Your emails are encrypted using your private key, not a "password". The password (or passphrase) is used to unlock the private key. It's perfectly possible to change the passphrase required for your private key without damaging your ability to read or send your emails. It's still the same key, it just needs a different pattern of bits to be able to use it.
Of course, they shouldn't have the ability to reset your key's passphrase. Maybe it took them 5 weeks because they had to brute force it?:)
Damned straight. When a business starts calling its customers "consumers", you know they've lost touch. The term makes it sound like your only purpose in life is to consume whatever shlock they produce; and if a company is thinking that way, then the answer to increasing profits is obvious: just produce more stuff! It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be what your customers actually want; because you no longer have customers, only consumers, and they'll consume anything!
You don't see small businesses using the term "consumers" very often, because they still know that in order to survive and prosper you need to actually provide something of value. Once you get to a certain size with a certain market share, you stop thinking like that. It's no longer about competing with others, trying to better yourself and provide a better service or product; it's just about selling more product to those who consume it.
Most of the industries where "consumer" is popular seem to be at a standstill, too. The music industry hasn't changed significantly during my lifetime, as far as I can tell; that's almost three decades. Same with the movie industry. It's still the same stuff produced in the same way by the same people.
As far as I've seen, people who prefer orchestral music tend to think they're better than everyone else, possibly just as a side-effect of having less popular tastes. This tends to isolate them a little as none of their friends enjoy the same kind of music as them. They sometimes get teased a bit, too: "don't let so-and-so pick the music, all he listens to his boring orchestral stuff."
To compensate, they denigrate anyone that enjoys more common or mainstream music, trying to convince themselves that nobody actually likes that sort of thing and only listen to it because they're so desperate to appear to fit in, or because they're such complete sheeple they can't stand being alone with their thoughts. Everyone knows that introspection and enjoying life is a privilege only enjoyed by the elite few, who appreciate the finer things.
It's not as if anyone could enjoy the rhythm and hook of mainstream music, or find it invigorating. Certainly there's no chance people might associate such music with the fun times they've had socialising with their friends and generally enjoying life and connecting with other human beings.
I guess musical pretentiousness isn't reserved for the indie-rock crowd after all.
Microsoft releases APIs and so forth allowing other entities to produce software: It is explicitly allowed because it adds value.
A lot of time and effort has been spent on projects like Samba and WINE and Microsoft Office format readers & writers to implement compatible implementations compatible with Microsoft's software. A significant part of the effort required to do this is due to Microsoft's choosing not to publish APIs and documentation, because they clearly don't want others to benefit from their hard work, at least not without licensing it from Microsoft.
Do you really think Microsoft would have permitted such developments if they'd had legal standing to squash them?
Rowling explicitly allowed these folks to add value with their fan work.
That's very nice if she did, but there is absolutely no requirement for her to do so. The only time you'd need permission is if you're breaching copyright. Using excerpts from texts for purposes of critique and commentary is a very well-established exception to copyright, and does not require any kind of approval, explicit or otherwise, from the copyright holder.
If the material to be published actually constitutes a violation of copyright, then fine -- she has a good case and good luck to her. TFA suggests that it's a load of hocus pocus, but it does exude more than a hint of bias, so I guess it is premature to criticise her for this.
I'd say the former. The GP is just pointing out that when Firefox was released, it was considered "small" by web browser standards, at "only" 8 megs. Now, it's still actually only 8 megs, but people call it "bloated".
Them's the breaks when you create something that enters the popular culture. Do you believe that third-parties shouldn't be allowed to sell "unauthorised" software for Windows because that would be preventing Microsoft from making a profit from all the hard work they did creating Windows? If so, then fine; I disagree, but at least you have a consistent position. If you disagree with that, then how is this different?
The content on the Lexicon seems to have taken a lot of time, effort and attention to detail (i.e. hard work) to create, and the author has made it available for free (presumably supported by ads, which may or may not pay for the site). It seems Rowling actually likes the site and doesn't have a problem with it if it's available for free. If people would be willing to pay for such content in book form, then why shouldn't he be able to make a profit from his own hard work? So long as he's not copying from the books so much that it would fail the "fair use" provisions, I can't see how there's a problem with this.
Her whole argument seems to be that she "plans" to release a companion book "one day", and if there's already a companion book it might decrease sales. What I think is that this third-party companion book created by a mere fan would be better than her own book, and she knows this -- and therefore yes, that may well hurt sales. Tough biscuits.
This seems like just another case of a commercial entity failing to meet consumer demand for their IP, and trying to sue anyone who DOES step up to meet that demand. Meeting consumer demand is pretty much the cornerstone of our entire economic system. What's more, in this case, meeting that demand isn't just a matter of providing the copyrighted content in a more convenient format (ala torrents), but providing supporting material which enhances the copyrighted content. It adds value.
Also, how many books are there in the Harry Potter series? Most fans seem to have bought them all. I don't think they'll hesitate to buy an "official" companion book as well as an unofficial one.;P
Another thought: why not partner with this guy to release an official companion book and split the proceeds?
If your customers are really using single 300 GB SATA drives for your application, then it can't be a very important application.;)
Big programs aren't too much of an issue if you're using a dedicated machine. I mean, the smallest discs we can readily source for our servers are 36 GB, so even with a 5 gig overhead for the bloated OS there's plenty of room for bloated apps.
But as virtualisation becomes more common, space does begin to be a consideration again. I don't appreciate vendors wasting our (relatively expensive) SAN storage space because they're too lazy to do their job properly. I particularly don't appreciate Microsoft wasting several gigabytes on multiple redundant copies of every single library on every single Windows VM we have.
That said, it sounds like your app is an end-user desktop thing (possibly with a server component), in which case that kind of bloat is absolutely not going to be noticed.
If you click on the "Go to google.com" link it'll take you to google.com, just like it says it will. The actual URL is http://www.google.com/ncr Although, I don't see any logo at the moment, so perhaps we missed it. Using a proxy on my co-lo server in the US I don't see it either, although for some reason I got redirected to google.co.za for a moment before it redirected me back to google.com.
Local businesses use.com because they're cheaper than.au. Not that much cheaper true, but hey, at least they're trying. Still a lot of people using @bigpond.com email addresses for their business.
And sorry Americans, but.com indicates international and/or North America. You deal with it.;)
Well of course. What, you expect me to actually research stuff I'm not sure about before I post? That's what the infinite power of the slashdot brain machine is for! Next you'll suggest I actually RTFA before posting about it. Insanity! Insanity!!!
I'm wondering if it's more intended as a feature of not-easily-removed drives. Not much good to auto run a program if the user's going to change their mind and unplug the device again in a second.
Auto-run obviously has useful implications for USB drives. I'm trying to recall an experiment some time ago where someone left a whole bunch of USB keys lying around in a public area, and employees picked them up and plugged them into their company computers without a second thought, thus infected the corporate network. I thought that at least some of them auto-ran, but perhaps it relied on inquisitive people opening stuff on the drive, possibly coupled with the retarded "hide known file extensions by default" configuration of Explorer.
What about "secure" flash drives? I've never used one, but from reading about them I always got the impression they auto-ran the drive manager software which let you unlock the encrypted portion. Do they all require you to manually install the software first, and then the management software detects when the drive is plugged in and automatically opens?
I had a feeling I probably was wrong, but I knew it was absolutely true that exe's can be run by autorun in some cases so it was worth risking a flame.;)
Your shell example makes it clear that Microsoft "kind of" understood the security risks when implementing this, and mitigated the most obvious avenue of attack, while still leaving people vulnerable. I think it also explains why normally double-clicking on a drive would expand it, but sometimes it wouldn't. That one confused more than once.
My impression is that they're just regular files pre-loaded on it, so reformatting will work. Provided of course you don't plug it in to a Windows PC with auto-run enabled in order to format it.
I wonder if one day we will see drives that have malware embedded in the controller that can't ever be erased? Maybe it's possible for them to detect "initial connection and probing by Windows" by waiting for a certain sequence of commands, and only expose the malware then. If you look at the drive later, or use a different OS which probes in a slightly different manner or with different timing, the files don't appear.
Autorun can definitely run exe's, that's its main purpose. That's how the installer automatically starts up when you insert a game or application CD. It's possible that the exe needs to be signed or something, but it's more likely that whatever program you were using simply "did it wrong".
Don't forget that you can also disable autorun permanently, rather than having to remember to hold shift every time you insert a disc.
You're right. I first saw the "my wife for hire" interpretation on slashdot, and it made me laugh so much I can't help but replace it whenever I hear or think of it.
Kind of like how I can't hear Smells Like Teen Spirit without thinking "Now I'm mumblin', and I'm screamin', and I don't know what I'm singin'".
It is actually possible that it's something related to your system's configuration, the extensions your using, or perhaps just the sites you visit. The work PC I'm on at the moment has been up for 6 days, and Firefox has been running pretty much since startup. Currently 11 tabs open. It's using 135 megs of memory of the machine's 3.6 gigs (it has 4 gigs, but it's XP 32-bit).
Maybe the Mac version behaves completely differently. Does Firefox allocate and use memory in the same way across all platforms, or does it do weird platform-specific things?
Sorry you have severe problems with it, but the fact is, for many people, it's a stable browser than runs from when the system starts up til when the system shuts down without any issues.
I agree. They have a big advantage over the cap groups: they have the episode well before it's aired, in perfect quality. They could put up their own torrents for it the moment the episode ends on TV, or even halfway through it. Provide their own trackers, but submit the torrent to the popular sites so it's easy to access (in addition to putting it on their own website). Using their own trackers means they get viewership statistics -- probably more accurate than the Neilson family stats at that!
Most people will use the official torrent: it's guaranteed good quality, complete, available before anyone else's, and sanctioned by the producer. People will tolerate some ads, so long as they're not obnoxious. There's only so many companies that can be advertised in a global market, anyway. Add a "If you want to support this show, visit..." to the end credits and have a site which lists the show's sponsors, a donation box, merchandise, etc. This site could use localisation to tell you about the sponsors nearest to you, so the networks don't need to miss out on local ad revenue.
It's interesting how big media still seems to believe they absolutely must exert 100% complete control over their content in order to be profitable, while seemingly oblivious to the fact they haven't had control for a long time and have been profitable regardless. Most people aren't greedy and selfish, but I think most people do feel completely disconnected from the fate of their favourite shows. For the vast majority of people, the networks have absolutely no idea what shows they watch. What does it matter if I torrent a show rather than watch it on TV? I'm not going to buy stuff I see advertised during it, and even if I did, the company that makes it has no real way of correlating that with the fact they sponsored a particular show.
I guess realistically, it's easier for the networks to produce a few shows which rake in millions in advertising, than it is to produce a lot of shows which are individually profitable, but with smaller margins.
It was very clear in my example (record resale, houses on your block) that was talking micro, not macro.
I'm not sure I follow this. What's the difference? How can something that works "macro" not work "micro"? How does this apply to Radiohead's experiment? Privately-funded websites that get by with the help of donations?
It's considered the trick of a slimy salesman if he prices the product, be it a car or whatever, to what he thinks you can pay.
My examples were all about voluntary payment, where the buyer decides what price they think is appropriate. It's completely different!
Why do I not deserve exclusive rights to my work?
You should be allowed to do whatever you want. That's fine. This is what I have a problem with (from your original post, which gets us back on to the thread's topic):
I would really LIKE and even EXPECT the government to do their job and enforce the laws and stop people from stealing from me.
Why should my tax money, and the tax money of millions of other people who have absolutely zero interest in your niche product, have to pay to help ensure nobody uses it without your permission? What's in it for the rest of society?
Moreover, the only way it's even remotely feasible for the government to perform this function is with invasive monitoring of every single thing we do. Is your program that only 1,000 people in the entire country (or entire world?) thought was worth paying your asking price for really so valuable that we should spend millions or billions of dollars monitoring everyone just so you can make $100,000 instead of $50,000? What makes you so sure those pirates will actually pay you the $50 you think your software is worth if you're enforcing payments, rather than just skip it entirely? If they do that, then our government's crackdown on piracy doesn't make you any more, but costs us all a lot.
Let's assume that it is economically feasible to monitor all digital content using taxpayer money. A society where everyone feels entitled to receive whatever payment they think is appropriate any time they fart out an idea would surely encourage the big corps to game the system (we already know certain record label execs truly believe they deserve to be paid every time anybody hears a song they've published).
But that's a slippery slope argument, so forget all that. I still have issues reconciling such monitoring with the notion of a "free society". I enjoy and value my privacy - real or imagined - and don't think the government has any right to invade it in such a manner. Free will only has value if we're able to use it.
Why should honest people pay -- in terms of taxes and freedom -- to help enforce copyright of things they have paid for the right to use? How does removing free will encourage honesty and ethics and such desirable traits in the members of our society?
And if I want somebody to have to pay $x to use it, I should have that exclusive right.
Sure, you absolutely have that right. But I think you'd be doing yourself and the rest of us a disservice to invoke it, and therefore why should the rest of society help you do it? Why do I think it'd be doing a disservice to the rest of society? You kind of said it yourself:
You have no standing to tell me how much profit is "enough" for a product. How could you EVER make the mistake in thinking that you do?
Let me reflect that: You have no standing to tell me how much your program is worth to me. How could you EVER make the mistake in thinking that you do?
How do you decide what value of x is appropriate for people to pay? Should someone who's going to use it for 6 hours to help them with a task but never need it again have to pay $50 as well? Are people who simply can't afford $50 somehow not good enough to benefit from your time, skill and creativity?
I don't think it comes with DirectX. Maybe I'm wrong. Once upon a time when the ArmA demo was first released, we happened to have a new Bladecenter sitting idle so I set up an ArmA server on that, and I needed to install DX for it to run. So if it does come with DirectX, then it's an old version.
But I do agree that Windows "server" comes with a lot of useless shit. A lot of my earlier VMs are seriously disc constrained, because it didn't occur to me that an out-of-the-box installation of Windows 2003 would need almost 5 gigs of disc space. And that's before it actually DOES anything. Most of the space seems to go to redundant copies of every DLL on the system just in case it needs to fix anything which has magically become "corrupted". What a joke.
If half the people on your block got their homes for free, how could you convince somebody to pay you $250k for YOURS?
Why should someone pay you $250k for your house if other people are able to get theirs for free? What's so fantastic about your house that it's worth so much, while other houses are being given away?
You can't give something away free for those who "can't afford it" and charge the ones that can.
The evidence we have suggests that that isn't true. Firstly, piracy exists, and is very widespread. What are some of the most pirated pieces of software in existence today? I'd hazard a guess that Windows and MS Office are in the top 10. And what pieces of software are some of the biggest money-earners in the software market? Windows and Office seem to have done a fantastic job of keeping Microsoft profitable over the years, even while they pour money into unprofitable markets. It's almost as if the people that can afford to pay hundreds of dollars for them are doing so, even though those that can't afford the arbitrary price tag don't.
What about the latest high-profile example: Radiohead's latest album. They explicitly gave it away for free, and made paying anything at all for it optional. Yet somehow they still made a profit from it. This isn't merely people finding an alternative way of acquiring the IP: this is a case of the owner and creator of that IP saying they don't believe it has any inherent value in and of itself; just pay whatever you think it's worth and can afford.
Another angle: I'm a slashdot subscriber and have been for ages, even though I don't really get anything out of it. Sure, no ads on pages, but I could just use adblock for that. But I like/. and I think the price is quite reasonable for what they offer, and I'm happy to support them in my little way. I periodically donate to subsim.com, because I find the forums useful. Neil (who runs it) pays for the hosting and bandwidth and so forth out of his own pocket, and tries to recoup some of the costs from people who can afford to pay for it, while letting everyone else use it for free.
So I really think your matter-of-fact statement "You can't give something away for free to those who can't afford it and charge the ones that can" is patently bogus. Charity organisations do this all the time. The OLPC project is doing this directly with the "buy one give one" programme.
To many, it's almost outrageous to suggest that music should be paid for.
Well, what's so wrong about that? Music is an easily produced and easily distributed commodity. Think about it. When was the last time you paid someone for having a conversation with you? Even if it was a really useful conversation which gave you great insight or clarity? What, you mean you don't pay people you converse with for their creativity and time when they pass on useful thoughts to you? For shame! How can you expect anyone to spend their time and creativity coming up with new original thoughts if you don't pay for every single one you hear?
Perhaps it's time to adjust our thinking, and face the fact that anything digital is a new economic paradigm. We can literally replicate this stuff an infinite number of times at no direct cost to the creator of the content. I have a torrent of Jimmy Eat World's latest album running on my server which I've uploaded 1,672 times over (make that 1,673 times). The cost to JEW of this: $0.00. That's at least 1,600 people who've heard the album because I haven't gotten around to stopping the torrent yet. Seems like a good deal to me.
I think content producers need to accept that not everyone is going to pay for their content, but that's okay, because not everybody has to. It's enough to simply have enough people pay.
In a way, this has been going on since the first days of commercial radio and TV: most people don't run out and buy everything that's advertised during thei
Re:I suppose the real question is....
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Is SETI Worth It?
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That's a very insightful summary, well done.
In simpler words, the SETI produces hope and sells it.
I donate my CPU time because they produce pretty imagery that makes it look like the IT department is doing complex IT stuff.;)
That is one weakness in the HTTPS scheme: it depends on non-hijackable DNS servers since it uses domain names instead of IP addresses for verification of your packets' destination.
Almost. The weakness in the HTTPS scheme is the chain of trust, not DNS. The SSL certificate contains a domain name, e.g. "secure.mybank.com". If the domain name contained in the certificate does not match the hostname requested by the browser (http://secure.mybank.com), then it will warn the user about the mismatch. This doesn't offer much protection in itself.
However, if the certificate offered by the web server is not authenticated by a certificate authority already trusted by the browser, then it will warn the user that it has no way of verifying the identity of the website. It is generally difficult to get a certificate for a domain which you don't actually control which is signed by a CA trusted by enough users to be useful.
If the ISP intercepts your traffic, they have to a) offer a certificate with the hostname your browser believes it is connecting to, which is b) signed by a trusted authority.
They can do a) with just an IP address, by connecting to the same IP and see what certificate the site offers, or by forcing you to use their proxy. b) is more difficult; the only way to do that is to get a trusted certificate installed in all of their customer's browsers, which they can use to sign the certificates they generate for the site they're spoofing. This could potentially be done as part of an ISP setup package, but they will probably lose a lot of customers when word gets out that they're spoofing secure sites. It may also be illegal to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
Your emails are encrypted using your private key, not a "password". The password (or passphrase) is used to unlock the private key. It's perfectly possible to change the passphrase required for your private key without damaging your ability to read or send your emails. It's still the same key, it just needs a different pattern of bits to be able to use it.
Of course, they shouldn't have the ability to reset your key's passphrase. Maybe it took them 5 weeks because they had to brute force it? :)
Damned straight. When a business starts calling its customers "consumers", you know they've lost touch. The term makes it sound like your only purpose in life is to consume whatever shlock they produce; and if a company is thinking that way, then the answer to increasing profits is obvious: just produce more stuff! It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be what your customers actually want; because you no longer have customers, only consumers, and they'll consume anything!
You don't see small businesses using the term "consumers" very often, because they still know that in order to survive and prosper you need to actually provide something of value. Once you get to a certain size with a certain market share, you stop thinking like that. It's no longer about competing with others, trying to better yourself and provide a better service or product; it's just about selling more product to those who consume it.
Most of the industries where "consumer" is popular seem to be at a standstill, too. The music industry hasn't changed significantly during my lifetime, as far as I can tell; that's almost three decades. Same with the movie industry. It's still the same stuff produced in the same way by the same people.
(Don't even get me started on "costumers"!)
As far as I've seen, people who prefer orchestral music tend to think they're better than everyone else, possibly just as a side-effect of having less popular tastes. This tends to isolate them a little as none of their friends enjoy the same kind of music as them. They sometimes get teased a bit, too: "don't let so-and-so pick the music, all he listens to his boring orchestral stuff."
To compensate, they denigrate anyone that enjoys more common or mainstream music, trying to convince themselves that nobody actually likes that sort of thing and only listen to it because they're so desperate to appear to fit in, or because they're such complete sheeple they can't stand being alone with their thoughts. Everyone knows that introspection and enjoying life is a privilege only enjoyed by the elite few, who appreciate the finer things.
It's not as if anyone could enjoy the rhythm and hook of mainstream music, or find it invigorating. Certainly there's no chance people might associate such music with the fun times they've had socialising with their friends and generally enjoying life and connecting with other human beings.
I guess musical pretentiousness isn't reserved for the indie-rock crowd after all.
A lot of time and effort has been spent on projects like Samba and WINE and Microsoft Office format readers & writers to implement compatible implementations compatible with Microsoft's software. A significant part of the effort required to do this is due to Microsoft's choosing not to publish APIs and documentation, because they clearly don't want others to benefit from their hard work, at least not without licensing it from Microsoft.
Do you really think Microsoft would have permitted such developments if they'd had legal standing to squash them?
Rowling explicitly allowed these folks to add value with their fan work.That's very nice if she did, but there is absolutely no requirement for her to do so. The only time you'd need permission is if you're breaching copyright. Using excerpts from texts for purposes of critique and commentary is a very well-established exception to copyright, and does not require any kind of approval, explicit or otherwise, from the copyright holder.
If the material to be published actually constitutes a violation of copyright, then fine -- she has a good case and good luck to her. TFA suggests that it's a load of hocus pocus, but it does exude more than a hint of bias, so I guess it is premature to criticise her for this.
I'd say the former. The GP is just pointing out that when Firefox was released, it was considered "small" by web browser standards, at "only" 8 megs. Now, it's still actually only 8 megs, but people call it "bloated".
Read into that whatever you want.
Them's the breaks when you create something that enters the popular culture. Do you believe that third-parties shouldn't be allowed to sell "unauthorised" software for Windows because that would be preventing Microsoft from making a profit from all the hard work they did creating Windows? If so, then fine; I disagree, but at least you have a consistent position. If you disagree with that, then how is this different?
The content on the Lexicon seems to have taken a lot of time, effort and attention to detail (i.e. hard work) to create, and the author has made it available for free (presumably supported by ads, which may or may not pay for the site). It seems Rowling actually likes the site and doesn't have a problem with it if it's available for free. If people would be willing to pay for such content in book form, then why shouldn't he be able to make a profit from his own hard work? So long as he's not copying from the books so much that it would fail the "fair use" provisions, I can't see how there's a problem with this.
Her whole argument seems to be that she "plans" to release a companion book "one day", and if there's already a companion book it might decrease sales. What I think is that this third-party companion book created by a mere fan would be better than her own book, and she knows this -- and therefore yes, that may well hurt sales. Tough biscuits.
This seems like just another case of a commercial entity failing to meet consumer demand for their IP, and trying to sue anyone who DOES step up to meet that demand. Meeting consumer demand is pretty much the cornerstone of our entire economic system. What's more, in this case, meeting that demand isn't just a matter of providing the copyrighted content in a more convenient format (ala torrents), but providing supporting material which enhances the copyrighted content. It adds value.
Also, how many books are there in the Harry Potter series? Most fans seem to have bought them all. I don't think they'll hesitate to buy an "official" companion book as well as an unofficial one. ;P
Another thought: why not partner with this guy to release an official companion book and split the proceeds?
If your customers are really using single 300 GB SATA drives for your application, then it can't be a very important application. ;)
Big programs aren't too much of an issue if you're using a dedicated machine. I mean, the smallest discs we can readily source for our servers are 36 GB, so even with a 5 gig overhead for the bloated OS there's plenty of room for bloated apps.
But as virtualisation becomes more common, space does begin to be a consideration again. I don't appreciate vendors wasting our (relatively expensive) SAN storage space because they're too lazy to do their job properly. I particularly don't appreciate Microsoft wasting several gigabytes on multiple redundant copies of every single library on every single Windows VM we have.
That said, it sounds like your app is an end-user desktop thing (possibly with a server component), in which case that kind of bloat is absolutely not going to be noticed.
If you click on the "Go to google.com" link it'll take you to google.com, just like it says it will. The actual URL is http://www.google.com/ncr Although, I don't see any logo at the moment, so perhaps we missed it. Using a proxy on my co-lo server in the US I don't see it either, although for some reason I got redirected to google.co.za for a moment before it redirected me back to google.com.
Local businesses use .com because they're cheaper than .au. Not that much cheaper true, but hey, at least they're trying. Still a lot of people using @bigpond.com email addresses for their business.
And sorry Americans, but .com indicates international and/or North America. You deal with it. ;)
Well of course. What, you expect me to actually research stuff I'm not sure about before I post? That's what the infinite power of the slashdot brain machine is for! Next you'll suggest I actually RTFA before posting about it. Insanity! Insanity!!!
I'm wondering if it's more intended as a feature of not-easily-removed drives. Not much good to auto run a program if the user's going to change their mind and unplug the device again in a second.
Auto-run obviously has useful implications for USB drives. I'm trying to recall an experiment some time ago where someone left a whole bunch of USB keys lying around in a public area, and employees picked them up and plugged them into their company computers without a second thought, thus infected the corporate network. I thought that at least some of them auto-ran, but perhaps it relied on inquisitive people opening stuff on the drive, possibly coupled with the retarded "hide known file extensions by default" configuration of Explorer.
What about "secure" flash drives? I've never used one, but from reading about them I always got the impression they auto-ran the drive manager software which let you unlock the encrypted portion. Do they all require you to manually install the software first, and then the management software detects when the drive is plugged in and automatically opens?
I had a feeling I probably was wrong, but I knew it was absolutely true that exe's can be run by autorun in some cases so it was worth risking a flame. ;)
Chris Pimlott's post explains why it behaves like it does.
Your shell example makes it clear that Microsoft "kind of" understood the security risks when implementing this, and mitigated the most obvious avenue of attack, while still leaving people vulnerable. I think it also explains why normally double-clicking on a drive would expand it, but sometimes it wouldn't. That one confused more than once.
You're in particularly good form today, QuantumG.
Pfth, everyone knows Henry Ford invented the automobile.
My impression is that they're just regular files pre-loaded on it, so reformatting will work. Provided of course you don't plug it in to a Windows PC with auto-run enabled in order to format it.
I wonder if one day we will see drives that have malware embedded in the controller that can't ever be erased? Maybe it's possible for them to detect "initial connection and probing by Windows" by waiting for a certain sequence of commands, and only expose the malware then. If you look at the drive later, or use a different OS which probes in a slightly different manner or with different timing, the files don't appear.
Autorun can definitely run exe's, that's its main purpose. That's how the installer automatically starts up when you insert a game or application CD. It's possible that the exe needs to be signed or something, but it's more likely that whatever program you were using simply "did it wrong".
Don't forget that you can also disable autorun permanently, rather than having to remember to hold shift every time you insert a disc.
You're right. I first saw the "my wife for hire" interpretation on slashdot, and it made me laugh so much I can't help but replace it whenever I hear or think of it.
Kind of like how I can't hear Smells Like Teen Spirit without thinking "Now I'm mumblin', and I'm screamin', and I don't know what I'm singin'".
It is actually possible that it's something related to your system's configuration, the extensions your using, or perhaps just the sites you visit. The work PC I'm on at the moment has been up for 6 days, and Firefox has been running pretty much since startup. Currently 11 tabs open. It's using 135 megs of memory of the machine's 3.6 gigs (it has 4 gigs, but it's XP 32-bit).
Maybe the Mac version behaves completely differently. Does Firefox allocate and use memory in the same way across all platforms, or does it do weird platform-specific things?
Sorry you have severe problems with it, but the fact is, for many people, it's a stable browser than runs from when the system starts up til when the system shuts down without any issues.
My wife for hire!
I agree. They have a big advantage over the cap groups: they have the episode well before it's aired, in perfect quality. They could put up their own torrents for it the moment the episode ends on TV, or even halfway through it. Provide their own trackers, but submit the torrent to the popular sites so it's easy to access (in addition to putting it on their own website). Using their own trackers means they get viewership statistics -- probably more accurate than the Neilson family stats at that!
Most people will use the official torrent: it's guaranteed good quality, complete, available before anyone else's, and sanctioned by the producer. People will tolerate some ads, so long as they're not obnoxious. There's only so many companies that can be advertised in a global market, anyway. Add a "If you want to support this show, visit ..." to the end credits and have a site which lists the show's sponsors, a donation box, merchandise, etc. This site could use localisation to tell you about the sponsors nearest to you, so the networks don't need to miss out on local ad revenue.
It's interesting how big media still seems to believe they absolutely must exert 100% complete control over their content in order to be profitable, while seemingly oblivious to the fact they haven't had control for a long time and have been profitable regardless. Most people aren't greedy and selfish, but I think most people do feel completely disconnected from the fate of their favourite shows. For the vast majority of people, the networks have absolutely no idea what shows they watch. What does it matter if I torrent a show rather than watch it on TV? I'm not going to buy stuff I see advertised during it, and even if I did, the company that makes it has no real way of correlating that with the fact they sponsored a particular show.
I guess realistically, it's easier for the networks to produce a few shows which rake in millions in advertising, than it is to produce a lot of shows which are individually profitable, but with smaller margins.
It was very clear in my example (record resale, houses on your block) that was talking micro, not macro.
I'm not sure I follow this. What's the difference? How can something that works "macro" not work "micro"? How does this apply to Radiohead's experiment? Privately-funded websites that get by with the help of donations?
It's considered the trick of a slimy salesman if he prices the product, be it a car or whatever, to what he thinks you can pay.
My examples were all about voluntary payment, where the buyer decides what price they think is appropriate. It's completely different!
Why do I not deserve exclusive rights to my work?
You should be allowed to do whatever you want. That's fine. This is what I have a problem with (from your original post, which gets us back on to the thread's topic):
I would really LIKE and even EXPECT the government to do their job and enforce the laws and stop people from stealing from me.
Why should my tax money, and the tax money of millions of other people who have absolutely zero interest in your niche product, have to pay to help ensure nobody uses it without your permission? What's in it for the rest of society?
Moreover, the only way it's even remotely feasible for the government to perform this function is with invasive monitoring of every single thing we do. Is your program that only 1,000 people in the entire country (or entire world?) thought was worth paying your asking price for really so valuable that we should spend millions or billions of dollars monitoring everyone just so you can make $100,000 instead of $50,000? What makes you so sure those pirates will actually pay you the $50 you think your software is worth if you're enforcing payments, rather than just skip it entirely? If they do that, then our government's crackdown on piracy doesn't make you any more, but costs us all a lot.
Let's assume that it is economically feasible to monitor all digital content using taxpayer money. A society where everyone feels entitled to receive whatever payment they think is appropriate any time they fart out an idea would surely encourage the big corps to game the system (we already know certain record label execs truly believe they deserve to be paid every time anybody hears a song they've published).
But that's a slippery slope argument, so forget all that. I still have issues reconciling such monitoring with the notion of a "free society". I enjoy and value my privacy - real or imagined - and don't think the government has any right to invade it in such a manner. Free will only has value if we're able to use it.
Why should honest people pay -- in terms of taxes and freedom -- to help enforce copyright of things they have paid for the right to use? How does removing free will encourage honesty and ethics and such desirable traits in the members of our society?
And if I want somebody to have to pay $x to use it, I should have that exclusive right.
Sure, you absolutely have that right. But I think you'd be doing yourself and the rest of us a disservice to invoke it, and therefore why should the rest of society help you do it? Why do I think it'd be doing a disservice to the rest of society? You kind of said it yourself:
You have no standing to tell me how much profit is "enough" for a product. How could you EVER make the mistake in thinking that you do?
Let me reflect that: You have no standing to tell me how much your program is worth to me. How could you EVER make the mistake in thinking that you do?
How do you decide what value of x is appropriate for people to pay? Should someone who's going to use it for 6 hours to help them with a task but never need it again have to pay $50 as well? Are people who simply can't afford $50 somehow not good enough to benefit from your time, skill and creativity?
How does your discriminati
I don't think it comes with DirectX. Maybe I'm wrong. Once upon a time when the ArmA demo was first released, we happened to have a new Bladecenter sitting idle so I set up an ArmA server on that, and I needed to install DX for it to run. So if it does come with DirectX, then it's an old version.
But I do agree that Windows "server" comes with a lot of useless shit. A lot of my earlier VMs are seriously disc constrained, because it didn't occur to me that an out-of-the-box installation of Windows 2003 would need almost 5 gigs of disc space. And that's before it actually DOES anything. Most of the space seems to go to redundant copies of every DLL on the system just in case it needs to fix anything which has magically become "corrupted". What a joke.
If half the people on your block got their homes for free, how could you convince somebody to pay you $250k for YOURS?
Why should someone pay you $250k for your house if other people are able to get theirs for free? What's so fantastic about your house that it's worth so much, while other houses are being given away?
You can't give something away free for those who "can't afford it" and charge the ones that can.
The evidence we have suggests that that isn't true. Firstly, piracy exists, and is very widespread. What are some of the most pirated pieces of software in existence today? I'd hazard a guess that Windows and MS Office are in the top 10. And what pieces of software are some of the biggest money-earners in the software market? Windows and Office seem to have done a fantastic job of keeping Microsoft profitable over the years, even while they pour money into unprofitable markets. It's almost as if the people that can afford to pay hundreds of dollars for them are doing so, even though those that can't afford the arbitrary price tag don't.
What about the latest high-profile example: Radiohead's latest album. They explicitly gave it away for free, and made paying anything at all for it optional. Yet somehow they still made a profit from it. This isn't merely people finding an alternative way of acquiring the IP: this is a case of the owner and creator of that IP saying they don't believe it has any inherent value in and of itself; just pay whatever you think it's worth and can afford.
Another angle: I'm a slashdot subscriber and have been for ages, even though I don't really get anything out of it. Sure, no ads on pages, but I could just use adblock for that. But I like /. and I think the price is quite reasonable for what they offer, and I'm happy to support them in my little way. I periodically donate to subsim.com, because I find the forums useful. Neil (who runs it) pays for the hosting and bandwidth and so forth out of his own pocket, and tries to recoup some of the costs from people who can afford to pay for it, while letting everyone else use it for free.
So I really think your matter-of-fact statement "You can't give something away for free to those who can't afford it and charge the ones that can" is patently bogus. Charity organisations do this all the time. The OLPC project is doing this directly with the "buy one give one" programme.
To many, it's almost outrageous to suggest that music should be paid for.
Well, what's so wrong about that? Music is an easily produced and easily distributed commodity. Think about it. When was the last time you paid someone for having a conversation with you? Even if it was a really useful conversation which gave you great insight or clarity? What, you mean you don't pay people you converse with for their creativity and time when they pass on useful thoughts to you? For shame! How can you expect anyone to spend their time and creativity coming up with new original thoughts if you don't pay for every single one you hear?
Perhaps it's time to adjust our thinking, and face the fact that anything digital is a new economic paradigm. We can literally replicate this stuff an infinite number of times at no direct cost to the creator of the content. I have a torrent of Jimmy Eat World's latest album running on my server which I've uploaded 1,672 times over (make that 1,673 times). The cost to JEW of this: $0.00. That's at least 1,600 people who've heard the album because I haven't gotten around to stopping the torrent yet. Seems like a good deal to me.
I think content producers need to accept that not everyone is going to pay for their content, but that's okay, because not everybody has to. It's enough to simply have enough people pay.
In a way, this has been going on since the first days of commercial radio and TV: most people don't run out and buy everything that's advertised during thei
That's a very insightful summary, well done.
In simpler words, the SETI produces hope and sells it.I donate my CPU time because they produce pretty imagery that makes it look like the IT department is doing complex IT stuff. ;)
Same thing. Alien genitals actually exist in another dimension, so in order to view them in this dimension they have to draw them.
Almost. The weakness in the HTTPS scheme is the chain of trust, not DNS. The SSL certificate contains a domain name, e.g. "secure.mybank.com". If the domain name contained in the certificate does not match the hostname requested by the browser (http://secure.mybank.com), then it will warn the user about the mismatch. This doesn't offer much protection in itself.
However, if the certificate offered by the web server is not authenticated by a certificate authority already trusted by the browser, then it will warn the user that it has no way of verifying the identity of the website. It is generally difficult to get a certificate for a domain which you don't actually control which is signed by a CA trusted by enough users to be useful.
If the ISP intercepts your traffic, they have to a) offer a certificate with the hostname your browser believes it is connecting to, which is b) signed by a trusted authority.
They can do a) with just an IP address, by connecting to the same IP and see what certificate the site offers, or by forcing you to use their proxy. b) is more difficult; the only way to do that is to get a trusted certificate installed in all of their customer's browsers, which they can use to sign the certificates they generate for the site they're spoofing. This could potentially be done as part of an ISP setup package, but they will probably lose a lot of customers when word gets out that they're spoofing secure sites. It may also be illegal to do this.