Yep. It's not as though the exploit allows the cops to think nothing's wrong. Surely, the cops will be curious when their wiretaps go:
Caller: Yo. It's me. >CARRIER LOST
Furthermore, the FBI has insane bugging technologies. Forget wiretaps. If they really want to get you, they'll stick parabolic or laser mikes all around you. Or bug your car and office or simply follow you around and take pictures of all your friends who they then bug and wiretap. Or what they really do is catch an associate on a felony and extort^H^H^H^H^H^H convince them to turn state's witness.
So while cool, this exploit probably does not help "bad" guys too much.
Personally, I find the MSN support for video better than AIM. I have not tried the Yahoo client for video. GAIM does not support audio or video yet, although 2.0 promises that. (The developer was hired by Google to institute voice for GTalk support.)
MSN is good because you can prevent people from spying on you without your knowledge. Under AIM, you have to block all users not on your Buddy List to get the same sort of protection but you lose the chance for people to contact you and ask you to add.
AIM has a really good webpage version, though, that is convenient at times.
Of course, it may have to get rid of its inventory of desktop Pentium 4 chips and might conflict with Intel commitments to Dell not to obsolete all of their offerings. Intel has to change fabs to make the new chips in larger amounts. All of the marketing about higher clock speeds have to go out the window, too. Furthermore, Intel has to concede that it made a huge mistake and that AMD was right all along with regard to the performance per cycle/pure megahertz debate.
Do we risk someone's life for a psychological benefit? I'm not taking a position either way, but that is why doctors feel there are ethical deliberations. More abstractly framed, what if a woman wanted body modifications that are life-threatening but would make her less depressed and much happier? Now, we think being disfigured is a valid reason to be annoyed because of our prejudices, but what if breast implants required a significant risk to health? Well, they banned silicone breast implants out of fear that women would take that risk (which may not have existed) to feel better about themselves.
Offtopic: Why do I keep get modded down? God. Look at my last post objecting to a racial joke. What's wrong with Slashdot mods?
(I'll get modded down now even though I said I was going to get modded down. First time in Slashdot history!)
Discrimination is finding a difference. Clearly, racial jokes are based on exploiting these differences while perpetuating stereotypes. They may be funny but represent discrimination. So imagine you are at work and all your white co-workers make racial jokes. And you laugh because you think it's funny. Then you do not get a job promotion that you think you should have gotten. You can't prove there was discrimination and you can't be sure but the fact that there were so many jokes makes you uncomfortable.
So yeah, racial jokes are funny until you get the shaft.
Technically, face transplants are not medically necessary. The surgery would definitely make the person feel better, but it is not life-saving such as heart, liver, lung, or kidney transplants. The side effects of immunosuppresants are still quite severe and perhaps life-threatening, since the immune system is getting shut down for the life of the patient. The question is whether a doctor can allow someone to take these risks for a non-life-saving procedure.
Living donors are not a problem because they're brain dead. So cutting off someone's face is scary; do so while they're still breathing (via ventilator) is really creepy. Yet, we pull hearts out of living people already so what's the face?
Federal anti-discrimination laws apply only to those over 40. Yes, teenagers have no rights. Otherwise, how can their parents take care of them, as they are legally required to do?
Does anyone think that a very handy Firefox add-on would be a button attached to this kind of dialogue that would instantly kill all Javascript scripts stone dead for the page?
No linky for this claim, but the flaw is with the closed-source Flash plugin for Firefox. Anyway, Flash gets abused most of the time with ads and stuff. Flashblock is a good feature because it stops those suckers dead and you can choose which Flash thingies to use.
Drug dealers are mostly young people a bad neighborhood who have nothing better to do. There was a study (in the book Freakonomics) that said that the average lifespan of a guy who stayed in the business to be around four years. Four years! And considering all that, the money they made in profit, with the jail time, etc., they made minimum wage. Being a drug dealer, the study found, had a significant degree of status and a lottery chance of being a kingpin. And that's about all they get from it.
Cybercriminals are sophisticated folks. Many phishers for online brokerages have graduate degrees in finance. (This week's Business Week.) They have capital to invest in their enterprise, too. Of course they're going to make more money and get away with it as compared to drug dealers, even the "high" level ones.
Anyway, I've been crazily modded down recently in weird ways. Look at my history. What the hell is going on? Someone leave me a message.
Well, if you are trying to block Bittorrent traffic, which is mostly porn anyways, block port range 6881-6889. Many people won't use the random ports anyway.
Hold up a second. The MS Hotmail flaw allowed anyone's Hotmail account to be compromised by going to a MS website and typing in the e-mail account they wanted to hack. The GMail flaw requires an user to send their certificate information to the hacker. The Hotmail flaw was much more significant and easier to fix: disable the second website (or at least ask for a secret question).
So is the Slashdot crowd going to complain and moan about Sony being a servant of the devil, and then happily go to Best Buy and get ther shiny new PS3?
No. I'm going to buy my console from a responsible corporate citizen, uh, >cough, Microsoft. No, I guess I'm going to build a gaming system with the Intel processor because...they're not a mono--... Damn.
AMD has no incentive to change its server chip just to better suit the niche supercomputer market. It would only alter the Opteron to fit the server market, not the supercomputer market. The firm already has manufacturing bottlenecks; its production fabs are cramped as is. There are also problems with inventory. Why would AMD spend the money to create a chip that would benefit supercomputers and not servers? It would make sense only if AMD and Cray improved the tech in a way that would make the Opteron better suited to the server market as well, such as by improving the scalability of the technology.
The judge has discretion to allocate the legal expenses as he sees fit. There may be many issues involved and the parties may split on who wins which issue. The judge would probably be more likely to give more of the fees to the richer party if the suits are about equal in merit. But there certainly is no law that dictates this, so there is still a large deterrent for small parties from filing suit.
The loser-pays system, ironically, leads to the perverse incentive to outspend your opponent. Game theory dictates that parties are not compelled to save money, but in fact to spend more money so as to avoid being stuck with the other party's expenses. Pretend you have spend $15,000 on legal expenses and the other side has spent a similar amount. If you spend $5,000 more, you can increase your chances of not getting stuck with $30,000 (plus your additional $5,000) in legal expenses. In other words, the other side is subsidizing around half of your costs and that leads to legal gambles to avoid liability.
So yeah, it is unclear whether loser-pays or self-pay is better or worse.
The PTO does not require a working prototype because it does not want all the patents to belong to huge corporations. Pretend you create a nuclear fission reactor that's table-sized. (You're like the second coming of Albert Einstein or something.) If the PTO required a prototype, you would have to find someone with a lot of cash to build the prototype to submit to the PTO. The corporation might steal your idea and take the prototype to the PTO by itself.
So while this lack of a requirement looks ridiculous in this example, there may be other more realistic places where it has protected the small inventor.
You can buy a hundred used consoles, take them apart, test each piece, and reconstruct new used consoles from the working parts. Completely legal. However, you cannot use the Nintendo name if you alter anything inside, since that would be abusing its trademark. The same goes if you do not mention that it was rebuilt.
"The decisions of this Court require the conclusion that reconstruction of a patented entity, comprised of unpatented elements, is limited to such a true reconstruction of the entity as to "in fact make a new article," United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, [148 F.2d 416, 425 (2d. Cir. 1945)], after the entity, viewed as a whole, has become spent. In order to call the monopoly, conferred by the patent grant, into play for a second time, it must, indeed, be a second creation of the patented entity, as, for example, in American Cotton Tie Co. v. Simmons, [106 U.S. 89 (1882)]. Mere replacement of individual unpatented parts, one at a time, whether of the same part repeatedly or different parts successively, is no more than the lawful right of the owner to repair his property." Aro Manufacturing Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336 (1961).
The company makes quite clear that what its software does may be illegal under some jurisdictions. In other words, it contributes to others spying. So how can it use the courts to enforce this contract, which prevents a victim from stopping themselves from being a victim of crime?
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. It's not as though the exploit allows the cops to think nothing's wrong. Surely, the cops will be curious when their wiretaps go:
Caller: Yo. It's me.
>CARRIER LOST
Furthermore, the FBI has insane bugging technologies. Forget wiretaps. If they really want to get you, they'll stick parabolic or laser mikes all around you. Or bug your car and office or simply follow you around and take pictures of all your friends who they then bug and wiretap. Or what they really do is catch an associate on a felony and extort^H^H^H^H^H^H convince them to turn state's witness.
So while cool, this exploit probably does not help "bad" guys too much.
Personally, I find the MSN support for video better than AIM. I have not tried the Yahoo client for video. GAIM does not support audio or video yet, although 2.0 promises that. (The developer was hired by Google to institute voice for GTalk support.)
MSN is good because you can prevent people from spying on you without your knowledge. Under AIM, you have to block all users not on your Buddy List to get the same sort of protection but you lose the chance for people to contact you and ask you to add.
AIM has a really good webpage version, though, that is convenient at times.
Of course, it may have to get rid of its inventory of desktop Pentium 4 chips and might conflict with Intel commitments to Dell not to obsolete all of their offerings. Intel has to change fabs to make the new chips in larger amounts. All of the marketing about higher clock speeds have to go out the window, too. Furthermore, Intel has to concede that it made a huge mistake and that AMD was right all along with regard to the performance per cycle/pure megahertz debate.
Do we risk someone's life for a psychological benefit? I'm not taking a position either way, but that is why doctors feel there are ethical deliberations. More abstractly framed, what if a woman wanted body modifications that are life-threatening but would make her less depressed and much happier? Now, we think being disfigured is a valid reason to be annoyed because of our prejudices, but what if breast implants required a significant risk to health? Well, they banned silicone breast implants out of fear that women would take that risk (which may not have existed) to feel better about themselves.
Offtopic: Why do I keep get modded down? God. Look at my last post objecting to a racial joke. What's wrong with Slashdot mods?
(I'll get modded down now even though I said I was going to get modded down. First time in Slashdot history!)
Discrimination is finding a difference. Clearly, racial jokes are based on exploiting these differences while perpetuating stereotypes. They may be funny but represent discrimination. So imagine you are at work and all your white co-workers make racial jokes. And you laugh because you think it's funny. Then you do not get a job promotion that you think you should have gotten. You can't prove there was discrimination and you can't be sure but the fact that there were so many jokes makes you uncomfortable.
So yeah, racial jokes are funny until you get the shaft.
Please mod parent down. Why do racial jokes get modded up?
Technically, face transplants are not medically necessary. The surgery would definitely make the person feel better, but it is not life-saving such as heart, liver, lung, or kidney transplants. The side effects of immunosuppresants are still quite severe and perhaps life-threatening, since the immune system is getting shut down for the life of the patient. The question is whether a doctor can allow someone to take these risks for a non-life-saving procedure.
Living donors are not a problem because they're brain dead. So cutting off someone's face is scary; do so while they're still breathing (via ventilator) is really creepy. Yet, we pull hearts out of living people already so what's the face?
Federal anti-discrimination laws apply only to those over 40. Yes, teenagers have no rights. Otherwise, how can their parents take care of them, as they are legally required to do?
Does anyone think that a very handy Firefox add-on would be a button attached to this kind of dialogue that would instantly kill all Javascript scripts stone dead for the page?
No script seems to be what you are looking for.
No linky for this claim, but the flaw is with the closed-source Flash plugin for Firefox. Anyway, Flash gets abused most of the time with ads and stuff. Flashblock is a good feature because it stops those suckers dead and you can choose which Flash thingies to use.
Once in a while, on a website with a flash banner ad, I'll firefox taking up 35% of my cpu.
One word: Flashblock
Here endeth the lesson.
Of course cybercriminals make more money.
Drug dealers are mostly young people a bad neighborhood who have nothing better to do. There was a study (in the book Freakonomics) that said that the average lifespan of a guy who stayed in the business to be around four years. Four years! And considering all that, the money they made in profit, with the jail time, etc., they made minimum wage. Being a drug dealer, the study found, had a significant degree of status and a lottery chance of being a kingpin. And that's about all they get from it.
Cybercriminals are sophisticated folks. Many phishers for online brokerages have graduate degrees in finance. (This week's Business Week.) They have capital to invest in their enterprise, too. Of course they're going to make more money and get away with it as compared to drug dealers, even the "high" level ones.
Anyway, I've been crazily modded down recently in weird ways. Look at my history. What the hell is going on? Someone leave me a message.
"Final" software has the same problem. For instance, EULAS already limit damages to a refund.
Well, if you are trying to block Bittorrent traffic, which is mostly porn anyways, block port range 6881-6889. Many people won't use the random ports anyway.
Hold up a second. The MS Hotmail flaw allowed anyone's Hotmail account to be compromised by going to a MS website and typing in the e-mail account they wanted to hack. The GMail flaw requires an user to send their certificate information to the hacker. The Hotmail flaw was much more significant and easier to fix: disable the second website (or at least ask for a secret question).
I thought BSPS was a measure of Microsoft's public relations staff. Like the BSPS goes up whenever there's an astroturf TCO article.
So is the Slashdot crowd going to complain and moan about Sony being a servant of the devil, and then happily go to Best Buy and get ther shiny new PS3?
No. I'm going to buy my console from a responsible corporate citizen, uh, >cough, Microsoft. No, I guess I'm going to build a gaming system with the Intel processor because...they're not a mono--... Damn.
How can I not get modded down now?
I guess we have learned what happens when you annoy the AMD-Linux zealots on this website.
Mod away.
AMD has no incentive to change its server chip just to better suit the niche supercomputer market. It would only alter the Opteron to fit the server market, not the supercomputer market. The firm already has manufacturing bottlenecks; its production fabs are cramped as is. There are also problems with inventory. Why would AMD spend the money to create a chip that would benefit supercomputers and not servers? It would make sense only if AMD and Cray improved the tech in a way that would make the Opteron better suited to the server market as well, such as by improving the scalability of the technology.
The judge has discretion to allocate the legal expenses as he sees fit. There may be many issues involved and the parties may split on who wins which issue. The judge would probably be more likely to give more of the fees to the richer party if the suits are about equal in merit. But there certainly is no law that dictates this, so there is still a large deterrent for small parties from filing suit.
The loser-pays system, ironically, leads to the perverse incentive to outspend your opponent. Game theory dictates that parties are not compelled to save money, but in fact to spend more money so as to avoid being stuck with the other party's expenses. Pretend you have spend $15,000 on legal expenses and the other side has spent a similar amount. If you spend $5,000 more, you can increase your chances of not getting stuck with $30,000 (plus your additional $5,000) in legal expenses. In other words, the other side is subsidizing around half of your costs and that leads to legal gambles to avoid liability.
So yeah, it is unclear whether loser-pays or self-pay is better or worse.
The PTO does not require a working prototype because it does not want all the patents to belong to huge corporations. Pretend you create a nuclear fission reactor that's table-sized. (You're like the second coming of Albert Einstein or something.) If the PTO required a prototype, you would have to find someone with a lot of cash to build the prototype to submit to the PTO. The corporation might steal your idea and take the prototype to the PTO by itself.
So while this lack of a requirement looks ridiculous in this example, there may be other more realistic places where it has protected the small inventor.
You can buy a hundred used consoles, take them apart, test each piece, and reconstruct new used consoles from the working parts. Completely legal. However, you cannot use the Nintendo name if you alter anything inside, since that would be abusing its trademark. The same goes if you do not mention that it was rebuilt.
"The decisions of this Court require the conclusion that reconstruction of a patented entity, comprised of unpatented elements, is limited to such a true reconstruction of the entity as to "in fact make a new article," United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, [148 F.2d 416, 425 (2d. Cir. 1945)], after the entity, viewed as a whole, has become spent. In order to call the monopoly, conferred by the patent grant, into play for a second time, it must, indeed, be a second creation of the patented entity, as, for example, in American Cotton Tie Co. v. Simmons, [106 U.S. 89 (1882)]. Mere replacement of individual unpatented parts, one at a time, whether of the same part repeatedly or different parts successively, is no more than the lawful right of the owner to repair his property." Aro Manufacturing Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336 (1961).
Or Apple could license their approval for hardware. "Approved for OS X" could mean more than "Designed for Windows XP".
The company makes quite clear that what its software does may be illegal under some jurisdictions. In other words, it contributes to others spying. So how can it use the courts to enforce this contract, which prevents a victim from stopping themselves from being a victim of crime?
One word: Spraypaint.