I know the article is about spam sent to AOL users. The parent post was complaining about spam sent from AOL users with spam proxy infected systems. Blocking home IPs will stop that.
You're damn right. Try explaining to a newbie the difference between ISP, web browser and web site when they complain their Internet doesn't work.
Techie: Try going to the web page 'www.blah.com'. Newbie: How do I do that? Technie: Run Internet Explorer and type 'www.blah.com' into the address line. Newbie: But I don't use Internet Explorer, I use Earthlink.
"you will probably want to run a wire round the maximum extents of your lawn and have a hall-effect or similar sensor"
The commercially available robot lawnmowers use this. Lay the wire around the perimeter of your lawn and around obstacles like flowerbeds. It takes the guesswork out of edge detection.
Not exactly grand theft. He's selling information not stolen property. This would be more like industrial espionage. In past cases people were charged with wire fraud and theft of trade secrets.
That's easy to block if you run your own mail server. All AOL dialups have hostnames ending with ipt.aol.com. AOL's mail servers have hostnames ending with mx.aol.com. Deny hosts from ipt.aol.com and problem solved.
The article says he's a software engineer at AOL with inside knowledge of their computer systems. It doesn't say that he was directly responsible for the customer database systems, but even if not, it can't be that hard to dump the names out. Any sysadmin is in a position of great trust. They could walk off with all your data on their servers, but they're trusted not to.
"Several years ago some white box OEMs were selling overclocked systems as though they contianed the rated chip."
It happened to my mom. She bought a Pentium 120 system from some mom and pop white box store. Years later when I upgraded it I took it apart and found the CPU was an overclocked P100. They even covered the bottom of the chip with a warranty void if removed sticker to stop you from looking, those fuckers. The rest of the box was a piece of shit too. All the cheapest no name parts you could imagine. Still, that was many years ago. With multiplier locking, it's pretty obvious if anyone tried to sell an overclocked CPU. The only people Intel is stopping with this are the overclocking enthusiasts, not the fraudsters.
"Compatibility is an important issue, but at some point shouldn't the ten-year-old programs run in a virtual environment separate from the OS?"
It's called the NT virtual DOS machine (NTVDM) and it's been part of Windows NT since at least 4.0. It does have protected memory space, but it doesn't do any sandboxing of the process from the filesystem or network interfaces.
The compatibility problems they're talking about are with more recent Win32 software and specifically with the RPC interface which they're locking down for SP2.
They used a leading edge panel from the Enterprise for an earlier test too, but it was a fiberglass panel. The last test was with a real carbon-carbon panel taken from the Atlantis. Link here.
The part that failed on the Columbia wasn't the ceramic heat tiles, it was the wing leading edge made from carbon-carbon composite. The only other things I know of that use that material are brake rotors for Formula 1 cars. It withstands higher temperatures than the tiles and covers the nose and wing leading edges. It's also very expensive and difficult to produce, even more so than the tiles. Apparently, they're so rare and expensive they didn't even have a spare one on which to test fire the foam during the accident investigation. The RCC panel used in the test came from the Shuttle Atlantis.
Has anyone tested if an administrator login is needed to install this DRM software? CD autorun is convenient for things like home theater PCs. If it's safe to leave it on for non-administrator accounts that would be nice, but as a vector for malware, CD autorun is just another huge gaping hole in Windows security. The only reason it's been neglected for so long is that in the past CDs have come from trusted sources. Well no more.
That's true. With evenly matched cars, it's impossible to overtake on the track. You'd need a car significantly faster than the one in front. I think the big reason for that is the high corner speeds and short braking distances from aerodynamic downforce. If you look at races with low downforce cars and motorcycles, there's a lot of passing. Nascar stock cars are big, fat and slow on a road course, but it's fun to watch because there's passing and you can really see the cars sliding around. The last few years MotoGP racing was dominated by Valentino Rossi and Honda, but the races were still close and not runaway wins. Now with Rossi switching to the slower Yamaha (he needed the challenge) this season has some great close racing. If you're bored of the F1 parade watch MotoGP! You don't know what you're missing.
True, as always it's the honest customer that suffers. This will just encourage people to back up the disc as soon as they unwrap it. 8 hours?!? That's less time than a one day rental at the video store.
"Perhaps just creating the appropriate hooks for low-level access would be more appropriate?"
Microsoft did this already, specifically with disk defrag software. For NT 4.0, Microsoft and Executive software, makers of Diskeeper, developed an undocumented API for low level disk access applicable to defrag software. They eventually disclosed this API to Symantec to use in their Speedisk product, but it remained undocumented.
I had wired Ethernet at home before wireless, and it really restricts where you can put your computers. Sure it would be nice to live in a geek house wired with CAT5 but I don't. I ran CAT5 along the baseboard and can't cross doorways unless I run them over the door jamb. I have a PC that's barely 10 ft from the switch, but it might take 50ft or more of cable to wire it up by going around the room. The USB adapter barely cost more than a premade 100ft cable. Laptops are especially a hassle with wired Ethernet. Say if you want to put it on your coffee table which is usually in the center of the room. The hub or switch would usually be on the side of the room. So you have a guaranteed trip hazard right there. Hope you don't have kids running around there. Trip on the wire, and it might just pull the laptop off the table.
I've had my complaints too. Windows 2000 with Dell TM1150 card and Netgear MR814V2 drops the connection intermittently. Web surfing is fine, but copying from Windows file shares is impossible. I'll try stopping the Wireless zero conf service since I haven't heard of that before.
There'll be a lot of "learn the rules" software out there
Yeah, I remember one ca. 1997 called simply Drivers Ed or something like that. No vehicle dynamics at all, just follow the rules of the road.
Like previous posters, I'd also heartily recommend titles like Gran Turismo 3, Burnout 1/2, Driver, GTA 3/VC
I agree with those and I'd add Grand Prix Legends and Netkar. Netkar is an interesting story. It's a free (beer) simulator created by one guy in his spare time. It's obviously a labor of love. The physics are modelled to an obsessive level of detail (even gearbox synchros!). Unfortunately while these two are very accurate simulators, they're very very hard to drive. It's hard to get a feeling of speed from a computer screen, and there's no feel of the forces from accelerating and cornering.
It's not going to happen in the US. The insurance industry has a huge influence on auto safety policy, and they don't want advanced/high performance driver training. They really want to dumb us down into sheep. One of the claims I've heard from their safety propaganda is that for example police officers are highly trained in vehicle handling, and their accident rates (off duty) are much higher than average.
The auto makers are happy to oblige by idiotproofing the cars. Powerful RWD like BMWs and Mercedes can be difficult to drive at the limit and in slippery conditions. It also happens BMW and Mercedes have also gone hog wild on electronic driver aids. It started with antilock brakes and traction control. Then came stability control. Yaw sensors combined with braking one corner of the car make it impossible to spin the car no matter how ham fisted you are with the controls. Now BMW has active steering, variable ratio steering based on vehicle speed. Mercedes has cruise control that maintains distance with the car in front and brakes that boost themselves in an emergency stop, the latter because they found novice drivers don't step on the brakes as hard as they could in a panic stop.
Don't get me wrong. A lot of these features are good things, but we are getting to the point where if you build an idiotproof car, the world will build a better idiot.
The size of the installed userbase isn't as much of a problem with portable players. On my PDA with flash memory, I recode to a lower bitrate anyway to fit more music. With a 2Ghz CPU it's practical to recode the bitrate while you copy. A 96Kbit/s audio file can sound crappy, but it's passable for portable use, and 96K vorbis sounds a little better than 96K MP3 to my untrained ear. To me it's a disposable file. I wouldn't bother exchanging it with anybody.
Multi GB hard disk players don't have the file size constraints of flash players, but aren't built for exchanging files either. Easy to copy songs to them, but hard to copy songs off them.
Re:Actually...Convergence happened ALREADY
on
Big Bang of Convergence
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Videogame consoles are nowadays video and music players too, with the XBox and PlayStation2."
Yes, they both play DVDs and CDs, but I hardly know anybody who use them that way because the value just isn't there, at least in this generation. The DVD playback kits for Xbox and PS2 cost $30. You get a remote control, infrared dongle, and the DVD decoder. Back when DVD players cost $200-300 it may have been worth it, but now you can get a cheap DVD player for $40, maybe even $30. Price points as much as features and convenience will determine which converged devices catch on or not.
IE will send your local OS credentials (username, password hash) via NTLM depending on your Security zones. The default is that sites in the Intranet zone will be sent them automatically and sites in the Internet zone will prompt for name and password. That sounds good and all, but a quick read of the Bugtraq archives will show that people are finding holes in this all the time. If you can get some piece of web content to load in the Intranet zone or even worse the My Computer zone, it's game over. The reason for the My Computer zone is that Internet Explorer == Windows Explorer and the web browser == the file manager.
Still, the whole complaint of entering your password again is tiny compared to the risks of IE. It's the *same* password that people use to log in. It's not like they have to remember a *new* password which is understandably a much bigger complaint.
Premium cable channels like Showtime, HBO and pay per view have no ads.
This is just like the difference between basic and premium cable. It's worth it to AOL to keep basic AIM features like text IM free. They might break even or make a little money on the ads, as long as most people don't use an ad blocker like Deadaim or a 3rd party client like Gaim or Trillian. What they're charging for is premium services like video conferencing and voice calls to POTS phones. People will pay money for these services.
A heat pipe can have two pipes too, but the tubes are usually oriented vertically so the vapor from the phase change coolant rises to the radiator. This might be a pumped system.
It's more than just the mere fact of the backdoor. It's the amateur way they coded the backdoor. They found the strings in plaintext after gunzipping the image file. And to further insult our intelligence, they changed the password and left it coded the same way thinking we're too dumb to find the new one. There's no obfuscation at all except for the gzipping. Linux and open source make no difference here. You can at least give some credit to a well hidden backdoor. What's disturbing is their naive, amateur approach to security.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the article is about spam sent to AOL users. The parent post was complaining about spam sent from AOL users with spam proxy infected systems. Blocking home IPs will stop that.
You're damn right. Try explaining to a newbie the difference between ISP, web browser and web site when they complain their Internet doesn't work.
Techie: Try going to the web page 'www.blah.com'.
Newbie: How do I do that?
Technie: Run Internet Explorer and type 'www.blah.com' into the address line.
Newbie: But I don't use Internet Explorer, I use Earthlink.
and so on and so on....
"you will probably want to run a wire round the maximum extents of your lawn and have a hall-effect or similar sensor"
The commercially available robot lawnmowers use this. Lay the wire around the perimeter of your lawn and around obstacles like flowerbeds. It takes the guesswork out of edge detection.
Not exactly grand theft. He's selling information not stolen property. This would be more like industrial espionage. In past cases people were charged with wire fraud and theft of trade secrets.
That's easy to block if you run your own mail server. All AOL dialups have hostnames ending with ipt.aol.com. AOL's mail servers have hostnames ending with mx.aol.com. Deny hosts from ipt.aol.com and problem solved.
The article says he's a software engineer at AOL with inside knowledge of their computer systems. It doesn't say that he was directly responsible for the customer database systems, but even if not, it can't be that hard to dump the names out. Any sysadmin is in a position of great trust. They could walk off with all your data on their servers, but they're trusted not to.
"Several years ago some white box OEMs were selling overclocked systems as though they contianed the rated chip."
It happened to my mom. She bought a Pentium 120 system from some mom and pop white box store. Years later when I upgraded it I took it apart and found the CPU was an overclocked P100. They even covered the bottom of the chip with a warranty void if removed sticker to stop you from looking, those fuckers. The rest of the box was a piece of shit too. All the cheapest no name parts you could imagine. Still, that was many years ago. With multiplier locking, it's pretty obvious if anyone tried to sell an overclocked CPU. The only people Intel is stopping with this are the overclocking enthusiasts, not the fraudsters.
"Compatibility is an important issue, but at some point shouldn't the ten-year-old programs run in a virtual environment separate from the OS?"
It's called the NT virtual DOS machine (NTVDM) and it's been part of Windows NT since at least 4.0. It does have protected memory space, but it doesn't do any sandboxing of the process from the filesystem or network interfaces.
The compatibility problems they're talking about are with more recent Win32 software and specifically with the RPC interface which they're locking down for SP2.
They used a leading edge panel from the Enterprise for an earlier test too, but it was a fiberglass panel. The last test was with a real carbon-carbon panel taken from the Atlantis. Link here.
The part that failed on the Columbia wasn't the ceramic heat tiles, it was the wing leading edge made from carbon-carbon composite. The only other things I know of that use that material are brake rotors for Formula 1 cars. It withstands higher temperatures than the tiles and covers the nose and wing leading edges. It's also very expensive and difficult to produce, even more so than the tiles. Apparently, they're so rare and expensive they didn't even have a spare one on which to test fire the foam during the accident investigation. The RCC panel used in the test came from the Shuttle Atlantis.
Has anyone tested if an administrator login is needed to install this DRM software? CD autorun is convenient for things like home theater PCs. If it's safe to leave it on for non-administrator accounts that would be nice, but as a vector for malware, CD autorun is just another huge gaping hole in Windows security. The only reason it's been neglected for so long is that in the past CDs have come from trusted sources. Well no more.
Huh? I think you mean DOS emulator. Terminal emulators are for things like DEC VT220 emulation.
That's true. With evenly matched cars, it's impossible to overtake on the track. You'd need a car significantly faster than the one in front. I think the big reason for that is the high corner speeds and short braking distances from aerodynamic downforce. If you look at races with low downforce cars and motorcycles, there's a lot of passing. Nascar stock cars are big, fat and slow on a road course, but it's fun to watch because there's passing and you can really see the cars sliding around. The last few years MotoGP racing was dominated by Valentino Rossi and Honda, but the races were still close and not runaway wins. Now with Rossi switching to the slower Yamaha (he needed the challenge) this season has some great close racing. If you're bored of the F1 parade watch MotoGP! You don't know what you're missing.
True, as always it's the honest customer that suffers. This will just encourage people to back up the disc as soon as they unwrap it. 8 hours?!? That's less time than a one day rental at the video store.
"Perhaps just creating the appropriate hooks for low-level access would be more appropriate?"
Microsoft did this already, specifically with disk defrag software. For NT 4.0, Microsoft and Executive software, makers of Diskeeper, developed an undocumented API for low level disk access applicable to defrag software. They eventually disclosed this API to Symantec to use in their Speedisk product, but it remained undocumented.
I had wired Ethernet at home before wireless, and it really restricts where you can put your computers. Sure it would be nice to live in a geek house wired with CAT5 but I don't. I ran CAT5 along the baseboard and can't cross doorways unless I run them over the door jamb. I have a PC that's barely 10 ft from the switch, but it might take 50ft or more of cable to wire it up by going around the room. The USB adapter barely cost more than a premade 100ft cable. Laptops are especially a hassle with wired Ethernet. Say if you want to put it on your coffee table which is usually in the center of the room. The hub or switch would usually be on the side of the room. So you have a guaranteed trip hazard right there. Hope you don't have kids running around there. Trip on the wire, and it might just pull the laptop off the table.
I've had my complaints too. Windows 2000 with Dell TM1150 card and Netgear MR814V2 drops the connection intermittently. Web surfing is fine, but copying from Windows file shares is impossible. I'll try stopping the Wireless zero conf service since I haven't heard of that before.
There'll be a lot of "learn the rules" software out there
Yeah, I remember one ca. 1997 called simply Drivers Ed or something like that. No vehicle dynamics at all, just follow the rules of the road.
Like previous posters, I'd also heartily recommend titles like Gran Turismo 3, Burnout 1/2, Driver, GTA 3/VC
I agree with those and I'd add Grand Prix Legends and Netkar. Netkar is an interesting story. It's a free (beer) simulator created by one guy in his spare time. It's obviously a labor of love. The physics are modelled to an obsessive level of detail (even gearbox synchros!). Unfortunately while these two are very accurate simulators, they're very very hard to drive. It's hard to get a feeling of speed from a computer screen, and there's no feel of the forces from accelerating and cornering.
It's not going to happen in the US. The insurance industry has a huge influence on auto safety policy, and they don't want advanced/high performance driver training. They really want to dumb us down into sheep. One of the claims I've heard from their safety propaganda is that for example police officers are highly trained in vehicle handling, and their accident rates (off duty) are much higher than average.
The auto makers are happy to oblige by idiotproofing the cars. Powerful RWD like BMWs and Mercedes can be difficult to drive at the limit and in slippery conditions. It also happens BMW and Mercedes have also gone hog wild on electronic driver aids. It started with antilock brakes and traction control. Then came stability control. Yaw sensors combined with braking one corner of the car make it impossible to spin the car no matter how ham fisted you are with the controls. Now BMW has active steering, variable ratio steering based on vehicle speed. Mercedes has cruise control that maintains distance with the car in front and brakes that boost themselves in an emergency stop, the latter because they found novice drivers don't step on the brakes as hard as they could in a panic stop.
Don't get me wrong. A lot of these features are good things, but we are getting to the point where if you build an idiotproof car, the world will build a better idiot.
The size of the installed userbase isn't as much of a problem with portable players. On my PDA with flash memory, I recode to a lower bitrate anyway to fit more music. With a 2Ghz CPU it's practical to recode the bitrate while you copy. A 96Kbit/s audio file can sound crappy, but it's passable for portable use, and 96K vorbis sounds a little better than 96K MP3 to my untrained ear. To me it's a disposable file. I wouldn't bother exchanging it with anybody.
Multi GB hard disk players don't have the file size constraints of flash players, but aren't built for exchanging files either. Easy to copy songs to them, but hard to copy songs off them.
"Videogame consoles are nowadays video and music players too, with the XBox and PlayStation2."
Yes, they both play DVDs and CDs, but I hardly know anybody who use them that way because the value just isn't there, at least in this generation. The DVD playback kits for Xbox and PS2 cost $30. You get a remote control, infrared dongle, and the DVD decoder. Back when DVD players cost $200-300 it may have been worth it, but now you can get a cheap DVD player for $40, maybe even $30. Price points as much as features and convenience will determine which converged devices catch on or not.
IE will send your local OS credentials (username, password hash) via NTLM depending on your Security zones. The default is that sites in the Intranet zone will be sent them automatically and sites in the Internet zone will prompt for name and password. That sounds good and all, but a quick read of the Bugtraq archives will show that people are finding holes in this all the time. If you can get some piece of web content to load in the Intranet zone or even worse the My Computer zone, it's game over. The reason for the My Computer zone is that Internet Explorer == Windows Explorer and the web browser == the file manager.
Still, the whole complaint of entering your password again is tiny compared to the risks of IE. It's the *same* password that people use to log in. It's not like they have to remember a *new* password which is understandably a much bigger complaint.
Premium cable channels like Showtime, HBO and pay per view have no ads.
This is just like the difference between basic and premium cable. It's worth it to AOL to keep basic AIM features like text IM free. They might break even or make a little money on the ads, as long as most people don't use an ad blocker like Deadaim or a 3rd party client like Gaim or Trillian. What they're charging for is premium services like video conferencing and voice calls to POTS phones. People will pay money for these services.
"No, which is why the grandparent comment doesn't make much sense. Some updates have license changes - that's annoying"
Easy answer to that. The license "reserves the right" to install DRM in a future patch if you run automatic updates.
A heat pipe can have two pipes too, but the tubes are usually oriented vertically so the vapor from the phase change coolant rises to the radiator. This might be a pumped system.
It's more than just the mere fact of the backdoor. It's the amateur way they coded the backdoor. They found the strings in plaintext after gunzipping the image file. And to further insult our intelligence, they changed the password and left it coded the same way thinking we're too dumb to find the new one. There's no obfuscation at all except for the gzipping. Linux and open source make no difference here. You can at least give some credit to a well hidden backdoor. What's disturbing is their naive, amateur approach to security.