It is an unsafe assumption to make. It is entirely possible to do a windows reinstall and continue to have a bootsector rootkit.
But hey, why spend the extra 5 minutes of ensuring you have a clean bootsector, when you can live with years of uncertainty about whether your computer is clean?
No, a full repartition would not. The bootsector is not in "formattable" space. Formatting refers to the process of creating a partition with a filesystem; Im talking about the segment of the drive where the partition table and the boot instructions reside, which formatting wont generally see as a valid target.
When they crunch their numbers and spin their theories of markets and corrective actions, they imagine it to be a painless and bloodless process. It isn't.
It doesnt have to be. Im not crafting some theory of how I think it should be; Im saying that in order for this to remotely work people need to recognize supply and demand. If farmers are operating at a loss, theyre trying to get around supply and demand, which simply does not work.
Its like saying that Im trying to posit gravity as some bloodless theory of how the earth should work. You dont have to like gravity to recognize that you cant win a fight against it by wishing it away.
No, not at all. Theyre completely different situations, and the analogy breaks down because yoghurt is not a creative work-- or at least, the particular culture in the yoghurt is not. The value in yoghurt is its one-time consumptive value, which you paid for and received; the creator of the yoghurt had no stipulations on how you could use it beyond that.
The author of DeCSS could presumably use it personally, and anyone else could presumably do it with their own work.
Im not defending the law here, but OP was incorrect in her statement. Ill also note that DeCSS etc are only necessary for formatshifting from DVD or BluRay.
Typical of the PC's were peripheral problems, programs suddenly not running because they relied on what was determined to be a security vulnerability, so that vulnerability was turned of, and so I had to search and find it.
I take it you werent around for the 10.6-10.7 upgrade, or the 10.7-10.8. Lots of fun figuring out why Cisco VPN wont work with 10.7, or why everything breaks in 10.8.
But by and large at home the only major upgrade issues Ive ever had were on the Linux side. Windows tends to be pretty trouble free; Ive had a machine that ran WinXP for about 4 years before being upgraded to Win7 which it has been for the last 2, with very few issues. The box cost $800 to build, FWIW, and so far Ive had to replace a graphics card (which was essentially free: a coworker had a spare, ancient 2007 graphics card).
Ill take that any day over having my computer purchase be a major investment.
Im not sure you understand the meaning of that word. Im sure noone has ever died because the RIAA sued them, regardless of whether their tactics were legal or not.
Financially Murder
You keep using that word, I dont think it means what you think it means.
At least with decapitation there is an end to it all.
Yes, and I think most sane people would prefer bankruptcy to that kind of end.
Music is now cheaper than ever, especially when you consider inflation. You can now get sub-99cent DRM free MP3s, which is what everyone was crying over a few years ago.
If people are honest with themselves, they will never be satisfied with any sustainable price; the argument will always be that the MP3s could be cheaper, and hey isnt limewire just so much easier.
Sorry, when I stopped doing P2P downloads a few years ago it was partly because I saw the utter hypocrisy of it all and that even my own actions were completely unjustifiable. At the root if it all is "I want what I want and to heck with everything else".
You miss the point. What I described could be defended as "not stealing", because technically the amount you paid covered all of the store's costs and they did not take a loss; yet certainly your actions robbed them of value-- not only with lost profits but in that the remaining milk now has less value to everyone who knows what you did. The fact that your actions are now a "legitimate" course for your peers means that more may be likely to do the same.
It is a very good parallel, and in each situation the argument "but Its not technically stealing" ignores how economics actually work, and the rules necessary for any capitalist society to function. If you dont like the seller's price, your options are to either change your expectations, find a new seller, or do without.
Circumventing the entire supply/demand curve by setting your own price and taking without permission just damages the entire system and removes the incentive for others to produce.
Before anyone takes your advice as a solid plan, just remember that formatting doesnt touch the MBR, which for a few years has been a favorite place to hide out for viruses.
dd if=/dev/null -of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
Will handily wipe out your bootsector (including, I believe, your partition table, so make a backup before running this).
Alternatively, if you want to try disinfecting, you can re-write it using the program "ms-sys", which I believe is on sourceforge and can rewrite a Windows MBR. Generally fixing the MBR is going to be necessary before you can begin doing an online disinfection.
Thats no longer enough. Formatting targets the partition; modern threats target the bootsector. Using dd or gparted to wipe out the MBR may be necessary at this point, as may reflashing the BIOS.
Thats assuming, of course, that you want to have any confidence in the computer ever again.
DeCSS isnt about timeshifting, its about whether its OK to circumvent copy protection (legally no, by DMCA). However, what OP mentioned was changing formats on downloaded media-- which IS legal and has been for a very long time.
Also, the case you cited was about the dissemination of the DeCSS program, not about an individual format-shifting for personal use. That may well fall under fair-use, but I am not positive on that.
Ok, thats a valid criticism and fodder for a good discussion. If your comment had been "we should reform campaign spending", I would agree with you (even tho it would have been off topic).
Or you could pay the ~$100 cost for the Microsoft Signature install, and save yourself ~$600 compared to getting an equivalent Mac.
Different people will like different OSes, and thats fine. But arguing from a hardware or convenience perspective that Macs are better just means you arent really aware of your options. One of them is to pay someone to set your PC up for you, and pocket the several hundred dollars you saved over buying a Mac.
A product's price being higher than what you think it should be is not justification for circumventing that price and just taking it. If it were, you would be justified in figuring out what a gallon of milk costs to stock in-store, and simply leaving that amount instead of paying the store's price.
But we call that shoplifting of course, and tend to recognize it as destructive to society.
The RIAA and MPAA are no different than Drug Cartels. Instead of cutting off heads, they ruin entire families for generations with billion dollar law suits that are presided over by corrupt judges.
Im sure having some perspective will get me modded down here, but Im gonna go out on a limb and say thats a pretty significant difference.
If some lawyer came to me and said, "Look, we have two options here: We can either file a lawsuit against you, or we can try some good old execution-by-decapitation", I think Im gonna opt for the lawsuit-- but thats just me.
The copyright cartels do not want to meet this demand (it is completely realistic for them to do so) at a price people will pay,
Songs are available right now on amazon.com for $0.99 per mp3, and music piracy continues. How can THAT be justified?
Lets be honest here. We have a big problem with onerous and unreasonable copyright terms, as well as litigation abuses; but we also have a large problem with people who are either ignorant or flat out dont care what the law has to say about copyright / licensing. I think both are pretty big problems, in their own way.
Clearly, the solution is to say "ah, whatever, we're not going to follow the law in any case" and post about how copyright is a construct of a corporate industrial complex every time it comes up on slashdot, right?
I would in all honesty change banks if that happened, not just because of the security holes but because it can be a phenomenal pain to get such an old version to play nice with a modern browser. You have to jump through hoops to even get such an old version. It would be sufficiently problematic that I would end up not using the web interface, which is sufficiently annoying that I would want a bank that had useable / secure web access.
Your parent was suggesting that uninstalling Java was better than fixing the security hole.
It is, given the huge percentage of malware infections directly caused by Java and Adobe plugin exploits.
Patching this particular hole fixes the problem for about 2 weeks till the next 0-day drops. Some of us like to get off of that nasty little merry-go-round, and get rid of a plugin that has basically no use. If you really need it, set your plugins to Click-To-Play (through flashblock for firefox, or as detailed here for chrome)
Thats not how a client VPN works. Only a site-to-site VPN would allow network-to-network access; a client VPN tunnel allows one device to access a remote network, but not necessarily vice-versa. Certainly you can firewall your VPN adapter to block incoming requests, which is (AFAIK) the default in Windows.
You have a case to cite where MPAA bribed a judge for a warrant? That would be quite a story if you did; I suggest you contact the NY Times and the Washington Post immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
It is an unsafe assumption to make. It is entirely possible to do a windows reinstall and continue to have a bootsector rootkit.
But hey, why spend the extra 5 minutes of ensuring you have a clean bootsector, when you can live with years of uncertainty about whether your computer is clean?
No, a full repartition would not. The bootsector is not in "formattable" space. Formatting refers to the process of creating a partition with a filesystem; Im talking about the segment of the drive where the partition table and the boot instructions reside, which formatting wont generally see as a valid target.
When they crunch their numbers and spin their theories of markets and corrective actions, they imagine it to be a painless and bloodless process. It isn't.
It doesnt have to be. Im not crafting some theory of how I think it should be; Im saying that in order for this to remotely work people need to recognize supply and demand. If farmers are operating at a loss, theyre trying to get around supply and demand, which simply does not work.
Its like saying that Im trying to posit gravity as some bloodless theory of how the earth should work. You dont have to like gravity to recognize that you cant win a fight against it by wishing it away.
No, not at all. Theyre completely different situations, and the analogy breaks down because yoghurt is not a creative work-- or at least, the particular culture in the yoghurt is not. The value in yoghurt is its one-time consumptive value, which you paid for and received; the creator of the yoghurt had no stipulations on how you could use it beyond that.
The author of DeCSS could presumably use it personally, and anyone else could presumably do it with their own work.
Im not defending the law here, but OP was incorrect in her statement. Ill also note that DeCSS etc are only necessary for formatshifting from DVD or BluRay.
Typical of the PC's were peripheral problems, programs suddenly not running because they relied on what was determined to be a security vulnerability, so that vulnerability was turned of, and so I had to search and find it.
I take it you werent around for the 10.6-10.7 upgrade, or the 10.7-10.8. Lots of fun figuring out why Cisco VPN wont work with 10.7, or why everything breaks in 10.8.
But by and large at home the only major upgrade issues Ive ever had were on the Linux side. Windows tends to be pretty trouble free; Ive had a machine that ran WinXP for about 4 years before being upgraded to Win7 which it has been for the last 2, with very few issues. The box cost $800 to build, FWIW, and so far Ive had to replace a graphics card (which was essentially free: a coworker had a spare, ancient 2007 graphics card).
Ill take that any day over having my computer purchase be a major investment.
a different but just as deadly
Im not sure you understand the meaning of that word. Im sure noone has ever died because the RIAA sued them, regardless of whether their tactics were legal or not.
Financially Murder
You keep using that word, I dont think it means what you think it means.
At least with decapitation there is an end to it all.
Yes, and I think most sane people would prefer bankruptcy to that kind of end.
And you consider "being out of money" in a first world country to be on par with decapitation by mexican drug cartels?
Wow, speaking of lack of perspective...
Music is now cheaper than ever, especially when you consider inflation. You can now get sub-99cent DRM free MP3s, which is what everyone was crying over a few years ago.
If people are honest with themselves, they will never be satisfied with any sustainable price; the argument will always be that the MP3s could be cheaper, and hey isnt limewire just so much easier.
Sorry, when I stopped doing P2P downloads a few years ago it was partly because I saw the utter hypocrisy of it all and that even my own actions were completely unjustifiable. At the root if it all is "I want what I want and to heck with everything else".
You miss the point. What I described could be defended as "not stealing", because technically the amount you paid covered all of the store's costs and they did not take a loss; yet certainly your actions robbed them of value-- not only with lost profits but in that the remaining milk now has less value to everyone who knows what you did. The fact that your actions are now a "legitimate" course for your peers means that more may be likely to do the same.
It is a very good parallel, and in each situation the argument "but Its not technically stealing" ignores how economics actually work, and the rules necessary for any capitalist society to function. If you dont like the seller's price, your options are to either change your expectations, find a new seller, or do without.
Circumventing the entire supply/demand curve by setting your own price and taking without permission just damages the entire system and removes the incentive for others to produce.
Wipes dont cover the bootsector, which is almost always hit by any rootkit.
Before anyone takes your advice as a solid plan, just remember that formatting doesnt touch the MBR, which for a few years has been a favorite place to hide out for viruses.
dd if=/dev/null -of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
Will handily wipe out your bootsector (including, I believe, your partition table, so make a backup before running this).
Alternatively, if you want to try disinfecting, you can re-write it using the program "ms-sys", which I believe is on sourceforge and can rewrite a Windows MBR. Generally fixing the MBR is going to be necessary before you can begin doing an online disinfection.
Thats no longer enough. Formatting targets the partition; modern threats target the bootsector. Using dd or gparted to wipe out the MBR may be necessary at this point, as may reflashing the BIOS.
Thats assuming, of course, that you want to have any confidence in the computer ever again.
DeCSS isnt about timeshifting, its about whether its OK to circumvent copy protection (legally no, by DMCA). However, what OP mentioned was changing formats on downloaded media-- which IS legal and has been for a very long time.
Also, the case you cited was about the dissemination of the DeCSS program, not about an individual format-shifting for personal use. That may well fall under fair-use, but I am not positive on that.
Ok, thats a valid criticism and fodder for a good discussion. If your comment had been "we should reform campaign spending", I would agree with you (even tho it would have been off topic).
What you posted however, was an inaccurate rant.
Or you could pay the ~$100 cost for the Microsoft Signature install, and save yourself ~$600 compared to getting an equivalent Mac.
Different people will like different OSes, and thats fine. But arguing from a hardware or convenience perspective that Macs are better just means you arent really aware of your options. One of them is to pay someone to set your PC up for you, and pocket the several hundred dollars you saved over buying a Mac.
A product's price being higher than what you think it should be is not justification for circumventing that price and just taking it. If it were, you would be justified in figuring out what a gallon of milk costs to stock in-store, and simply leaving that amount instead of paying the store's price.
But we call that shoplifting of course, and tend to recognize it as destructive to society.
The RIAA and MPAA are no different than Drug Cartels. Instead of cutting off heads, they ruin entire families for generations with billion dollar law suits that are presided over by corrupt judges.
Im sure having some perspective will get me modded down here, but Im gonna go out on a limb and say thats a pretty significant difference.
If some lawyer came to me and said, "Look, we have two options here: We can either file a lawsuit against you, or we can try some good old execution-by-decapitation", I think Im gonna opt for the lawsuit-- but thats just me.
Black markets are created by unsatisfied demand,
Right, and sometimes the demand is unreasonable.
The copyright cartels do not want to meet this demand (it is completely realistic for them to do so) at a price people will pay,
Songs are available right now on amazon.com for $0.99 per mp3, and music piracy continues. How can THAT be justified?
Lets be honest here. We have a big problem with onerous and unreasonable copyright terms, as well as litigation abuses; but we also have a large problem with people who are either ignorant or flat out dont care what the law has to say about copyright / licensing. I think both are pretty big problems, in their own way.
Clearly, the solution is to say "ah, whatever, we're not going to follow the law in any case" and post about how copyright is a construct of a corporate industrial complex every time it comes up on slashdot, right?
I would in all honesty change banks if that happened, not just because of the security holes but because it can be a phenomenal pain to get such an old version to play nice with a modern browser. You have to jump through hoops to even get such an old version. It would be sufficiently problematic that I would end up not using the web interface, which is sufficiently annoying that I would want a bank that had useable / secure web access.
Your parent was suggesting that uninstalling Java was better than fixing the security hole.
It is, given the huge percentage of malware infections directly caused by Java and Adobe plugin exploits.
Patching this particular hole fixes the problem for about 2 weeks till the next 0-day drops. Some of us like to get off of that nasty little merry-go-round, and get rid of a plugin that has basically no use. If you really need it, set your plugins to Click-To-Play (through flashblock for firefox, or as detailed here for chrome)
In Chrome: Wrench-->Settings; Advanced Settings; Content settings; "Click to Play" under plugins.
Problem solved.
Thats not how a client VPN works. Only a site-to-site VPN would allow network-to-network access; a client VPN tunnel allows one device to access a remote network, but not necessarily vice-versa. Certainly you can firewall your VPN adapter to block incoming requests, which is (AFAIK) the default in Windows.
You have a case to cite where MPAA bribed a judge for a warrant? That would be quite a story if you did; I suggest you contact the NY Times and the Washington Post immediately.