Nobody is upset (well except for some geeks) over DVD region coding and CSS because it's minor and really doesn't affect them....yet
If you're in Region 1, maybe - but here in the UK, apparently 80% of DVD players now have region coding disabled. A non-techie friend is planning to buy a DVD player for home, and I asked what he was looking for; in the list of "must-haves", he mentioned it must have region coding disabled - something along the lines of "I'm not dumb enough to pay money for crippleware!"
Plenty of people whine about MP3 being inferior quality, and no match for a CD. I can't hear the difference, TBH - and if MP3 is so poor, why are the RIAA and co so worried about Napster? Similarly, if analogue TV is so crap, WTF have we all been paying money for it all these years?!
Basically, if digital TV is crippled in this way, I won't go for it. Here in the UK, even if I do go for digital, it'll be through a set top box - which produces a nice unprotected analogue signal for my VCR and TV. You want me to "up"grade to something, where the only "advantage" is that you can prevent me doing what I want? Forget it.
3) (optional) The song is encrypted as well as watermarked. You can play with the key given in step #1. This prevents distribution, and if also watermarked as above, means even if you distribute the unenctypted version, you are tagged.
Wrong. If the song is encrypted, I must have the decryption key to play it - at which point, I can decrypt it, so I can record the plaintext and distribute it.
You suggest putting the watermark in "the low order bits", if I understand you correctly. This is trivial to defeat: I just change the low order bits randomly myself! If you can change them without affecting the music, so can I.
More sophisticating ways of hiding the watermark are also doomed: you must be changing the music itself very slightly (otherwise, simply changing format will destroy the watermark!). Each subsequent watermark will corrupt previous ones, since there is only a finite (and small) area of data they can affect without their watermark being trivial to remove.
I can just take a watermark reader and a watermark writer. I add my own watermark - random data - then try to read the watermark back from the music. Perhaps some of my ID is still there? No problem - add another random watermark. Rinse, repeat. Compress, Opennap.
Because unless the decrypting and playback equipment is embedded within your skull, some enterprising hacker will simply find a way to take the decrypted audio stream and create a replayable file out of it.
Exactly. They will never succeed at this, because what they are trying to do is an oxymoron: they want a watermarking system which cannot be removed, yet cannot be detected by the human ear. Meanwhile, audio codecs are designed to remove everything which cannot be heard by the human ear (which will include a successful watermark).
Either they produce a watermark which ruins the music, so they fail - or they produce a watermark which can't be heard, and is promptly deleted from the music when you compress it.
Then, there's the simple DoS attack: take their watermarked track with your unique ID in - and add a couple of other inaudible watermarks at random, using the same method. After a couple of tries, the original watermark will have been corrupted by all the other "fake" watermarks you added.
If a watermarking scheme is required to play music, a free, open source player that had the code to check the watermark could easily be changed to play without the watermark.
Wrong. The whole point is that if the system were truly secure, you could know everything about the encryption etc. and you still wouldn't be able to remove it. Does having the source code to PGP mean you can read encrypted mail without the key? Of course not. Similarly, if SDMI depends on security through obscurity, it is insecure.
If it is truly secure, the SDMI people should give us the source and all the information you have; if not, they should go away and learn about basic security.
I would think doing something like this would be fairly simple technically, but what about the legal aspects of it. what if the site reports, say, CNN as being down and they sue? (i can think of a number of arguments for a legal action). i don't think we'll see a solution anytime soon unless someone has the negotiating power to actually have a contract with all reportes websites.
I think this could be done quite "safely"; perhaps a Slash-type site, where people could post "stories" along the lines of "I'm getting `connection refused' from www.cnn.com - anyone know what's up?". People could then indicate whether or not they are having similar problems, and any official reports ("Power outage at the hosting company - should be back up RSN" or whatever) could be added.
There is one obvious reason they don't put status pages on their WWW sites - if there's a problem with the WWW site, how on earth are you going to read the status page to find out?!
It's a good idea, I think, and as long as you stick to simply relaying reports, you should be OK legally? (IANAL, though...)
Very strange: i wonder if it is the same project? The one I'm talking about was developed in Europe (Switzerland if i remember it correctly).
This was done in Zurich, as the story says, so I presume this is the same story you have in mind.
What I find appalling is that the Swiss government is now planning to pass legislation permanently banning the export of things like this - WTF?!
The patent holders, I can almost understand; they did at least spend a lot of money developing this technology, and deserve some payback - but the Swiss government just saying "No, you're not allowed to use your product to save lives. Just throw it away and let those people die." That, IMO, is an appalling crime on their govt's part.
If only this story would not require registration.:-(
It doesn't. Just use partners.nytimes.com instead, and you bypass the registration completely.
Either spammers spam random addresses, or hotmail is selling addresses to sex spammers.
I'm in a similar situation; one of my two Hotmail addresses is completely unpublished, unknown etc., yet still gets plenty of spam. (The other is three letters and two numbers @hotmail.com, and gets spammed into the ground...)
A friend of mine set up two Hotmail accounts, with very different user profiles: one honest (late twenties male geek, a couple of interests), one not so (maximum age, no interests...). Both have attracted some spam, but the first one gets far more - and he hasn't used either address publicly.
So, no hard evidence here, but it looks to me like Hotmail have been leaking user profiles...
the napster client already sends your MD5 info into the servers on login, it was used for auto resuming which has been disabled now..and it only MD5's the first 300k so if you have an incomplete file that's 350k and the full file is 5Mb the MD5's will match as the first 300k will be identical and we can safely assume it's the same file and resume regardless of filename.
If you go entirely on the MD5 hash, you will get false positives: look at the "birthday problem" to see why. With literally millions of different songs on Napster, there will be many random "collisions" (as they are known in crypto circles).
Of course, you can then remove or randomise the hash from your Napster client. Since it is no longer used, why keep it?
Then there's the problem Emusic will be using a bot to do all this - at which point, they get barred from the service for ToS violations!
One small problem here: MD5 is specifically designed to make sure that changing a single bit in the data changes the checksum. Assuming they check the ID tag at the end, this means you can just change the artist's name a bit - from "Spears, Britney" to "Britney Spears", say - and their `clever' software will regard it as completely different. Duh.
Failing that, chop the last byte off the file. It won't affect the music you hear - just cutting the last millisecond or so of sound out - but it will make the file size and MD5 hash different.
Finally, in order to calculate an MD5 hash, you need to download the whole file. EMusic plan to download every single file on Napster, just to check for files they claim rights to?? This, I must see!
I don't understand how the French government has any control over a website hosted on US soil. It would seem to me that, unless there is some physical presence of Yahoo in France, they can't force Yahoo to modify their content. I'm not up on my international law, but how can they force Yahoo to do anything? The United States certainly won't allow the French FBI to come over and shut Yahoo down by force, and if somebody sues Yahoo from France, how do they enforce collection?
Nice theory. Unfortunately, the UK government has a fairly effective way of suppressing unwanted TV channels on satellite, known as a "proscription" order: they make it directly illegal for any company subject to UK law (any company with an office in the UK) to advertise with that channel, as well as making advertising the channel in the UK illegal, and selling access to that channel. Oh, and they make it a criminal offence to possess videotapes which haven't been censored by the British Board of Film Censorship (now renamed "Classification", but the function's the same).
In theory, Yahoo could just put two fingers up to the court. In practice, that would cost them all their revenue from any multinational advertising with them (Coca Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Mars) - European governments have become pretty good at suppressing free speech.
Your post got me wondering how long it would take to download the CD image. A CD holds about 650 MB, and with a 56K dial-up getting 5KB/s download speed, that works out to about 36 hours per CD. It seems to me a CD burner would "pay for itself" pretty quickly...
Yes, it would - except most of Europe pays by the minute for Net access calls, at about the same rate as US long distance calls. At which point, it's probably still cheaper to pay the tax, even without factoring in the time, CDr drive cost, etc...
Isn't your address and phone number also contact information?
It is contact information, but it is the wrong contact information! I do not control those DNS servers or that zone. They do.
And is there a good reason you provided your home address and phone as administrative contact information?
I didn't. That's why I'm complaining: this was the billing info for my credit card! I have no control over the WHOIS entry: they created it from my billing info without informing me.
Declaring laws unconstitutional is not a power granted to any court, even the Supreme Court. It is instead the logical extension of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution as applied to court interpretation of conflicting laws. As such, it is an implied power held by every court, not just the Supreme Court.
Having said that, though, how many lower court judges would have the stones to go up against the government directly, when they could "delegate" the decision to a higher authority, avoiding the issue?
Even if Kaplan thought the law might be constitutional, I suspect he would rather see the issue decided by the Supreme Court - they, after all, do have the power to say "No, govt., you screwed up - your law goes in the bitbucket NOW" without being second-guessed by their colleagues.
Speaking as a network administrator, whois records perform a vital function. It allows admins from one site to be able to find and contact admins at another site when network problems occur. Problems such as routing issues security compromises and open mail relays. There is no better way to find out how to contact the maintainers of a network for operational problems than WHOIS.
Agreed completely - but can we please NOT follow the example of web2010.com, who created the following WHOIS entry for me on a domain of mine:
whois holly-marie-coombs.com@whois.corenic.net
[whois.corenic.net]
James Sutherland (template COCO-645538)
jas88@cam.ac.uk
20 Young St
Craigie
Perth, - PH2 OEF uk
Domain Name: holly-marie-coombs.com
Status: production
Admin Contact:
James Sutherland (COCO-645538) jas88@cam.ac.uk
+441738443515
(snip)
Contact information is one thing, but my home address and 'phone number?!
Just hope they dont fight back with a copy of the old OLE 1.0 spec. Holy Toledo, a foot and a half of paper!
Uhh... that's only 18 inches. Last place I worked had the Solaris 2.5.1 manuals on a shelf - the whole shelf. Three or four feet of the things! Luckily, when the 2.6 manuals arrived and needed carrying up to Systems & Networks dept (5th floor!), we developed an urgent problem somewhere else:-)
I know someone in my college who paid off his loans because he got in on the VA Linux IPO - all because he co-wrote some GPL'ed utility program that got in the major distros... And I know he did it on his spare time, in college, and the university was NOT demanding any profits. That's how most college-based contributions arise... not from schoolwork, but from spare time. So while the issue is valid, it's mostly irrelevant.
Here in Cambridge (England), two Comp Sci students wrote a single-threaded WWW server as a final year project. They kept the copyright, and started selling it as a commercial product, under the name Zeus. Not only could this pay off their student loans, it could probably buy half the university:-)
I don't know of any official position, but AFAICS the university doesn't try to assert ownership of student's code. In fact, our in-house mailserver is GPLed and used by many big ISPs (Exim). Who knows - maybe if they'd kept it proprietary and sold it, we could have had that OC-48 already...
Ok, so the multicast could send at a slow-ish rate (not 56k modem slow, maybe 30KB/s?) You would then also send a packet number with each packet of data, and at the end of the transmission, the client could request any dropped/missing packets from the server.
I think we can do better than that: slice the package into multiple streams - say, 256 of them, each at 20 Kbit/sec. Big mirror sites could just follow all 256 streams at once, and get the package at 5 Mbit/sec; modem and ISDN users would receive two or three streams at once. Just piece together all 256 strands of data, and you've got the whole tarball/MPEG/whatever!
I don't think on-demand retransmission is a good idea, though. Instead, just have the multicast repeated continuously by a handful of big servers. The stuff nobody wants wouldn't be transmitted anywhere, so it doesn't take any bandwidth - but it's there if you want it.
In fact, many years ago Acorn Computers used a similar technique for loading software over their network, Econet, known as the Broadcast Loader: a client would request a file from the server. If any other clients wanted a copy, they'd ask for one, and the file would be broadcast around that network segment. Clever stuff - and the user manual had a copy of the transceiver circuit diagram in the back! Now that's open;-)
That's funny that RS is called Tandy in the UK, because in the 70s Tandy Leather shops used to exist here in the US. The truly funny thing is they were owned by the same company as RS. Strange indeed.
Funnier still, we have a chain called "RS" - not related to Radio Shack/Tandy in any way, AFAICT! The main UK outfits are RS, Maplin (with a professional side called MPS) and Tandy.
This is just an extended version of the 'filename doesn't match contents' problem, in reality. And yes, any moron who downloads.vbs files and clicks on them DESERVES to have their Hard-Drives erased. Now if only there was some way that there could be a script that would cause their monitor to explode.
Be careful what you wish for:-)
It's very easy for a malicious piece of Windows code to attempt a firmware upgrade on most IDE hard drives. The `upgrade' won't work, of course, but it will screw the hard drive - to the point you need to return it to the manufacturer. Not nice.
I'd almost agree that anyone dumb enough to download and run `britney.exe' (or.vbs, or whatever) deserves to lose their hardware. Now, if it were `shania.exe', I'd have more sympathy...;-)
Hold on a second... this ISP is supposed to be non-profit? Then, especially given the current state of Australian Internet access, how do we know that is going to offer anything better?
Yep - after all, Windows 3.0 was really crap, then along came this Torvalds guy giving his OS away free. If a for-profit company can't produce a decent OS, what hope does a non-profit band of volunteers have?
Maybe it's because a for-profit company's sole aim is to make profit - while the sole aim of these non-profits is to provide the best service possible. Put like that, it seems clear which will lead to the better service:-)
It may not work out, but I certainly hope it does. Like the many other volunteer projects we see here - Linux, Apache, Wine... - they are setting out to make things better. Not to make a fast buck, not to set up a huge company, but to provide a better service. IMO, they are a long way ahead of any for-profit ISP already in that respect.
Here in Cambridge, we had a specialist in this from DERA (Defence Evaluation & Research Agency - UK version of DARPA/ARPA) talking on this very topic. He said the power output from a cellphone is a tiny fraction of the output it would take to upset avionics; they are specifically tested for resistance to radio interference at various frequencies - and they are required to be unaffected by a much higher power level than a cellphone can put out.
There is an issue with the cellphone itself, apparently - they get upset when they find they are in range of too many base stations at once, since it upsets the cell to cell handoff algorithm. That's not the aircraft's problem, though:-)
What about letting the software company keep IE, but Windows company gets IIS? That way they can't leverage IIS and IE together? I don't like the idea of IE+Windows together for the short term though.
Actually, so long as IIS is separated from NT, we're probably safe. Right now, IIS is `free' (i.e. bundled) with NT. This means any company with NT servers automatically has an NT+IIS WWW server on their hands - so why would they want to use another WWW server like Apache? They've already got one!
If NT cannot come with IIS, however, it's a different kettle of fish: the company will have all those NT servers, but without a WWW server. They look around, and see two options: IIS and Apache. One has three times the market share, and a much better reputation, and it comes with source so you can modify it if you need. The other has been out there for years, but hasn't made much progress in terms of market share; the standards compliance is a bit iffy, and it dies you down to one OS. Oh, and there's no source code: you have problems, you're SOL.
*Splat*. IIS loses. Microsoft Apps are stuck having to comply with open standards, on a level playing field. No hidden APIs to help them, no bundling to push IE out there to all the Windows users - suddenly, Real, Quicktime etc. can get a foot in the door.
Meanwhile, MS OS (M SOS?) decides they do want to bundle a browser, video player etc., but they aren't allowed to get it from MS Apps. Where do they go? Well, Netscape have a nice new browser which should be perfect...:-)
A relative of mine had the bank call her up one day to check a suspicious set of transactions: her card had been used to buy several loads of groceries several hundred miles away. Her card had been stolen - but the bank noticed this before she did! Now that's useful software...
On the other hand, my father had his card cloned in LA a couple of years ago. The duplicate card spent a happy three months buying fuel at the same gas station, and that bank didn't notice a thing - even though the same card was also being used back home in the UK at the same time. Then the bank refused to cancel the transactions, since the card hadn't been stolen and the protection plan only covered card theft. Sometimes, the cards themselves have a higher IQ than the bank that issues them:-(
Slashdot Mirror
If you're in Region 1, maybe - but here in the UK, apparently 80% of DVD players now have region coding disabled. A non-techie friend is planning to buy a DVD player for home, and I asked what he was looking for; in the list of "must-haves", he mentioned it must have region coding disabled - something along the lines of "I'm not dumb enough to pay money for crippleware!"
Plenty of people whine about MP3 being inferior quality, and no match for a CD. I can't hear the difference, TBH - and if MP3 is so poor, why are the RIAA and co so worried about Napster? Similarly, if analogue TV is so crap, WTF have we all been paying money for it all these years?!
Basically, if digital TV is crippled in this way, I won't go for it. Here in the UK, even if I do go for digital, it'll be through a set top box - which produces a nice unprotected analogue signal for my VCR and TV. You want me to "up"grade to something, where the only "advantage" is that you can prevent me doing what I want? Forget it.
Wrong. If the song is encrypted, I must have the decryption key to play it - at which point, I can decrypt it, so I can record the plaintext and distribute it.
You suggest putting the watermark in "the low order bits", if I understand you correctly. This is trivial to defeat: I just change the low order bits randomly myself! If you can change them without affecting the music, so can I.
More sophisticating ways of hiding the watermark are also doomed: you must be changing the music itself very slightly (otherwise, simply changing format will destroy the watermark!). Each subsequent watermark will corrupt previous ones, since there is only a finite (and small) area of data they can affect without their watermark being trivial to remove.
I can just take a watermark reader and a watermark writer. I add my own watermark - random data - then try to read the watermark back from the music. Perhaps some of my ID is still there? No problem - add another random watermark. Rinse, repeat. Compress, Opennap.
Exactly. They will never succeed at this, because what they are trying to do is an oxymoron: they want a watermarking system which cannot be removed, yet cannot be detected by the human ear. Meanwhile, audio codecs are designed to remove everything which cannot be heard by the human ear (which will include a successful watermark).
Either they produce a watermark which ruins the music, so they fail - or they produce a watermark which can't be heard, and is promptly deleted from the music when you compress it.
Then, there's the simple DoS attack: take their watermarked track with your unique ID in - and add a couple of other inaudible watermarks at random, using the same method. After a couple of tries, the original watermark will have been corrupted by all the other "fake" watermarks you added.
Wrong. The whole point is that if the system were truly secure, you could know everything about the encryption etc. and you still wouldn't be able to remove it. Does having the source code to PGP mean you can read encrypted mail without the key? Of course not. Similarly, if SDMI depends on security through obscurity, it is insecure.
If it is truly secure, the SDMI people should give us the source and all the information you have; if not, they should go away and learn about basic security.
I think this could be done quite "safely"; perhaps a Slash-type site, where people could post "stories" along the lines of "I'm getting `connection refused' from www.cnn.com - anyone know what's up?". People could then indicate whether or not they are having similar problems, and any official reports ("Power outage at the hosting company - should be back up RSN" or whatever) could be added.
There is one obvious reason they don't put status pages on their WWW sites - if there's a problem with the WWW site, how on earth are you going to read the status page to find out?!
It's a good idea, I think, and as long as you stick to simply relaying reports, you should be OK legally? (IANAL, though...)
This was done in Zurich, as the story says, so I presume this is the same story you have in mind.
What I find appalling is that the Swiss government is now planning to pass legislation permanently banning the export of things like this - WTF?!
The patent holders, I can almost understand; they did at least spend a lot of money developing this technology, and deserve some payback - but the Swiss government just saying "No, you're not allowed to use your product to save lives. Just throw it away and let those people die." That, IMO, is an appalling crime on their govt's part.
If only this story would not require registration. :-(
It doesn't. Just use partners.nytimes.com instead, and you bypass the registration completely.
I'm in a similar situation; one of my two Hotmail addresses is completely unpublished, unknown etc., yet still gets plenty of spam. (The other is three letters and two numbers @hotmail.com, and gets spammed into the ground...)
A friend of mine set up two Hotmail accounts, with very different user profiles: one honest (late twenties male geek, a couple of interests), one not so (maximum age, no interests...). Both have attracted some spam, but the first one gets far more - and he hasn't used either address publicly.
So, no hard evidence here, but it looks to me like Hotmail have been leaking user profiles...
If you go entirely on the MD5 hash, you will get false positives: look at the "birthday problem" to see why. With literally millions of different songs on Napster, there will be many random "collisions" (as they are known in crypto circles).
Of course, you can then remove or randomise the hash from your Napster client. Since it is no longer used, why keep it?
Then there's the problem Emusic will be using a bot to do all this - at which point, they get barred from the service for ToS violations!
Failing that, chop the last byte off the file. It won't affect the music you hear - just cutting the last millisecond or so of sound out - but it will make the file size and MD5 hash different.
Finally, in order to calculate an MD5 hash, you need to download the whole file. EMusic plan to download every single file on Napster, just to check for files they claim rights to?? This, I must see!
It should be OK - Linus is running IIS 5 with the latest Service Pack, so it can hold up to any load. ;-)
Nice theory. Unfortunately, the UK government has a fairly effective way of suppressing unwanted TV channels on satellite, known as a "proscription" order: they make it directly illegal for any company subject to UK law (any company with an office in the UK) to advertise with that channel, as well as making advertising the channel in the UK illegal, and selling access to that channel. Oh, and they make it a criminal offence to possess videotapes which haven't been censored by the British Board of Film Censorship (now renamed "Classification", but the function's the same).
In theory, Yahoo could just put two fingers up to the court. In practice, that would cost them all their revenue from any multinational advertising with them (Coca Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Mars) - European governments have become pretty good at suppressing free speech.
Yes, it would - except most of Europe pays by the minute for Net access calls, at about the same rate as US long distance calls. At which point, it's probably still cheaper to pay the tax, even without factoring in the time, CDr drive cost, etc...
It is contact information, but it is the wrong contact information! I do not control those DNS servers or that zone. They do.
And is there a good reason you provided your home address and phone as administrative contact information?
I didn't. That's why I'm complaining: this was the billing info for my credit card! I have no control over the WHOIS entry: they created it from my billing info without informing me.
Having said that, though, how many lower court judges would have the stones to go up against the government directly, when they could "delegate" the decision to a higher authority, avoiding the issue?
Even if Kaplan thought the law might be constitutional, I suspect he would rather see the issue decided by the Supreme Court - they, after all, do have the power to say "No, govt., you screwed up - your law goes in the bitbucket NOW" without being second-guessed by their colleagues.
Agreed completely - but can we please NOT follow the example of web2010.com, who created the following WHOIS entry for me on a domain of mine:
whois holly-marie-coombs.com@whois.corenic.net
[whois.corenic.net]
James Sutherland (template COCO-645538) jas88@cam.ac.uk
20 Young St
Craigie
Perth, - PH2 OEF uk
Domain Name: holly-marie-coombs.com
Status: production
Admin Contact:
James Sutherland (COCO-645538)
jas88@cam.ac.uk
+441738443515 (snip) Contact information is one thing, but my home address and 'phone number?!
Just hope they dont fight back with a copy of the old OLE 1.0 spec. Holy Toledo, a foot and a half of paper! :-)
Uhh... that's only 18 inches. Last place I worked had the Solaris 2.5.1 manuals on a shelf - the whole shelf. Three or four feet of the things! Luckily, when the 2.6 manuals arrived and needed carrying up to Systems & Networks dept (5th floor!), we developed an urgent problem somewhere else
I know someone in my college who paid off his loans because he got in on the VA Linux IPO - all because he co-wrote some GPL'ed utility program that got in the major distros... And I know he did it on his spare time, in college, and the university was NOT demanding any profits. That's how most college-based contributions arise... not from schoolwork, but from spare time. So while the issue is valid, it's mostly irrelevant. :-)
Here in Cambridge (England), two Comp Sci students wrote a single-threaded WWW server as a final year project. They kept the copyright, and started selling it as a commercial product, under the name Zeus. Not only could this pay off their student loans, it could probably buy half the university
I don't know of any official position, but AFAICS the university doesn't try to assert ownership of student's code. In fact, our in-house mailserver is GPLed and used by many big ISPs (Exim). Who knows - maybe if they'd kept it proprietary and sold it, we could have had that OC-48 already...
Colonel?? If you mean the nice bloke with the little black moustache, he was a corporal.
I think we can do better than that: slice the package into multiple streams - say, 256 of them, each at 20 Kbit/sec. Big mirror sites could just follow all 256 streams at once, and get the package at 5 Mbit/sec; modem and ISDN users would receive two or three streams at once. Just piece together all 256 strands of data, and you've got the whole tarball/MPEG/whatever!
I don't think on-demand retransmission is a good idea, though. Instead, just have the multicast repeated continuously by a handful of big servers. The stuff nobody wants wouldn't be transmitted anywhere, so it doesn't take any bandwidth - but it's there if you want it.
In fact, many years ago Acorn Computers used a similar technique for loading software over their network, Econet, known as the Broadcast Loader: a client would request a file from the server. If any other clients wanted a copy, they'd ask for one, and the file would be broadcast around that network segment. Clever stuff - and the user manual had a copy of the transceiver circuit diagram in the back! Now that's open ;-)
Funnier still, we have a chain called "RS" - not related to Radio Shack/Tandy in any way, AFAICT! The main UK outfits are RS, Maplin (with a professional side called MPS) and Tandy.
Be careful what you wish for :-)
It's very easy for a malicious piece of Windows code to attempt a firmware upgrade on most IDE hard drives. The `upgrade' won't work, of course, but it will screw the hard drive - to the point you need to return it to the manufacturer. Not nice.
I'd almost agree that anyone dumb enough to download and run `britney.exe' (or .vbs, or whatever) deserves to lose their hardware. Now, if it were `shania.exe', I'd have more sympathy... ;-)
Yep - after all, Windows 3.0 was really crap, then along came this Torvalds guy giving his OS away free. If a for-profit company can't produce a decent OS, what hope does a non-profit band of volunteers have?
Maybe it's because a for-profit company's sole aim is to make profit - while the sole aim of these non-profits is to provide the best service possible. Put like that, it seems clear which will lead to the better service :-)
It may not work out, but I certainly hope it does. Like the many other volunteer projects we see here - Linux, Apache, Wine ... - they are setting out to make things better. Not to make a fast buck, not to set up a huge company, but to provide a better service. IMO, they are a long way ahead of any for-profit ISP already in that respect.
There is an issue with the cellphone itself, apparently - they get upset when they find they are in range of too many base stations at once, since it upsets the cell to cell handoff algorithm. That's not the aircraft's problem, though :-)
Actually, so long as IIS is separated from NT, we're probably safe. Right now, IIS is `free' (i.e. bundled) with NT. This means any company with NT servers automatically has an NT+IIS WWW server on their hands - so why would they want to use another WWW server like Apache? They've already got one!
If NT cannot come with IIS, however, it's a different kettle of fish: the company will have all those NT servers, but without a WWW server. They look around, and see two options: IIS and Apache. One has three times the market share, and a much better reputation, and it comes with source so you can modify it if you need. The other has been out there for years, but hasn't made much progress in terms of market share; the standards compliance is a bit iffy, and it dies you down to one OS. Oh, and there's no source code: you have problems, you're SOL.
*Splat*. IIS loses. Microsoft Apps are stuck having to comply with open standards, on a level playing field. No hidden APIs to help them, no bundling to push IE out there to all the Windows users - suddenly, Real, Quicktime etc. can get a foot in the door.
Meanwhile, MS OS (M SOS?) decides they do want to bundle a browser, video player etc., but they aren't allowed to get it from MS Apps. Where do they go? Well, Netscape have a nice new browser which should be perfect... :-)
On the other hand, my father had his card cloned in LA a couple of years ago. The duplicate card spent a happy three months buying fuel at the same gas station, and that bank didn't notice a thing - even though the same card was also being used back home in the UK at the same time. Then the bank refused to cancel the transactions, since the card hadn't been stolen and the protection plan only covered card theft. Sometimes, the cards themselves have a higher IQ than the bank that issues them :-(