablo 2, real-cash sales have lead to a staggering surge in cheats and scams. Whole game accounts were cracked by brute force and all their contents sold away on ebay.
Other people used exploits to allow them to loot duel players, often leaving more unexperienced players without a single dime while all their stuff was sold away by the looter.
There have also been numerous hacks to steal and duplicate items, mostly with the intention of selling them away for hard cash.
All in all, the ability of making cash has severely damaged the playing communities of the affected games.
I definitely hope that any future online games forbid the sale of items. And the final statement from Paul Sams gives me a little bit of hope that it will at least be so in Blizzard's future game World of Warcraft...
The very fact that a.bat (which is supposed to be a text file and contain DOS commands) and a.pif (which should only contain a few preferences for launching other executables) can spread viruses since they are called the exactly same way as real executables is so stupid I can't even begin to understand why they did it.
This is as if perl would check a file it has received through the pipe ("/usr/bin/perl script.txt") and if it's not a real script, just launch it as an binary.
The worldofwarcraft.com domain was registered in August 1999.
So I think Blizzard got the edge here. However, the similarities between Warhammer and Warcraft are indeed striking...
Well, it's not really like they have a choice. They need a way to get a living, even if it's by sitting all day long in a call-center and asking silly question to annoyed people.
And if you want to vent your agressions, do it to the manager and not the phone reps.
Amiga users. Demos in LHA archives are mostly Amiga binaries, so you couldn't run it anyways...
> what does file:///c:/con/con do
That was an old exploit for IE 4 (maybe 5.0?) that caused Windows to lock up completely. Kinda funny to put on your webpage and hide it with a little bit of on mouseover Javascript:)
Let's not forget how they shut down "Babylon 5: Into the Fire" after about 75% of it had already been finished, but subsequently refused to give the ex-developers access to their work.
It really seems that Sierra Management consists of the most clueless of assholes, worse than anything else you usually see in the world of the big game developers...
The same people who are criticizing users because of their stupidity when dealing with mail worms can be so easily tricked into promoting domain sales... --------------------------------------
Well, i don't have access to the original notice and there doesn't seem to be any news regarding this chance of policy on the Verizon homepage, but it seems like you could still send email with "From:"-headers like fakespammeraddress@verizon.com
This whole idea rather seems like an anticompetitive measure to keep their customers from using life-long email addresses e.g. from mail.com --------------------------------------
This isn't necessarily a shortcoming. As pointed out in the detailed analysis on Usenet:
The worm could have done
truly random IP generation and that would have allowed it to infect a lot
more systems a lot faster. We are not sure why that was not done but a
friend of ours did pose an interesting idea... If the person who wrote this
worm owned an IP address that was one of the first hundred or thousand
etc... to be scanned then they could setup a sniffer and anytime and IP
address tried to connect to port 80 on their IP address they would know that
the IP address that connected to them was infected with the worm and they
would therefore be able to create a list of the majority of systems that
were infected by this worm.
Well, the problem is that all those copy protection methods are more or less to ROT13. Some may use rotation, some XOR (like Adobe), and some even Twofish.
But they are all equally simple to hack since the decryption key has to be stored on the same medium as the encrypted data! It simply isn't possible to find a secure method this way, and in the end, ROT13 is just as secure as a real code with a key everyone knows... --------------------------------------
To post something worthwile: It is kinda ironic that you see a lot of stories on/. talking about the stupidity of Netsitter-like filters while they implement a just as braindead one for their posts... --------------------------------------
And everyone who replaces "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" with "-----my network admin is an idiot-----" can send out confidential information... ---------------------------------- ----
With CCs, there's no other way to pay you bills than to give the receiving party complete control over all your money (up to the charging limit, which usually is no less than $5000) and then trust them to only take as much as they're supposed to.
Now don't tell me you don't see the stupidity here...
Every highschool student could come up with a more secure, yet still simple method, but I guess CCs is what you get when you hire banking idiots instead of students.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they're running log analyzing software on both the web page and the ad server. When a client requests more HTML pages than ads, he's obviously using a blocker software.
However, such a software can easily be countered by loading ads and then not displaying them, which would hurt online advertising much more than today's blockers...
If you're talking about applying the reverse of various well documented steganography algorithm on an image (or an mp3-song, for that matter) and then looking at the result, you're wrong.
All you will get is a random stream of bits. And without the private key to which this message was encrypted, you have no possibility to know whether these random bits really are some supersecret data, or just random noise introduced by the digital camera, the image processing software or the compression algorithm.
http://directory.google.com/Top/Science/Technology /Mechanical_Engineering/Propulsion/Aerospace/Space /Electric/
With the latest version, the window doesnt even start up at all if you have popup-suppresion enabled :)
Ahem.
The point of stenographic images is exactly that you can't differ whether an image contains hidden data or it's just a plain normal image.
Otherwise you could as well be posting plain binary encrypted files.
Also, some of the more advanced stenography methods can even withstand printing out the image, and scanning it back in.
Due to a process called Hawking Radiation they tend to "evaporate" rather quickly. The time it will take depends on the size of the black hole, and the density of the surrounding material.
The exact formula is rather complex, but for average environments, a black hole has to be more than a 1000 tons at creation to be of any danger. Considering that particle accelerators never handle material heavier than a few atoms, we are quite a bit on the safe side...
The problem isn't the market itself, but its consequences.
There are already enough lowlifes to worry about in normal online games (take Counterstrike as an example). However, when there's the possibility to win real cash in a game is where the bottom feeders really begin to show up and ruin everyones fun.
In Everquest, this has lead on some servers to a total cornering of the item market by ebay-sale-guilds. If you wanted a rare item, you had no choice other than to buy it for cash, since all the important places in the game had been occupied by them.
This had such a profound impact on most people's gaming experience that (as mentioned in the article) sony's lawyers approached ebay and were able to shut down the sales.
In Diablo 2, real-cash sales have lead to a staggering surge in cheats and scams. Whole game accounts were cracked by brute force and all their contents sold away on ebay.
Other people used exploits to allow them to loot duel players, often leaving more unexperienced players without a single dime while all their stuff was sold away by the looter.
There have also been numerous hacks to steal and duplicate items, mostly with the intention of selling them away for hard cash.
All in all, the ability of making cash has severely damaged the playing communities of the affected games.
I definitely hope that any future online games forbid the sale of items. And the final statement from Paul Sams gives me a little bit of hope that it will at least be so in Blizzard's future game World of Warcraft...
Yeah, go ahead. Don't feel any need for proof or similarily silly things.
If I had any points, I would have modded you down, that's for sure...
The very fact that a .bat (which is supposed to be a text file and contain DOS commands) and a .pif (which should only contain a few preferences for launching other executables) can spread viruses since they are called the exactly same way as real executables is so stupid I can't even begin to understand why they did it.
This is as if perl would check a file it has received through the pipe ("/usr/bin/perl script.txt") and if it's not a real script, just launch it as an binary.
The worldofwarcraft.com domain was registered in August 1999.
So I think Blizzard got the edge here. However, the similarities between Warhammer and Warcraft are indeed striking...
Well, it's not really like they have a choice. They need a way to get a living, even if it's by sitting all day long in a call-center and asking silly question to annoyed people.
And if you want to vent your agressions, do it to the manager and not the phone reps.
Ah, good ol' irony.
Like anyone would prefer B&W over Civilization (no matter whether in 2001 or 2034)
> who the @#%$@#% uses LHA these days?!?
:)
Amiga users. Demos in LHA archives are mostly Amiga binaries, so you couldn't run it anyways...
> what does file:///c:/con/con do
That was an old exploit for IE 4 (maybe 5.0?) that caused Windows to lock up completely. Kinda funny to put on your webpage and hide it with a little bit of on mouseover Javascript
Let's not forget how they shut down "Babylon 5: Into the Fire" after about 75% of it had already been finished, but subsequently refused to give the ex-developers access to their work.
It really seems that Sierra Management consists of the most clueless of assholes, worse than anything else you usually see in the world of the big game developers...
The same people who are criticizing users because of their stupidity when dealing with mail worms can be so easily tricked into promoting domain sales...
--------------------------------------
Well, i don't have access to the original notice and there doesn't seem to be any news regarding this chance of policy on the Verizon homepage, but it seems like you could still send email with "From:"-headers like fakespammeraddress@verizon.com
This whole idea rather seems like an anticompetitive measure to keep their customers from using life-long email addresses e.g. from mail.com
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
Well, the problem is that all those copy protection methods are more or less to ROT13. Some may use rotation, some XOR (like Adobe), and some even Twofish.
But they are all equally simple to hack since the decryption key has to be stored on the same medium as the encrypted data! It simply isn't possible to find a secure method this way, and in the end, ROT13 is just as secure as a real code with a key everyone knows...
--------------------------------------
To post something worthwile: It is kinda ironic that you see a lot of stories on /. talking about the stupidity of Netsitter-like filters while they implement a just as braindead one for their posts...
--------------------------------------
And everyone who replaces "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" with "-----my network admin is an idiot-----" can send out confidential information...- ----
---------------------------------
> Several of our soldiers have.
And I always thought it was the environment which had to pay for the low gas prices...
--------------------------------------
That was why I found "Cube" such an extraordinary movie. It raises exactly the point you're trying to make fun of.
--------------------------------------
Use cron to switch filtering tables
--------------------------------------
With CCs, there's no other way to pay you bills than to give the receiving party complete control over all your money (up to the charging limit, which usually is no less than $5000) and then trust them to only take as much as they're supposed to.
Now don't tell me you don't see the stupidity here...
Every highschool student could come up with a more secure, yet still simple method, but I guess CCs is what you get when you hire banking idiots instead of students.
--------------------------------------
He prolly meant 1.6 billion page impressions...
--------------------------------------