Yeah, I think Blizzard must have cracked down on bots a little too well, and hacking is now much easier for stealing accounts. Especially with all the flash keylogging opportunities they've had:P
Let's not forget the real reason authenticators are becoming mandatory. It's because accounts are getting hacked, sure, but why are accounts getting hacked?
Because there are idiots paying real life $$ for in-game money, which they get by hacking accounts and selling off their stuff. The customers of these websites are paying these hackers to take over people's accounts, effectively.
Do away with the monetary incentive, and accounts wouldn't be getting hacked.
I appreciate your response, even if you do come off as an arrogant blowhard.;)
Your link suggests that resistance to disinfectants and antibiotics may go hand-in-hand. However it still seems like a stretch to suggest livestock would develop and retain antibiotic resistance without the use of antibiotics, due solely to disinfectant use by their handlers.
Looking at some other articles, you might be confusing growth-promoters with therapeutic antibiotics?
When growth promoter antibiotics were banned, there was increased sickness in animals. They then used (different) therapeutic antibiotics on the sick animals, which led to increased resistance to those antibiotics. No big surprise there, is there?
Do you have any links supporting your assertion that antibiotic resistance stuck around or increased in an antibiotic-free environment in the EU?
Modeling shows that use of antibiotics in livestock at worst will decrease the amount of time it takes for a resistance gene to appear by 2 to 5 years (they will appear anyway, it's just a matter of time).
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Antibiotic resistance could show up a thousand times a day in livestock bacteria, and it would die off every time. There is no fitness advantage to antibiotic resistance in a natural livestock population. It's only when we select for antibiotic resistance by loading up livestock with antibiotics, that such a strain becomes prevalent and likely to transfer to humans (or other livestock/other farms, which isn't much better).
If we eliminated antibiotics even in livestock already full of resistance genes, the resistance would again have no benefit over other strains, and would most likely die off. Antibiotics are at beast a short-term productivity increase in farming, as it just leads to the same animals having the same bacteria, but now with no way to get rid of it. (Unless you're optimistic we can keep finding bigger guns than the bacteria)
Thanks for RTFA for us. I'm surprised if people here don't already realize that engineers tend to be stubborn and militant.
When I stopped eating meat, two friends in particular were outraged and argued incessantly with me about it. This is without any provocation from me - I don't care what other people do and take a very laid back approach to being vegetarian.
Both of these friends are now militant vegetarians. Go figure. They're always all-in, no middle ground or gray areas allowed.
I think you need to distinguish between good engineering and bad engineering. Engineers disdain compromise, and this is what makes the engineers who do not even more valuable.
Predictable searches such as racial profiling are not very useful. If all middle-eastern-looking fliers are searched, then terrorists will only send bombs in on people of other races and ages. You think they can't find a grandma to put a bomb on, or a white engineer prone to extremist views?
I'd disagree. Every site I can think of off the top of my head uses e-mail addresses and usernames as separate entities if the username is public. For instance netflix uses e-mail addresses to login, but they have you create a separate username for posting reviews and other shared/social parts of the site. Likewise slashdot makes sharing your e-mail address optional. And even the site in question tried to hide the e-mail address, they just did a very poor job of it.
That's just the fucking point... there is no such service that won't be "evil" should the feds come a knocking. You might as well just use the one that works.
Actually, Starcraft is a clone (incremental improvement really) of Warcraft. Space archetypes are a tiny part of Starcraft and what made it popular and successful.
Unless you're claiming there was a Warhammer 40k RTS game with similar gameplay mechanics, online play, maps, etc? Or do you really consider "humans bugs and greys" to be enough commonality to call two completely different games "clones"?
you could replace them with any company that operates a network and it'd be the same concept.
You could also replace it with any place of business. When I got off the old timey cars at the amusement park and ran around, I got kicked off the ride. Friends have also been kicked out of the park for misbehaving.
So what's the problem exactly? If a company does something egregious there will be a backlash and they'll pay for it.
This is only a problem in areas where a company has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) and users have no choice to go elsewhere for similar services. (eg. ISPs)
While I agree with GP post that EA had to do something, there are ways they could make more money without giving a for-pay competitive advantage. They could have started charging for those new maps, add another class (a balanced one) that costs $ to unlock, stuff like that.
That way players would start and play "fairly" on the free stuff, and get lured into buying the extra content. That's how most DLC on consoles work.
Instead, knowing from the get-go that "whoever spends more $ will do better" will prevent many players from even considering the game.
You're essentially claiming that Global Warming is and has always been a money-grabbing scam by the scientists doing the research?
A perpetual motion machine business gone wildly out of control because more and more scientists are trying to get in on this "global warming pyramid scheme"?
I think it'd be a lot more believable if you claimed the researchers were mistaken, rather than claiming it's an overtly malicious conspiracy.
With so much money behind proving CO2 is NOT harmful, I find it really hard to believe there's a monetary incentive to come to the conclusion that it IS harmful.
If it was so profitable for alarmists to sound an alarm about totally bogus claims, we'd have a lot more bogus claims out there than just global warming. Sure we have "infinite energy" startups, and every news article has somewhat of an alarmist spin on it. But global warming has been claimed by many scientists for many years. There are still a lot of unknowns I'm sure when making predictions on such a long time scale with so many inputs. So sure, claim they're extrapolating without adequate evidence. Say they're using bad science and point out where.
But it's a really tough sell to say that ALL global warming research has been intentionally dishonest.
Yes, but only if what you meant was "hundreds of.conf files in users' home directories that keep the app, the user, and the OS as independent entities".
Windows has this feature already, right? It's just not being used very extensively by 3rd party apps (or by MS itself either?).
Eh - there's a very very large grey area there. There are a lot of "application platforms" that are closed enough to prevent malware (or at least particularly harmful malware) by not supporting any potentially malicious functions. Look at the (non-cracked) iPhone, video game mods, winamp plugins, facebook apps, and many more.
You only have a problem if the user needs specific functionality that can also be malicious.
Gold spammers in WOW is a great example of malware authors trying to abuse any niche they can find in-game, and Blizzard cracking down on them further and further by locking down functionality for ALL users (or at least a class of users, free-trial users).
Interestingly enough, I've never really heard of a WOW addon being malicious. Perhaps because its so much more cumbersome to download+install a WOW addon, compared to IE prompting you to automatically run untrusted code? Or maybe addons are locked down so successfully that they can be massively popular without being exploitable?
Most people seem to miss this large grey area, even though it's been discussed a lot as Apple's reason for not allowing apps to continue running in the background. Killing battery life, privacy, and self-propagating worms are all in the realm of "potential harmful functionality" that would be enabled by running apps in the background. Since there are also legitimate non-harmful uses, we have power-users upset at the loss of functionality.
Give me one of those laptop dongle 3D cards and I'd ditch the desktop in favor of the laptop and never look back.
But re: GP post, yes, many of us put together PCs primarily for playing video games. And they typically have to run Windows, because there's no competitive cross-OS gaming platform.
Maybe it's sad to be paying $500+ to build a souped up Xbox360, but we still do it, at least for the time being. The death of PC gaming has been a long time coming. Maybe next generation?;)
The sudo part does really matter. In all 3 major OSes a mechanism similar to sudo is being used for ALL execution of new code (especially files from the internet), rather than just using sudo for root escalation.
If people are clicking "OK" to "run this unknown executable" it's, as you imply, nearly immaterial whether they're root or executing as your user account. The problem is the execution of code, and thats what the modern sudo-like (psuedo-sudo?) mechanisms are preventing.
It's a usability problem as much as a security problem.
I rented almost every NES and Genesis game within 20 miles of my home (at least 5 different rental stores) and never heard of a cartridge copier except vague notions of epic machinery at Nintendo HQ until I read your post.
AFAIK Wave is open source and being built so you run your own server for your domain, like e-mail. You can host your own wave server, and then build your social network and communicate across other Wave servers including Google's.
The plugins they've shown so far are happy to let you download your picture albums back out of Wave. Compare this to Flickr, where my friend had to download every single picture out of her own album manually, or find a 3d-party (potentially malicious) program to do it.
On top of that, you could presumably make a Wave client that caches all content on your desktop just like Thunderbird/Outlook does with IMAP e-mail. So even if you're having someone else host your data, you can still take your data and leave without a fuss. It remains to be seen if you can easily re-import this data into another Wave server, but I can't see any reason why not.
I'd still prefer to see an open social network apart from any of these apps - but if Wave is what it takes for easy and private media sharing, at least we know that option is on its way too.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm encouraging individuals to stop funding account hacking, not encouraging Blizzard to "solve" people buying gold. (which they already try to do)
Yeah, I think Blizzard must have cracked down on bots a little too well, and hacking is now much easier for stealing accounts. Especially with all the flash keylogging opportunities they've had :P
Let's not forget the real reason authenticators are becoming mandatory. It's because accounts are getting hacked, sure, but why are accounts getting hacked?
Because there are idiots paying real life $$ for in-game money, which they get by hacking accounts and selling off their stuff. The customers of these websites are paying these hackers to take over people's accounts, effectively.
Do away with the monetary incentive, and accounts wouldn't be getting hacked.
I appreciate your response, even if you do come off as an arrogant blowhard. ;)
Your link suggests that resistance to disinfectants and antibiotics may go hand-in-hand. However it still seems like a stretch to suggest livestock would develop and retain antibiotic resistance without the use of antibiotics, due solely to disinfectant use by their handlers.
Looking at some other articles, you might be confusing growth-promoters with therapeutic antibiotics?
http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/52/2/159.pdf
When growth promoter antibiotics were banned, there was increased sickness in animals. They then used (different) therapeutic antibiotics on the sick animals, which led to increased resistance to those antibiotics. No big surprise there, is there?
Do you have any links supporting your assertion that antibiotic resistance stuck around or increased in an antibiotic-free environment in the EU?
Modeling shows that use of antibiotics in livestock at worst will decrease the amount of time it takes for a resistance gene to appear by 2 to 5 years (they will appear anyway, it's just a matter of time).
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Antibiotic resistance could show up a thousand times a day in livestock bacteria, and it would die off every time. There is no fitness advantage to antibiotic resistance in a natural livestock population. It's only when we select for antibiotic resistance by loading up livestock with antibiotics, that such a strain becomes prevalent and likely to transfer to humans (or other livestock/other farms, which isn't much better).
If we eliminated antibiotics even in livestock already full of resistance genes, the resistance would again have no benefit over other strains, and would most likely die off. Antibiotics are at beast a short-term productivity increase in farming, as it just leads to the same animals having the same bacteria, but now with no way to get rid of it. (Unless you're optimistic we can keep finding bigger guns than the bacteria)
Thanks for RTFA for us. I'm surprised if people here don't already realize that engineers tend to be stubborn and militant.
When I stopped eating meat, two friends in particular were outraged and argued incessantly with me about it. This is without any provocation from me - I don't care what other people do and take a very laid back approach to being vegetarian.
Both of these friends are now militant vegetarians. Go figure. They're always all-in, no middle ground or gray areas allowed.
I think you need to distinguish between good engineering and bad engineering. Engineers disdain compromise, and this is what makes the engineers who do not even more valuable.
Predictable searches such as racial profiling are not very useful. If all middle-eastern-looking fliers are searched, then terrorists will only send bombs in on people of other races and ages. You think they can't find a grandma to put a bomb on, or a white engineer prone to extremist views?
The metrics you're using to define "BETTER" are metrics no one cares about.
I'd disagree. Every site I can think of off the top of my head uses e-mail addresses and usernames as separate entities if the username is public. For instance netflix uses e-mail addresses to login, but they have you create a separate username for posting reviews and other shared/social parts of the site. Likewise slashdot makes sharing your e-mail address optional. And even the site in question tried to hide the e-mail address, they just did a very poor job of it.
That's just the fucking point... there is no such service that won't be "evil" should the feds come a knocking. You might as well just use the one that works.
This.
Actually, Starcraft is a clone (incremental improvement really) of Warcraft. Space archetypes are a tiny part of Starcraft and what made it popular and successful.
Unless you're claiming there was a Warhammer 40k RTS game with similar gameplay mechanics, online play, maps, etc? Or do you really consider "humans bugs and greys" to be enough commonality to call two completely different games "clones"?
you could replace them with any company that operates a network and it'd be the same concept.
You could also replace it with any place of business. When I got off the old timey cars at the amusement park and ran around, I got kicked off the ride. Friends have also been kicked out of the park for misbehaving.
So what's the problem exactly? If a company does something egregious there will be a backlash and they'll pay for it.
This is only a problem in areas where a company has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) and users have no choice to go elsewhere for similar services. (eg. ISPs)
While I agree with GP post that EA had to do something, there are ways they could make more money without giving a for-pay competitive advantage. They could have started charging for those new maps, add another class (a balanced one) that costs $ to unlock, stuff like that.
That way players would start and play "fairly" on the free stuff, and get lured into buying the extra content. That's how most DLC on consoles work.
Instead, knowing from the get-go that "whoever spends more $ will do better" will prevent many players from even considering the game.
, I dont really want to burn that much of my life playing a game
Don't have the time to grind? That's ok! Just pull out that credit card and buy some BattleFunds(tm) to get started having fun without the grind!
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
You're essentially claiming that Global Warming is and has always been a money-grabbing scam by the scientists doing the research?
A perpetual motion machine business gone wildly out of control because more and more scientists are trying to get in on this "global warming pyramid scheme"?
I think it'd be a lot more believable if you claimed the researchers were mistaken, rather than claiming it's an overtly malicious conspiracy.
Ah-ha! Finally, I found the insider comment that explains the deep pockets behind pro-global warming research! It's the Illuminati!
With so much money behind proving CO2 is NOT harmful, I find it really hard to believe there's a monetary incentive to come to the conclusion that it IS harmful.
If it was so profitable for alarmists to sound an alarm about totally bogus claims, we'd have a lot more bogus claims out there than just global warming. Sure we have "infinite energy" startups, and every news article has somewhat of an alarmist spin on it. But global warming has been claimed by many scientists for many years. There are still a lot of unknowns I'm sure when making predictions on such a long time scale with so many inputs. So sure, claim they're extrapolating without adequate evidence. Say they're using bad science and point out where.
But it's a really tough sell to say that ALL global warming research has been intentionally dishonest.
Who is it that you think is dishonestly funding Global Warming research? What is their motivation in doing so?
We already know who is funding all the anti-Global Warming commentary. Much like Health Care, there are deep deep pockets with a specific agenda.
I'd really like to know whose deep pockets you think are trying to "invent" global warming.
Yes, but only if what you meant was "hundreds of .conf files in users' home directories that keep the app, the user, and the OS as independent entities".
Windows has this feature already, right? It's just not being used very extensively by 3rd party apps (or by MS itself either?).
The user can control the computer, or they can't.
Eh - there's a very very large grey area there. There are a lot of "application platforms" that are closed enough to prevent malware (or at least particularly harmful malware) by not supporting any potentially malicious functions. Look at the (non-cracked) iPhone, video game mods, winamp plugins, facebook apps, and many more.
You only have a problem if the user needs specific functionality that can also be malicious.
Gold spammers in WOW is a great example of malware authors trying to abuse any niche they can find in-game, and Blizzard cracking down on them further and further by locking down functionality for ALL users (or at least a class of users, free-trial users).
Interestingly enough, I've never really heard of a WOW addon being malicious. Perhaps because its so much more cumbersome to download+install a WOW addon, compared to IE prompting you to automatically run untrusted code? Or maybe addons are locked down so successfully that they can be massively popular without being exploitable?
Most people seem to miss this large grey area, even though it's been discussed a lot as Apple's reason for not allowing apps to continue running in the background. Killing battery life, privacy, and self-propagating worms are all in the realm of "potential harmful functionality" that would be enabled by running apps in the background. Since there are also legitimate non-harmful uses, we have power-users upset at the loss of functionality.
Give me one of those laptop dongle 3D cards and I'd ditch the desktop in favor of the laptop and never look back.
But re: GP post, yes, many of us put together PCs primarily for playing video games. And they typically have to run Windows, because there's no competitive cross-OS gaming platform.
Maybe it's sad to be paying $500+ to build a souped up Xbox360, but we still do it, at least for the time being. The death of PC gaming has been a long time coming. Maybe next generation? ;)
The sudo part does really matter. In all 3 major OSes a mechanism similar to sudo is being used for ALL execution of new code (especially files from the internet), rather than just using sudo for root escalation.
If people are clicking "OK" to "run this unknown executable" it's, as you imply, nearly immaterial whether they're root or executing as your user account. The problem is the execution of code, and thats what the modern sudo-like (psuedo-sudo?) mechanisms are preventing.
It's a usability problem as much as a security problem.
I rented almost every NES and Genesis game within 20 miles of my home (at least 5 different rental stores) and never heard of a cartridge copier except vague notions of epic machinery at Nintendo HQ until I read your post.
Did you live in Akihabara or something?
AFAIK Wave is open source and being built so you run your own server for your domain, like e-mail. You can host your own wave server, and then build your social network and communicate across other Wave servers including Google's.
The plugins they've shown so far are happy to let you download your picture albums back out of Wave. Compare this to Flickr, where my friend had to download every single picture out of her own album manually, or find a 3d-party (potentially malicious) program to do it.
On top of that, you could presumably make a Wave client that caches all content on your desktop just like Thunderbird/Outlook does with IMAP e-mail. So even if you're having someone else host your data, you can still take your data and leave without a fuss. It remains to be seen if you can easily re-import this data into another Wave server, but I can't see any reason why not.
I'd still prefer to see an open social network apart from any of these apps - but if Wave is what it takes for easy and private media sharing, at least we know that option is on its way too.