There was no hacking involved. He stole the documents from his employer.
There were no "codes" to give back. It's not like he swiped a disk and stashed it on his shelf. If that was all he had done, nobody would have known about theft in the first place.
Chances are, the first that DTV knew they had been stolen was when they saw them posted on the web. After that, the cat was out of the bag. There was no way the information could have been recalled.
I'm wondering how they traced them back to the law firm. Were they Word documents with the machine ID still embedded in them? If so, the guy was doubly stupid - first for stealing them in the first place, and second for not reformatting them to text only to hide his tracks.
Instead of concrete, try dropping it on an old shoe, then see if it blows apart.
Terminal velocity on something as small as that rock in the picture will be quite low. If she was wearing sturdy shoes, I see it being quite possible that it would just bounce off...
I'm thinking this would be even easier to do under Windows - just write a little Trojan, copy it onto a floppy, and install it on any unsecured Windows box. No extra hardware needed!
As others have pointed out, it's not the fact that you can get a Dreamcast to do all this stuff that's the problem, it's the fact that you can physically get to the network.
My wife and I got one for her about a month ago. The more I drive it, the more I like it.
It handles very well, the steering is very responsive. It has a very tight turning radius - I can make a complete U-turn in a standard residentail street. And of course, the gas mileage is really great.
I only have 2 minor nits to pick with it.
The shift lever is in a somewhat non-standard position on the dash, and obscures some of the radio controls from the view of the driver.
And the gas gauge is wildly inaccurate - when it reads 3/4 full, you really have about 1/4 tank, and when the low gas warning chime goes off, you have about 5 miles left instead of the 30 or 40 you get in most cars.
But those are really very minor complaints, and if I had to replace my car today (my wife drives the Prius), I'd get another one.
He described communications satellites, but that was back in the late 40s/early 50s. "Fountains of Paradise" was published in the 80s, and concerned the space elevator.
He didn't come up with the idea of the space elevator, though. That idea was first proposed in 1895 by Tsiolkovsky.
Heinlein first described those remote-controlled hands used to manipulate radioactive or otherwise dangerous materials from behind a thick window. They're called "waldoes" after the story he described them in, "Waldo".
He also described the moving sidewalk, and the waterbed. The waterbed was described so well that the first person to build one was unable to patent it.
A quote:
> Of course 5 years from now that will be
> different, but 5 years from now everyone will
> be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M
> SPARCstation-5.
Actually, I -personally- used 99/99/99 as an end-of-data marker in a COBOL program. COBOL doesn't (or didn't at the time) have a "date" variable type.
So we defined dates as either PIC 9(6) or PIC X(6) (one 6-digit field), or broke it up into three 2-digit fields. Note: TWO DIGIT FIELDS.
COBOL also had a built-in sort procedure, but there was no way to check for end-of-data. So if we were sorting by date, we'd throw in a dummy record with a date of 999999 so that it would be at the end (or 000000 if sorting in reverse order).
When the dummy record came up, we knew there was no more data.
But of course, 999999 is not a valid date, and will never come up. All the fuss is quite amusing.
Ender's Game was great. Speaker for the Dead was great. Xenocide was OK. Children of the Mind was, alas, crap.
Card's earlier stuff was brilliant, but lately he's getting more and more self-indulgent, writing whatever the hell will fill up a page. His editor and publisher let him get away with it because they know that no matter how bad it is, enough people will buy it and they'll make money.
Card used to be on my 'unconditional buy' list - if I saw something by him that I didn't have, I bought it. I took him off of it several years ago.
The various DSS systems are not compatible with each other, so once you get something, you're stuck with it.
The big ones seem to be DirecTV/USSB and Dish Network. You'll have to look at the lineup and cost for each and make your own decision.
Your options for local programming are either get an antenna, or get basic cable. Many cable companies have an unmentioned, unadvertised, ultra-basic package of JUST the broadcast channels. Check with your cable company.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to print the EULA on the box, they'd have to use very small print.
Of course, then you run afoul of the ADA. "The print is too small! People with vision impairments can't read it!"
There was no hacking involved. He stole the documents from his employer.
There were no "codes" to give back. It's not like he swiped a disk and stashed it on his shelf. If that was all he had done, nobody would have known about theft in the first place.
Chances are, the first that DTV knew they had been stolen was when they saw them posted on the web. After that, the cat was out of the bag. There was no way the information could have been recalled.
I'm wondering how they traced them back to the law firm. Were they Word documents with the machine ID still embedded in them? If so, the guy was doubly stupid - first for stealing them in the first place, and second for not reformatting them to text only to hide his tracks.
Instead of concrete, try dropping it on an old shoe, then see if it blows apart.
Terminal velocity on something as small as that rock in the picture will be quite low. If she was wearing sturdy shoes, I see it being quite possible that it would just bounce off...
Why would you need the OS source code to do this?
I'm thinking this would be even easier to do under Windows - just write a little Trojan, copy it onto a floppy, and install it on any unsecured Windows box. No extra hardware needed!
As others have pointed out, it's not the fact that you can get a Dreamcast to do all this stuff that's the problem, it's the fact that you can physically get to the network.
My wife and I got one for her about a month ago. The more I drive it, the more I like it.
It handles very well, the steering is very responsive. It has a very tight turning radius - I can make a complete U-turn in a standard residentail street. And of course, the gas mileage is really great.
I only have 2 minor nits to pick with it.
The shift lever is in a somewhat non-standard position on the dash, and obscures some of the radio controls from the view of the driver.
And the gas gauge is wildly inaccurate - when it reads 3/4 full, you really have about 1/4 tank, and when the low gas warning chime goes off, you have about 5 miles left instead of the 30 or 40 you get in most cars.
But those are really very minor complaints, and if I had to replace my car today (my wife drives the Prius), I'd get another one.
He described communications satellites, but that was back in the late 40s/early 50s. "Fountains of Paradise" was published in the 80s, and concerned the space elevator.
He didn't come up with the idea of the space elevator, though. That idea was first proposed in 1895 by Tsiolkovsky.
Heinlein first described those remote-controlled hands used to manipulate radioactive or otherwise dangerous materials from behind a thick window. They're called "waldoes" after the story he described them in, "Waldo".
He also described the moving sidewalk, and the waterbed. The waterbed was described so well that the first person to build one was unable to patent it.
A quote:
> Of course 5 years from now that will be
> different, but 5 years from now everyone will
> be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M
> SPARCstation-5.
Yep, and I picked it up in my flying car!
Blame Canada!
Actually, I -personally- used 99/99/99 as an end-of-data marker in a COBOL program. COBOL doesn't (or didn't at the time) have a "date" variable type.
So we defined dates as either PIC 9(6) or PIC X(6) (one 6-digit field), or broke it up into three 2-digit fields. Note: TWO DIGIT FIELDS.
COBOL also had a built-in sort procedure, but there was no way to check for end-of-data. So if we were sorting by date, we'd throw in a dummy record with a date of 999999 so that it would be at the end (or 000000 if sorting in reverse order).
When the dummy record came up, we knew there was no more data.
But of course, 999999 is not a valid date, and will never come up. All the fuss is quite amusing.
Joe D
But I don't care about the security issue.
The reason is that all I use the thing for is web site registration where they require you to provide an email address. Like, for example, Microsoft.
This is the ONLY thing I use it for, and have never given it out anywhere else.
That account now gets 4 or 5 spams a day. I pop in every couple of weeks and clear them out.
In the meantime, my main account hasn't gotten spammed in almost 2 weeks.
So there is a purpose for a hotmail account, and I'll continue to use it. If some script kiddie wants to read my spam, I don't care.
Joe D
Ender's Game was great. Speaker for the Dead was great. Xenocide was OK. Children of the Mind was, alas, crap.
Card's earlier stuff was brilliant, but lately he's getting more and more self-indulgent, writing whatever the hell will fill up a page. His editor and publisher let him get away with it because they know that no matter how bad it is, enough people will buy it and they'll make money.
Card used to be on my 'unconditional buy' list - if I saw something by him that I didn't have, I bought it. I took him off of it several years ago.
Joe D
Me too. I wrote thousands of lines of TP code, starting with version 2.0 and riding the upgrade train to version 5.5.
I wrote a BBS entirely in Turbo Pascal, plus a bunch of utilites and games for it. I'd guess it was about 30,000 lines of code.
The programming habits that Pascal forced me to use have stayed with me now that I do C, and I'm a better programmer for it.
The only downside was that since TP was so powerful, I kept putting off learning C, which stalled my career for a bit until I did.
Joe D
Sounds more like a Randroid fantasy than anything else.
I would never join a club that would have me as a member. - Groucho Marx
The big ones seem to be DirecTV/USSB and Dish Network. You'll have to look at the lineup and cost for each and make your own decision.
Your options for local programming are either get an antenna, or get basic cable. Many cable companies have an unmentioned, unadvertised, ultra-basic package of JUST the broadcast channels. Check with your cable company.
STTF are the same folks that put out that story about the THC-producing orange tree a few months back.
There were only (I think) 5 actual engineers. The rest were managers and project lead types.
The Furbies are going to hook up with Lego Mindstorms and create SkyNet.
How many people here actually saw Star Wars in the theater when it was first released?
This might actually make a good poll question...
So did anyone else think of that Bob Shaw short story 'Light of Other Days'?