Sell your old stuff on ebay, and post about it on http://vogons.zetafleet.com./ That's the DOSBox forum. If you've got any Roland sound cards, those guys will pay a premium. The Roland stuff = one of the few things that wasn't emulated 100%, the last time I checked.
Everyone I've ever talked to about old DOS games recommends DOSBox highly, because adjusting the processor speed for old games on the fly is a lot easier than fighting with jumpers.
I know it's not much help, but if you're a Metallica fan, you can go to their website and buy a dizzying number of their concert performances in mp3 (320 vbr if memory serves) for $9.99 or FLAC for $12.99, and there's no DRM involved whatsoever. For a band that cried so hard over Napster 10 years ago, they've made a good deal of progress.
Hah, this got modded down? The NY Times article is paywalled off, and nobody else posted it, so I fail to see how the fact that I potentially saved a bunch of people from going to bugmenot to grab a username/password for nytimes.com is redundant.
Oh, wait. This is Slashdot. Nobody reads the articles, and very few even read the summaries. My bad. In Soviet Russia, etc, etc.
November 10, 2010
The Great Cyberheist
By JAMES VERINI
One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn't stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.
Indeed, the young man was in the act of "cashing out," as he would later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with stolen card numbers and was withdrawing as much cash as he could from each account. He was doing this just before 12 a.m., because that's when daily withdrawal limits end, and a "casher" can double his take with another withdrawal a few minutes later. To throw off anyone who might later look at surveillance footage, the young man was wearing a woman's wig and a costume-jewelry nose ring. The detective asked his name, and though the man went by many aliases on the Internet -- sometimes he was cumbajohny, sometimes segvec, but his favorite was soupnazi -- he politely told the truth. "Albert Gonzalez," he said.
After Gonzalez was arrested, word quickly made its way to the New Jersey U.S. attorney's office in Newark, which, along with agents from the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force, had been investigating credit- and debit-card fraud involving cashers in the area, without much luck. Gonzalez was debriefed and soon found to be a rare catch. Not only did he have data on millions of card accounts stored on the computer back in his New Jersey apartment, but he also had a knack for patiently explaining his expertise in online card fraud. As one former Secret Service agent told me, Gonzalez was extremely intelligent. "He knew computers. He knew fraud. He was good."
Gonzalez, law-enforcement officials would discover, was more than just a casher. He was a moderator and rising star on Shadowcrew.com, an archetypal criminal cyberbazaar that sprang up during the Internet-commerce boom in the early 2000s. Its users trafficked in databases of stolen card accounts and devices like magnetic strip-encoders and card-embossers; they posted tips on vulnerable banks and stores and effective e-mail scams. Created by a part-time student in Arizona and a former mortgage broker in New Jersey, Shadowcrew had hundreds of members across the United States, Europe and Asia. It was, as one federal prosecutor put it to me, "an eBay, Monster.com and MySpace for cybercrime."
After a couple of interviews, Gonzalez agreed to help the government so he could avoid prosecution. "I was 22 years old and scared," he'd tell me later. "When you have a Secret Service agent in your apartment telling you you'll go away for 20 years, you'll do anything."
He was also good-natured and helpful. "He was very respectable, very nice, very calm, very well spoken," says the Secret Service agent who would come to know Gonzalez best, Agent Michael (a nickname derived from his real name). "In the beginning, he was quiet and reserved, but then he started opening up. He started to trust us."
The agents won his trust in part by paying for his living expenses while they brought him to their side and by waiting for Gonzalez to work through his withdrawal. An intermittent drug addict, Gonzalez had been taking cocaine and modafinil, an antinarcoleptic, to keep awake during his long hours at the computer. To decompress, he liked Ecstasy and ketamine. At first, a different agent told me, "he was extremely thin; he smoked a lot, his clothes were disheveled. Over time, he gained weight, started cutting his hair shorter and shaving every day. It was having a good effect on his health." The agent went on to say: "He could be very disarming, if you let your guard down
From the summary: WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.
This line is so stupid that it hurts, because it makes the assumption that WGA is somehow going to vanish in a puff of smoke if you'll just nuke from orbit and start over. These people should just do the following, if WGA offends them so badly:
1. Make a text file, but give it a.bat extension. Make it something like, oh, I don't know, "wganuke.bat."
2. Paste the following into your new text file:
echo Y > cacls wgatray.exe/d everyone
echo Y > cacls wgalogon.dll/d everyone
echo Y > cacls legitcheckcontrol.dll/d everyone
3. Save.
4. Double-click on the icon for your new text file.
5. No more WGA (Sorry, no PROFIT! jokes here). Updating also works like a charm. The above was tested on XP SP3, but I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't work on Vista or Win7.
Actually, you're close and didn't realize it. By default, every time you move to another directory in Windows Explorer, it scans for network shares every single time. There's a checkbox to turn this off somwhere. I haven't used Windows for anything other than IE-specific stuff in over a year, so the details are fuzzy. You might try googling "tweakhound" or "blackviper" and working from there.
.... And I just realized that I forgot to say that the people who can't grasp humor are the cause of my lurking. I've had 3 or 4 replies torpedoed by robots like that. Otherwise, I would probably post more.
I'm wondering the same thing. I've got a WRT54G (One of the early linux version ones), and a BEFSX41. I usually never have to reset either unless there's a cable outage, and even then I don't always have to reset it. I just had a power outage just today, and that was probably the first time in 6 months that my WRT54G had been off for any reason. I just wish there was a gigabit equivalent to it, but one can dream, I suppose.
Replies like the gp's are exactly why I lurk here. You never know when someone with a broken sarcasm detector is going to come out of nowhere and deflate the funny from an otherwise good post.
Slashdot Mirror
Sell your old stuff on ebay, and post about it on http://vogons.zetafleet.com./ That's the DOSBox forum. If you've got any Roland sound cards, those guys will pay a premium. The Roland stuff = one of the few things that wasn't emulated 100%, the last time I checked.
Everyone I've ever talked to about old DOS games recommends DOSBox highly, because adjusting the processor speed for old games on the fly is a lot easier than fighting with jumpers.
I'm adding Book Reviews to the list of article categories that don't show up for me. Idle just got some company.
This was talked about back in October:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/15/1340244/Data-Miners-Scraping-Away-Our-Privacy?from=rss
I thought the guy in the picture looked familiar...
I know it's not much help, but if you're a Metallica fan, you can go to their website and buy a dizzying number of their concert performances in mp3 (320 vbr if memory serves) for $9.99 or FLAC for $12.99, and there's no DRM involved whatsoever. For a band that cried so hard over Napster 10 years ago, they've made a good deal of progress.
Hah, this got modded down? The NY Times article is paywalled off, and nobody else posted it, so I fail to see how the fact that I potentially saved a bunch of people from going to bugmenot to grab a username/password for nytimes.com is redundant.
Oh, wait. This is Slashdot. Nobody reads the articles, and very few even read the summaries. My bad. In Soviet Russia, etc, etc.
November 10, 2010
The Great Cyberheist
By JAMES VERINI
One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn't stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.
Indeed, the young man was in the act of "cashing out," as he would later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with stolen card numbers and was withdrawing as much cash as he could from each account. He was doing this just before 12 a.m., because that's when daily withdrawal limits end, and a "casher" can double his take with another withdrawal a few minutes later. To throw off anyone who might later look at surveillance footage, the young man was wearing a woman's wig and a costume-jewelry nose ring. The detective asked his name, and though the man went by many aliases on the Internet -- sometimes he was cumbajohny, sometimes segvec, but his favorite was soupnazi -- he politely told the truth. "Albert Gonzalez," he said.
After Gonzalez was arrested, word quickly made its way to the New Jersey U.S. attorney's office in Newark, which, along with agents from the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force, had been investigating credit- and debit-card fraud involving cashers in the area, without much luck. Gonzalez was debriefed and soon found to be a rare catch. Not only did he have data on millions of card accounts stored on the computer back in his New Jersey apartment, but he also had a knack for patiently explaining his expertise in online card fraud. As one former Secret Service agent told me, Gonzalez was extremely intelligent. "He knew computers. He knew fraud. He was good."
Gonzalez, law-enforcement officials would discover, was more than just a casher. He was a moderator and rising star on Shadowcrew.com, an archetypal criminal cyberbazaar that sprang up during the Internet-commerce boom in the early 2000s. Its users trafficked in databases of stolen card accounts and devices like magnetic strip-encoders and card-embossers; they posted tips on vulnerable banks and stores and effective e-mail scams. Created by a part-time student in Arizona and a former mortgage broker in New Jersey, Shadowcrew had hundreds of members across the United States, Europe and Asia. It was, as one federal prosecutor put it to me, "an eBay, Monster.com and MySpace for cybercrime."
After a couple of interviews, Gonzalez agreed to help the government so he could avoid prosecution. "I was 22 years old and scared," he'd tell me later. "When you have a Secret Service agent in your apartment telling you you'll go away for 20 years, you'll do anything."
He was also good-natured and helpful. "He was very respectable, very nice, very calm, very well spoken," says the Secret Service agent who would come to know Gonzalez best, Agent Michael (a nickname derived from his real name). "In the beginning, he was quiet and reserved, but then he started opening up. He started to trust us."
The agents won his trust in part by paying for his living expenses while they brought him to their side and by waiting for Gonzalez to work through his withdrawal. An intermittent drug addict, Gonzalez had been taking cocaine and modafinil, an antinarcoleptic, to keep awake during his long hours at the computer. To decompress, he liked Ecstasy and ketamine. At first, a different agent told me, "he was extremely thin; he smoked a lot, his clothes were disheveled. Over time, he gained weight, started cutting his hair shorter and shaving every day. It was having a good effect on his health." The agent went on to say: "He could be very disarming, if you let your guard down
FLAWLESS VICTORY
Let's hope he doesn't put Steve Ballmer in charge of running it.
Roundhouse kicks transcend international borders.
Especially when they're executed by Chuck Norris.
I tend to prefer using 12345 as my zip code, but will use 1/1 and a random year for my birthday.
I forgot that you've got to cd into C:\Windows\System32 first, before running those commands.
From the summary: WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.
.bat extension. Make it something like, oh, I don't know, "wganuke.bat."
/d everyone /d everyone /d everyone
This line is so stupid that it hurts, because it makes the assumption that WGA is somehow going to vanish in a puff of smoke if you'll just nuke from orbit and start over. These people should just do the following, if WGA offends them so badly:
1. Make a text file, but give it a
2. Paste the following into your new text file:
echo Y > cacls wgatray.exe
echo Y > cacls wgalogon.dll
echo Y > cacls legitcheckcontrol.dll
3. Save.
4. Double-click on the icon for your new text file.
5. No more WGA (Sorry, no PROFIT! jokes here). Updating also works like a charm. The above was tested on XP SP3, but I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't work on Vista or Win7.
No, no, no. You've got it all wrong!
They're supposed to telnet to port 80 and type their own HTTP commands!
I accidentally the whole thing
The complete lack of joke comprehension at this place is one reason I lurk. Take me with you!
Actually, you're close and didn't realize it. By default, every time you move to another directory in Windows Explorer, it scans for network shares every single time. There's a checkbox to turn this off somwhere. I haven't used Windows for anything other than IE-specific stuff in over a year, so the details are fuzzy. You might try googling "tweakhound" or "blackviper" and working from there.
I'm going to have to disagree with you about the wasted brain sweat. I actually find Ask Slashdot topics like these fascinating.
I thought that's what BSODs were for?
Finally, an operating system designed with Steve Ballmer in mind.
What, no bofh tag?
.... And I just realized that I forgot to say that the people who can't grasp humor are the cause of my lurking. I've had 3 or 4 replies torpedoed by robots like that. Otherwise, I would probably post more.
I'm wondering the same thing. I've got a WRT54G (One of the early linux version ones), and a BEFSX41. I usually never have to reset either unless there's a cable outage, and even then I don't always have to reset it. I just had a power outage just today, and that was probably the first time in 6 months that my WRT54G had been off for any reason. I just wish there was a gigabit equivalent to it, but one can dream, I suppose.
Replies like the gp's are exactly why I lurk here. You never know when someone with a broken sarcasm detector is going to come out of nowhere and deflate the funny from an otherwise good post.
Is it too late to vote this down as bin spam?
It looks like somebody got their cut.