On the Android version of Skype, Microsoft recently made a change to their privacy policy or app permissions or something. I noticed that my contact list now recommends several people's Skype accounts who I previously only had as phone number contacts in my phone.
Perhaps then he should lead by keeping jobs in the USA instead of having his ties (and possibly/probably other things) made in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He most likely called the wrong number from a fake Netgear site, but that's just a guess.
Nah it was most definitely Netgear's official line. Their tech support calls are getting routed to this company. He said that after the 1st call, he found a different Netgear number that wasn't specifically for tech support and called that. That person then directed his call to their tech support, which ended up being these scammers again!
A co-worker of mine told me that he called Netgear tech support for some help setting up a wireless router and his call got routed to these guys, or people almost exactly like them. From the description of the call, it looks/sounds like the exact same script/ploy. They asked him to run some command and said that the results of that command indicated that he had vulnerabilities on his machine. They'd need to remote in to install some stuff. He didn't fall for that last part, thankfully!
It's absolutely insane that a call to a well-known company's tech support line is getting sent to a scam like this. Yay outsourcing!
Not exactly what you described, but TrackMeNot is a browser add-on for Firefox & Chrome randomizes Google searches in non-repeating intervals that average a time length you can set. Poisson distribution in time, I believe. This creates a lot of "noise" for anybody tracking you via your searches:
https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Apparently I'm the only one that noticed this article is about Antarctica and not the Arctic. Different side of the globe. The predictions for what will happen in the Arctic do not apply to Antarctica...
In theory it's a good idea for police to have these, iff the video is available to the general public. Otherwise, the police could lie about their own actions and only show evidence against others. Then again, right there in that video, they show a female police officer chasing a drunk man on foot and using her taser on him for seemingly no good reason. He didn't seem to be physically resisting arrest (other than the running) and was not a threat to her, yet she tased him and they're showing it on a news report like it's no big deal or standard procedure or whatever. The fact that it's on a news report and there's no backlash against that use of a taser is a bit disturbing to me, personally.
Anyway, yes I think personal cameras are a great idea for several reasons. If more people start wearing these and it becomes more normal and accepted, then maybe, just maybe societal norms will change and less people will get hassled by authorities for taking pictures or recording video in public
I assure you I'm not kidding. I have always built my own PCs using name-brand components and have been reading user reviews for products on Newegg since whenever they started providing them. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about saving power wherever I can. I already use CF lights in most places in my house, program the thermostat to save power during times when nobody is here, etc. This winter, I plan on adding rolls of insulation to the attic and possibly the crawl-space and am also looking into those films I can apply to my windows so they don't conduct so much heat/cold through them.
All of the things I mentioned above are doable with almost no negative side effects. Unfortunately, power cycling my PC has the nasty side effect of occasionally causing some component inside (motherboard, video card, RAM, hard drive... all things off the top of my head that have simply died on me during or shortly after a power cycle over the years) to die and leaving me one less PC for however long it takes to troubleshoot the problem and get a replacement part. Since I've started the practice of leaving my computer on 24/7 a few years ago, I have had no components die on me except the motherboard back in April, and that was within minutes of turning it back on after leaving the computer off during a weekend away from home. If you want to, you can compare the carbon footprint of me leaving it on all the time vs. the carbon footprint of the manufacture and shipping of the replacement parts to my house since I would need them more often... once every year or so on average.
Want to save energy? Turn your PC system off at night unless you've got a giant download, are running a server, or some other valid reason to have it on.
I have to disagree with this advice. Yes, turning your PC off when you're done using it will save you power but in my experience with PCs (15+ years now) it causes more trouble than it's worth. Almost every major hardware failure I've had with PCs (both my own and as working in tech support in college) over the years has occurred within a few minutes/hours of turning it on, including one earlier this year when I turned my computer back on after a weekend away from the house and the motherboard simply died within a few minutes. Also in my experience, for some reason it seems laptops are less prone to this same phenomenon
I now leave my main PC on all the time. I pay a bit extra in power bills but I also no longer need to order a new part to replace a bad one every few months/years either. This to me is worth the extra $10/month on my power bill.
It looks like they are counting any coastal areas, including rivers and lakes that eventually connect to the ocean. I was surprised to see my entire area around Washington D.C. in there. If they counted it from the ocean on the other side of Maryland, DC might POSSIBLY be included, but it looks like they are considering 100 miles inland from the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay as a Constitution Free zone as well, which means some parts of West Virginia are included too.
It seems like a bit of a stretch as I haven't heard of any DHS stops around here like what the ones that were happening in Washington State, but it's still good to know exactly which areas DHS believes they can legally rape us in.
Have you ever used that stuff? It STINKS, and I mean in a way nothing I've smelled before or since has. It had this chemical smell that stayed with me for the rest of the day and ruined my dinner several hours after I was around it.
I was an unwilling Comcast customer (they were the only provider around because I live in a DSL black hole) for a couple years, right up until Verizon Fios became available and was installed last Friday. As soon as I was able, I switched. Their P2P blocking was only slightly annoying to me since I only use P2P once every few months on average. However, the side effect that it caused was infuriating!
Back in late '06 and early to mid '07, I would use P2P to download some music very sparingly. It always worked and would complete in a matter of minutes/hours with no side effects. I remember first seeing news of the Comcast P2P blocking in the Summer of '07, but it never affected me when I would use Bittorrent. However, one day in September of '07, a couple friends of mine were over and one of them wanted to watch a show. He logged into a torrent tracker that he's a member of and we started downloading a couple episodes. One finished, but the other one froze and would not transfer at all. Actually, at this point my entire Internet connection was dead and I couldn't even browse websites! After about 30 minutes, the Internet connection returned... mostly. I could do most things on the Internet, but strangely enough my Vonage VoIP phone line was dead. If I tried starting a Bittorrent download, the entire Internet connection would die again for about 30 minutes. If I rebooted the Vonage router (gateway router for our home network), the Internet connection would remain dead for 30 minutes then come back, but the Vonage line stayed dead.
Of course, a call to Comcast's tech support line was not helpful at all. They denied that it was due to P2P blocking and sent me on my merry way. At this point I didn't have enough evidence to argue to the contrary, so I tried troubleshooting it with Vonage.
Since the Internet connection was working again and only the Vonage line had problems, I guessed that the Vonage router had somehow been damaged. Vonage tech support logged into the router, could communicate with it, but it just wasn't able to connect to their servers to establish a VoIP phone line connection. I ended up sending them the router back and got a replacement, which worked and gave me VoIP connectivity again immediately.
Fast forward to November. I try another P2P download and sure enough, the Internet connection dies again! Same thing... 30 minutes later, everything returns except for my VoIP line. Now, I'm pissed because I know it's Comcast. What if I needed to dial 911? As a side effect of their P2P blocking, they blocked my ability to dial anybody, including 911, from my home phone. 3 days later, the VoIP line inexplicably returns.
I'm a network engineer by day, grad student and dad by evening/night. I would have hooked up another PC with sniffing software on it to further troubleshoot the problem but I simply didn't have time to do so. With the information I have, it is obvious that Comcast was doing something to my Internet connection. It is highly unlikely that the Vonage routers were the problem. Let's review the facts:
- Router #1 worked for a year with P2P downloads.
- Then Comcast hits the news sites about blocking P2P.
- Then I try P2P download, my connection gets screwy and my Vonage phone line dies for a week.
- Two months later I try another P2P download with a different, newly shipped Vonage router and the exact same thing happens!
A month or so later, I read that Comcast was backing off on their P2P blocking a bit so I try another download. Finally, it's back to normal like in '06 and early '07; the download worked and there were no side effects. However, the whole experience of not having a usable home phone line for a total of 1.5 weeks left me quite bitter and I switched ISPs to Verizon Fios the week that it became available here. When the FCC had that comments page up for the Comcast P2P blocking investigation, I posted my story on there as well. From what I under
Yes I am logged in (with my username/password... don't know what you mean by "key") and am using the RSS link at the bottom of the page, which still leads to the same RSS feed as before. It giving me this link:
I just read the RSS FAQ here and the only username-associated RSS feeds that I can find are if I want to subscribe to a specific user's journal, or the RSS for their list of friends, foes, etc.
Offtopic, I know, but I'm wondering if anybody knows the answer.
I view Slashdot using the RSS feed. However, articles like this one are left out of the RSS feed. Is there a way to get the "less important" articles to show up in RSS? Because, well... having to check Slashdot to see certain new articles defeats the purpose of RSS.
My wife isn't much of a gamer and she was all for getting a Wii after seeing Monkey Ball on it. IMO, it is a must-have title already and it baffles me that I don't see it mentioned more. Seriously, check out that game and show your woman the mini-games. There are 50 of them, many using the Wiimote in different ways.
(I don't remember the exact in-game names...)
Darts: you hold the controller like a dart and flick it towards the screen, releasing the button to release the dart.
Disc golf: frisbee golf. Line up your shot, then make a throwing motion with the controller. The faster the motion, the more power your throw will have in-game.
Alien capture: silly little game where you control a UFO and pick up aliens. Move the controller towards and away from the sensor bar to move your UFO closer or farther away.
Slingshot: you position the controller like you are positioning the ball behind a slingshot (left if you want the ball to shoot towards the right, farther back if you want more power and the ball to shoot farther).
Asteroid blaster: control a turret and shoot incoming asteroids before they hit your space station. You aim the controller at the screen to aim the turret.
Just seeing some of these and all of the different and versatile uses for the Wiimote convinced me and, more importantly, my wife that the Wii is something we wanted and could enjoy together as a family.
MHz-Man
P.S. Yeah I know this is my 2nd post and I'm pimping Monkey Ball in both of them... I just seriously think it's a great, underrated game that really shows off the Wiimote and is fun for both single player gamers and non-gamers alike.
Why does nobody ever mention Monkey Ball for the Wii? If you look past the kiddie/cutesy storyline and appearance, it's really a modern-day 3d Marble Madness. They took a great game and made it even better with the Wiimote controls. Playing the previous ones with the analog thumbstick was fun, but actually tilting the controller in the way you want to "tilt" the level to get your ball to roll in a certain direction is intuitive and challenging. I'm still trying to master it to unlock the later levels.
Seeing and playing this game is really what sold me on finding and getting a Wii. If the games are already finding fun and intuitive uses for the Wiimote only 3 months after the console's release, and given the trend that games get better for a console the longer it has been out (as developers/designers are better able to code for the system, think of new uses for the controller, etc.), it makes me wonder what uses they'll think of for the Wiimote in games that come out 1 or 2 years from now.
MHz-Man
Slashdot Mirror
On the Android version of Skype, Microsoft recently made a change to their privacy policy or app permissions or something. I noticed that my contact list now recommends several people's Skype accounts who I previously only had as phone number contacts in my phone.
Perhaps then he should lead by keeping jobs in the USA instead of having his ties (and possibly/probably other things) made in China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Conjoined satellites with solar panels and two ion engines? I've seen that somewhere before...
http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net...
He most likely called the wrong number from a fake Netgear site, but that's just a guess.
Nah it was most definitely Netgear's official line. Their tech support calls are getting routed to this company. He said that after the 1st call, he found a different Netgear number that wasn't specifically for tech support and called that. That person then directed his call to their tech support, which ended up being these scammers again!
A co-worker of mine told me that he called Netgear tech support for some help setting up a wireless router and his call got routed to these guys, or people almost exactly like them. From the description of the call, it looks/sounds like the exact same script/ploy. They asked him to run some command and said that the results of that command indicated that he had vulnerabilities on his machine. They'd need to remote in to install some stuff. He didn't fall for that last part, thankfully!
It's absolutely insane that a call to a well-known company's tech support line is getting sent to a scam like this. Yay outsourcing!
Not exactly what you described, but TrackMeNot is a browser add-on for Firefox & Chrome randomizes Google searches in non-repeating intervals that average a time length you can set. Poisson distribution in time, I believe. This creates a lot of "noise" for anybody tracking you via your searches: https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Apparently I'm the only one that noticed this article is about Antarctica and not the Arctic. Different side of the globe. The predictions for what will happen in the Arctic do not apply to Antarctica...
Says who? WTF do you even base the comment on? Yes there scanning the data looking for sociological trends, not looking for the word bomb.
Idiot.
(WHOOOSH!)
Those neutrinos are totally rad dudes!!!
Those neutrinos are some totally radical dudes!!!
Challenge - Hack a bird: create large magnetic field with proper orientation to temporarily blind it!
Woah! Those neutrinos are some COOL DUDES!
I just watched a news report on this kind of device for police officers last night. Here's the link:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/16/police.head.cam/index.html
In theory it's a good idea for police to have these, iff the video is available to the general public. Otherwise, the police could lie about their own actions and only show evidence against others. Then again, right there in that video, they show a female police officer chasing a drunk man on foot and using her taser on him for seemingly no good reason. He didn't seem to be physically resisting arrest (other than the running) and was not a threat to her, yet she tased him and they're showing it on a news report like it's no big deal or standard procedure or whatever. The fact that it's on a news report and there's no backlash against that use of a taser is a bit disturbing to me, personally.
Anyway, yes I think personal cameras are a great idea for several reasons. If more people start wearing these and it becomes more normal and accepted, then maybe, just maybe societal norms will change and less people will get hassled by authorities for taking pictures or recording video in public
I assure you I'm not kidding. I have always built my own PCs using name-brand components and have been reading user reviews for products on Newegg since whenever they started providing them. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about saving power wherever I can. I already use CF lights in most places in my house, program the thermostat to save power during times when nobody is here, etc. This winter, I plan on adding rolls of insulation to the attic and possibly the crawl-space and am also looking into those films I can apply to my windows so they don't conduct so much heat/cold through them.
All of the things I mentioned above are doable with almost no negative side effects. Unfortunately, power cycling my PC has the nasty side effect of occasionally causing some component inside (motherboard, video card, RAM, hard drive... all things off the top of my head that have simply died on me during or shortly after a power cycle over the years) to die and leaving me one less PC for however long it takes to troubleshoot the problem and get a replacement part. Since I've started the practice of leaving my computer on 24/7 a few years ago, I have had no components die on me except the motherboard back in April, and that was within minutes of turning it back on after leaving the computer off during a weekend away from home. If you want to, you can compare the carbon footprint of me leaving it on all the time vs. the carbon footprint of the manufacture and shipping of the replacement parts to my house since I would need them more often... once every year or so on average.
Want to save energy? Turn your PC system off at night unless you've got a giant download, are running a server, or some other valid reason to have it on.
I have to disagree with this advice. Yes, turning your PC off when you're done using it will save you power but in my experience with PCs (15+ years now) it causes more trouble than it's worth. Almost every major hardware failure I've had with PCs (both my own and as working in tech support in college) over the years has occurred within a few minutes/hours of turning it on, including one earlier this year when I turned my computer back on after a weekend away from the house and the motherboard simply died within a few minutes. Also in my experience, for some reason it seems laptops are less prone to this same phenomenon
I now leave my main PC on all the time. I pay a bit extra in power bills but I also no longer need to order a new part to replace a bad one every few months/years either. This to me is worth the extra $10/month on my power bill.
It looks like they are counting any coastal areas, including rivers and lakes that eventually connect to the ocean. I was surprised to see my entire area around Washington D.C. in there. If they counted it from the ocean on the other side of Maryland, DC might POSSIBLY be included, but it looks like they are considering 100 miles inland from the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay as a Constitution Free zone as well, which means some parts of West Virginia are included too.
It seems like a bit of a stretch as I haven't heard of any DHS stops around here like what the ones that were happening in Washington State, but it's still good to know exactly which areas DHS believes they can legally rape us in.
Have you ever used that stuff? It STINKS, and I mean in a way nothing I've smelled before or since has. It had this chemical smell that stayed with me for the rest of the day and ruined my dinner several hours after I was around it.
I was an unwilling Comcast customer (they were the only provider around because I live in a DSL black hole) for a couple years, right up until Verizon Fios became available and was installed last Friday. As soon as I was able, I switched. Their P2P blocking was only slightly annoying to me since I only use P2P once every few months on average. However, the side effect that it caused was infuriating!
Back in late '06 and early to mid '07, I would use P2P to download some music very sparingly. It always worked and would complete in a matter of minutes/hours with no side effects. I remember first seeing news of the Comcast P2P blocking in the Summer of '07, but it never affected me when I would use Bittorrent. However, one day in September of '07, a couple friends of mine were over and one of them wanted to watch a show. He logged into a torrent tracker that he's a member of and we started downloading a couple episodes. One finished, but the other one froze and would not transfer at all. Actually, at this point my entire Internet connection was dead and I couldn't even browse websites! After about 30 minutes, the Internet connection returned... mostly. I could do most things on the Internet, but strangely enough my Vonage VoIP phone line was dead. If I tried starting a Bittorrent download, the entire Internet connection would die again for about 30 minutes. If I rebooted the Vonage router (gateway router for our home network), the Internet connection would remain dead for 30 minutes then come back, but the Vonage line stayed dead.
Of course, a call to Comcast's tech support line was not helpful at all. They denied that it was due to P2P blocking and sent me on my merry way. At this point I didn't have enough evidence to argue to the contrary, so I tried troubleshooting it with Vonage.
Since the Internet connection was working again and only the Vonage line had problems, I guessed that the Vonage router had somehow been damaged. Vonage tech support logged into the router, could communicate with it, but it just wasn't able to connect to their servers to establish a VoIP phone line connection. I ended up sending them the router back and got a replacement, which worked and gave me VoIP connectivity again immediately.
Fast forward to November. I try another P2P download and sure enough, the Internet connection dies again! Same thing... 30 minutes later, everything returns except for my VoIP line. Now, I'm pissed because I know it's Comcast. What if I needed to dial 911? As a side effect of their P2P blocking, they blocked my ability to dial anybody, including 911, from my home phone. 3 days later, the VoIP line inexplicably returns.
I'm a network engineer by day, grad student and dad by evening/night. I would have hooked up another PC with sniffing software on it to further troubleshoot the problem but I simply didn't have time to do so. With the information I have, it is obvious that Comcast was doing something to my Internet connection. It is highly unlikely that the Vonage routers were the problem. Let's review the facts:
- Router #1 worked for a year with P2P downloads.
- Then Comcast hits the news sites about blocking P2P.
- Then I try P2P download, my connection gets screwy and my Vonage phone line dies for a week.
- Two months later I try another P2P download with a different, newly shipped Vonage router and the exact same thing happens!
A month or so later, I read that Comcast was backing off on their P2P blocking a bit so I try another download. Finally, it's back to normal like in '06 and early '07; the download worked and there were no side effects. However, the whole experience of not having a usable home phone line for a total of 1.5 weeks left me quite bitter and I switched ISPs to Verizon Fios the week that it became available here. When the FCC had that comments page up for the Comcast P2P blocking investigation, I posted my story on there as well. From what I under
Yes I am logged in (with my username/password... don't know what you mean by "key") and am using the RSS link at the bottom of the page, which still leads to the same RSS feed as before. It giving me this link:
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot
I just read the RSS FAQ here and the only username-associated RSS feeds that I can find are if I want to subscribe to a specific user's journal, or the RSS for their list of friends, foes, etc.
Offtopic, I know, but I'm wondering if anybody knows the answer.
I view Slashdot using the RSS feed. However, articles like this one are left out of the RSS feed. Is there a way to get the "less important" articles to show up in RSS? Because, well... having to check Slashdot to see certain new articles defeats the purpose of RSS.
It was a precursor bomb! Looks like someone's copying the Shofixti's tactics.
My wife isn't much of a gamer and she was all for getting a Wii after seeing Monkey Ball on it. IMO, it is a must-have title already and it baffles me that I don't see it mentioned more. Seriously, check out that game and show your woman the mini-games. There are 50 of them, many using the Wiimote in different ways.
(I don't remember the exact in-game names...)
Darts: you hold the controller like a dart and flick it towards the screen, releasing the button to release the dart.
Disc golf: frisbee golf. Line up your shot, then make a throwing motion with the controller. The faster the motion, the more power your throw will have in-game.
Alien capture: silly little game where you control a UFO and pick up aliens. Move the controller towards and away from the sensor bar to move your UFO closer or farther away.
Slingshot: you position the controller like you are positioning the ball behind a slingshot (left if you want the ball to shoot towards the right, farther back if you want more power and the ball to shoot farther).
Asteroid blaster: control a turret and shoot incoming asteroids before they hit your space station. You aim the controller at the screen to aim the turret.
Just seeing some of these and all of the different and versatile uses for the Wiimote convinced me and, more importantly, my wife that the Wii is something we wanted and could enjoy together as a family.
MHz-Man
P.S. Yeah I know this is my 2nd post and I'm pimping Monkey Ball in both of them... I just seriously think it's a great, underrated game that really shows off the Wiimote and is fun for both single player gamers and non-gamers alike.
Why does nobody ever mention Monkey Ball for the Wii? If you look past the kiddie/cutesy storyline and appearance, it's really a modern-day 3d Marble Madness. They took a great game and made it even better with the Wiimote controls. Playing the previous ones with the analog thumbstick was fun, but actually tilting the controller in the way you want to "tilt" the level to get your ball to roll in a certain direction is intuitive and challenging. I'm still trying to master it to unlock the later levels. Seeing and playing this game is really what sold me on finding and getting a Wii. If the games are already finding fun and intuitive uses for the Wiimote only 3 months after the console's release, and given the trend that games get better for a console the longer it has been out (as developers/designers are better able to code for the system, think of new uses for the controller, etc.), it makes me wonder what uses they'll think of for the Wiimote in games that come out 1 or 2 years from now. MHz-Man