Plenty there to suggest that the owner of Codex is a slimeball, and lies about the capabilities of his product. But D.I.R.T. does appear to be a real Trojan with surveillance capabilities (as well as the ability to plant evidence on the suspect's hard drive), really being sold to government(s) by this creep.
That Magic Lantern is a custom version of D.I.R.T. was suggested here.
Wasn't new even then. In 1965 or '66 we had an AM radio sitting on top of the console of my school's IBM 1620 (small mainframe), and people were writing programs to play music on it.
But the original author wasn't claiming "new", it was more a way to dramatize the van Eck radiation. And note that the example uses an AM radio tuned to 10MHz (that is, shortwave, not the US 540-1620kHz broadcast band).
Don't count on "well-guarded". That may apply to the freezer at the CDC and the one in Moscow. But the USSR made tons of the stuff. And while those programs have been closed, some of the people who worked in them are out of work, even those with jobs may not have gotten paid in six months. The corner loan shark says "we got two choices... either I break both your legs and my friends rape your wife, or I cancel your debt and give you a thousand bucks US cash, it's your choice, all you gotta do is bring me a vial." You don't think anyone kept a souvenir from the glory days when they had a really important national security job? You think the mafia has too many scruples?
Such a list already exists: http://filext.com/index.htm
Don't know how this site compares to the "100,000" extensions mentioned. But with 40 legal characters (we're talking M$, so upper and lower case are equivalent), there are only 64,000 possible 3-character file extensions.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company trying to make a buck.
On the other hand, a company that immorally claims rights that it does not legitimately have, that hires scumbags to send threatening letters to people who are acting within their legal rights, that gives away items and then claims to still own or control them. That company should be skinned, have its pelt nailed to the barn door as a warning to others, and have its:CueCat carcass thrown into the ditch for the dogs to eat.
A lot of us bought that drive. I got the $30 rebate in a reasonable time (before the fine print said you were SOL). The $60 rebate didn't come. Called the fulfillment house and they said the check had been cut, but they weren't going to mail it out until they got paid by CompUSA. Apparently response rates were a bit higher than expected. Got the check yesterday. Would I have got the check if I hadn't called? Probably, but who knows?
Yeah, keep a photocopy. If you get screwed, yell to the BBB, your state's consumer protection agency or attorney general, and the corporate office of the vendor.
No, this is not proportional representation. Proportional representation is where various groups (parties) receive a number of seats proportional to their share of the vote. In proportional representation, voters vote for parties rather than individuals.
This "instant runoff" system is a way of letting people go with their second (...) choice when their first choice bites the dust.
I think what's to be emulated is not necessary the internet part, but the instant runoff part. If your candidate isn't the winner, you still get a say in the outcome (ok, so Gandhi didn't get it... your opinion that Ed Gein is preferable to Bill Gates still matters).
The instant runoff bit didn't turn out to make a lot of difference in this particular election, though.
Just to point out that it's not all that clear about what's "obviously" a universal trademark. "Disney" is a personal surname, should others who share it be blocked from using it in their domain name? While "Coca-Cola" is probably universal, "coke" is the generic name for several products, some legal. While "Microsoft" may be a unique name, "MS" is a term used in several fields.
One civil liberties issue is how ICANN handles disputes regarding trademarks (the "Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy" or "UDRP"). Under current policies, you can lose your domain name because some Fredonian lawyer complains that it violates his client's trademark for their line of spittoons. Even if it's a common name like "Smith" or "American", or merely contains that trademark string internally (a la "arrowSMITH.com"). This happens is because ICANN currently encourages such abuses.
I don't know whether you'd consider ICANN's penchant for meeting in secret, or the fact that their board is stacked with representatives of narrow commercial interests (as opposed to the public or users) civil liberties issues, or the fact that they make the name, address, and phone number of domain holders available to any spammer who wants it (while keeping the voter list secret so that candidates cannot access it). But they could be.
Another civil liberties issue is the way this election has been conducted (whether caused by malice or mere incompetence). Such as hastily meeting before the election and cutting the number of elected seats in half, to ensure that the incumbents would not face a serious challenge no matter who got elected. Such as the disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters because of failure to provide a server that could handle the load of registrations. Such as an ungainly and confusing registration procedure (hell, it me about 10 tries to figure out that the string "PIN-" was part of my PINumber, but maybe I'm exceptionally dense.. I'm sure those extra characters immensely improve the security). Such as failure to mail out PINs by snail mail in a timely fashion. Such as changing the election rules after the election had begun, to try to prevent publicly nominated candidates from reaching the threshold necessary to challenge their hand-picked nominees.
You're an optimist. He'll be lucky if they don't indict him for computer crimes. Breaking into their system. Accessing without authorization. Evil evil evil, bad hacker.
It's much easier to kill the messenger, and (hopefully) quietly make fixes. Otherwise they'll have to admit that they have been grossly negligent in their security.
The ISP should not be responsible for blocking spam (unless they have committed to do so). But Harris (and you?) is saying that the ISP, a privately owned business that is not a public utility, should be forced by the government to carry Harris's mail.
If you don't like what your ISP is doing re spam, complain to them, or vote with your feet. Let's keep the government off our backs, eh? And if you don't like what Harris is doing, they invite your questions or comments. Let them know how you feel, at 1-877-919-4765, or at info@harrisinteractive.com. Or you can chat with them live online, at: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/about/contactus.a sp
will figure out that the US isn't planning to invade?
Perhaps there's a strain of paranoia in the Russian soul. But it's not just their imagination. In the last 90 years they were invaded by Germany and Austria, Great Britain, France, and the US. And that was just during WWI. During WWII they were invaded again by Germany and Japan and suffered massive casulties. Something like 1 out of every 10 Russians died.
Overly paranoid? We all know that the US would never invade a foreign country to "protect national interest". Not the Dominican Republic, or Nicagagua, or Grenada, or Panama, or Cuba. Certainly not Russia. Except for that once. The US has a navy that nobody else can equal, but still hasn't stopped developing dangerous and costly new weapons.
National memories are long. In the US South, they remember "The War of Northern Agression". All over the US, there are still people who still distrust the Japanese. And in Bosnia, there are people who are bitter about an invasion that happened in the year 1389. Why would we expect Russia to trust the US?
PayPal is working for me, though I don't do much volume. They're still in the process of getting their act together, and did have some nasty problems a couple of months ago.. some people weren't able to access their account for as much as a week, and there were reports of double-billing, which may have been related to system unresponsiveness (nothing happened, so you push the button again). They currently only accept payment from the US but say they have plans to expand internationally (as one might expect.. their investors include Nokia, Deutsche Bank, and Singapore Telcom). Will they be around in 5 years? Who knows? With their "personal" payment structure (no fees at all to the parties involved) they claim to make their profit from the float. That's a little hard to believe, given that my cc gives me a 1% kickback and is certainly charging _someone_ enough to cover that.
Not only do we need "a system that prevents the government or voting authority from tying votes to the voter", we need one that prevents family members/gurus/cult leaders/the computer owner/drill sargents/the boss from watching over the voter's shoulder. Or, for that matter, pushing the voter aside after authentication and casting a vote "for the good of the community".
I concur with the others questioning this story. It certainly could have happened (and most likely if it did, the ISP was within its legal if not moral rights), but absolutely no supporting info is given. If it did happen as reported, and there isn't more to the story than that, we need to know who the ISP was, so they (both the company, and the individuals who run it, I'm a big believer in holding individuals personally accountable) can be held up for community scorn and derision, and to warn people that they're spineless scum who can't be trusted with one's business. OTOH, it's a little premature to be calling for the rope just yet.
If your PIN was of the format "PIN-12345", the "PIN-" is part of it. Mine was, and it took me about ten tries to realize what the problem was. Honest, it took me that long to realize that whoever was issuing numbers was playing games.
You've got something here. If your business is damaged you may have a case to collect damages for lost sales, etc. If you don't have material on your site that meets the advertised criteria like nudity, etc. then Mattel's inclusion of you on their block list must be due to malice or negligence.
Wonder if you could sue in small claims court. Defending against thousands of small lawsuits, all over the country, might get their attention, or at least keep their lawyers too busy to engage in mischief elsewhere.
Why put R&D into innovating? So they can produce a product, generate demand, sell it, and make some money in the process, while making even more money selling the media that will be consumed by not only their product, but also also by any reverse-engineered clone that appears. If they produced something worthy of a patent, they've got protection against people copying it. But if people figure out another way to achieve the same ends without infringing on their patent, that's called "progress".
DisplayWriter was IBM dedicated hardware word processor, using (IIRC) a 1MHz 8086. A truly great machine for typists, but I don't think it had any sort of clock or datestamping. The WP software was "TextPack". Somebody did indeed sell CP/M-86 for that machine, on 8" SSSD floppies, but it was pretty rare (we had a copy so that we could run SuperCalc spreadsheets that were larger than you could run on a 64K Osborne).
"DisplayWrite" was IBM word processing software for PC/MSDOS that provided much the same user interface.
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Plenty there to suggest that the owner of Codex is a slimeball, and lies about the capabilities of his product. But D.I.R.T. does appear to be a real Trojan with surveillance capabilities (as well as the ability to plant evidence on the suspect's hard drive), really being sold to government(s) by this creep.
That Magic Lantern is a custom version of D.I.R.T. was suggested here.
According to Declan McCullagh's Politech mailing list, Magic Lantern was produced by Codex Data Systems.
Wasn't new even then. In 1965 or '66 we had an AM radio sitting on top of the console of my school's IBM 1620 (small mainframe), and people were writing programs to play music on it.
But the original author wasn't claiming "new", it was more a way to dramatize the van Eck radiation. And note that the example uses an AM radio tuned to 10MHz (that is, shortwave, not the US 540-1620kHz broadcast band).
Don't count on "well-guarded". That may apply to the freezer at the CDC and the one in Moscow. But the USSR made tons of the stuff. And while those programs have been closed, some of the people who worked in them are out of work, even those with jobs may not have gotten paid in six months. The corner loan shark says "we got two choices... either I break both your legs and my friends rape your wife, or I cancel your debt and give you a thousand bucks US cash, it's your choice, all you gotta do is bring me a vial." You don't think anyone kept a souvenir from the glory days when they had a really important national security job? You think the mafia has too many scruples?
Such a list already exists: http://filext.com/index.htm
Don't know how this site compares to the "100,000" extensions mentioned. But with 40 legal characters (we're talking M$, so upper and lower case are equivalent), there are only 64,000 possible 3-character file extensions.
Don't beat on xStore. They just found out they got screwed, and are presumably trying to figure out what to do about it.
Yeah, they have USENET archived all the way back to March 29, 2001!!
On the other hand, a company that immorally claims rights that it does not legitimately have, that hires scumbags to send threatening letters to people who are acting within their legal rights, that gives away items and then claims to still own or control them. That company should be skinned, have its pelt nailed to the barn door as a warning to others, and have its :CueCat carcass thrown into the ditch for the dogs to eat.
Next question?
Yeah, keep a photocopy. If you get screwed, yell to the BBB, your state's consumer protection agency or attorney general, and the corporate office of the vendor.
No, this is not proportional representation. Proportional representation is where various groups (parties) receive a number of seats proportional to their share of the vote. In proportional representation, voters vote for parties rather than individuals. This "instant runoff" system is a way of letting people go with their second (...) choice when their first choice bites the dust.
I think what's to be emulated is not necessary the internet part, but the instant runoff part. If your candidate isn't the winner, you still get a say in the outcome (ok, so Gandhi didn't get it... your opinion that Ed Gein is preferable to Bill Gates still matters). The instant runoff bit didn't turn out to make a lot of difference in this particular election, though.
Just to point out that it's not all that clear about what's "obviously" a universal trademark. "Disney" is a personal surname, should others who share it be blocked from using it in their domain name? While "Coca-Cola" is probably universal, "coke" is the generic name for several products, some legal. While "Microsoft" may be a unique name, "MS" is a term used in several fields.
I don't know whether you'd consider ICANN's penchant for meeting in secret, or the fact that their board is stacked with representatives of narrow commercial interests (as opposed to the public or users) civil liberties issues, or the fact that they make the name, address, and phone number of domain holders available to any spammer who wants it (while keeping the voter list secret so that candidates cannot access it). But they could be.
Another civil liberties issue is the way this election has been conducted (whether caused by malice or mere incompetence). Such as hastily meeting before the election and cutting the number of elected seats in half, to ensure that the incumbents would not face a serious challenge no matter who got elected. Such as the disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters because of failure to provide a server that could handle the load of registrations. Such as an ungainly and confusing registration procedure (hell, it me about 10 tries to figure out that the string "PIN-" was part of my PINumber, but maybe I'm exceptionally dense.. I'm sure those extra characters immensely improve the security). Such as failure to mail out PINs by snail mail in a timely fashion. Such as changing the election rules after the election had begun, to try to prevent publicly nominated candidates from reaching the threshold necessary to challenge their hand-picked nominees.
You're an optimist. He'll be lucky if they don't indict him for computer crimes. Breaking into their system. Accessing without authorization. Evil evil evil, bad hacker.
It's much easier to kill the messenger, and (hopefully) quietly make fixes. Otherwise they'll have to admit that they have been grossly negligent in their security.
If you don't like what your ISP is doing re spam, complain to them, or vote with your feet. Let's keep the government off our backs, eh? And if you don't like what Harris is doing, they invite your questions or comments. Let them know how you feel, at 1-877-919-4765, or at info@harrisinteractive.com. Or you can chat with them live online, at: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/about/contactus.a sp
will figure out that the US isn't planning to invade?
Perhaps there's a strain of paranoia in the Russian soul. But it's not just their imagination. In the last 90 years they were invaded by Germany and Austria, Great Britain, France, and the US. And that was just during WWI. During WWII they were invaded again by Germany and Japan and suffered massive casulties. Something like 1 out of every 10 Russians died.
Overly paranoid? We all know that the US would never invade a foreign country to "protect national interest". Not the Dominican Republic, or Nicagagua, or Grenada, or Panama, or Cuba. Certainly not Russia. Except for that once. The US has a navy that nobody else can equal, but still hasn't stopped developing dangerous and costly new weapons.
National memories are long. In the US South, they remember "The War of Northern Agression". All over the US, there are still people who still distrust the Japanese. And in Bosnia, there are people who are bitter about an invasion that happened in the year 1389. Why would we expect Russia to trust the US?
PayPal is working for me, though I don't do much volume. They're still in the process of getting their act together, and did have some nasty problems a couple of months ago.. some people weren't able to access their account for as much as a week, and there were reports of double-billing, which may have been related to system unresponsiveness (nothing happened, so you push the button again). They currently only accept payment from the US but say they have plans to expand internationally (as one might expect.. their investors include Nokia, Deutsche Bank, and Singapore Telcom). Will they be around in 5 years? Who knows? With their "personal" payment structure (no fees at all to the parties involved) they claim to make their profit from the float. That's a little hard to believe, given that my cc gives me a 1% kickback and is certainly charging _someone_ enough to cover that.
Not only do we need "a system that prevents the government or voting authority from tying votes to the voter", we need one that prevents family members/gurus/cult leaders/the computer owner/drill sargents/the boss from watching over the voter's shoulder. Or, for that matter, pushing the voter aside after authentication and casting a vote "for the good of the community".
I concur with the others questioning this story. It certainly could have happened (and most likely if it did, the ISP was within its legal if not moral rights), but absolutely no supporting info is given. If it did happen as reported, and there isn't more to the story than that, we need to know who the ISP was, so they (both the company, and the individuals who run it, I'm a big believer in holding individuals personally accountable) can be held up for community scorn and derision, and to warn people that they're spineless scum who can't be trusted with one's business. OTOH, it's a little premature to be calling for the rope just yet.
If your PIN was of the format "PIN-12345", the "PIN-" is part of it. Mine was, and it took me about ten tries to realize what the problem was. Honest, it took me that long to realize that whoever was issuing numbers was playing games.
You've got something here. If your business is damaged you may have a case to collect damages for lost sales, etc. If you don't have material on your site that meets the advertised criteria like nudity, etc. then Mattel's inclusion of you on their block list must be due to malice or negligence.
Wonder if you could sue in small claims court. Defending against thousands of small lawsuits, all over the country, might get their attention, or at least keep their lawyers too busy to engage in mischief elsewhere.
Why put R&D into innovating? So they can produce a product, generate demand, sell it, and make some money in the process, while making even more money selling the media that will be consumed by not only their product, but also also by any reverse-engineered clone that appears. If they produced something worthy of a patent, they've got protection against people copying it. But if people figure out another way to achieve the same ends without infringing on their patent, that's called "progress".
DisplayWriter was IBM dedicated hardware word processor, using (IIRC) a 1MHz 8086. A truly great machine for typists, but I don't think it had any sort of clock or datestamping. The WP software was "TextPack". Somebody did indeed sell CP/M-86 for that machine, on 8" SSSD floppies, but it was pretty rare (we had a copy so that we could run SuperCalc spreadsheets that were larger than you could run on a 64K Osborne).
"DisplayWrite" was IBM word processing software for PC/MSDOS that provided much the same user interface.