Wired posted this story yesterday on MS' patch for Outlook that would have killed this outbreak like a big ol' bottle of Envirochem on a teaspoon of e. coli. But the problem is the average Win9x user doesn't update their machine, ever...
I'm saved from all this, I never even installed Outlook or it's evil cousin Express. Nothing like unchecking the box in the installer...
The cure to human engineering based virii is a good spanking to those who open the attachments...
I agree with the points made but you have to admit AT&T has its flaws. I once asked their tech support people the name of the mail server. They told me to just type 'mail' in the server box. I told them that wasn't going to work and that I needed the real server name, they said they didn't support anything but Outlook so I should switch to it. When I was done laughing, I called the provider they took over, Mediaone, a skilled bunch of dudes and dudettes, and had an answer in 15 seconds.
Outlook, eh? As I see it, it's their network, let them clean up after a Sircam outbreak...
I believe Discover Magazine had a thing a couple years ago on what if animals could be placed in the Olympics. They waived such requirments as having to stay in water and allowed things to be scaled up (or down) to human size. The overall winner was, if I remember correctly, the mantis shrimp.
That's something to fear. I've snorkled around these buggers, and they're a mean bunch. An antisocial, which is good in this case, shrimp the size of a hamster... A tail that can pop the walls out of an aquarium, a lower jaw that can snap your fingers off, and an attitude like you wouldn't believe...
This was a chick with bad eyesight. The picutre of the guy could have been from anywhere. She just recognized it. The fact that it was in the context of the facial criminal recognition system is what triggered this. If the caption had been "Random guy sitting on bench" nothing would have come of it. The scary thing is that just being on this camera brands you suspicious, even if it looks at everyone walking by. People assume you're up to no good if you get singled out, which is why the system is flawed. Assumption of innocence is everything.
Leave your stuff at home if it's so damn annoying! Why in hell would you need to carry around all these stupid gadgets? Honestly, give me a reason. What, your glove compartment isn't hip enough? You can't seem to cram one more thing into your pockets? Give me a break. You have to have some kind of mental illness to need all this crap. Leave it at work! Leave it at home! Leave it in the store!
Because that would be all that your bond certificates would be worth. Bonds have to be backed by someone, usually someone big like a bank or investment brokerage firm or a small town in central Pennsylvania. Huge companies put out bonds to do big things, like build power plants, not little things like make software. Software projects aren't nearly as much money. It's usually a guarantee that the big stuff the bonds were issued to fund will be built, barring tremendous fraud or disaster. Steel and concrete holds things up better than code.
A bond issue backed by software is nuts. How is the company going to pay back the bonds in X years or months? Most, and yes, you know I'm right, software projects wither and die or make little money. To get people to invest in bonds with a crap rating, which software bonds would have, you need to promise massive returns in a short period. I know software engineers are good at promising things they can't deliver, but this is another story.
Now I may be taking the minority opinion, but this actually doesn't sound like a big deal. Just because the computer loses, say, 120 kilos of U-235 or something does not make the uranium disappear. To this to be a problem, somebody has to actually steal the materials. I don't think that anyone out to steal weapon's grade nuke fixin's are going to be so concerned about a software glitch or rely upon one.
Also, most nuclear materials can be tracked to their point of manufacture even after they've been assembled into a bomb and detonated. You find the core, you can analyze the left overs and know which plant, US or Russian or god knows who, manufactured the stuff. So if somebody stole material that was recovered, it would be a one time deal.
Finally, if theft and purchase of nuclear materials are so common, the plans so easy to attain, customs so easy to bypass, why hasn't some "rogue nation" detonated a bomb in downtown Cleveland? or Jerusalem? or Kennebunkport? Shipments have only been intercepted a few times, no terrorists have ever threatened to use nukes, and the only 2 countries that we (the US of Absolute Stupidity) have a major beef with, N. Korea and Iraq, that claim to be developing nukes haven't. What are we worrying about? Oh, and the greatest threat isn't theft, it's assembly. The response time on the guards at our main plant is fast enough to prevent escape, but not fast enough to stop someone from barricading themselves inside, dragging out some material and all the fixin's to a workshop and whipping up a Grade-A 100 megaton party popper. Who needs to escape? Turn the entire mid-west into a glass parking lot.
What good is WinWhatevertheheckthey'reusingnow if buying a copy isn't good enough for MS? Now you have to buy it, register it, then proove to them that you are NOT stealing it. Maybe that's why you payed for the liscencse in the first place, so that they wouldn't bother you. Goes to show that if you do things by the book you just get screwed.
Don't forget, the easier to build an e-commerce site is to use, the easier it is to get screwed. Gee,
Mr. Jeff Bozos, Internet Get Rich Quicker: "NT is quick out of the box and everyone uses it, well I should put my E-Business on it. Teehee, install and forget? Keen!"
Urie the 3l1t3 Russian Haxor: "Haha! What is this? SP3? Time for me to beink getting pizza, with some person other than me's kredit kards! Da, is good!"
Bozos: "Whuzzis? I don't know nothin' about upgradin' no servers and what is this here, 'Securitee Upduhate Neheeded?' This computer stuff makes me thirsty, what was the button Homer pressed?"
Urie: "Yes, I would like 350 large pizzas, with everything, and borscht for 200. Nyet? No borscht.... is okay! Could you be makink design out of anchovies on pizza? Da? Could it be beingk a [mumble mumble] Be deliverink it to Mr. Jeff Bozos at junglebooks.com for me. Da, is good."
What will Jeff do when he discovers that his
valuable credit card database has been stolen? Will he call the cops? Notify his customers? Eat the anchovie pizza? We'll find out next time on, "As the Tech Bubble Bursts!"
Okay, I know this is not the best forum for this, but who the hell here has EVER, in their ENTIRE LIVES, purchased a CD single? I mean, it's called radio people. If you want top 40, tune in to any station. Jinkies, so has anybody bought one measly little 3 dollar single? I haven't.
Now that Microsoft has told everyone that open source is unAmerican and unpatriotic, it is my duty to follow their orders. Let me just reformat my box right now, I don't want to offend anyone in Redmond. I better go buy myself a copy of another operating system and pay every year for the privilege of having the most American operating system, like the true patriot that I am
Yes, voter registration rolls are public and anyone can get them, as every campaign worth its two cents does. The only information on those rolls are name, address, maybe phone number, and party affiliation. No record is given as to whom you voted for, when you voted, when you registered, or anything else. At the polls, on election day, anyone can grab the book of registered voters and see who has voted that day so far. It's fun. Go at 7:50 and watch the lines, then wait till 8:00 and see how many registered voters decided to let other people control their lives. The campaign I work on has a simple agenda, if they're a Dem, they WILL vote, no matter what we have to do. If they are a Republicanian or Independentanese, election day is Nov. 8th.
"If you don't turn on to politics, politics will turn on you."
That's the smartest thing to come out of Ralph Nader's mouth in oh, 25 years. Nader is a great guy, but not presidential material and he doesn't have a chance, but he tells it like it is. Don't vote for him this year, he doesn't want your vote, he wants you to think. Not about intellectual property or income taxes, but your own life. So do it. Put your vote in the place that will get what you want. Forget about Open Source and Linux and DeCSS and the DMCA for five minutes and think about real people. Dubya has killed almost 150 people in Texas. How many have been killed by the MPAA? This election isn't about "Geek" issues, it's about people, and people will benefit from a president who isn't a murderer, isn't an idiot, isn't an addict, and is willing to protect the freedoms that count. You can have my fucking MP3s, you can shutdown Napster, you can block DeCSS, I don't need them. But give me liberty, the right to walk down the streets and say what I want, to not live in fear of violence, to not have my life cut short by the air I breathe or the water I drink, to make my own decisions about my health and my body, to do some good around the world. Get out there, vote. I won't tell you who to vote for here, but I will tell you who I am voting for. Politics is a game, and I'm putting my voice behind the blue square. I don't love Al Gore, but he will speak for me, for my rights, my freedoms. The country is changing, don't let it revert to what it was.
If you don't vote, stop whining...
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
Napster gets an injunction thrown on it.
People whine.
The MPAA goes after DeCSS.
People complain.
Microsoft uses its influence to get unfiar treatment in the court.
People cry out.
George Bush pulls ahead in the polls with a position that supports all three of these things.
Kind of quiet around here lately...
I'm not telling you to go vote for the hell of it. Just get out there. Who cares if Al Gore invented the internet, (He never said that by the way.) he's not an IT professional, he is trying to lead the ultimate open source project here. American government. By the people, for the people, so where are you?
Whoever is writing these things over at MS must be screwing with his superiors or something. This can't be serious. Forget the whole infringement debate, but now users shouldn't go to a store and buy Windows at top dollar? What ever happened to Linux, OS2, and heck DOS? Does MS think all computers should come with Win98 and anyone who wants to change that is going to "obviously" install an illegal copy of an OS? The marketing and legal people don't need help, they need to stop putting out these press releases to fuck with people's heads and get them thinking that maybe there isn't anyone in charge over in Redmond.
This goes to show that stupid security holes aren't for Microsoft anymore. Of course, is this Sun's problem, or Netscape's? What's next, an email that runs this script and posts the contents of your hard drive on the web? Tehe, the joy of it.
DNA as a storage media is interesting because it is already very well understood, (Well, the parts that we use at least and synthesis and translation/transcription) but using it has a few challenges. One, although you can pump out a custom sequence with a desktop sequencer, the accuracy is not guaranteed. Imagine that you CDRW randomly dumped 15MB of data every time you burnt a CD. Another problem is storage. DNA requires specific conditions or it starts breaking down, and even in an ideal environment is starts to cook. The human body is constantly repairing its DNA, but we have cellular mechanisms to do that. DNA stored within a cell, such as a simple bacterium, is a concept, but do you really want you data escaping the lab? And the contents of you hard drive probably don't code for any useful proteins... Of course, DNA is easy to copy and propagate, just fragile and slow to build. The idea of some guy popping his open source software into a PCR machine and making 1x10^12 copies is cool.
With all of these media mergers, eventually one or two companies will control every media outlet and the content it provides. No more discrepancies in the news, everything will agree, nothing bad happened today. THa tlittle war over in Africa, it isn't "good" news, so who needs to know? Want to hear what is really goging on, go those subversive, low budget, non-flashy blink tag free "independent" outlets, such as NPR, which is almost broke, or PBS, which is also strapped for cash. Already, the mainstream media only reports a small fraction of what is really happening out there in places other than TVLand, so take that one step further. Don't worry, be happy, those 13 million dead (insert non-white, poor, non-christian, far away) group here weren't on your buddy list....
Slashdot Mirror
I'm saved from all this, I never even installed Outlook or it's evil cousin Express. Nothing like unchecking the box in the installer... The cure to human engineering based virii is a good spanking to those who open the attachments...
I agree with the points made but you have to admit AT&T has its flaws. I once asked their tech support people the name of the mail server. They told me to just type 'mail' in the server box. I told them that wasn't going to work and that I needed the real server name, they said they didn't support anything but Outlook so I should switch to it. When I was done laughing, I called the provider they took over, Mediaone, a skilled bunch of dudes and dudettes, and had an answer in 15 seconds.
Outlook, eh? As I see it, it's their network, let them clean up after a Sircam outbreak...
I believe Discover Magazine had a thing a couple years ago on what if animals could be placed in the Olympics. They waived such requirments as having to stay in water and allowed things to be scaled up (or down) to human size. The overall winner was, if I remember correctly, the mantis shrimp.
That's something to fear. I've snorkled around these buggers, and they're a mean bunch. An antisocial, which is good in this case, shrimp the size of a hamster... A tail that can pop the walls out of an aquarium, a lower jaw that can snap your fingers off, and an attitude like you wouldn't believe...
Slashdot is turning into Everything 3! Run for the hills, the node police are going to hunt me here too!
Those 220,000 new webservers that were just counted this month...
By Incidents.org
Code Red was really MS's way of getting a boost in the server market. Stand up and be counted, IIS servers, 100 threads at a time...
This was a chick with bad eyesight. The picutre of the guy could have been from anywhere. She just recognized it. The fact that it was in the context of the facial criminal recognition system is what triggered this. If the caption had been "Random guy sitting on bench" nothing would have come of it. The scary thing is that just being on this camera brands you suspicious, even if it looks at everyone walking by. People assume you're up to no good if you get singled out, which is why the system is flawed. Assumption of innocence is everything.
Leave your stuff at home if it's so damn annoying! Why in hell would you need to carry around all these stupid gadgets? Honestly, give me a reason. What, your glove compartment isn't hip enough? You can't seem to cram one more thing into your pockets? Give me a break. You have to have some kind of mental illness to need all this crap. Leave it at work! Leave it at home! Leave it in the store!
Because that would be all that your bond certificates would be worth. Bonds have to be backed by someone, usually someone big like a bank or investment brokerage firm or a small town in central Pennsylvania. Huge companies put out bonds to do big things, like build power plants, not little things like make software. Software projects aren't nearly as much money. It's usually a guarantee that the big stuff the bonds were issued to fund will be built, barring tremendous fraud or disaster. Steel and concrete holds things up better than code.
A bond issue backed by software is nuts. How is the company going to pay back the bonds in X years or months? Most, and yes, you know I'm right, software projects wither and die or make little money. To get people to invest in bonds with a crap rating, which software bonds would have, you need to promise massive returns in a short period. I know software engineers are good at promising things they can't deliver, but this is another story.
Now I may be taking the minority opinion, but this actually doesn't sound like a big deal. Just because the computer loses, say, 120 kilos of U-235 or something does not make the uranium disappear. To this to be a problem, somebody has to actually steal the materials. I don't think that anyone out to steal weapon's grade nuke fixin's are going to be so concerned about a software glitch or rely upon one.
Also, most nuclear materials can be tracked to their point of manufacture even after they've been assembled into a bomb and detonated. You find the core, you can analyze the left overs and know which plant, US or Russian or god knows who, manufactured the stuff. So if somebody stole material that was recovered, it would be a one time deal.
Finally, if theft and purchase of nuclear materials are so common, the plans so easy to attain, customs so easy to bypass, why hasn't some "rogue nation" detonated a bomb in downtown Cleveland? or Jerusalem? or Kennebunkport? Shipments have only been intercepted a few times, no terrorists have ever threatened to use nukes, and the only 2 countries that we (the US of Absolute Stupidity) have a major beef with, N. Korea and Iraq, that claim to be developing nukes haven't. What are we worrying about? Oh, and the greatest threat isn't theft, it's assembly. The response time on the guards at our main plant is fast enough to prevent escape, but not fast enough to stop someone from barricading themselves inside, dragging out some material and all the fixin's to a workshop and whipping up a Grade-A 100 megaton party popper. Who needs to escape? Turn the entire mid-west into a glass parking lot.
What good is WinWhatevertheheckthey'reusingnow if buying a copy isn't good enough for MS? Now you have to buy it, register it, then proove to them that you are NOT stealing it. Maybe that's why you payed for the liscencse in the first place, so that they wouldn't bother you. Goes to show that if you do things by the book you just get screwed.
Don't forget, the easier to build an e-commerce site is to use, the easier it is to get screwed. Gee, Mr. Jeff Bozos, Internet Get Rich Quicker: "NT is quick out of the box and everyone uses it, well I should put my E-Business on it. Teehee, install and forget? Keen!" Urie the 3l1t3 Russian Haxor: "Haha! What is this? SP3? Time for me to beink getting pizza, with some person other than me's kredit kards! Da, is good!" Bozos: "Whuzzis? I don't know nothin' about upgradin' no servers and what is this here, 'Securitee Upduhate Neheeded?' This computer stuff makes me thirsty, what was the button Homer pressed?" Urie: "Yes, I would like 350 large pizzas, with everything, and borscht for 200. Nyet? No borscht.... is okay! Could you be makink design out of anchovies on pizza? Da? Could it be beingk a [mumble mumble] Be deliverink it to Mr. Jeff Bozos at junglebooks.com for me. Da, is good." What will Jeff do when he discovers that his valuable credit card database has been stolen? Will he call the cops? Notify his customers? Eat the anchovie pizza? We'll find out next time on, "As the Tech Bubble Bursts!"
Okay, I know this is not the best forum for this, but who the hell here has EVER, in their ENTIRE LIVES, purchased a CD single? I mean, it's called radio people. If you want top 40, tune in to any station. Jinkies, so has anybody bought one measly little 3 dollar single? I haven't.
Now that Microsoft has told everyone that open source is unAmerican and unpatriotic, it is my duty to follow their orders. Let me just reformat my box right now, I don't want to offend anyone in Redmond. I better go buy myself a copy of another operating system and pay every year for the privilege of having the most American operating system, like the true patriot that I am
Yes, voter registration rolls are public and anyone can get them, as every campaign worth its two cents does. The only information on those rolls are name, address, maybe phone number, and party affiliation. No record is given as to whom you voted for, when you voted, when you registered, or anything else. At the polls, on election day, anyone can grab the book of registered voters and see who has voted that day so far. It's fun. Go at 7:50 and watch the lines, then wait till 8:00 and see how many registered voters decided to let other people control their lives. The campaign I work on has a simple agenda, if they're a Dem, they WILL vote, no matter what we have to do. If they are a Republicanian or Independentanese, election day is Nov. 8th.
"If you don't turn on to politics, politics will turn on you."
That's the smartest thing to come out of Ralph Nader's mouth in oh, 25 years. Nader is a great guy, but not presidential material and he doesn't have a chance, but he tells it like it is. Don't vote for him this year, he doesn't want your vote, he wants you to think. Not about intellectual property or income taxes, but your own life. So do it. Put your vote in the place that will get what you want. Forget about Open Source and Linux and DeCSS and the DMCA for five minutes and think about real people. Dubya has killed almost 150 people in Texas. How many have been killed by the MPAA? This election isn't about "Geek" issues, it's about people, and people will benefit from a president who isn't a murderer, isn't an idiot, isn't an addict, and is willing to protect the freedoms that count. You can have my fucking MP3s, you can shutdown Napster, you can block DeCSS, I don't need them. But give me liberty, the right to walk down the streets and say what I want, to not live in fear of violence, to not have my life cut short by the air I breathe or the water I drink, to make my own decisions about my health and my body, to do some good around the world. Get out there, vote. I won't tell you who to vote for here, but I will tell you who I am voting for. Politics is a game, and I'm putting my voice behind the blue square. I don't love Al Gore, but he will speak for me, for my rights, my freedoms. The country is changing, don't let it revert to what it was.
Stop Bush 2000
GW Bush.com
Napster gets an injunction thrown on it.
People whine.
The MPAA goes after DeCSS.
People complain.
Microsoft uses its influence to get unfiar treatment in the court.
People cry out.
George Bush pulls ahead in the polls with a position that supports all three of these things.
Kind of quiet around here lately...
I'm not telling you to go vote for the hell of it. Just get out there. Who cares if Al Gore invented the internet, (He never said that by the way.) he's not an IT professional, he is trying to lead the ultimate open source project here. American government. By the people, for the people, so where are you?
Whoever is writing these things over at MS must be screwing with his superiors or something. This can't be serious. Forget the whole infringement debate, but now users shouldn't go to a store and buy Windows at top dollar? What ever happened to Linux, OS2, and heck DOS? Does MS think all computers should come with Win98 and anyone who wants to change that is going to "obviously" install an illegal copy of an OS? The marketing and legal people don't need help, they need to stop putting out these press releases to fuck with people's heads and get them thinking that maybe there isn't anyone in charge over in Redmond.
This goes to show that stupid security holes aren't for Microsoft anymore. Of course, is this Sun's problem, or Netscape's? What's next, an email that runs this script and posts the contents of your hard drive on the web? Tehe, the joy of it.
DNA as a storage media is interesting because it is already very well understood, (Well, the parts that we use at least and synthesis and translation/transcription) but using it has a few challenges. One, although you can pump out a custom sequence with a desktop sequencer, the accuracy is not guaranteed. Imagine that you CDRW randomly dumped 15MB of data every time you burnt a CD. Another problem is storage. DNA requires specific conditions or it starts breaking down, and even in an ideal environment is starts to cook. The human body is constantly repairing its DNA, but we have cellular mechanisms to do that. DNA stored within a cell, such as a simple bacterium, is a concept, but do you really want you data escaping the lab? And the contents of you hard drive probably don't code for any useful proteins... Of course, DNA is easy to copy and propagate, just fragile and slow to build. The idea of some guy popping his open source software into a PCR machine and making 1x10^12 copies is cool.
With all of these media mergers, eventually one or two companies will control every media outlet and the content it provides. No more discrepancies in the news, everything will agree, nothing bad happened today. THa tlittle war over in Africa, it isn't "good" news, so who needs to know? Want to hear what is really goging on, go those subversive, low budget, non-flashy blink tag free "independent" outlets, such as NPR, which is almost broke, or PBS, which is also strapped for cash. Already, the mainstream media only reports a small fraction of what is really happening out there in places other than TVLand, so take that one step further. Don't worry, be happy, those 13 million dead (insert non-white, poor, non-christian, far away) group here weren't on your buddy list....