This reminds me of google hacking, the method of using google to search for things that aren't supposed to be displayed on the web, such as passwords, credit card #s or social security numbers. First, you research what strings to look for. Then you type those strings into google. But all you get back are all of the "google hacking" sites that suggest you look for that string.
There is a big difference between what you link to, and what California proposes. California proposes that every new home built, and every home with major modifications be forced to include one of these thermostats. City of Ames electric department offers a $5 discount to everyone who allows them to install a remote-control thermostat.
Firefox probably has similar results. It displays a red box with a weird bunny creature inside. I looked at the "reference redering" and laughed. It's supposed to be a series of boxes, each a different rainbow color.
It should be noted that the ACID3 test is not ready, and should not really be used for comparison, and certainly should not be used by browser developers yet.
What does a drivers license have to do with SS taxation?
Originally, a person's SSN was internal to Social Security. Eventually, so many people had one, and it became so convenient for jobs, Credit Card companies, etc, to require it, that it became a Citizen ID #. We still call it a SSN for historical reasons, and I believe the Department of Social Security is still responsible for assigning them.
Note that a Citizen ID # is optional in the U.S. You don't really have to get one. However, your parents are encouraged to sign you up for one when you are born, and everything from getting a job, to renting an apartment, to retrieving your "Social Security Investment" is a huge hassle without a Citizen ID #.
Umm, you apparently don't know much about "Compact discs" as many such discs HAVE DRM (Sony rootkit, anyone?)
That's not quite the same thing. The music on the CD is encoded without DRM. The CDDA format does not allow DRM. Many music manufacturers add trojans (such as Sony's rootkit) to the CD, which is similar, but not quite the same thing. A Linux user won't notice the trojan. A Mac user won't notice the trojan. Someone who puts the CD into a standalone player won't notice the trojan. Someone who uses Windows, and has patched their registry to fix the Autoplay security bug won't notice the trojan. OTOH, perhaps it is the same thing. I always think of DRM as inconveniencing most of the people who use it, and requiring special software.
The GPP said that he buys CDs that don't have DRM, and you countered with "apparently you don't know that some CDs have DRM." That's like me saying that I eat clean strawberries, and you saying that I must not know that strawberries grown in some parts of the world are not clean. I don't buy those, and maybe the GPP doesn't buy CDs without the "Compact Disc" logo. It is too soon to judge.
Will you buy MP3s, unrestricted, for a reasonable price?
I think it is a good move on Sony's part to release DRM-free music. But it is too soon to start buying their stuff. They are still Sony. Don't forget the Blu-Ray DRM. With the region codes they intend to spring if they win the format war. And don't forget the rootkit fiasco. As I understand it, Sony continues to plant trojans on their CDs, they just don't contain rootkits anymore. Yes, definitely too soon.
To use a term from the lexicon of the average New Yorker, why don't those companies, which are based OUTSIDE of New York, politely tell the attorney general of New York to go f*** himself?
The average New Yorker doesn't know what "lexicon", "politely" or "OUTSIDE of New York" means.
Disclaimer: I've been to New York. I loved the people. Didn't like the atmosphere. Don't plan to go back.
I think your brain is compensating for a mismatched nerve map. Your sensations appear to be coming from the right place only because you know where they are supposed to be coming from.
Starcraft is an RTS. If you could see three times as much of the battlefield as your opponents, that would give you a distinct, and unfair, advantage. If you were playing a turn based game, such as Battle of Wesnoth, or chess, it wouldn't really matter much.
NoScript is a tool. Using it has advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages: the internet is less annoying. And faster. And you are safer from Javascript exploits (which are quite common in Firefox) Disadvantages: some poorly written pages don't work, or work poorly.
I feel that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so I use NoScript. Sites that require Javascript and don't say so are probably lame and annoying anyway.
a) it is too restrictive, and would disqualify the GPL as free software. Remember, that the GPL is a distribution license, not a list of restrictions. You should be able to talk to other people (even publicly) about software without contacting the maintainer first. The behavior you describe is responsible, and generally recommended, but should not be forced.
b) as you have it worded, if the restrictions were followed, it would enable a maintainer to prevent anyone from disclosing any security bugs. You say that reporters have to wait for an acknowledgment. What if one is never received? What if there is no maintainer? The solution for this problem is obvious (don't require an acknowledgment), but I should point it out, nonetheless.
c) It is not enforceable in most jurisdictions. In the US, and I assume most of the "free world", you can't prevent someone from talking about your products publicly. You can have them sign an NDA, but that doesn't work for publicly available software. McAfee tried something like this some time ago, stipulating in the EULA that you can't benchmark their software. It got shot down in court.
To be fair, I inferred from the summary and article that this was possible by an ordinary user. After I read several comments on slashdot that say something similar to what you say, I checked the article, and read it carefully. Nowhere does it say whether or not Administrator access is required to use their rootkit. I would have assumed that it was not.
If you are right, and Administrator access is required to write to the MBR, then this is certainly not a security-related issue.
Remember back in the day when we were told that computers would never be able to learn how to understand human speech because it's too complicated?
I remember being told a lot of things. Like there is no moon. Only a small percentage of people would say that a technological advance would never happen. Never is a long time. As a previous poster pointed out, this particular advance hasn't happened yet, but it probably will eventually.
now we've got voice recognition working over crappy telephone connections
That depends on how you define "working." I would not qualify yelling into a phone slowly, and repeating yourself over and over as working. It is sad that so many places have replaced the old "press 1 to do x", which was slow, but worked.
But can it give me the equivalent of 17" CRT at arms length?
There is no "equivalent" to 17" at arms length, nor is half an inch screen next to your eyes equivalent to 54" at 2 meters. That's just marketer-speak.
I've used devices similar to this before, and they are all crap. The pictures are fuzzy. They are painful. You can't use them for long periods of time, and probably shouldn't use them at all. Many people complain of headaches and nausea. If the screen is flat, and most of them are, it can't work right. I doubt that any one-eyed model will ever be suitable for humans. Terminators, maybe, but not humans. We don't work that way.
I have not used this one. Maybe this one is different. The resolution is certainly much better. But I would not recommend buying one of these without testing it first.
There are some 10-15 million rabid Sony hating Xbox/Microsoft fans in the US. They will support any 'not Sony format' with a fanatical commitment If true, that is by far one of the most alarming statistics I have ever read. If large cooperations marketing has succeeded to the point that there are 10 million people that will not buy a company's product regardless of its technical merits and price point, we've reached a truly low point in society.
Large corporate marketing has succeeded to the point that there are millions of people in the US who will buy a product regardless of it's technical merits and price point. (cue MS jokes) The problem is that nobody is an expert in everything, and sometimes we have to make uninformed decisions.
I meant relatively. Compared to most plane crashes, and other such tragedies, it isn't too bad. Out of millions of miles of zeppelin travel, I think the Hindenburg was the only passenger craft to kill anybody. While any death is a bad thing, this certainly was not "the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world", as some people report.
But really, I just meant that one disaster almost a century ago shouldn't bar us from using hydrogen in modern craft.
Hydrogen is much cheaper, and is pretty safe if done properly. Hydrogen zeppelins of the first half of last century had an excellent safety record.
The Hindenburg disaster wasn't that bad. It only killed a few dozen people. And it involved other shortcuts that shouldn't have been done. The only reason that the Hindenburg seems so bad in retrospect is because there were a buttload of reporters at the right place at the right time (they planned to report a successful zeppelin trip), and because zeppelins don't die quietly, but rather in a huge exploding fireball.
Good point. I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic, but McAfee's license has been tested in court. I remember a ruling saying that you can't put "If you use our product, you can't say bad things about us" in a license. A magazine published benchmarks on several anti-virus products, including McAfee's. I guess the results did not favor McAfee. McAfee sued using this clause in the EULA.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of google hacking, the method of using google to search for things that aren't supposed to be displayed on the web, such as passwords, credit card #s or social security numbers. First, you research what strings to look for. Then you type those strings into google. But all you get back are all of the "google hacking" sites that suggest you look for that string.
There is a big difference between what you link to, and what California proposes. California proposes that every new home built, and every home with major modifications be forced to include one of these thermostats. City of Ames electric department offers a $5 discount to everyone who allows them to install a remote-control thermostat.
According to my (informal) studies, 90% of all web pages that display the "(X)HTML X.X" compliant logo are non-conformant in some way.
Iceweasel 2.0.0.11-1 @ Debian Linux: 59%
Firefox probably has similar results. It displays a red box with a weird bunny creature inside. I looked at the "reference redering" and laughed. It's supposed to be a series of boxes, each a different rainbow color.
It should be noted that the ACID3 test is not ready, and should not really be used for comparison, and certainly should not be used by browser developers yet.
That doesn't mean that the DHS is completely wrong. Real ID will protect us from repeat suicide bombers.
Originally, a person's SSN was internal to Social Security. Eventually, so many people had one, and it became so convenient for jobs, Credit Card companies, etc, to require it, that it became a Citizen ID #. We still call it a SSN for historical reasons, and I believe the Department of Social Security is still responsible for assigning them.
Note that a Citizen ID # is optional in the U.S. You don't really have to get one. However, your parents are encouraged to sign you up for one when you are born, and everything from getting a job, to renting an apartment, to retrieving your "Social Security Investment" is a huge hassle without a Citizen ID #.
That's not quite the same thing. The music on the CD is encoded without DRM. The CDDA format does not allow DRM. Many music manufacturers add trojans (such as Sony's rootkit) to the CD, which is similar, but not quite the same thing. A Linux user won't notice the trojan. A Mac user won't notice the trojan. Someone who puts the CD into a standalone player won't notice the trojan. Someone who uses Windows, and has patched their registry to fix the Autoplay security bug won't notice the trojan. OTOH, perhaps it is the same thing. I always think of DRM as inconveniencing most of the people who use it, and requiring special software.
The GPP said that he buys CDs that don't have DRM, and you countered with "apparently you don't know that some CDs have DRM." That's like me saying that I eat clean strawberries, and you saying that I must not know that strawberries grown in some parts of the world are not clean. I don't buy those, and maybe the GPP doesn't buy CDs without the "Compact Disc" logo. It is too soon to judge.
I think it is a good move on Sony's part to release DRM-free music. But it is too soon to start buying their stuff. They are still Sony. Don't forget the Blu-Ray DRM. With the region codes they intend to spring if they win the format war. And don't forget the rootkit fiasco. As I understand it, Sony continues to plant trojans on their CDs, they just don't contain rootkits anymore. Yes, definitely too soon.
I do.
The average New Yorker doesn't know what "lexicon", "politely" or "OUTSIDE of New York" means.
Disclaimer: I've been to New York. I loved the people. Didn't like the atmosphere. Don't plan to go back.
I think your brain is compensating for a mismatched nerve map. Your sensations appear to be coming from the right place only because you know where they are supposed to be coming from.
Starcraft is an RTS. If you could see three times as much of the battlefield as your opponents, that would give you a distinct, and unfair, advantage. If you were playing a turn based game, such as Battle of Wesnoth, or chess, it wouldn't really matter much.
NoScript is a tool. Using it has advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages: the internet is less annoying. And faster. And you are safer from Javascript exploits (which are quite common in Firefox)
Disadvantages: some poorly written pages don't work, or work poorly.
I feel that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so I use NoScript. Sites that require Javascript and don't say so are probably lame and annoying anyway.
Good point. It's too bad they can't do both.
There are two problems with your suggestion:
a) it is too restrictive, and would disqualify the GPL as free software. Remember, that the GPL is a distribution license, not a list of restrictions. You should be able to talk to other people (even publicly) about software without contacting the maintainer first. The behavior you describe is responsible, and generally recommended, but should not be forced.
b) as you have it worded, if the restrictions were followed, it would enable a maintainer to prevent anyone from disclosing any security bugs. You say that reporters have to wait for an acknowledgment. What if one is never received? What if there is no maintainer? The solution for this problem is obvious (don't require an acknowledgment), but I should point it out, nonetheless.
c) It is not enforceable in most jurisdictions. In the US, and I assume most of the "free world", you can't prevent someone from talking about your products publicly. You can have them sign an NDA, but that doesn't work for publicly available software. McAfee tried something like this some time ago, stipulating in the EULA that you can't benchmark their software. It got shot down in court.
To be fair, I inferred from the summary and article that this was possible by an ordinary user. After I read several comments on slashdot that say something similar to what you say, I checked the article, and read it carefully. Nowhere does it say whether or not Administrator access is required to use their rootkit. I would have assumed that it was not.
If you are right, and Administrator access is required to write to the MBR, then this is certainly not a security-related issue.
The ASCII file format is not insecure. However, the behavior you suggest is dangerous.
Maybe it is kind of like Burger Time.
I remember being told a lot of things. Like there is no moon. Only a small percentage of people would say that a technological advance would never happen. Never is a long time. As a previous poster pointed out, this particular advance hasn't happened yet, but it probably will eventually.
now we've got voice recognition working over crappy telephone connectionsThat depends on how you define "working." I would not qualify yelling into a phone slowly, and repeating yourself over and over as working. It is sad that so many places have replaced the old "press 1 to do x", which was slow, but worked.
There is no "equivalent" to 17" at arms length, nor is half an inch screen next to your eyes equivalent to 54" at 2 meters. That's just marketer-speak.
I've used devices similar to this before, and they are all crap. The pictures are fuzzy. They are painful. You can't use them for long periods of time, and probably shouldn't use them at all. Many people complain of headaches and nausea. If the screen is flat, and most of them are, it can't work right. I doubt that any one-eyed model will ever be suitable for humans. Terminators, maybe, but not humans. We don't work that way.
I have not used this one. Maybe this one is different. The resolution is certainly much better. But I would not recommend buying one of these without testing it first.
Large corporate marketing has succeeded to the point that there are millions of people in the US who will buy a product regardless of it's technical merits and price point. (cue MS jokes) The problem is that nobody is an expert in everything, and sometimes we have to make uninformed decisions.
I meant relatively. Compared to most plane crashes, and other such tragedies, it isn't too bad. Out of millions of miles of zeppelin travel, I think the Hindenburg was the only passenger craft to kill anybody. While any death is a bad thing, this certainly was not "the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world", as some people report.
But really, I just meant that one disaster almost a century ago shouldn't bar us from using hydrogen in modern craft.
Hydrogen is much cheaper, and is pretty safe if done properly. Hydrogen zeppelins of the first half of last century had an excellent safety record.
The Hindenburg disaster wasn't that bad. It only killed a few dozen people. And it involved other shortcuts that shouldn't have been done. The only reason that the Hindenburg seems so bad in retrospect is because there were a buttload of reporters at the right place at the right time (they planned to report a successful zeppelin trip), and because zeppelins don't die quietly, but rather in a huge exploding fireball.
Yeah. We don't have to worry about anyone touching that. What is Scoble?
Good point. I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic, but McAfee's license has been tested in court. I remember a ruling saying that you can't put "If you use our product, you can't say bad things about us" in a license. A magazine published benchmarks on several anti-virus products, including McAfee's. I guess the results did not favor McAfee. McAfee sued using this clause in the EULA.