Not always intentionally so designed, though that can be a cause. The crippling effects are just as often a result of the elaborate things viri do to hide themselves and prevent removal.
For example, suppose a virus is designed to patch a system DLL so that it includes a copy of the virus. Now suppose that the patch basis it's using disagrees from thecurrent version of the DLL. GNU Patch would refuse to do the patch if it couldn't be done safely, but the viruses doing binary patches on DLLs may not be so concerned with data integrity.
Similar nastiness in the registry, and you can have a system failure waiting to happen. And with Windows, even modern ones, many failure types are sufficient to crash the system.
Oh indeed. But guess what: They are. Maybe in the obvious stupid way, maybe it's a computer that used to be an office machine and got repurposed (intentionally or accidentally) without a reimage. Maybe there's a firewall snafu.
Although loss of life is the obvious example of oh-shit resulting from computer failure, there are many, MANY situations where it could lead to tremendous loss of capital (remember back when the LSE went down for a day due to using MS software a few months ago?
It'd be a great project, though you do want to be careful, some of these viri are designed to do harm if disabled improperly, and some of these computers could be in situations where their failure could cause the loss of lives.
Again, not saying don't do it...saying do it carefully.
Uh...the IEA is saying that everything is fine and dandy and it's some random person in the IEA who is saying the sky is falling...not sure what you're driving at, I'm sure claiming things are fine as they are is a massive conspiracy to bring about a big scary bad world government.
Because it's easier to assuage the public outcry and win PoliticanPoints by attacking those who possess it than going after those who produce it (since a lot of it isn't in the States, for one thing) and/or saving the kids.
There was a great article in the Economist recently about how there's no motivation for politicians to care at all about the suspect's side (felons don't vote, for one thing), so laws just become more and more unreasonable and the rights of pedophiles get eroded worse and worse.
Ever since that one girl had to Register after having naked pics of herself on her cell phone when underage, then charged as an adult, I've had basically zero respect for these laws, even as the thought of CP makes me sick.
Don't forget to change your MAC address before you connect. macchanger on linux, I assume there's similar functionality for other OSes. MACs encode the brand of wifi card (and usually of your laptop if it came with) so it can be reasonably easy to visually scan the room for the offender if there aren't 9001 MacBook Pros in it.
Of course, I'm against actually doing this as then the wifi owner gets yelled at and shuts it down, denying me free internet.
I object to anyone who turns a profit on copyright infringement, but not to the infringement itself. If you want to violate the GPL so you can have ZFS in your linux and then distribute it illegally, this is fine by me. Whether you're a DVD peddler on the street or Microsoft or a small business pirating Office, I object to that.
That's just a US phenomenon because people are spread out here it's a lot more expensive to provide connectivity, and because we don't have any competition in the market..
I have a few concrete suggestions but none are complete fixes. For example, you have many more voter-verification numbers than actual votes, distributed uniformly, so it's easy for any employee to find a number that corresponds to any vote and claim it was his. Problem: What if the company gets the same number from two employees. This isn't an issue for integrity because while everyone knows there are loads of fake votes in the numbers, he can still look up his own number.
Have the system only give you a lookup number with probability 0.5/0.1/whatever, so each employee can reasonably claim he didn't get one. Problem: Some companies have a statistically significant number of employees. Even if they don't know which ones to punish, they can just take it out on the group.
Give the user a secret code that can be used to change the number on the site after viewing it. Problem: Security risk, trust issues, too complicated for most people to use.
Have strict laws against voter intimidation. Problem: We do already; it still happens.
I personally believe that with all the crooked electric voting we've had in the past ten years, accountability is more important than anonymity. But the fact is: There's no system that's COMPLETELY immune to government tampering. One some level you have to trust the government. But there are different levels of trust, and making it as hard as you can to mess with is a good idea. And I'm not convinced we need to give up anonymity to obtain greater accountability.
Then again, I've never been personally threatened regarding my vote. It sounds really scary, I hope I never am.
I'd trust it a lot more if I could log on online and verify my vote. I have heard one reason against it: Suppose you work for a company that enjoys putting [illegal, but still] pressure on employees to vote for the Baby Eating party because it supports their economic policy. They could then demand that employees tell them their numbers so they can check that they didn't vote for the Cute Animal Hugging party instead.
There are ways to mitigate this, and it isn't a huge concern, buth worth mentioning.
From what I hear Vista cleaned up dramatically after its initial release (more frighteningly, the RCs seemed good), but the reputation damage was already done.
Vista SP1 (aka win7) seeks to be following the same path. Aside from a picture of Hitler that just flashes his eyes, the RC seemed smooth to me, the release has its issues, and perhaps MS will clean it up.
That said, I haven't really used windows or (os x for that matter) for anything but occasional gaming since high school.
And I still can't make Vista work with several of my friends' shiny new/preloaded/ computers' wireless cards. Is there an inverse ndiswrapper?
Precisely. Today it's a pandemic, tomorrow it's legitimate competition. Given power to shut down the internet at will, the excuses for doing so will only continue to grow.
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Not always intentionally so designed, though that can be a cause. The crippling effects are just as often a result of the elaborate things viri do to hide themselves and prevent removal.
For example, suppose a virus is designed to patch a system DLL so that it includes a copy of the virus. Now suppose that the patch basis it's using disagrees from thecurrent version of the DLL. GNU Patch would refuse to do the patch if it couldn't be done safely, but the viruses doing binary patches on DLLs may not be so concerned with data integrity.
Similar nastiness in the registry, and you can have a system failure waiting to happen. And with Windows, even modern ones, many failure types are sufficient to crash the system.
Oh indeed. But guess what: They are. Maybe in the obvious stupid way, maybe it's a computer that used to be an office machine and got repurposed (intentionally or accidentally) without a reimage. Maybe there's a firewall snafu.
Although loss of life is the obvious example of oh-shit resulting from computer failure, there are many, MANY situations where it could lead to tremendous loss of capital (remember back when the LSE went down for a day due to using MS software a few months ago?
It'd be a great project, though you do want to be careful, some of these viri are designed to do harm if disabled improperly, and some of these computers could be in situations where their failure could cause the loss of lives.
Again, not saying don't do it...saying do it carefully.
Uh...the IEA is saying that everything is fine and dandy and it's some random person in the IEA who is saying the sky is falling...not sure what you're driving at, I'm sure claiming things are fine as they are is a massive conspiracy to bring about a big scary bad world government.
And some pot with every chicken!
Because it's easier to assuage the public outcry and win PoliticanPoints by attacking those who possess it than going after those who produce it (since a lot of it isn't in the States, for one thing) and/or saving the kids.
There was a great article in the Economist recently about how there's no motivation for politicians to care at all about the suspect's side (felons don't vote, for one thing), so laws just become more and more unreasonable and the rights of pedophiles get eroded worse and worse.
Ever since that one girl had to Register after having naked pics of herself on her cell phone when underage, then charged as an adult, I've had basically zero respect for these laws, even as the thought of CP makes me sick.
Don't forget to change your MAC address before you connect. macchanger on linux, I assume there's similar functionality for other OSes. MACs encode the brand of wifi card (and usually of your laptop if it came with) so it can be reasonably easy to visually scan the room for the offender if there aren't 9001 MacBook Pros in it.
Of course, I'm against actually doing this as then the wifi owner gets yelled at and shuts it down, denying me free internet.
I object to anyone who turns a profit on copyright infringement, but not to the infringement itself. If you want to violate the GPL so you can have ZFS in your linux and then distribute it illegally, this is fine by me. Whether you're a DVD peddler on the street or Microsoft or a small business pirating Office, I object to that.
They'd rather blame piracy than the recession for the reduction in spending on luxury goods.
The "of any kind" part is clearly a troll, but I also don't get 20 lashes if I want to have a ringtone.
America may be run by religious bigots, but it gets a LOT worse.
It's not piracy if you buy it. It's well established that EULAs are not legally binding.
That's just a US phenomenon because people are spread out here it's a lot more expensive to provide connectivity, and because we don't have any competition in the market..
Niche? That all depends on your industry/area of research.
I have a few concrete suggestions but none are complete fixes. For example, you have many more voter-verification numbers than actual votes, distributed uniformly, so it's easy for any employee to find a number that corresponds to any vote and claim it was his. Problem: What if the company gets the same number from two employees. This isn't an issue for integrity because while everyone knows there are loads of fake votes in the numbers, he can still look up his own number.
Have the system only give you a lookup number with probability 0.5/0.1/whatever, so each employee can reasonably claim he didn't get one. Problem: Some companies have a statistically significant number of employees. Even if they don't know which ones to punish, they can just take it out on the group.
Give the user a secret code that can be used to change the number on the site after viewing it. Problem: Security risk, trust issues, too complicated for most people to use.
Have strict laws against voter intimidation. Problem: We do already; it still happens.
I personally believe that with all the crooked electric voting we've had in the past ten years, accountability is more important than anonymity. But the fact is: There's no system that's COMPLETELY immune to government tampering. One some level you have to trust the government. But there are different levels of trust, and making it as hard as you can to mess with is a good idea. And I'm not convinced we need to give up anonymity to obtain greater accountability.
Then again, I've never been personally threatened regarding my vote. It sounds really scary, I hope I never am.
I'd trust it a lot more if I could log on online and verify my vote. I have heard one reason against it: Suppose you work for a company that enjoys putting [illegal, but still] pressure on employees to vote for the Baby Eating party because it supports their economic policy. They could then demand that employees tell them their numbers so they can check that they didn't vote for the Cute Animal Hugging party instead.
There are ways to mitigate this, and it isn't a huge concern, buth worth mentioning.
I think you have to be in your house (or on the premises) for this to be legal. And that only in some states.
From what I understand, it's only infringement to sing in the shower if someone else can hear you.
These are the death throws of these leeches on society. They won't be able to stop piracy and in a decade they won't be around to bitch.
...upside down...and inside out...
winners will be executed
Ah sorry about that, I get confused sometimes.
Pichu evolves into pikachu evolves into richu, I think.
From what I hear Vista cleaned up dramatically after its initial release (more frighteningly, the RCs seemed good), but the reputation damage was already done.
Vista SP1 (aka win7) seeks to be following the same path. Aside from a picture of Hitler that just flashes his eyes, the RC seemed smooth to me, the release has its issues, and perhaps MS will clean it up.
That said, I haven't really used windows or (os x for that matter) for anything but occasional gaming since high school.
And I still can't make Vista work with several of my friends' shiny new /preloaded/ computers' wireless cards. Is there an inverse ndiswrapper?
Sorry, missed that last line there.
Ads can be targetted based on IP. If your IP isn't hidden behind a VPN, that is.
I'm starting to wonder when the content industry will realize that their competition in the form of piracy is higher quality, free, and easier to use.
No it's great: that's why it's still legal.
Precisely. Today it's a pandemic, tomorrow it's legitimate competition. Given power to shut down the internet at will, the excuses for doing so will only continue to grow.