I wonder if MS is purposefully leaving bugs in XP simply to encourage Vista sales? Or at least to counter all the negativity Vista has been copping. Why do we have to wait for SP3 for this fix, if not to allow more time for news to circulate that Vista is "more secure" than XP? I imagine MS is trying hard to make Vista seem more appealing than staying with XP.. not hard to imagine any large company using tactics like this with their products.
"The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said."
How realistic is this.. really? They must have some serious bandwidth to be receiving Terrabytes of information from around the world to one single IP.
Besides, if this was really happening on a grand scale, wouldn't internet traffic spike more dramatically than any botnet sending simple emails?
Why not just create (and keep creating) "good" virii that will infect computers and look for malicious traffic. They can perhaps closely imitate the code signatures of the infections they're trying to thwart - if the user has enough anti-virus nous to remove the offender, it also removes the "good" virus, no long-term harm done.
In the meantime, fight fire with fire. If there's a hole in that approach, I'd like to hear it.
I've never been able to understand this seeming contradiction.. I'm sure this will be a stupid question..
It's accepted that the universe (spacetime) is expanding. So as we go back in time, everything should be closer together, right?
But you always hear that we have seen "further" in distance, hence further "back" in time.
Light obviously travels faster than the expansion of spacetime, otherwise we'd never see anything, therefore there must be a limit to how far back we can see, because the oldest light would have passed us by already. Does that make sense?
So as I see it, there is only so far back we should be able to see...?
"No officer, I was just playing Silent Hill 5 with my DirectX13 VWorld headset. It's great, almost like killing real people!"
"oh ok, you can go then..."
"All of these components are build into the world, and when you make decisions in the game you're making many of the same decisions you make in your daily life."
..Except you're too busy playing the game all day to make any real life decisions.
But joking aside, if playing the same was actually LINKED to "soft" products in the real-world economy (e.g. buying/selling shares) and profit/loss from these reflected in online gold etc as well as your real bank account, we may get more kids interested in participating that that sort of thing.
Or we may get a lot of bankrupted kids... still, the merging of real and virtual economies will happen more and more I think.
We have the LifeStraw, LifeSaver Bottle, and other consumer filtering devices.
So why are children in 3rd world countries still dying every day from drinking dirty water?
Chalk up another one for us lucky consumers, with piles of shit we don't need to stuff into landfills while kids die who simply would rather have clean water than the latest plastic toy.
Someone should write a little freeware app to monitor AU communication. Then it can ask you, "do you really want to communicate with Microsoft Y/N?"
If you say yes, and AU itself doesn't alert you of updates, we can at least see how often this is happening.
On another note, hasn't Microsoft just opened a massive security hole? Surely some hacker will rise to the challenge in a few weeks?
..is there a web site/blog/forum somewhere which discusses the latest in "best practices" (and variations thereof) all in one place? i.e. discussing good js libraries, UI design, various handy techniques for doing this and that...?
As big as a botnet is, it has only 2 main weapons - spam and DoS.
To help fix the first problem, why can't ISPs analyse outgoing mail and if spam-like behaviour appears (which shouldn't be hard to detect), do the following:
1. Completely block customer's traffic, except to allow the following:
2. Direct customer to the ISP's download page of links to virus scanning software & updates.
3. Allow customer to tick a box saying "yes I've done a scan, all ok now" and service resumes.
4. If spam behaviour continues, return to step 1.
Customer can resume service immediately if they want, but will get pissed off enough with the interruptions to eventually install/scan and/or learn not to run EXEs.
DoS attacks could easily be twarted by building an alert network for all ISPs. If a site is attacked, they alert the network and any ISPs seeing traffic going to that site does the same to the customer as above. Block them until they clear the infection.
By badgering the end users until they learn, we might see PCs around the world quickly cleaned up. The government could help by providing free antivirus & firewall software too, or at least make them tax exempt.
Since the iPhone has a microphone (does iTouch?) I wonder why you can't use voice commands?
Just press a speak button (or something you have to find on the screen that looks like the speak button) and say "Playlist Five" or "Shuffle".
Or, there could be a "no look" mode, where it speaks to you as your finger passes over particular buttons, telling you what you're about to press (a vocal tooltip) and each menu item.
Surely the latter isn't hard to achieve. Voice commands would rock though.
Indeed, now we're getting to the real issues.
Anyone else interested in matters such as these would be interested in documentaries like The Corporation (now freely available) and those by Adam Curtis and John Pilger.
It seems to me one has to look at a larger scope of problems. We can't *blame* anyone for the systems that are in place, as the culture dictates behaviour as much as our innate selfishness creates the culture. What's missing in Aus, the US and almost everywhere is responsible oversight, which is the role of government.
In addition, such oversight and regulation must be constantly matched against the expectations of society at large - what do we, as a whole, expect as proper behaviour in both commerce and policy?
This then feeds back into our interaction as consumers with business... it's a circle, it seems to me, but in the world right now we have real issues around protectionism... everyone trying to build little empires, and never the twain shall meet. No wonder we're in such a misanthropic mess.
There should be a *LIMIT* on the size any one business can grow to. Shocking I know.. who could think such a thing?
Just thought - the filter is probably not meant to thwart anyone over the age of like 13 anyway.. perhaps it's just for fairly young kids playing on computers? Seems a lot of money just for that tho.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely somewhere in all this is an Australian scientist who couldn't get funding.
[conspiracy]
I wonder if MS is purposefully leaving bugs in XP simply to encourage Vista sales? Or at least to counter all the negativity Vista has been copping. Why do we have to wait for SP3 for this fix, if not to allow more time for news to circulate that Vista is "more secure" than XP? I imagine MS is trying hard to make Vista seem more appealing than staying with XP.. not hard to imagine any large company using tactics like this with their products.
[/conspiracy]
"The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said."
How realistic is this.. really? They must have some serious bandwidth to be receiving Terrabytes of information from around the world to one single IP.
Besides, if this was really happening on a grand scale, wouldn't internet traffic spike more dramatically than any botnet sending simple emails?
1. An increase in security at the cost of traffic? Doesn't sound too bad.
:)
2. Nothing is illegal if the government does it.
Why not just create (and keep creating) "good" virii that will infect computers and look for malicious traffic. They can perhaps closely imitate the code signatures of the infections they're trying to thwart - if the user has enough anti-virus nous to remove the offender, it also removes the "good" virus, no long-term harm done.
In the meantime, fight fire with fire. If there's a hole in that approach, I'd like to hear it.
Murdoch now owns the WST oops that should be a J. Soon it will say global warming studies are flawed. /ignore wsj
I've never been able to understand this seeming contradiction.. I'm sure this will be a stupid question..
It's accepted that the universe (spacetime) is expanding. So as we go back in time, everything should be closer together, right?
But you always hear that we have seen "further" in distance, hence further "back" in time.
Light obviously travels faster than the expansion of spacetime, otherwise we'd never see anything, therefore there must be a limit to how far back we can see, because the oldest light would have passed us by already. Does that make sense?
So as I see it, there is only so far back we should be able to see...?
I wonder what the iterative capacity of the human brain is for processing nested brackets in sentences?
Apparently this is only the 2nd highest court in the EU.. so still a chance for an appeal.
Will MS give in or appeal? Bets are on!
"No officer, I was just playing Silent Hill 5 with my DirectX13 VWorld headset. It's great, almost like killing real people!" "oh ok, you can go then..."
"All of these components are build into the world, and when you make decisions in the game you're making many of the same decisions you make in your daily life."
..Except you're too busy playing the game all day to make any real life decisions.
But joking aside, if playing the same was actually LINKED to "soft" products in the real-world economy (e.g. buying/selling shares) and profit/loss from these reflected in online gold etc as well as your real bank account, we may get more kids interested in participating that that sort of thing.
Or we may get a lot of bankrupted kids... still, the merging of real and virtual economies will happen more and more I think.
We're missing something important here.
We have the LifeStraw, LifeSaver Bottle, and other consumer filtering devices.
So why are children in 3rd world countries still dying every day from drinking dirty water?
Chalk up another one for us lucky consumers, with piles of shit we don't need to stuff into landfills while kids die who simply would rather have clean water than the latest plastic toy.
Someone should write a little freeware app to monitor AU communication. Then it can ask you, "do you really want to communicate with Microsoft Y/N?" If you say yes, and AU itself doesn't alert you of updates, we can at least see how often this is happening. On another note, hasn't Microsoft just opened a massive security hole? Surely some hacker will rise to the challenge in a few weeks?
..is there a web site/blog/forum somewhere which discusses the latest in "best practices" (and variations thereof) all in one place? i.e. discussing good js libraries, UI design, various handy techniques for doing this and that...?
As big as a botnet is, it has only 2 main weapons - spam and DoS. To help fix the first problem, why can't ISPs analyse outgoing mail and if spam-like behaviour appears (which shouldn't be hard to detect), do the following: 1. Completely block customer's traffic, except to allow the following: 2. Direct customer to the ISP's download page of links to virus scanning software & updates. 3. Allow customer to tick a box saying "yes I've done a scan, all ok now" and service resumes. 4. If spam behaviour continues, return to step 1. Customer can resume service immediately if they want, but will get pissed off enough with the interruptions to eventually install/scan and/or learn not to run EXEs. DoS attacks could easily be twarted by building an alert network for all ISPs. If a site is attacked, they alert the network and any ISPs seeing traffic going to that site does the same to the customer as above. Block them until they clear the infection. By badgering the end users until they learn, we might see PCs around the world quickly cleaned up. The government could help by providing free antivirus & firewall software too, or at least make them tax exempt.
Since the iPhone has a microphone (does iTouch?) I wonder why you can't use voice commands? Just press a speak button (or something you have to find on the screen that looks like the speak button) and say "Playlist Five" or "Shuffle". Or, there could be a "no look" mode, where it speaks to you as your finger passes over particular buttons, telling you what you're about to press (a vocal tooltip) and each menu item. Surely the latter isn't hard to achieve. Voice commands would rock though.
Indeed, now we're getting to the real issues. Anyone else interested in matters such as these would be interested in documentaries like The Corporation (now freely available) and those by Adam Curtis and John Pilger.
The article is recent, but the incident itself, that the OP mentions, happened in 2004.
It seems to me one has to look at a larger scope of problems. We can't *blame* anyone for the systems that are in place, as the culture dictates behaviour as much as our innate selfishness creates the culture. What's missing in Aus, the US and almost everywhere is responsible oversight, which is the role of government. In addition, such oversight and regulation must be constantly matched against the expectations of society at large - what do we, as a whole, expect as proper behaviour in both commerce and policy? This then feeds back into our interaction as consumers with business... it's a circle, it seems to me, but in the world right now we have real issues around protectionism... everyone trying to build little empires, and never the twain shall meet. No wonder we're in such a misanthropic mess. There should be a *LIMIT* on the size any one business can grow to. Shocking I know.. who could think such a thing?
This is the market opportunity they've been waiting for. Put tape in.. click.. play. It's better quality than VHS you know.
Just thought - the filter is probably not meant to thwart anyone over the age of like 13 anyway.. perhaps it's just for fairly young kids playing on computers? Seems a lot of money just for that tho.
I mean look at how many parents these posts have. Has it helped??
Well companies have patented genomes, so nothing seems sacred.