"If you really are paranoid then turn off you phone so no one can track you.
Not good enough, you have to remove the battery on many phones."
I've heard that rumor before, even on slashdot, but I have yet to see compelling evidence that my phone is a sleeper cell in my pocket. Can you provide any evidence that this is going on? Im sure someone could very easily measure the radio output of a deactivated phone with the right equipment. But i guess that doesnt take into effect the super secret WOL service that the government has right?/sarcasm
"But straight up long term use of pirated (another imperfect term) software is not good for our industry.
I work in systems administration and tech support. I try and use free tools whenever possible. Due to stupid licensing schemes and propriety interoperability problems, this is not always possible. How is it not good for my industry (tech support and systems administration) to not use whatever tool I think will work the best? Why is it the right of the tool creator to tell me what I can and cannot do with his tools? The purpose of my industry is solving problems using tools.
"I download tons of stuff against the "law" but I am certain to observe the moral law of paying my due."
So if I give credit and say for instance, that norton ghost is a great product! that will do in your mind? "the moral law of paying *your* due" is a cute way of rationalizing your copyrigth infringment of music. The only people who think that programs and music differ, when it comes to copyright infringement, are software developers.
This hypocrisy of devs always gives me a good laugh.
I should also note, that if it were possible, through the use of nanoforges or other atomic compilers, to create cars, food, computers, etc without paying anyone a cent, I would have no problems doing that either. That is the future. None of this artificial scarcity crap.
So I assume you would be in favour of trojaned pirated mp3s deleting your music collection?
There are no "ethical" virus writers. Do not pretend this was done as some sort of moralistic point. They are building botnets, and that is wrong. Period.
"I know my own news site is read on a regular basis by just about every intelligence agency there is. I know when I write a story about being flagged as a security risk at the airport, I'm not flagged again."... "but they do know, I'm not a risk. I know if I look through my logs, I get a good glimpse of what they're willing to let me see (the occasional IP from their agency). I know that's not the whole story either. I just think of it as their way of saying "hi"."
I love how some people like to build little conspiracies in order to make themselves seem more important. Classic delusions of grandeur. The fact that all this makes you think it OK for the US government to do illegal spying is I think the most worrying part. If you are not doing anything illegal personally, then everyone should be spyed upon? great logic there..
But you know youre right on one point. The chinese (as evidenced by their IPs) have been trying to hack into my FTP for YEARS. Clearly they see the obvious tactical military value of my flying squirrel porn collection and would like nothing better than to steal it for themselves. I was telling this all to ghrams, my pet squirrel, and he like, totally agrees.
Im sure glad he enamored himself to you, but this guy wrote nail.exe/aurora spyware. That piece of shit caused me more headaches than all the rest of the spyware I've had to deal with _combined_.
If there was one person who deserves furious vengence its that guy. And he has the nerve to smile about it, to blame the users??? FUCK MATT KNOX!!!
"We have no dress code, decent salaries, plenty of paid time off, a boss who is easy to deal with, and a foosball table"
No offense, but youve been there 5 months. Everyone loves the company the first company they work for after 5 months. You have been probably busting your ass, working 10 hour days. As an example, if you are the current lead developer, try taking some of that paid time off. Take a week off, and see if they a) let you or b) don't just call you every single day. The reason companies give you foosball and catered lunches is at either the expense of your time or money. Nothing is free. It took me quite a few, what I thought were, coushy jobs to realize that. In a year or two you will be burned out, demand more money and they will hire some intern to do exactly what you did to your former co workers.
Ive seen it happen so many times I dont know why they don't teach you that in school!
also you should probably start reviewing your own resumes if you want good people (like craigslist). hr people dont know dick about computers.
But pretty much everyone here hated his linkjacking ass, even threatening to boycott the site. I can remember threads calling him the worst of the worst, and for a time, he was. To steal others content and pass it off as your own is real intellectual property theft. Especially when you make advertising money from it!! To see everyone get all two faced and misty eyed now that he has died is pretty unreal. Its like everyone feels guilty somewhat. He linkjacked all his content, and everybody dies. I really dont see what saying RIP does for anyone except the person that says it. My guess is that people are trying to say "im sorry".
Whats next, jon katz found dead and we build him a monument?
Hopefully I dont get bitchslapped for insulting a slashdot "celebrity", but someone has to tell it like it was
So you did at one point give them your address....
Not very mysterious then is it?
Why is this sensationalistic crap on the frontpage?
Customer gives BB address and CC, BB saves address and CC for all time. NO STORY HERE, every company does this!! You should be happy you at least got something out of the whole charade.
"You just empty them onto your computer every so often (this doesn't work for the Wii"
? Unless something changed in the year since I used a wii, you could very easily use SD cards for saves and stuff. I even downloaded save games to unlock different things. If they stopped this, I would love to know as I plan to purchase my own wii someday.
"at some point, someone has to be thinking that maybe these are messages from God telling them that they're not going to win."
Except that there is no god, only men and countries. Men and countries making deals with other men and countries. Men and countries writing propaganda on slashdot telling them that god says they won't win.
I used to work in a call center. One day, one of the CSR's came to me with a problem. She was trying to write notes in a customers file but every time she put her coursor into the text field, strange words appeared. The words came as if they were typed in manually and seemed to go everywhere. Address bar, email messages, word documents. The user was convinced that someone had hacked her pc and was sending her cryptic messages like "please visit the bathroom my apple friend".
Long story short, I went to investigate but could not duplicate the problem. That is, until I watched her take a call. As soon as she started speaking into the mic the words returned, and I was able to figure out that microsoft text to speech (came with word) had been installed and enabled somehow. It was doing voice recognition on all her phones headset speech.
Well no one knows who the criminals were in this case, so who do you kill?
People will try to get away with anything they can, how can you stop people from trying to break into your car? Most people use locks. Are they 100% effective? no! do they deter drunks and hoodlums from casually making off with all your change? yes! This is exactly the same.
Would you walk down the street counting a stack of hundred dollar bills? I think most people can agree that thats a stupid idea. There must be a line drawn where you can say, ok this person is being stupid and even though they were victimized, they made zero effort to protect themselves and therefor are responsible. You are basically asking for the state to babysit the populace. You want citizens to go crying to mommy and daddy because they haven't protected themselves adequately. Its not the governments job to protect you from having your car broken into, or babysit every threat to your personal security. Why should they protect you from having your computer or phone systems compromised? Thats why you hire competent security people, to make up for your lack of knowledge. I dont build locks, so I buy a car with locks built in.
"People ought to be able to have a relative sense of security about themselves, and if we have to behead 50,000 convicted hackers and identity thieves and hang their bloated corpses off of bridges as an example to others, then, lets get on with it."
The only security you have is the security you make for yourself. In your scenario, you would just be victimized by the 50001th hacker. You havent actually solved the problem. There is plenty of evidence that the death penalty does not deter crime. Look at american states where they have it and you can see that they are not utopias of 0% crime. Criminals almost never think that they will be the ones who are caught. The key to personal security, whether online or off, is knowledge. Yes I am sorry that you cant just be a mindless zombie and let other people defend you all your life. Thats how the world is. You occasionally have to LEARN skills to defend yourself from other people. You cant just go around killing everyone that threatens you.
Besides, good hackers dont get caught, so there would be no one to kill.
"Hint - the mechanic's car is usually fixed last, if ever"
Either you don't know any mechanics personally, or the mechanics you deal with are shitty ones. Ive seen engines so spotless that you can eat off them, with brand new bolts everywhere. Mechanics take DAMN good care of their cars, just like computer repair people take good care of their personal PCs (if they do their job with pride and arent merely there to cash a paycheque).
Their wives cars on the other hand...
Most security companies provide the illusion of security and an external person to blame, thats all. If someone really wants to hack your business, they will. Even if it takes backing a truck through your front door and making off with the physical servers (actually happened at one location i used to work for). In this case Im not sure what I would do differently. Its a small business, so auditing incomming calls shouldn't be overly complex. Although who really audits their call logs every week? Perhaps there was a password lockout function that was not enabled properly? Some SNMP triggers to log failed password attempts..
Most likely though, was that someones password was 1234 or 2468.
I guess you've never sped on a highway, or eaten out of the bulk bins at a supermarket eh? Guess what, those are CRIMES too! Getting arrested for rape when the girl consented demonstrates how horribly unfair laws are to males these days. Women have way too much power in our society.
Also mods, please dont mod the parent up because shes a girl. Shes not going to sleep with you and, considering shes on slashdot, is probably just as maladjusted and unattractive as everyone else.
So they replaced windowskey + r with ctrl + esc and you are Blown away by the ingenuity!
And to do all that, they need a search indexer constantly indexing the drive. Oh the bloat! its not XP's fault that you just learned OS shortcut keys.. They have been there for years.
"On Vista, a snippet of that webpage is sitting on my desktop in the form of a Vista Gadget."
Perhaps your too young to remember, but they had an activeX type channel push bar in windows 98. I believe the google app does this as well. Hardly a reason to install a gigantic bloatship of an OS.
Maybe you want to sell our your country to alberta religious hicks who use tax dollars to mail out pure propaganda, but I dont. CONservatives have CONvinced the rural populations to vote for them, while they sell off their land to rich white folks. A conservative majority would be EXACTLY like a bush government. Cronyism, incompetence, spending and tax breaks for business and the loss of our healthcare. This article very easily illustrates the kind of things that they would do if they had a majority. We need to avoid that at all costs. I dont want some wannabee american alberta secessionists running my country. The best most honest political figure in the debates was duceppe. If he had any party offices outside quebec I would vote for him.
I agree the liberal leadership is a joke. We need chretien back.
"But we live on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees."
Im pretty sure the average comfort zone of humans is between 15 and 25 degrees. I find it odd that they picked such a high number. Are they trying to set the upper bound of human tolerance or something?
"Writing? fucked. Combat? fucked. Quests? oh boy. Character progression? there isn't any"
Are you kidding me? Its the most revolutionary game put out in years. Every day at work I cant wait to get back to the wastes just to explore. Nothing beats cresting a hill, hunting rifle in hand and seeing an abandoned sewer grate in the distance. As you move closer you spot some feral dogs who also have an eye on you. Raise your rifle, toggle into VATS and BOOM HEADSHOT - the head is now cleft and flying through the air. You move towards the corpse and noticed that you can interact with the sewer. Do you dare open the grate and climb into the darkness?
Fallout is awesome! I actually thought the combat sucked too untill I realized that you could freeze time with vats ala oldschool fallout, and turn it into a turn based game. Before that I was mindlessly spray and praying things, and wasting tonnes of ammo.
Theres so much to explore, so many interesting conversations and so much freedom to be as good or bad as you want to be.
Im not sure what you were expecting, and I never played oblivian, but if you enjoyed the first 2 fallout games you WILL have a BLAST in this one. It is very true to the story and feel of the originals. I hope it wins game of the year, instead of a boring rehash which probably will win (im looking at you call of duty 4)
"We put away a lot of bad people for a long time. Brilliant. "
While an interesting story, I hope you don't believe that anyone put away for dealing illegal drugs is a "bad" person. Drugs are by and large a choice that effects no one except yourself. You can get into debates using crackheads (who are universally hated) if you'd like, but the point still remains. If all drugs were legal, these "bad people" would simply cease to exsist, or at worst become coca farmers.
Dont even get me started on the "evilness" of users, whom im sure you had no moral problems in also arresting.
I was pleased to read a really well written article in the new yorker where they interview the lead designer Cliff Bleszinski (CliffyB). Being a PC gamer I had never tried gears of war (yes I am now aware that there is a PC version) but found the article brought me up to speed on the franchise and also gave a good behind the scene look at Epic games and their garage to riches history.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that rumor before, even on slashdot, but I have yet to see compelling evidence that my phone is a sleeper cell in my pocket. Can you provide any evidence that this is going on? Im sure someone could very easily measure the radio output of a deactivated phone with the right equipment. But i guess that doesnt take into effect the super secret WOL service that the government has right? /sarcasm
And how exactly did you determine that her issues were caused by win2k?
Ignorance in tech support. Big surprise.
I work in systems administration and tech support. I try and use free tools whenever possible. Due to stupid licensing schemes and propriety interoperability problems, this is not always possible. How is it not good for my industry (tech support and systems administration) to not use whatever tool I think will work the best? Why is it the right of the tool creator to tell me what I can and cannot do with his tools? The purpose of my industry is solving problems using tools.
So if I give credit and say for instance, that norton ghost is a great product! that will do in your mind? "the moral law of paying *your* due" is a cute way of rationalizing your copyrigth infringment of music. The only people who think that programs and music differ, when it comes to copyright infringement, are software developers.
This hypocrisy of devs always gives me a good laugh.
I should also note, that if it were possible, through the use of nanoforges or other atomic compilers, to create cars, food, computers, etc without paying anyone a cent, I would have no problems doing that either. That is the future. None of this artificial scarcity crap.
So I assume you would be in favour of trojaned pirated mp3s deleting your music collection?
There are no "ethical" virus writers. Do not pretend this was done as some sort of moralistic point. They are building botnets, and that is wrong.
Period.
slashdot: Individual personalized tech support?
wtf kind of article is this?
fucking take it to a shop if you cant handle reinstalling windows
I love how some people like to build little conspiracies in order to make themselves seem more important. Classic delusions of grandeur. The fact that all this makes you think it OK for the US government to do illegal spying is I think the most worrying part. If you are not doing anything illegal personally, then everyone should be spyed upon? great logic there..
But you know youre right on one point. The chinese (as evidenced by their IPs) have been trying to hack into my FTP for YEARS. Clearly they see the obvious tactical military value of my flying squirrel porn collection and would like nothing better than to steal it for themselves. I was telling this all to ghrams, my pet squirrel, and he like, totally agrees.
Im sure glad he enamored himself to you, but this guy wrote nail.exe/aurora spyware. That piece of shit caused me more headaches than all the rest of the spyware I've had to deal with _combined_.
If there was one person who deserves furious vengence its that guy. And he has the nerve to smile about it, to blame the users??? FUCK MATT KNOX!!!
at least now we have a name...
No offense, but youve been there 5 months. Everyone loves the company the first company they work for after 5 months. You have been probably busting your ass, working 10 hour days. As an example, if you are the current lead developer, try taking some of that paid time off. Take a week off, and see if they a) let you or b) don't just call you every single day. The reason companies give you foosball and catered lunches is at either the expense of your time or money. Nothing is free. It took me quite a few, what I thought were, coushy jobs to realize that. In a year or two you will be burned out, demand more money and they will hire some intern to do exactly what you did to your former co workers.
Ive seen it happen so many times I dont know why they don't teach you that in school!
also you should probably start reviewing your own resumes if you want good people (like craigslist). hr people dont know dick about computers.
But pretty much everyone here hated his linkjacking ass, even threatening to boycott the site. I can remember threads calling him the worst of the worst, and for a time, he was. To steal others content and pass it off as your own is real intellectual property theft. Especially when you make advertising money from it!! To see everyone get all two faced and misty eyed now that he has died is pretty unreal. Its like everyone feels guilty somewhat. He linkjacked all his content, and everybody dies. I really dont see what saying RIP does for anyone except the person that says it. My guess is that people are trying to say "im sorry".
Whats next, jon katz found dead and we build him a monument?
Hopefully I dont get bitchslapped for insulting a slashdot "celebrity", but someone has to tell it like it was
So you did at one point give them your address....
Not very mysterious then is it?
Why is this sensationalistic crap on the frontpage?
Customer gives BB address and CC, BB saves address and CC for all time. NO STORY HERE, every company does this!!
You should be happy you at least got something out of the whole charade.
? Unless something changed in the year since I used a wii, you could very easily use SD cards for saves and stuff. I even downloaded save games to unlock different things. If they stopped this, I would love to know as I plan to purchase my own wii someday.
Except that there is no god, only men and countries. Men and countries making deals with other men and countries. Men and countries writing propaganda on slashdot telling them that god says they won't win.
have you contemplated killing yourself?
zune rapture.. hilarious!
I used to work in a call center. One day, one of the CSR's came to me with a problem. She was trying to write notes in a customers file but every time she put her coursor into the text field, strange words appeared. The words came as if they were typed in manually and seemed to go everywhere. Address bar, email messages, word documents. The user was convinced that someone had hacked her pc and was sending her cryptic messages like "please visit the bathroom my apple friend".
Long story short, I went to investigate but could not duplicate the problem. That is, until I watched her take a call. As soon as she started speaking into the mic the words returned, and I was able to figure out that microsoft text to speech (came with word) had been installed and enabled somehow. It was doing voice recognition on all her phones headset speech.
Well no one knows who the criminals were in this case, so who do you kill?
People will try to get away with anything they can, how can you stop people from trying to break into your car? Most people use locks. Are they 100% effective? no! do they deter drunks and hoodlums from casually making off with all your change? yes! This is exactly the same.
Would you walk down the street counting a stack of hundred dollar bills? I think most people can agree that thats a stupid idea. There must be a line drawn where you can say, ok this person is being stupid and even though they were victimized, they made zero effort to protect themselves and therefor are responsible. You are basically asking for the state to babysit the populace. You want citizens to go crying to mommy and daddy because they haven't protected themselves adequately. Its not the governments job to protect you from having your car broken into, or babysit every threat to your personal security. Why should they protect you from having your computer or phone systems compromised? Thats why you hire competent security people, to make up for your lack of knowledge. I dont build locks, so I buy a car with locks built in.
The only security you have is the security you make for yourself. In your scenario, you would just be victimized by the 50001th hacker. You havent actually solved the problem. There is plenty of evidence that the death penalty does not deter crime. Look at american states where they have it and you can see that they are not utopias of 0% crime. Criminals almost never think that they will be the ones who are caught.
The key to personal security, whether online or off, is knowledge. Yes I am sorry that you cant just be a mindless zombie and let other people defend you all your life. Thats how the world is. You occasionally have to LEARN skills to defend yourself from other people. You cant just go around killing everyone that threatens you.
Besides, good hackers dont get caught, so there would be no one to kill.
Either you don't know any mechanics personally, or the mechanics you deal with are shitty ones. Ive seen engines so spotless that you can eat off them, with brand new bolts everywhere. Mechanics take DAMN good care of their cars, just like computer repair people take good care of their personal PCs (if they do their job with pride and arent merely there to cash a paycheque).
Their wives cars on the other hand...
Most security companies provide the illusion of security and an external person to blame, thats all. If someone really wants to hack your business, they will. Even if it takes backing a truck through your front door and making off with the physical servers (actually happened at one location i used to work for). In this case Im not sure what I would do differently. Its a small business, so auditing incomming calls shouldn't be overly complex. Although who really audits their call logs every week? Perhaps there was a password lockout function that was not enabled properly? Some SNMP triggers to log failed password attempts..
Most likely though, was that someones password was 1234 or 2468.
I guess you've never sped on a highway, or eaten out of the bulk bins at a supermarket eh? Guess what, those are CRIMES too!
Getting arrested for rape when the girl consented demonstrates how horribly unfair laws are to males these days. Women have way too much power in our society.
Also mods, please dont mod the parent up because shes a girl. Shes not going to sleep with you and, considering shes on slashdot, is probably just as maladjusted and unattractive as everyone else.
So they replaced windowskey + r with ctrl + esc and you are Blown away by the ingenuity!
And to do all that, they need a search indexer constantly indexing the drive. Oh the bloat!
its not XP's fault that you just learned OS shortcut keys.. They have been there for years.
Perhaps your too young to remember, but they had an activeX type channel push bar in windows 98. I believe the google app does this as well. Hardly a reason to install a gigantic bloatship of an OS.
Maybe you want to sell our your country to alberta religious hicks who use tax dollars to mail out pure propaganda, but I dont. CONservatives have CONvinced the rural populations to vote for them, while they sell off their land to rich white folks. A conservative majority would be EXACTLY like a bush government. Cronyism, incompetence, spending and tax breaks for business and the loss of our healthcare. This article very easily illustrates the kind of things that they would do if they had a majority. We need to avoid that at all costs. I dont want some wannabee american alberta secessionists running my country. The best most honest political figure in the debates was duceppe. If he had any party offices outside quebec I would vote for him.
I agree the liberal leadership is a joke. We need chretien back.
Im pretty sure the average comfort zone of humans is between 15 and 25 degrees. I find it odd that they picked such a high number. Are they trying to set the upper bound of human tolerance or something?
Are you kidding me? Its the most revolutionary game put out in years. Every day at work I cant wait to get back to the wastes just to explore. Nothing beats cresting a hill, hunting rifle in hand and seeing an abandoned sewer grate in the distance. As you move closer you spot some feral dogs who also have an eye on you. Raise your rifle, toggle into VATS and BOOM HEADSHOT - the head is now cleft and flying through the air. You move towards the corpse and noticed that you can interact with the sewer. Do you dare open the grate and climb into the darkness?
Fallout is awesome! I actually thought the combat sucked too untill I realized that you could freeze time with vats ala oldschool fallout, and turn it into a turn based game. Before that I was mindlessly spray and praying things, and wasting tonnes of ammo.
Theres so much to explore, so many interesting conversations and so much freedom to be as good or bad as you want to be.
Im not sure what you were expecting, and I never played oblivian, but if you enjoyed the first 2 fallout games you WILL have a BLAST in this one. It is very true to the story and feel of the originals. I hope it wins game of the year, instead of a boring rehash which probably will win (im looking at you call of duty 4)
I use to throw in a microsoft mouse. All nice and legal.
While an interesting story, I hope you don't believe that anyone put away for dealing illegal drugs is a "bad" person. Drugs are by and large a choice that effects no one except yourself. You can get into debates using crackheads (who are universally hated) if you'd like, but the point still remains. If all drugs were legal, these "bad people" would simply cease to exsist, or at worst become coca farmers.
Dont even get me started on the "evilness" of users, whom im sure you had no moral problems in also arresting.
I was pleased to read a really well written article in the new yorker where they interview the lead designer Cliff Bleszinski (CliffyB). Being a PC gamer I had never tried gears of war (yes I am now aware that there is a PC version) but found the article brought me up to speed on the franchise and also gave a good behind the scene look at Epic games and their garage to riches history.
Well worth checking out. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_bissell