People tend to use User-Agent settings only when things do not work or when the site denies them access. In either case these are not common enough to influence a large sample usage statistic (which looks about right by the way).
Well... There is a news item in the graph if you bother to RTFA.
The (Not Windows + Not Mac) has dropped from more than 5 to around 3% for the period which means that actually the numbers should read:
Mac on PPC dwindles, but does not convert fully to Mac on Intel. Quite clearly people switch to Winhoze instead. Mac on Intel looks like generated from a mix of Linux, BSD, Solaris converts and some conversions from Mac PPC.
The real losers are actually the desktop Unixes. By far.
Instead of looking for exploits just suggest that Steve Jobs and JK Rawlins should marry as this will be a meeting of alike souls. Extra bonus points could have been had for doing that on Saturday, 21st of July 2007 (provided that you had enough ammo to defend yourself after that).
Though, the magic day has passed, this is still a good treat if you want to observe how an otherwise normal looking person suddenly morphs into something out of a nightmare horror movie.
Sounds more like some of the more obscure Stalin time press ravings about the horrible west spying on the peacefull people of Soviet Union. Or the more recent similar ravings about the extreme power of chiapata flour and Calor gas explosive.
After all, "scare from a super-technologically advanced external enemy" is a method to control the population that has been tested and proven over and over again for thousands of years. And it works. You can push the most unpopular measure and keep it there after the threat "subsides". VAT (UK), income tax (UK), Champagne fleet tax (Germany) you name it.
Google is present nearly everywhere. All it needs to do is to start using this presence instead of forcing the local talent to relocate into one of the golden cage slaveshops (apologies, Googleplexes). So as far as H1B that is indeed loads of bull and as far as wasting too much money that is likely to be so. One relocation allowance too many.
That shall be coding to a standard defined by a vendor infested committee where each representative has been obsessed to ensure that all of their bugs are standardised as "this is not a bug, it is a feature".
As a result the implementations will remain as quirky as they are now. At best. At worst...
Not really. It takes on the average 5-12 years for most ideas based on discoveries in physics, chemistry or math to start raking in profits. Biotech is slightly better, but not by much. These timeframes are way beyond any VC patience. The only way to finance research that takes that long is either if you are working on a state grant or if you are working for a big corp with a state-like research division (blue 2 and 3 letter words come to mind). VCs are usefully once you have a prototype and a proof of concept to actually do the engineering work and deliver a product. That takes 1-3 years on average and this is a timeline VCs are happy to cope with.
It does. I nearly put airconditioning in my house 3 years ago. Having the walls, loft and roof insulated to a higher standard more or less did with that idea. It no longer warms up to the same extent (and cools down to the same extent in winter).
There's probably a loophole in the ToS anyway to cover this.
Three bits are too few to have a place for a loophole in them as well.
On the other hand, people have started relying on email to the point where commercial email service providers should be held to the same standard as the snail mail providers.
Most decent AV products intercept a number of syscalls which an application needs to invoke to become "invisible". Nearly all do tracing/sandboxing of applications as well to see if the first couple of calls made by the app looks suspicious. Nearly all intercept common vulnerability entry points (like IFRAME processing in IE) and look for anyone trying to use that. All of these combined can detect many new malware strains without having to have new signatures. In many products these checks are also enabled by default.
While it is possible to circumvent these defences through an ingenious exploit, it is more likely that lawfull intercept has got itself on the whitelists which AV vendors maintain for applications that act suspiciously, but should be allowed. The list is made of other AV software as well as litigiuous adware vendors who have been successfull in threatening the AV vendor not to list them as malware. From there to actively assisting a "lawfull" trojan in taking over the machine is just one step. Very small step in fact.
You can take any provisioned modem ANYWHERE, in state, out of state, it doesn't matter
Comcast - maybe. But not in the UK on NTL network which means that Comcast can still learn how to become even worse. You cannot even move an NTL modem to a HFC that terminates on the same CMTS, but a different interface in the same area. It will not work. You have to call the support helline and get it reregistered. That is a fact. Last time I have seen this happen was Dec 2005 which is less than 2 years ago.
Haha. You have seriously underestimated the mad desire of the marketeering slime at least here to ensure that your computer has been infected with the goodness of the bundled IExploiter, mandatory homepages and a couple of other adware.
It is done by analysing the DHCP server logs. Trivial actually:
1. By default your modem is assigned to an "unregistered" class. Any DHCP requests from behind a modem in the unregistered class are given IP addresses which are in an ACL which prohibits connections anywhere but to the registration server.
2. If you successfully run the registration program your IP gets recorded and the registration program invokes a simple script which reads a database containing the DHCP leases (not directly, it is transported elsewhere realtime and abstracted) and associates your account, the MAC address of the modem and the CMTS system interface (so that you do not move the modem to another part of the cable network without NTL knowledge and permission). After that you can reset the modem. The user-end software is web-based and in theory you should be able to walk through a couple of URLs through with a browser. Good luck. When I tried, it did not work on anything but their bundled IE.
3. Once the association is in place the DHCP server starts dishing your modem addresses from a different address class. And you get DHCP for the PC from a different address class as well. The system is extremely fragile and it broke large number of customers whose modems were registered in the user database manually (I was one of their first customers in my area). It is also mostly done using functionality in the ghastly POS excuse for DHCP/Radius software known as Internet Access Registrar (nowdays property of Cisco) and various consluttant written software that operates on logs.
The sole reason for this idiocy is direct marketing and nothing else. By the way, I am not sure they still do it. They did in 2001 when I cared. I have no intention to try if they still do it now.
Neither.
In the current security climate most security vendors will bend over straight away and turn a blind eye on an "authorised" Troyan. In fact at least one of the US ones is known to have done so and that was leaked to the press around 2004 (sorry forgot which one). Even further, I would not be surprised if some of them go as far as "facilitating" its installation.
Not quite so. Comcast are showing a common form of braindamage caused by putting a marketing brain (or lack of) into close proximity to cable systems. It is quite common in most cable operators.
Technically it is exactly as you say. Cable just works with DHCP. Nothing else necessary.
Practically, several examples of lowlife marketeer slime have looked at it and have said: "Oh my god, we are not branding the customer computer. What about all that lost revenue from forced ads and page-views?". Hence they have invented the install program. Things could have finished here as DHCP still works. Unfortunately they do not. Sooner or later another marketing slime realises that and makes the software "phone home" and ensure that the customer computer has been bastardised throughout. It also records your MAC on the way as well as a correspondence to your cable modem MAC. So if you do not go through the approved procedure on the approved OS you can end up being in a state of limbo in the CMTS provisoning system. You connect, but you get no service, or not the service you are subscribed to.
Happened to me with NTL in the UK. I ended up having to involve trading standards (which are by the way extremely unhelpfull as they consider it OK for you not to have any Internet service for 2 weeks). At the end of the day, I just payed up and went elsewhere for DSL.
As a result "Cable" is a prohibited service in my house. I do not have one and will never get one. Unless I see with my own eyes several cable marketing departments being lead to the wall and summarily executed. Along with the customer support of course.
Are the sites representative of the overall web demographic?
If you are trying to sell wine for 25+ quid a bottle over the web you very soon realise that Safari and Firefox on Mac is actually 40+ of your audience followed closely by Firefox on other platforms. IE simply does not show up on the radar.
If you are trying to serve pornography for the soul like Daily Mail or Sun IE is 99% of your readership and is not going to change any time soon.
AFAIK in both cases the basic package is supplied for free. It is the "enhancement" and "extension" which is bought.
The difference is that Second Life is being more honest. It calls the "enhancement" and "extension" for what it is - an enhancement, replacement and extension of genitalia. If you are discontent with your basic armament you go and buy it.
If you are similarly discontent with your basic armament in real life you go and buy an M3, Q8, S4 4.4L or a 550 AMG. Same function - penile deficiency compensator, just slightly less honest marketing.
You are right that going x86 limits them to two suppliers in this space, but the suppliers are not AMD and Intel, they are AMD and Via. Any C3 series CPU beats the holy crap out of the Geode while having comparable power consumption if run at the same frequency. In addition to this, the more recent ones have crypto accel which can become very handy when trying to establish mesh networks in the middle of nowhere. Add to that a very reasonable and throughly open source platform for the rest. The only missing bit Via did not have was wireless, but it could have probably teamed up with someone for a project this size.
It reflects poorly on him as he is just another one of the few lame shmucks to get caught. The other 99.999% did not. This is just a variation on the old saying that on the internet all men are men, all women are men and all children are FBI agents.
That does not prevent some companies in the UK from still trying to make you sign away your rights. This is especially valid for smaller companies which are often using a boilerplate US EULA on EU products. Unfortunately they are hardly ever challenged on this in the UK.
Re:Sony BMG does nothing to hurt their reputation
on
Sony Sues Rootkit Maker
·
· Score: 4, Funny
With all these name changes, I wonder when Macrovision is going to change theirs.
Probably on the day DRM is renamed as DCE as per recent industry execs suggestions. Digital Consumer Enablement.
In most other industries and in fact in other parts of the IT industry you are mandated to do that as a part of the standards process. At the very least you have to guarantee that you will offer your IP on non-discriminatory terms.
It is entertaining to see SOA getting to its supposedly standard and uberinteroperable status without anyone paying attention to this minute IP detail. Entertaining, but not surprising. If you actually can read a SOA spec, comprehend it entirety and have some functioning brain cells left after that you are mad anyway. Every time I have to read Xpath or god forbid one of the WS security or addressing space specs I remember Dijkstra. He was absolutely right:
b> The problems of business administration in general and data base management in particular are much too difficult for people that think in IBMerese, compounded with sloppy English. Still right today. Just change data base management for interoperability and you got a description of WS/SOAP and the rest of that standard ilk.
I would second that. It is either that or they do not believe you as a result the interview becomes quite hard. Quite often you get filtered out at the pre-interview stage. Suffered from that myself.
One thing that helps in cases like this is to use different identities for your different personas. Most recruiters index their databases based on email so have your Unix persona CV with a "unix" email address, Network persona with a CV with a "network" email address and software development persona with a CV with a "software" email address. Amend the relevant CVs so that the "primary" skills look "primary" and are not muddled by the "secondary" ones.
And overall, being the jack of all trades in nowdays IT is bad for your career.
If this is indeed the case the complaint that the standard is badly defined should have gone to the approving body during the consultation period. Now it is a bit late, but still possible to do this as this may require amending the standard. This has happened many times in the past. It is, in fact, quite common for standards to be amended or even withdrawn because of things like this.
Slashdot Mirror
People tend to use User-Agent settings only when things do not work or when the site denies them access. In either case these are not common enough to influence a large sample usage statistic (which looks about right by the way).
Well... There is a news item in the graph if you bother to RTFA.
The (Not Windows + Not Mac) has dropped from more than 5 to around 3% for the period which means that actually the numbers should read:
Mac on PPC dwindles, but does not convert fully to Mac on Intel. Quite clearly people switch to Winhoze instead.
Mac on Intel looks like generated from a mix of Linux, BSD, Solaris converts and some conversions from Mac PPC.
The real losers are actually the desktop Unixes. By far.
There is an easier way to do that.
Instead of looking for exploits just suggest that Steve Jobs and JK Rawlins should marry as this will be a meeting of alike souls. Extra bonus points could have been had for doing that on Saturday, 21st of July 2007 (provided that you had enough ammo to defend yourself after that).
Though, the magic day has passed, this is still a good treat if you want to observe how an otherwise normal looking person suddenly morphs into something out of a nightmare horror movie.
Err...
Sounds more like some of the more obscure Stalin time press ravings about the horrible west spying on the peacefull people of Soviet Union. Or the more recent similar ravings about the extreme power of chiapata flour and Calor gas explosive.
After all, "scare from a super-technologically advanced external enemy" is a method to control the population that has been tested and proven over and over again for thousands of years. And it works. You can push the most unpopular measure and keep it there after the threat "subsides". VAT (UK), income tax (UK), Champagne fleet tax (Germany) you name it.
You do not need to.
Google is present nearly everywhere. All it needs to do is to start using this presence instead of forcing the local talent to relocate into one of the golden cage slaveshops (apologies, Googleplexes). So as far as H1B that is indeed loads of bull and as far as wasting too much money that is likely to be so. One relocation allowance too many.
Yeah, right.
That shall be coding to a standard defined by a vendor infested committee where each representative has been obsessed to ensure that all of their bugs are standardised as "this is not a bug, it is a feature".
As a result the implementations will remain as quirky as they are now. At best. At worst...
I recently heard a excellent joke from a friend of mine who still works in scientific research:
Q: What is an American University?
A: This is a strange place where Russian professors teach Chinese students in English.
Not really. It takes on the average 5-12 years for most ideas based on discoveries in physics, chemistry or math to start raking in profits. Biotech is slightly better, but not by much. These timeframes are way beyond any VC patience. The only way to finance research that takes that long is either if you are working on a state grant or if you are working for a big corp with a state-like research division (blue 2 and 3 letter words come to mind).
VCs are usefully once you have a prototype and a proof of concept to actually do the engineering work and deliver a product. That takes 1-3 years on average and this is a timeline VCs are happy to cope with.
It does. I nearly put airconditioning in my house 3 years ago. Having the walls, loft and roof insulated to a higher standard more or less did with that idea. It no longer warms up to the same extent (and cools down to the same extent in winter).
Three bits are too few to have a place for a loophole in them as well.
On the other hand, people have started relying on email to the point where commercial email service providers should be held to the same standard as the snail mail providers.
Not quite so.
Most decent AV products intercept a number of syscalls which an application needs to invoke to become "invisible". Nearly all do tracing/sandboxing of applications as well to see if the first couple of calls made by the app looks suspicious. Nearly all intercept common vulnerability entry points (like IFRAME processing in IE) and look for anyone trying to use that. All of these combined can detect many new malware strains without having to have new signatures. In many products these checks are also enabled by default.
While it is possible to circumvent these defences through an ingenious exploit, it is more likely that lawfull intercept has got itself on the whitelists which AV vendors maintain for applications that act suspiciously, but should be allowed. The list is made of other AV software as well as litigiuous adware vendors who have been successfull in threatening the AV vendor not to list them as malware. From there to actively assisting a "lawfull" trojan in taking over the machine is just one step. Very small step in fact.
Comcast - maybe. But not in the UK on NTL network which means that Comcast can still learn how to become even worse. You cannot even move an NTL modem to a HFC that terminates on the same CMTS, but a different interface in the same area. It will not work. You have to call the support helline and get it reregistered. That is a fact. Last time I have seen this happen was Dec 2005 which is less than 2 years ago.
Haha. You have seriously underestimated the mad desire of the marketeering slime at least here to ensure that your computer has been infected with the goodness of the bundled IExploiter, mandatory homepages and a couple of other adware.
It is done by analysing the DHCP server logs. Trivial actually:
1. By default your modem is assigned to an "unregistered" class. Any DHCP requests from behind a modem in the unregistered class are given IP addresses which are in an ACL which prohibits connections anywhere but to the registration server.
2. If you successfully run the registration program your IP gets recorded and the registration program invokes a simple script which reads a database containing the DHCP leases (not directly, it is transported elsewhere realtime and abstracted) and associates your account, the MAC address of the modem and the CMTS system interface (so that you do not move the modem to another part of the cable network without NTL knowledge and permission). After that you can reset the modem. The user-end software is web-based and in theory you should be able to walk through a couple of URLs through with a browser. Good luck. When I tried, it did not work on anything but their bundled IE.
3. Once the association is in place the DHCP server starts dishing your modem addresses from a different address class. And you get DHCP for the PC from a different address class as well. The system is extremely fragile and it broke large number of customers whose modems were registered in the user database manually (I was one of their first customers in my area). It is also mostly done using functionality in the ghastly POS excuse for DHCP/Radius software known as Internet Access Registrar (nowdays property of Cisco) and various consluttant written software that operates on logs.
The sole reason for this idiocy is direct marketing and nothing else. By the way, I am not sure they still do it. They did in 2001 when I cared. I have no intention to try if they still do it now.
Neither. In the current security climate most security vendors will bend over straight away and turn a blind eye on an "authorised" Troyan. In fact at least one of the US ones is known to have done so and that was leaked to the press around 2004 (sorry forgot which one). Even further, I would not be surprised if some of them go as far as "facilitating" its installation.
Not quite so. Comcast are showing a common form of braindamage caused by putting a marketing brain (or lack of) into close proximity to cable systems. It is quite common in most cable operators.
Technically it is exactly as you say. Cable just works with DHCP. Nothing else necessary.
Practically, several examples of lowlife marketeer slime have looked at it and have said: "Oh my god, we are not branding the customer computer. What about all that lost revenue from forced ads and page-views?". Hence they have invented the install program. Things could have finished here as DHCP still works. Unfortunately they do not. Sooner or later another marketing slime realises that and makes the software "phone home" and ensure that the customer computer has been bastardised throughout. It also records your MAC on the way as well as a correspondence to your cable modem MAC. So if you do not go through the approved procedure on the approved OS you can end up being in a state of limbo in the CMTS provisoning system. You connect, but you get no service, or not the service you are subscribed to.
Happened to me with NTL in the UK. I ended up having to involve trading standards (which are by the way extremely unhelpfull as they consider it OK for you not to have any Internet service for 2 weeks). At the end of the day, I just payed up and went elsewhere for DSL.
As a result "Cable" is a prohibited service in my house. I do not have one and will never get one. Unless I see with my own eyes several cable marketing departments being lead to the wall and summarily executed. Along with the customer support of course.
At least you did not read it as "X-File themed episode of Red Shoe Diaries" starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
Are the sites representative of the overall web demographic?
If you are trying to sell wine for 25+ quid a bottle over the web you very soon realise that Safari and Firefox on Mac is actually 40+ of your audience followed closely by Firefox on other platforms. IE simply does not show up on the radar.
If you are trying to serve pornography for the soul like Daily Mail or Sun IE is 99% of your readership and is not going to change any time soon.
AFAIK in both cases the basic package is supplied for free. It is the "enhancement" and "extension" which is bought.
The difference is that Second Life is being more honest. It calls the "enhancement" and "extension" for what it is - an enhancement, replacement and extension of genitalia. If you are discontent with your basic armament you go and buy it.
If you are similarly discontent with your basic armament in real life you go and buy an M3, Q8, S4 4.4L or a 550 AMG. Same function - penile deficiency compensator, just slightly less honest marketing.
You are right that going x86 limits them to two suppliers in this space, but the suppliers are not AMD and Intel, they are AMD and Via. Any C3 series CPU beats the holy crap out of the Geode while having comparable power consumption if run at the same frequency. In addition to this, the more recent ones have crypto accel which can become very handy when trying to establish mesh networks in the middle of nowhere. Add to that a very reasonable and throughly open source platform for the rest. The only missing bit Via did not have was wireless, but it could have probably teamed up with someone for a project this size.
It reflects poorly on him as he is just another one of the few lame shmucks to get caught. The other 99.999% did not. This is just a variation on the old saying that on the internet all men are men, all women are men and all children are FBI agents.
That does not prevent some companies in the UK from still trying to make you sign away your rights. This is especially valid for smaller companies which are often using a boilerplate US EULA on EU products. Unfortunately they are hardly ever challenged on this in the UK.
With all these name changes, I wonder when Macrovision is going to change theirs. Probably on the day DRM is renamed as DCE as per recent industry execs suggestions. Digital Consumer Enablement.
In most other industries and in fact in other parts of the IT industry you are mandated to do that as a part of the standards process. At the very least you have to guarantee that you will offer your IP on non-discriminatory terms.
It is entertaining to see SOA getting to its supposedly standard and uberinteroperable status without anyone paying attention to this minute IP detail. Entertaining, but not surprising. If you actually can read a SOA spec, comprehend it entirety and have some functioning brain cells left after that you are mad anyway. Every time I have to read Xpath or god forbid one of the WS security or addressing space specs I remember Dijkstra. He was absolutely right:
b> The problems of business administration in general and data base management in particular are much too difficult for people that think in IBMerese, compounded with sloppy English. Still right today. Just change data base management for interoperability and you got a description of WS/SOAP and the rest of that standard ilk.
I would second that. It is either that or they do not believe you as a result the interview becomes quite hard. Quite often you get filtered out at the pre-interview stage. Suffered from that myself.
One thing that helps in cases like this is to use different identities for your different personas. Most recruiters index their databases based on email so have your Unix persona CV with a "unix" email address, Network persona with a CV with a "network" email address and software development persona with a CV with a "software" email address. Amend the relevant CVs so that the "primary" skills look "primary" and are not muddled by the "secondary" ones.
And overall, being the jack of all trades in nowdays IT is bad for your career.
If this is indeed the case the complaint that the standard is badly defined should have gone to the approving body during the consultation period. Now it is a bit late, but still possible to do this as this may require amending the standard. This has happened many times in the past. It is, in fact, quite common for standards to be amended or even withdrawn because of things like this.