Are they even paying attention? At first it was.exe worms in email, then it was network-layer exploits, and then it was spyware, and now in the past week it seems that IE is totally unsafe for any purpose whatsoever.
What's amazing me is why Microsoft isn't *running* to provide patches, for at least XP and 2K, to mitigate this. They're offering non-solutions like disabling Active X and Javascript. Sure, fixing the problem may mean some serious breakage for some in-house software someplace, but does anyone care that Spyware+Malware+IE is rendering their operating systems junk?
Are they even paying attention? Is XP SP2 a magic fix? Is it just too badly broken to even BE fixed?
The governments are a huge part of the problem. In many cases, the "government" is whatever collection of dope dealers, gun runners and paramilitary thugs can gain predominant control over whatever the UN considers to be the government of the country, and this generally includes the post and telecom monopoly, the central bank, and the customs system. It's not that some of them are corrupt, it's that corruption *is* the system.
This will eventually force their governments to pay attention to the issue.
Not really. "The people" are generally just a source of low-end conscripts to be given whatever Enfields are left over from British colonial occupation and thrown at whatever border region is most troublesome this month; they could care less whether they're able to "participate" in the internet economy. Anyone who matters has access to dollar/euro/yen markets overseas, and can buy what they want.
If eventually they make "the world" pissed off enough (ie, European and American central banks ban wire transfers), they'll just hang a couple of wanted "terrorists" out to dry (typically for being behind on their protection payments) for western military interests and use it as leverage to get back in the game.
That was the first thing I thought of. Is the judge going to force the original ISP to stop advertising the summary of its net block and force it to advertise "around" the block being forced portable, even if it leaves the people on new, stubbier blocks with possibly less advantageous routing paths?
Is it going to force a new ISP to advertise the chunk being made portable?
It just strikes me as one of those things that makes no sense and requires some blank court order that applies to anyone running a backbone agree to.
It seems most similar to an electricity customer demanding that it gets its electricity from a specific plant, even though they are moving to a region that cannot be served from that plant.
Wasn't part of the "attraction" of ActiveX that it gave applets a "normal" Windows user interface, and not the relatively crippled UI that people were experiencing around that time with Java applets?
The Color 8500 series had EFI Fiery chips (complete with logo) all over the formatter board.
Given the dominance of a few major Japanese companies in the entire xerography space, it wouldn't surprise me if HP was getting a 2 year exclusive on a third-party engine/formatter design, throwing an exclusive HP case on it and calling it a day. Even the HP NICs have someone else's embedded OS and NIC hardware, although the board layout and firmware may actually be theirs.
HP still makes some decent printers, even if they're just repackaging someone else's print engine -- we have an HP5500 color printer that runs circles around a 2 year old Canon CLC5000, and several of our HP 8100 B&W printers have engine page counts in the millions with only consumables (fuser, toner, pickup rollers) that have needed replacement.
I think they make enough money from printers that people working there from the "old" HP haven't been replaced by outsource-everthing MBAs who only care about 3 month profitability and cost containment.
But overall, their biggest problem seems to be that the "invent" moniker they're so fond of doesn't apply to HP anymore. It's all about the HP label being slapped on someone else's invention.
Trying to stop technological processes in the pursuit of extra jobs is pointless, because it will hold back the economy in general. Would we be better you think haveing a blacksmith make car parts by hand in his small workshop, or can we do things better with a robot with ±0.01mm tolerance.
Who says that letting the market dictate its own future necessarily means "progress"?
Let's say that blacksmiths make car parts by hand in small workshops; there are millions of blacksmiths, but few cars because they are expensive due to the labor-intensive manufacturing. The implication? Several orders of magnitude less pollution. A population that walks more than it rides, isn't morbidly obese, and doesn't tax the healthcare system. A middle east that still hates themselves, but doesn't have a couple of trillion dollars worth of foreign weapons to kill themselves and us with.
Lack of equipment or how it's supposed to work?
on
IEEE Approves 802.11i
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
IANA wireless expert, but isn't one of the annoying gotchas of 802.11g that the presence of a B client drops all connected nodes down to B speeds?
If I'm remembering that right, then what you're experiencing may not be a lack of standards uptake -- you could be connecting to a ton of 802.11g stations, but somebody's got a B card running.
Them: "Hi, I'm Tyrone, and I'm calling from the $Police_Fire_Charity. Did you know that $Police_Fire personnel are great guys and don't any benefits at all? How would you like to help?"
Me: "Well, Tyrone, I've already donated this year, three times so far and I plan to give again in the fall."
Them: "Mr. $Mispronounced_Lastname, you've been giving to one of those other charities. We represent the real $Policy_Fire_Charity -- how about helping us out with $20?"
Me: "No, no, I'm positive I've donated three times already. I even have the cancelled checks. Let's see here, this big one's made out to "Hennepin County", the other to "Minnesota Revenue Service" and the third and largest to "Internal Revenue Service." I'm sure that all of those donations cover all the money I'm giving to law enforcement."
The rest boils down to an amusing argument with the high school dropout on the other end of the line about whose benefits are better, his (none), mine, or the cops. I'm actually pretty sure mine are better than both, but the cops around here sure get to retire on a nice pension before I do.
...to my home voice number? In the middle of the night? It's weird -- I get two within 15 minutes from UNAVAILABLE, the third one has a number (which I can't call to -- assuming a non-answering PRI/DSS trunk), and the fourth attempt is back to unavailable.
I've had this happen for two nights running. I could hook up the modem and answer it, but I'm worried that even accepting the call will hook me up for even more overnight FAX spam. I hoping that I might get one more night of it and then they'll give up since they never get a FAX answer.
Sorry, but this sounds like engineering doublespeak and QA ass-covering. By the most basic definition of 'defect' and 'bug', bugs are defects, and zero defect software should have zero bugs. The only thing that does make sense is the assertion that some bugs aren't necessary destructive or contributory to malfunction.
Redefining 'zero defect' to not mean 'free from bugs' is like redefining 'zero pregnancies' such that a class of pregnant women aren't really pregnant.
You're presuming that spam "business", such as it is, is actually like any other mail order business, where you send them money and then they send you a product, and that the business has the same kinds of overhead costs as any other business.
First of all, their product costs are near zero; remember, there's not really a pill that makes your penis huge. Sugarpills are pennies per thousand. Add a B&W label and a plastic bottle, and you have a product with a net cost of about $0.50.
Second of all, this assume you get sent a 'product' at all. Who are most of these clowns buying drugs going to call if they spend $100 on x.a.n.a.x from and get nothing? The cops? "Ahh, yeah, I mail-ordered some Vicodin and I didn't get anything....no, I don't have a perscription to take to Walgreen's....uhh, I'm under arrest? Shopping for narcotics without a prescription is a felony?"
Thirdly, where do you think your credit/bank/identity information goes when you "buy" something from a spammer? Into their encrypted database at their multimillion dollar secure hosting center staffed with highly trained, background-checked professionals? No, it gets resold to scam artists and theives who bilk your cards and then sell what's left of your identity to pros who work it over even harder.
So for every $100 "sale" that even ships a product you have about $95 in profit, another $500 in credit card fraud (double/triple charged), an identity resellable to identity theives for maybe $1000 if you do it quick before the victim cancels the card (which can then be bilked for another $1000 or more if you can do some quality ID theft).
So there you have it -- $2k pretty easily from a single sale. How many of those do you have to make before it's considered profitable? 3? 10?
OK, my wish is that someone combined screen with the built-in FreeBSD window(1) application. I like screen better, but the idea of making overlapping windows can be appealing, especially if you need to see multiple output simultaneously. I find window's UI to be horrid, so I don't really use it.
After that gets done, I'd like the resulting application merged into my favorite shell so that my logins automatically had screen's functionality. I particularly like the nohup aspect, where I can start a process and get back to it if I disconnect.
A quick look at the screen manpage indicates you might be able to kludge screen as your login "shell" (having screen spawn your actual shell), although it would create the problem of reconnecting to existing screen sessions instead of creating new ones. Maybe the -R or -x option behavior could be changed to show a list of available sessions if more than one existed and create a new one if none exists.
But how much interaction and hands-on can you *really* get at a trade show? At the few that I've been to, the best it might get is a backroom at a booth or maybe a hotel meeting room with a more in-depth setup.
Even then, you're unlikely to be buying from the trade show rep, there's likely a sales office/person that represents your geographical area, or maybe you even have to go through a reseller.
Sometimes you get weird inspirations at trade shows simply because there's so much to see, but often it just seems like an excuse for an all-expenses junket on the company dime.
And as we all know, those aren't part of the new economy.
With BBC America available on a number of cable systems (it's on the digital tier here in the Twin Cities on T-W Cable), I kind of doubt we'd ever get a BBC UK feed, just the recycled BBC stuff, spliced with thousands of annoying commercials.
That's an excellent idea! Data pollution of gator and other spyware would be excellent; they would either have to change their format, obsoleteing thousands of infested PCs, or just live with bogus data.
You have to presume that it's far more common than anyone would suspect, and I think not only are the spammers/ISPs linked this way, but the sleazeballs behind the spam likely have similar arrangements with banks and credit card processors.
Which is why we need a RICO investigation of spamming. As long as it's treated by law enforcement as merely unpopular, the otherwise legitimate providers of services necessary for spam (ISPs, banks) will just take extra money -- over OR under the table -- to provide them those services.
A few high-profile prosecutions of the entire "spam team" (the spam mail sender, the spamvertized business owner, and all the "legit" business people that enabled them) could scare legit businesses to the point where they won't get involved with spammers for a price that spammers can afford to pay.
If you push the costs spammers have to pay high enough, it won't be profitable and no one will do it.
Re:All they needed were a few plastic baggies...
on
War Kayaking
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· Score: 1
Shoot, I only need one baggie and it only has to be filled with a couple of grams. Sounds like they grabbed the wrong baggy.
To totally sidetrack, and leave animal analogies behind, I simply think that corporate power is being alowed to run amok, the current trend towards more and bigger mergers is probably a bigger threat to capitalism than communism ever dreamed of being.
It was once said that capitalists would sell the rope the socialists would use to hang them.
I have a friend who works there who I just saw for the first time since college. I asked him what he's worked on since he's been there (you can count to his employee number on your fingers and toes), and he said one of the things was internal code to optimize the bandwidth of links.
From our conversation, I suspect that a lot of the really hard work is optimizing their use of networks and clustering. PageRank is a neat idea, but without an efficient distributed clustering system to make it work you run into problems.
I was more concerned with not getting the windows smashed than features. The single-disc replacement was cheap, about $250 installed, and I got to keep my tape deck.
Plus I think it helps the resale of the car to keep it all factory-original components.
I have a '99 Accord V6. It came with an AM/FM/Tapedeck which could control a CD player (single-disc or changer). I put the single-disc in-dash player in, but now I couldn't use the IceLink, since my CD control is already taken. I think..
They claim it doesn't compete with in-dash CD players, but that would seem to exclude mine, which is essemtially be controlled as a six-disc changer would be.
I'd like to see a unifying plot or plots that arched over series, but they need to leave out the soap opera style relationships and character development.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they even paying attention? At first it was .exe worms in email, then it was network-layer exploits, and then it was spyware, and now in the past week it seems that IE is totally unsafe for any purpose whatsoever.
What's amazing me is why Microsoft isn't *running* to provide patches, for at least XP and 2K, to mitigate this. They're offering non-solutions like disabling Active X and Javascript. Sure, fixing the problem may mean some serious breakage for some in-house software someplace, but does anyone care that Spyware+Malware+IE is rendering their operating systems junk?
Are they even paying attention? Is XP SP2 a magic fix? Is it just too badly broken to even BE fixed?
The governments are a huge part of the problem. In many cases, the "government" is whatever collection of dope dealers, gun runners and paramilitary thugs can gain predominant control over whatever the UN considers to be the government of the country, and this generally includes the post and telecom monopoly, the central bank, and the customs system. It's not that some of them are corrupt, it's that corruption *is* the system.
This will eventually force their governments to pay attention to the issue.
Not really. "The people" are generally just a source of low-end conscripts to be given whatever Enfields are left over from British colonial occupation and thrown at whatever border region is most troublesome this month; they could care less whether they're able to "participate" in the internet economy. Anyone who matters has access to dollar/euro/yen markets overseas, and can buy what they want.
If eventually they make "the world" pissed off enough (ie, European and American central banks ban wire transfers), they'll just hang a couple of wanted "terrorists" out to dry (typically for being behind on their protection payments) for western military interests and use it as leverage to get back in the game.
That was the first thing I thought of. Is the judge going to force the original ISP to stop advertising the summary of its net block and force it to advertise "around" the block being forced portable, even if it leaves the people on new, stubbier blocks with possibly less advantageous routing paths?
Is it going to force a new ISP to advertise the chunk being made portable?
It just strikes me as one of those things that makes no sense and requires some blank court order that applies to anyone running a backbone agree to.
It seems most similar to an electricity customer demanding that it gets its electricity from a specific plant, even though they are moving to a region that cannot be served from that plant.
Wasn't part of the "attraction" of ActiveX that it gave applets a "normal" Windows user interface, and not the relatively crippled UI that people were experiencing around that time with Java applets?
The Color 8500 series had EFI Fiery chips (complete with logo) all over the formatter board.
Given the dominance of a few major Japanese companies in the entire xerography space, it wouldn't surprise me if HP was getting a 2 year exclusive on a third-party engine/formatter design, throwing an exclusive HP case on it and calling it a day. Even the HP NICs have someone else's embedded OS and NIC hardware, although the board layout and firmware may actually be theirs.
HP still makes some decent printers, even if they're just repackaging someone else's print engine -- we have an HP5500 color printer that runs circles around a 2 year old Canon CLC5000, and several of our HP 8100 B&W printers have engine page counts in the millions with only consumables (fuser, toner, pickup rollers) that have needed replacement.
I think they make enough money from printers that people working there from the "old" HP haven't been replaced by outsource-everthing MBAs who only care about 3 month profitability and cost containment.
But overall, their biggest problem seems to be that the "invent" moniker they're so fond of doesn't apply to HP anymore. It's all about the HP label being slapped on someone else's invention.
Trying to stop technological processes in the pursuit of extra jobs is pointless, because it will hold back the economy in general. Would we be better you think haveing a blacksmith make car parts by hand in his small workshop, or can we do things better with a robot with ±0.01mm tolerance.
Who says that letting the market dictate its own future necessarily means "progress"?
Let's say that blacksmiths make car parts by hand in small workshops; there are millions of blacksmiths, but few cars because they are expensive due to the labor-intensive manufacturing. The implication? Several orders of magnitude less pollution. A population that walks more than it rides, isn't morbidly obese, and doesn't tax the healthcare system. A middle east that still hates themselves, but doesn't have a couple of trillion dollars worth of foreign weapons to kill themselves and us with.
IANA wireless expert, but isn't one of the annoying gotchas of 802.11g that the presence of a B client drops all connected nodes down to B speeds?
If I'm remembering that right, then what you're experiencing may not be a lack of standards uptake -- you could be connecting to a ton of 802.11g stations, but somebody's got a B card running.
[ring][ring]
Them: "Hi, I'm Tyrone, and I'm calling from the $Police_Fire_Charity. Did you know that $Police_Fire personnel are great guys and don't any benefits at all? How would you like to help?"
Me: "Well, Tyrone, I've already donated this year, three times so far and I plan to give again in the fall."
Them: "Mr. $Mispronounced_Lastname, you've been giving to one of those other charities. We represent the real $Policy_Fire_Charity -- how about helping us out with $20?"
Me: "No, no, I'm positive I've donated three times already. I even have the cancelled checks. Let's see here, this big one's made out to "Hennepin County", the other to "Minnesota Revenue Service" and the third and largest to "Internal Revenue Service." I'm sure that all of those donations cover all the money I'm giving to law enforcement."
The rest boils down to an amusing argument with the high school dropout on the other end of the line about whose benefits are better, his (none), mine, or the cops. I'm actually pretty sure mine are better than both, but the cops around here sure get to retire on a nice pension before I do.
We write software, and we have our own jargon for describing that process. You can like it or not - we really don't care what you think.
Well, that nicely encapsulates it -- redefine the terms, eliminate the problem and ignore those that challenge the misuse of language.
What's next, will you demand that doctors use plain english when talking to one another?
Sure, if they redfine "sick" to only include illnesses they know about and can cure.
...to my home voice number? In the middle of the night? It's weird -- I get two within 15 minutes from UNAVAILABLE, the third one has a number (which I can't call to -- assuming a non-answering PRI/DSS trunk), and the fourth attempt is back to unavailable.
I've had this happen for two nights running. I could hook up the modem and answer it, but I'm worried that even accepting the call will hook me up for even more overnight FAX spam. I hoping that I might get one more night of it and then they'll give up since they never get a FAX answer.
Sorry, but this sounds like engineering doublespeak and QA ass-covering. By the most basic definition of 'defect' and 'bug', bugs are defects, and zero defect software should have zero bugs. The only thing that does make sense is the assertion that some bugs aren't necessary destructive or contributory to malfunction.
Redefining 'zero defect' to not mean 'free from bugs' is like redefining 'zero pregnancies' such that a class of pregnant women aren't really pregnant.
You're presuming that spam "business", such as it is, is actually like any other mail order business, where you send them money and then they send you a product, and that the business has the same kinds of overhead costs as any other business.
First of all, their product costs are near zero; remember, there's not really a pill that makes your penis huge. Sugarpills are pennies per thousand. Add a B&W label and a plastic bottle, and you have a product with a net cost of about $0.50.
Second of all, this assume you get sent a 'product' at all. Who are most of these clowns buying drugs going to call if they spend $100 on x.a.n.a.x from and get nothing? The cops? "Ahh, yeah, I mail-ordered some Vicodin and I didn't get anything....no, I don't have a perscription to take to Walgreen's....uhh, I'm under arrest? Shopping for narcotics without a prescription is a felony?"
Thirdly, where do you think your credit/bank/identity information goes when you "buy" something from a spammer? Into their encrypted database at their multimillion dollar secure hosting center staffed with highly trained, background-checked professionals? No, it gets resold to scam artists and theives who bilk your cards and then sell what's left of your identity to pros who work it over even harder.
So for every $100 "sale" that even ships a product you have about $95 in profit, another $500 in credit card fraud (double/triple charged), an identity resellable to identity theives for maybe $1000 if you do it quick before the victim cancels the card (which can then be bilked for another $1000 or more if you can do some quality ID theft).
So there you have it -- $2k pretty easily from a single sale. How many of those do you have to make before it's considered profitable? 3? 10?
OK, my wish is that someone combined screen with the built-in FreeBSD window(1) application. I like screen better, but the idea of making overlapping windows can be appealing, especially if you need to see multiple output simultaneously. I find window's UI to be horrid, so I don't really use it.
After that gets done, I'd like the resulting application merged into my favorite shell so that my logins automatically had screen's functionality. I particularly like the nohup aspect, where I can start a process and get back to it if I disconnect.
A quick look at the screen manpage indicates you might be able to kludge screen as your login "shell" (having screen spawn your actual shell), although it would create the problem of reconnecting to existing screen sessions instead of creating new ones. Maybe the -R or -x option behavior could be changed to show a list of available sessions if more than one existed and create a new one if none exists.
But how much interaction and hands-on can you *really* get at a trade show? At the few that I've been to, the best it might get is a backroom at a booth or maybe a hotel meeting room with a more in-depth setup.
Even then, you're unlikely to be buying from the trade show rep, there's likely a sales office/person that represents your geographical area, or maybe you even have to go through a reseller.
Sometimes you get weird inspirations at trade shows simply because there's so much to see, but often it just seems like an excuse for an all-expenses junket on the company dime.
And as we all know, those aren't part of the new economy.
With BBC America available on a number of cable systems (it's on the digital tier here in the Twin Cities on T-W Cable), I kind of doubt we'd ever get a BBC UK feed, just the recycled BBC stuff, spliced with thousands of annoying commercials.
That's an excellent idea! Data pollution of gator and other spyware would be excellent; they would either have to change their format, obsoleteing thousands of infested PCs, or just live with bogus data.
You have to presume that it's far more common than anyone would suspect, and I think not only are the spammers/ISPs linked this way, but the sleazeballs behind the spam likely have similar arrangements with banks and credit card processors.
Which is why we need a RICO investigation of spamming. As long as it's treated by law enforcement as merely unpopular, the otherwise legitimate providers of services necessary for spam (ISPs, banks) will just take extra money -- over OR under the table -- to provide them those services.
A few high-profile prosecutions of the entire "spam team" (the spam mail sender, the spamvertized business owner, and all the "legit" business people that enabled them) could scare legit businesses to the point where they won't get involved with spammers for a price that spammers can afford to pay.
If you push the costs spammers have to pay high enough, it won't be profitable and no one will do it.
Shoot, I only need one baggie and it only has to be filled with a couple of grams. Sounds like they grabbed the wrong baggy.
To totally sidetrack, and leave animal analogies behind, I simply think that corporate power is being alowed to run amok, the current trend towards more and bigger mergers is probably a bigger threat to capitalism than communism ever dreamed of being.
It was once said that capitalists would sell the rope the socialists would use to hang them.
I think we'll just sell it to ourselves now.
I have a friend who works there who I just saw for the first time since college. I asked him what he's worked on since he's been there (you can count to his employee number on your fingers and toes), and he said one of the things was internal code to optimize the bandwidth of links.
From our conversation, I suspect that a lot of the really hard work is optimizing their use of networks and clustering. PageRank is a neat idea, but without an efficient distributed clustering system to make it work you run into problems.
They're sick of being the errand boys of the RIAA and MPAA, for one.
But you have to presume that somebody needs to "make money" off of DMCA changes, or nobody will support it. It's sad, but simple.
I was more concerned with not getting the windows smashed than features. The single-disc replacement was cheap, about $250 installed, and I got to keep my tape deck.
Plus I think it helps the resale of the car to keep it all factory-original components.
I have a '99 Accord V6. It came with an AM/FM/Tapedeck which could control a CD player (single-disc or changer). I put the single-disc in-dash player in, but now I couldn't use the IceLink, since my CD control is already taken. I think..
They claim it doesn't compete with in-dash CD players, but that would seem to exclude mine, which is essemtially be controlled as a six-disc changer would be.
I'd like to see a unifying plot or plots that arched over series, but they need to leave out the soap opera style relationships and character development.