Do you see the sell-the-tech support model as being the ultimately successful one in the Linux (heck, OS in general) marketplace? Will computer and software vendors have to find new value-adds? (bundled, closed-source software (games?)) to tag on?
After hours, literally, of trying, many of the popular illicit poses you immediately begin to think of when you have access to these guys seem to be explicitly forbidden by the design. Nonetheless, with some modification, anything is possible. More evidence for the power of reverse engineering and open source over MS...
From the wired article BEIJING -- Software giant Microsoft Corp has run into more bad publicity in China with a newspaper reporting that its latest Windows 2000 operating system will be barred throughout the government.
Microsoft and Chinese officials on Thursday denied the report, which appeared in Wednesday's edition of the Yangcheng Evening News.
What about X10--were they raided? We've all seen the banners advertising their micro-mini camera with all these softcore pictures of girls. I can't imagine a device more aimed at 'surreptitious interception', and marketed that way, than that thing
(because we're lazy, the list is short, and because I want to eschew the 1stposters)
Multiwrite IDE breaks on a disk error Poll on > 16000 file handles fails Restore O_SYNC functionality Merge the network fixes - there is a ton of backed up stuff to do asap ISA DMA is no longer allocating correctly aligned data vmalloc(GFP_DMA) is needed for DMA drivers VM needs rebalancing NFSD fixes for path walking to regenerate dentries Fix eth= command line Check O_APPEND atomicity bug fixing is complete Protection on isize (sct) Merge 2.2.13/14 changes Get RAID 0.90 in PAE36 failures USB HID merge Mikulas claims we need to fix the getblk/mark_buffer_uptodate thing gor 2.3.x as well PIII/Athlon/MMX/etc acceleration merge from 2.2.x-ac Merge arcnet update (DONE) Fix SPX socket code AHA152x isnt smp safe (FIXED) NCR5380 isnt smp safe isofs break on 4Gig disk (FIXED ?) Finish 64bit vfs merges (stat64 etc) (DONE ??) Make syncppp use new ppp code Fbcon races Fix all remaining PCI code to use new resources and enable_Device Stackable fs ?? (Erez) Get the Emu10K merged Test PMC code on Athlon Fix module remove race bug (-- not in open so why did I see crashes ??? --) Per Process rtsigio Maybe merge the ibcs emulation code VFS?VM - mmap/write deadlock initrd is bust rw sempahores on page faults (mmap_sem) kiobuf seperate lock functions/bounce/page_address fixes per super block write_super needs an async flag addres_space needs a VM pressure/flush callback per file_op rw_kiovec enhanced disk statistics Fix routing by fwmark put_user appears to be broken for i386 machines
First of all, I think a petition would be useful as a PR attack.
But more importantly, IIRC, the deCSS source is pretty tiny. GIFs have those fantastic comment blocks available through any decent editing software. So why not start distributing gif files with the deCSS source code stuck in them? Half the people who possessed the GIF would be unaware, and every.gif in every cache of every browser that saw it would provide the DVD CCA with another defendant to worry about.
Admittedly, they encoded with a pitifully weak 40bit key, one which anyone, had we but known how pitiful it was, dedicated a few machines to cracking anyway. But in fact, Xing (which is why they keep turning up in the legal docs) left their decoding key accessible in their player software; MoRE didn't even 'reverse engineer' the code or crack the crypto. They just found they key laying around, effectively.
Actually, until this xmas, my computer screen was larger than my TV screen. And it faces my bed, which, as a futon, turns into a couch (or stays as a bed, depending). Right now I'm investigating a TV-out vidcard since I have a big TV nowadays.
They've had a few problems with script being able to be sent through email headers (read, "!!VIRUS that infects you without even opening your email!!"). These didn't get abused to my knowledge and were patched soon after Yahoo's attention was brought to them.
I personally despise their UI on logging in, too many clicks to get to my inbox. That's not to say that I don't have 4-5 yahoo accounts, tho O:)
Entrust has global export approval for their website certificates, great customer support (speaking from experience), no Y2K expiration issues, unlike Verisign.
There's only one catch.
Their certs are signed off on by (drumroll) Thawte! Which is now a subsidiary of Entrust's rival, Verisign. Hm.
...wouldn't it be wonderful if there was some open-source, open-server, non-commercialized community for chatting, where anyone could use any client or roll their own, which was compatible with any machine because it effectively worked on a pre-existing port (say telnet?) that allowed file transers, private and public chats, notifications when friends join, use of name and domain instead of random numbers...
Oh, wait, it's IRC!
Seriously, tho--what about an ueberclient that incorporated/stole from/abused the other clients and enabled just one client to talk on all different networks (like Orac and other IRC bots linking different IRCnets)?
Prevent access to files that have been deleted by others
C2 certification only applies to stand-alone, non-networked machines.
Ooooh. An NT server/PDC is C2 certified. As long as it's not functioning in a network. Woo-hoo. Hear my excitement. The sad part is the powerful spin this has been given.
These are the ones that piss me off the most--names that tag together words and prefixes or suffixes from greek or latin, hoping to make it sound good. Micro-soft, Uni-Sys, and the most gawdawful of them all, trans-meta. WTF were they thinking?
One advantage us lefties have had in this harsh and cruel right-handed centric world has been the keyboard-- most of the best letters are located on the left side of the keyboard, giving us a slight advantage. MEanwhile, our less-used right hand slips over to the mouse (and can hit the number-pad Enter button with ease from there). This gives us a wonderful interface. Now they want to take our good hand away and place it on a pointing device and force our weaker hand to use the keyboard? P'shaw. I'll stick with the mouse.
I've been a mud addict, and IRC addict, and an e-mail addict.
I wanted out, tho. There's something, to me, that simply goes unfullfilled with the online relationship that is not lacking in normal F2F relationships. Besides the sex, I mean.
And don't get me wrong. I wrote a fragging thesis on the use of language online--you can transmit surprising amounts of information normally delegated to body-language. It's not the information, I posit, but the perception.
I've moved out of the OL arena to find dates, though I will occasionally drop a line to a particularly skilled (or interesting) webmistress to strike up a conversation. I've learned to dance and try to meet girls through off-line type ways. And, I live in Austin, so there are nerd/techie socializing events now and again
But as another/.er posted, online is a great way to keep in touch with a friend who's moved away.
What do you mean, nothing truly innovative?! Haven't you used their new scroll-ball mouse? I mean, for an OS/software company, they *have* done one thing truly innovative. Admittedly, nothing at all software-related, but they're allowed us to get repretitve-strain injuries in yet another innovative and 'efficiency-increasing' (with the right drivers and.dlls) quantum leap in technology.
Not to mention their incredible marketing and FUD departments. admittedly, this is just taking the ball from IBM, but what MS has done with it-- simply amazing.
Hell. They INVENTED the concept of Vaporware.
And you're sitting here telling me that they're no being innovative?
DVDs will sink or swim due to invisiblle,m automatic install-base on PCs. I can't say this enough. How do you think Iomega still exists at all with their lackluster stock? Install base on PCs. I'd never buy a $200 dollar DVD player for when I already have a VCR. But lookie; I got a DVD/CD-ROM in my latest Dell box. So I went out and started buying DVDs instead of VHS tapes.
Now with DeCSS, maybe I can get Matrix to perform well off my HD.
I don't expect DVD piracy to be any more popular than current taping-at-the-movie-theater and burning to CD that exists already (Good 'ol Z). I had the ability to get a pirate copy of the MAtrix from this channel. I bought the DVD for all the cool features (which don't work) and the quality.
Now, DVD piracy allows for high-quality transfer, something that MP3 and.vcd doesn't. The trade-off is the GIGS of HD space required. I'm not worried.
The big point missed is the one Katz already treated.
The important, and relevant to this case point that has been completely missed by the media, Katz, and my dear fellow readers is that this is a grand example of -perfectly healthy behavior-!!
The kid was asked to write a scary story. A story detailing things that he'd normally find repulsive, morally wrong, etc. So, he writes about shooting classmates and teachers, defending against an intruder, etc. Wonderful. Fantastic--he's clued enough to realize these things can happen, and moral enough to realize what's *wrong*. It's this that makes the story scary.
If he'd been asked to write a happy story for thanksgiving and wrote about this, there'd be something wrong. That he wrote this for an assignment for a scary story means that everything's going great.
Expression of these types of ideas through words, images, and other art is healthy. Expression through action ain't. A good way to reduce expression through action is to allow expression through art.
Hell, back in 5th/6th grade I had a whole series of short stories I worked on for class assigments about a teacher getting murdered, and how her ghost came back and helped the kids in her class avoid Really Bad Things. It was bloody, full of gore and murder and whatnot, and the whole series got up to like 20 pages all said and done. And it was set in a fictionlized version of my school.
I'm practically a model citizen nowadays. I vote, I watch the news, I pay my taxes, and I help my landlady carry out her trash (wait, that last one's Neo). I don't shoot people. I am to my constant amazement commended on my calmness and ability to cope with things rationally, and help others do the same.
They've probably scarred this kid for life for doing not only his assignment, but a socially healthy version of it. I hope the media drags them over the coals for it.
And don't forget last month's (failed) Jam Echelon Day.
Tons of fun things to bait feds with, like the following:
I was thinking the other day how fun it'd be to take an assault rifle and assassinate all the secret encrypted files on my computer that don't contain information on nuclear device construction, and then smuggle them to Waco or maybe Washington D.C. like so many kilos of cocaine.
This being aired can mean good things--like a reason to fight for privacy instead of letting it slowly eek away. As Echelon gets uncovered more and more, it has the potential, as soon as the big media outlets get ahold of it, to really freak out mainsteam types who don't realize the absolute insecurity of email/cell phones/ and evidentally even some land-line voice communication.
They're doing it. No surprise. Y'all saw the story about warantless peeping-tom via thermal imaging, right? The faster these come, the more likely people will wake up and fight for privacy. Or at least download GPG.
Does anyone have the link to DeCSS? In all seriousness, I want to copy Matrix to my HD to see if I can run it any better from the HD than from the dvd.
This is not anything terribly new--RealNetwork's been hyper about gathering userinfo for a looooong time--back to RPlayer 2 at least. Not, admittedly, at this level, and it's been opt-out-able prefviously (I never downloaded jukebox, so I don't know if there's an opt-out feature as usual)
This is apparently a bit slimier than previous attempts, but hardly a change in fundamental tactics.
I'd like to see a class-action lawsuit using the new marketing techniques (pay to surf style, etc) as a basis to force RN to pay its customers for the information they were forced to provide.
The problem with the MS sites crack-wise is that they are very careful and have some truly state-of-the-art firewalls and proxies and whatnot, not to mention I'd wager everything is being load-balanced and round-robined, making it even more of a headache.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you see the sell-the-tech support model as being the ultimately successful one in the Linux (heck, OS in general) marketplace? Will computer and software vendors have to find new value-adds? (bundled, closed-source software (games?)) to tag on?
After hours, literally, of trying, many of the popular illicit poses you immediately begin to think of when you have access to these guys seem to be explicitly forbidden by the design. Nonetheless, with some modification, anything is possible. More evidence for the power of reverse engineering and open source over MS...
From the wired article
BEIJING -- Software giant Microsoft Corp
has run into more bad publicity in China
with a newspaper reporting that its latest
Windows 2000 operating system will be
barred throughout the government.
Microsoft and Chinese officials on
Thursday denied the report, which
appeared in Wednesday's edition of the
Yangcheng Evening News.
What about X10--were they raided? We've all seen the banners advertising their micro-mini camera with all these softcore pictures of girls. I can't imagine a device more aimed at 'surreptitious interception', and marketed that way, than that thing
(because we're lazy, the list is short, and because I want to eschew the 1stposters)
Multiwrite IDE breaks on a disk error
Poll on > 16000 file handles fails
Restore O_SYNC functionality
Merge the network fixes - there is a ton of backed up stuff to do asap
ISA DMA is no longer allocating correctly aligned data
vmalloc(GFP_DMA) is needed for DMA drivers
VM needs rebalancing
NFSD fixes for path walking to regenerate dentries
Fix eth= command line
Check O_APPEND atomicity bug fixing is complete
Protection on isize (sct)
Merge 2.2.13/14 changes
Get RAID 0.90 in
PAE36 failures
USB HID merge
Mikulas claims we need to fix the getblk/mark_buffer_uptodate thing gor
2.3.x as well
PIII/Athlon/MMX/etc acceleration merge from 2.2.x-ac
Merge arcnet update (DONE)
Fix SPX socket code
AHA152x isnt smp safe (FIXED)
NCR5380 isnt smp safe
isofs break on 4Gig disk (FIXED ?)
Finish 64bit vfs merges (stat64 etc) (DONE ??)
Make syncppp use new ppp code
Fbcon races
Fix all remaining PCI code to use new resources and enable_Device
Stackable fs ?? (Erez)
Get the Emu10K merged
Test PMC code on Athlon
Fix module remove race bug (-- not in open so why did I see crashes ??? --)
Per Process rtsigio
Maybe merge the ibcs emulation code
VFS?VM - mmap/write deadlock
initrd is bust
rw sempahores on page faults (mmap_sem)
kiobuf seperate lock functions/bounce/page_address fixes
per super block write_super needs an async flag
addres_space needs a VM pressure/flush callback
per file_op rw_kiovec
enhanced disk statistics
Fix routing by fwmark
put_user appears to be broken for i386 machines
First of all, I think a petition would be useful as a PR attack.
.gif in every cache of every browser that saw it would provide the DVD CCA with another defendant to worry about.
But more importantly, IIRC, the deCSS source is pretty tiny. GIFs have those fantastic comment blocks available through any decent editing software. So why not start distributing gif files with the deCSS source code stuck in them? Half the people who possessed the GIF would be unaware, and every
Admittedly, they encoded with a pitifully weak 40bit key, one which anyone, had we but known how pitiful it was, dedicated a few machines to cracking anyway. But in fact, Xing (which is why they keep turning up in the legal docs) left their decoding key accessible in their player software; MoRE didn't even 'reverse engineer' the code or crack the crypto. They just found they key laying around, effectively.
DVD Copy Control Association
225 B Cochrane Circle
Morgan Hill CA 95037
EMAIL: john.hoy@lmicp.com
Actually, until this xmas, my computer screen was larger than my TV screen. And it faces my bed, which, as a futon, turns into a couch (or stays as a bed, depending). Right now I'm investigating a TV-out vidcard since I have a big TV nowadays.
I personally despise their UI on logging in, too many clicks to get to my inbox. That's not to say that I don't have 4-5 yahoo accounts, tho O:)
Entrust has global export approval for their website certificates, great customer support (speaking from experience), no Y2K expiration issues, unlike Verisign.
There's only one catch.
Their certs are signed off on by (drumroll) Thawte! Which is now a subsidiary of Entrust's rival, Verisign. Hm.
...wouldn't it be wonderful if there was some open-source, open-server, non-commercialized community for chatting, where anyone could use any client or roll their own, which was compatible with any machine because it effectively worked on a pre-existing port (say telnet?) that allowed file transers, private and public chats, notifications when friends join, use of name and domain instead of random numbers...
Oh, wait, it's IRC!
Seriously, tho--what about an ueberclient that incorporated/stole from/abused the other clients and enabled just one client to talk on all different networks (like Orac and other IRC bots linking different IRCnets)?
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1 299/120699j1.htm explains the rating;
Ooooh. An NT server/PDC is C2 certified. As long as it's not functioning in a network. Woo-hoo. Hear my excitement. The sad part is the powerful spin this has been given.
These are the ones that piss me off the most--names that tag together words and prefixes or suffixes from greek or latin, hoping to make it sound good. Micro-soft, Uni-Sys, and the most gawdawful of them all, trans-meta. WTF were they thinking?
One advantage us lefties have had in this harsh and cruel right-handed centric world has been the keyboard-- most of the best letters are located on the left side of the keyboard, giving us a slight advantage. MEanwhile, our less-used right hand slips over to the mouse (and can hit the number-pad Enter button with ease from there). This gives us a wonderful interface. Now they want to take our good hand away and place it on a pointing device and force our weaker hand to use the keyboard? P'shaw. I'll stick with the mouse.
I wanted out, tho. There's something, to me, that simply goes unfullfilled with the online relationship that is not lacking in normal F2F relationships. Besides the sex, I mean.
And don't get me wrong. I wrote a fragging thesis on the use of language online--you can transmit surprising amounts of information normally delegated to body-language. It's not the information, I posit, but the perception.
I've moved out of the OL arena to find dates, though I will occasionally drop a line to a particularly skilled (or interesting) webmistress to strike up a conversation. I've learned to dance and try to meet girls through off-line type ways. And, I live in Austin, so there are nerd/techie socializing events now and again
But as another
What do you mean, nothing truly innovative?! Haven't you used their new scroll-ball mouse? I mean, for an OS/software company, they *have* done one thing truly innovative. Admittedly, nothing at all software-related, but they're allowed us to get repretitve-strain injuries in yet another innovative and 'efficiency-increasing' (with the right drivers and .dlls) quantum leap in technology.
Not to mention their incredible marketing and FUD departments. admittedly, this is just taking the ball from IBM, but what MS has done with it-- simply amazing.
Hell. They INVENTED the concept of Vaporware.
And you're sitting here telling me that they're no being innovative?
Great assessment.
.vcd doesn't. The trade-off is the GIGS of HD space required. I'm not worried.
DVDs will sink or swim due to invisiblle,m automatic install-base on PCs. I can't say this enough. How do you think Iomega still exists at all with their lackluster stock? Install base on PCs. I'd never buy a $200 dollar DVD player for when I already have a VCR. But lookie; I got a DVD/CD-ROM in my latest Dell box. So I went out and started buying DVDs instead of VHS tapes.
Now with DeCSS, maybe I can get Matrix to perform well off my HD.
I don't expect DVD piracy to be any more popular than current taping-at-the-movie-theater and burning to CD that exists already (Good 'ol Z). I had the ability to get a pirate copy of the MAtrix from this channel. I bought the DVD for all the cool features (which don't work) and the quality.
Now, DVD piracy allows for high-quality transfer, something that MP3 and
The big point missed is the one Katz already treated.
The important, and relevant to this case point that has been completely missed by the media, Katz, and my dear fellow readers is that this is a grand example of -perfectly healthy behavior-!!
The kid was asked to write a scary story. A story detailing things that he'd normally find repulsive, morally wrong, etc. So, he writes about shooting classmates and teachers, defending against an intruder, etc. Wonderful. Fantastic--he's clued enough to realize these things can happen, and moral enough to realize what's *wrong*. It's this that makes the story scary.
If he'd been asked to write a happy story for thanksgiving and wrote about this, there'd be something wrong. That he wrote this for an assignment for a scary story means that everything's going great.
Expression of these types of ideas through words, images, and other art is healthy. Expression through action ain't. A good way to reduce expression through action is to allow expression through art.
Hell, back in 5th/6th grade I had a whole series of short stories I worked on for class assigments about a teacher getting murdered, and how her ghost came back and helped the kids in her class avoid Really Bad Things. It was bloody, full of gore and murder and whatnot, and the whole series got up to like 20 pages all said and done. And it was set in a fictionlized version of my school.
I'm practically a model citizen nowadays. I vote, I watch the news, I pay my taxes, and I help my landlady carry out her trash (wait, that last one's Neo). I don't shoot people. I am to my constant amazement commended on my calmness and ability to cope with things rationally, and help others do the same.
They've probably scarred this kid for life for doing not only his assignment, but a socially healthy version of it. I hope the media drags them over the coals for it.
Wired has an update on the story: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,32302,00 .html
in which most people say, "well,duh, naturally". This basically does nothing to futher confim Echelon's existance than what was already known.
OTOH,it has spurrer Republican Bob Barr into action, huffing about privacy. MAybe he can gain some steam.
And don't forget last month's (failed) Jam Echelon Day.
Tons of fun things to bait feds with, like the following:
I was thinking the other day how fun it'd be to take an assault rifle and assassinate all the secret encrypted files on my computer that don't contain information on nuclear device construction, and then smuggle them to Waco or maybe Washington D.C. like so many kilos of cocaine.
This being aired can mean good things--like a reason to fight for privacy instead of letting it slowly eek away. As Echelon gets uncovered more and more, it has the potential, as soon as the big media outlets get ahold of it, to really freak out mainsteam types who don't realize the absolute insecurity of email/cell phones/ and evidentally even some land-line voice communication.
They're doing it. No surprise. Y'all saw the story about warantless peeping-tom via thermal imaging, right? The faster these come, the more likely people will wake up and fight for privacy. Or at least download GPG.
Does anyone have the link to DeCSS? In all seriousness, I want to copy Matrix to my HD to see if I can run it any better from the HD than from the dvd.
This is not anything terribly new--RealNetwork's been hyper about gathering userinfo for a looooong time--back to RPlayer 2 at least. Not, admittedly, at this level, and it's been opt-out-able prefviously (I never downloaded jukebox, so I don't know if there's an opt-out feature as usual)
This is apparently a bit slimier than previous attempts, but hardly a change in fundamental tactics.
I'd like to see a class-action lawsuit using the new marketing techniques (pay to surf style, etc) as a basis to force RN to pay its customers for the information they were forced to provide.
The problem with the MS sites crack-wise is that they are very careful and have some truly state-of-the-art firewalls and proxies and whatnot, not to mention I'd wager everything is being load-balanced and round-robined, making it even more of a headache.