I see you missed the link to http://logicalmedia.com/ then, as OONI has them identified as an "affiliate network" site. That's advertiser-speak for "advertiser".
Maybe they're on the list because they stiffed T-Mobile for overage charges or something.
The chat log at the bottom clearly shows they're just looking for mud to rake. The low-paid chat support guy isn't going to know that stuff to start with, and the ooni moron just keeps repeating himself as if it will make him look smarter.
Well, the T-Mobile guy was repeatedly hitting the button for "Canned Reply #17" and "Canned Reply #13" anyway. The whole thing reminded me of Eliza talking to Eliza.
... censorware tends to break in interesting ways, even when it's not by design.
In web development circles this is known as the "clbuttic mistake".;-)
Anybody else have fun when they discovered filters that would naively drop the naughty letters, but wasn't recursive? "You're full of shshitit!" would yield the desired epithet anyway.
I copied it (made a slight edit)!! Whatcha gonna do about it?
Thank you for it, of course. I was struggling to rhyme and missed the obvious past tense of the phrase that fit the rest of the stanza anyway. Nicely done.
A long long time ago I can still remember how That number used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those lawyers dance And maybe they'd be happy for a while But March 14th made me shiver With every digit I'd deliver Bad news in the courtroom I couldn't take one more suit I can't remember if I cried When I read the judges opines But something touched me deep inside
The day the copyright died.
Bye, bye to copyrighted Pi Drove my Chevy to the courthouse where the lawyers would fight But them good ole boys were thinking common sense was all right Singin' this'll be the day that I die This'll be the day that I die
It's an application specific device. I could use such things for industrial or commercial applications like the GP mentioned: ticketing, sales, proofing. I agree with you that the average tablet owner would never want one.
Actually, if you price them out, the commercial supplies come in at exactly the same cost / mL as consumer cartridge ink. I've only compared Canon ink to their commercial inkjet printers, but commercial prices range from about $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL (PFI-103MBK, 130 mL tank, about $45-$140 retail). Small format cartridges, (BCI-6BK 14.5mL, $5-$15 retail), cost anywhere from $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL.
The difference is that a printing shop charges their customers enough to cover all their costs and make a profit. If ink prices go up, so do customer prices. A customer is far more price sensitive, as they see those ink prices directly.
Occam's razor. The simplest answer is usually correct. That drives an awful lot of investigations.
Despite the twists and turns that you see in TV crime dramas, most real world bad guys aren't quite that clever at hiding all of their tracks. Sure, they're going to hide the obvious ones they know they're leaving. They will use hacked proxies to deliver their code. They'll use sophisticated command and control networks to make sure nobody can track them back to the actual box making the inputs. They'll have a l33t Fast DNS setup to avoid takedowns.
But this level of sophistication in some aspects of tracking prevention doesn't mean they covered every other attribute perfectly. The author might be reading this on Slashdot right now and saying "oh, crap, I never thought they'd reverse engineer it to figure out I used my boss' old OO C library! Dammit!"
Or not. This could be a total red herring, bait cleverly dragged across the trail to distract the investigators further. But as an investigator, you have to start somewhere, and this is as good as anyplace. They'll probably never find box zero, so there's not much else to go on at this stage.
I don't think the article implied that this framework was pre-existing or not. They don't know. It could have been a custom written framework to help the author(s) specifically build this virus. Rudimentary OO C frameworks are easy enough to write from scratch.
What they saw was a regular pattern common across many different functions in the binary, which suggested that the same source was used to create it throughout the code. And if the source code is that regular, either the author is a serial copy-paster (which implies bad coder, which the rest of the code provides evidence that he isn't), or the more likely answer is that macros were used to produce it.
They are probably hoping it's a particular OO C framework that's been used elsewhere, but not far and wide. They might be able to fingerprint the libraries that are in use around the world, and further narrow down the list of suspects. They might be able to compare this to different published software package fingerprints to see if any are a potential match. Maybe they'll find out it was downloaded from sourceforge, which leaves a short list of only a few thousand people or IP addresses who've ever downloaded it before (depending on what kinds of logs the servers and ISPs kept.)
The chances are really good that it won't lead straight to a specific Joe Ocaml of 123 Main Street, Fairview, Connecticut. The chances are high that it won't give them anything useful at all. But if there's even a 1% chance it might tell them exactly who wrote it? That's totally worth it to pursue the leads, especially since it's so little work to run that small bit of investigation.
If you continue carrying your wallet in your hip pocket, you risk damaging the sciatic nerve bundle that serves your leg. That creates a condition called sciatica. It's characterized by long term hip and leg pain and/or numbness that really isn't any fun at all. I strongly recommend you move your wallet to your front pocket today, and never again carry it in your hip pocket. Your ass and leg pain won't abate immediately, but over time it might get better. For me, it took a few months after moving the wallet before the pain was mostly gone, but years later I still have occasional pain from it. Certain kinds of chair seats seem to aggravate it.
The wallet in the front pocket isn't so bad once you get used to the new location. As a bonus, it's slightly more secure from pickpockets.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical doctor, nor do I play one on Slashdot. If you want real medical advice, go see a real medical doctor.
There's the benefit of making your phone the target of hackers everywhere. The reason mobile malware hasn't been nearly as successful as PC malware is there hasn't been enough profit motive. Just wait until mobile phones all have wallets that could give thieves access to billions of dollars of credit. You want incentive to create malware? You'll get scads of professionally written free malware.
There's also the convenience benefit of using a cell phone to pay. Instead of all that hard work of getting your card out of your wallet and swiping it, you simply get out your phone, unlock the keypad with your simple code, find the simple wallet app and tap on it, simply wait for it to load and to prompt you for your PIN, then you simply tap your phone on the NFC reader! Simple, no?
Finally, there's the privacy benefit. If you use Google Wallet, now Google can complete their trifecta of intelligence gathering. They'll know what you search for, they'll know where you surfed to research the thing, and now they'll know when you walked into a brick and mortar store and bought it at retail even after all that on-line research. Google will know everything about commerce everywhere. And if you tell them you're opting out, they won't maintain that association with you, just your habits. How much more privacy could you want?
The answer is we need more negative reinforcement.
We need people to sue because they removed literature from our children's hands, depriving them of a quality education. We need every non-nutjob parent in that class to sue the schoolboard because they fired a valuable teacher that was really connecting with their children. We need the school boards to learn that throwing the teacher under the bus has worse consequences by a factor of 20 than defending them against that one useless waster of free oxygen. Until we stop rolling over as parents of children who are getting screwed over by these bad school boards, we will continue to have nutjobs selecting the pablum they feed our kids.
I don't care about the crazy soccer moms here. I care that the school board is failing utterly at their job. They are supposed to insulate teachers from crazy parents. They are supposed to be rational, and say "Yes, Mrs. Smith, we heard you, but we leave individual book assignments to the teachers. If you're unhappy with the content the public education system provides, take your child down the street to the private school that more closely matches your morals. Yes, we know it's expensive, but that's your choice."
And yes, a vocal minority of outraged parents (bonded together by a common hatred of porn / literature / science / logic / foreign accents / whatever) will put up their own flat-earth candidate, and will get that school board member fired. Term limits of one would prevent them from worrying about it too much.
Instead, what this school board did is told all their teachers "you're going to get fired for teaching anything that goes against the arbitrary capricious whims of any nutcake parent." And they told every nutcake parent in the district "want to get that unmarried pregnant teacher fired? Just accuse her of having dyed her hair, we're just as crazy as you and we'll fire her for you." That board may as well not exist for all the good they're doing their school system.
Absolutely, they have certain products that are very accessible. Their towers are great to work on, and shows exactly the kind of nice accessibility design that we all know they're capable of. And that shows the contrast, and makes my point. They are perfectly capable of creating a phone with a replaceable battery. If they made an iDevice with a replaceable battery, I expect it would be magically socketed, it would be impossible to install in an incorrect polarity, it would have recessed contacts so it couldn't be accidentally shorted. It would probably even have a little SPD-like chip with a serial number and manufacture date so the device would know the voltage and capacity for charging reasons, and wouldn't accept counterfeit batteries (probably for claims of safety reasons.)
Apple is perfectly capable of producing this engineered to a finer degree than any company has ever made a replaceable battery device before. Yet they don't. The only logical reason for them to be so DIY-hostile is to entice users to throw away their old phones and trade up about the same time as their batteries are showing signs of wear. That's the outward sign of a company who thinks they own their users, not one who thinks they owe their customers.
It's only a clue, not an answer. But it's one data point more than they had before. And they need somewhere to start looking for the author.
OO C is very interesting. C++ developers are a dime a dozen (OK, it's 2012, we're four for a quarter.) And you can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting a C coder. But OO C developers are a subset of a subset of people. Nobody who sets out to write a virus for the first time says "I should download a four year old compiler for a language I know nothing about and start writing my virus." They don't read in their copy of "Virus Creation Lab for Dummies" book where it says to torrent a copy of Visual Studio 2008, then download some GNU OO C framework for it. This is a tool that a limited set of experts uses for their day jobs. Possibly it's something a laid off software engineer would still have on his home machine. It might be code generated by a custom library that some gaming house wrote for their own internal stuff, and that by pattern matching with commercial software products they might be able to find the company of origin. They can go back and figure out who they fired in the last three years, and who now is driving the Ferrari. Maybe there's an OO C Google Group this guy participates in. Maybe he published a bogus "please help me with my homework" question on stackoverflow, and they can match some source code to some object code.
Or maybe it doesn't help find the guy today, but tomorrow if they haul a potential perpetrator before a judge, they can provide as corroborating evidence to the jury that the person who wrote this code was very specialized in his knowledge of this esoteric tool, and the defendant worked with this tool every day.
Whatever that clue might be, it could be useful knowledge to someone hunting down the author. Either way, it certainly has value.
Let me get this straight: you're defending Apple's "thin and light" design on the one hand, but on the other you think Apple's engineers are so stupid and incompetent that they can't design the case to be thin and light while still permitting the users to replace the battery and screen? There is no universe where that argument even makes sense.
Instead of trying to convince you that the current case is designed to be anything but a repair-bill-generator for Apple technicians, I'll present the evidence for the further loathing Apple demonstrates for their DIY customers in just two words: pentalobular screws. If Apple gave even ONE shit about user access, we would never have seen them add these tiny abortions to an existing consumer product. Yet there you go.
And this certainly isn't Apple's first attempt to treat their customers like stupid money cows to be milked on an annual basis. They use their vertical integration monopoly to have software changes drive people to buy upgrades. iOS4 pretty much rendered every iPhone 3 and older useless. And if you set the wayback machine to the 1980s, you may recall the original Macintosh case had to be opened with specialty extra long Torx screwdrivers that Apple wouldn't sell you. Want an upgrade? Go to an authorized Macintosh repair center, you filthy vermin customer, and spend your money on us.
Apple is like the goblin race in the Harry Potter movies. They think they can collect money from you for the hardware but they somehow really still own it because they made it. And as long as the fanbois are so busy trading in their iPad 2s for iPad 3s (to get that extra 512MB of RAM for only an additional $599) they'll get away with it.
I contracted at a utility that had a knee-high pile of ancient Compaq 386 laptops in their radio communications shop. When I offered to dispose of them the guys told me they had a half-million dollar radio tower which used configuration software that would **ONLY** run under MS DOS 3 on a 386 CPU. The manufacturer had been gobbled up by some other company and had no intention of re-writing software for a product that they no longer made. They kept that pile for 14 years, until the tower was finally replaced.
Lemme have a "Yay" for GW-BASIC and TSRs!
<crickets>
OK, then, let me have the system maintenance contractor's paycheck. Yay!
It doesn't take an insider source to figure that out. They included "d'oh" last year, and there's no reason to treat internet-memes differently than TV-memes.
Depending on your definition of "internet-meme" some already made it on there, for example lol.
How disappointing. I just checked out cromulent. Apparently that word isn't as cromulent as I thought it was.
He's already guilty of the crimes he committed before, and he has not yet completed his sentence for those crimes. He's on parole after being released early from prison. Actually, he's on parole for a second time, after having violated the terms of his parole earlier and going back to prison for an additional year and a hafl.
One of the terms of his parole is that he must not have a mobile phone. Another one of the terms is that any passwords, encryption, to any information whatsoever that he has, he will immediately provide the means to access that data upon demand of his parole officer. He denied to his parole officer that he had a mobile phone, but his parole officer found it and seized it. The parole officer had every right to do so under the terms of his parole. He's also refused to provide the account and password information to access it, even though he agreed to provide it as a condition of his early release. So he's already in violation of two of the terms of his parole, and for that alone he gets to go back to prison. There is no additional trial needed -- he has already been found guilty of his original crimes. The terms of parole have nothing to do with "innocent until proven guilty." That bit of justice ended with his verdict. He is guilty.
As far as these new allegations and crimes go, he needs to stand trial for them. But he's already a convicted felon who was let loose from prison too early, twice. "Wholly innocent" is not a factual statement one uses to describe this felon.
So you think "run of the mill pimps" somehow deserve a pass on human trafficking? Is that because they're too numerous to arrest? They have too much evidence against cops, judges, and politicians? Or is it because they just traffic in "hoes", not "people"?
The Ars article mentions a woman who he locked in the trunk of a car to prevent her escape. In what corner of the world do you live in where would that be dismissed as "run of the mill"? What kinds of people are willing to accept that behavior? Is it because she's not your daughter or sister, so it's OK that a pimp keeps her on the streets?
I agree that law enforcement often overstates their case, and try to throw a dozen charges at someone in hopes that one might stick. But this is the signed statement of an agent who interviewed a witnesses who directly observed the convicted parolee texting women who then appeared and delivered money to him throughout the evening. That's plenty of evidence to at least ask a judge to issue a search warrant for the phone. The judge could say no, of course, but this affidavit doesn't seem out of line for such requests.
He's already violating the terms of his parole agreement by not divulging his password to the FBI. The guy could certainly rot in jail for the rest of his sentence, with no more effort on anyone's part. But if additional crimes have been committed, they should be tried as well.
Are you saying that trial and error isn't appropriate for a system that cannot fail even one time?
I think it'd be very appropriate to build reactor control software with tests. Lots of tests. Lots and lots of tests. And you can simulate every device out there, you can simulate what happens when pressure builds or releases unexpectedly, you can simulate what happens when the operator pours his pepsi down the control panel and provides you with non-sensible inputs, etc.
Matter of fact, I can't see any other way to build safety critical software. Not just testing the hell out of it, but designing it to be testable in the first place.
I've been using ddg.gg a lot lately and trying as hard as I can to like it.
I like what they say about not tracking users, and if they hold to that, they'll get major positive marks in my book.
That's exactly what I've done, and the position I hold. I went so far as to change ddg to be my home page in all my browsers, instead of Google. For me, a new home page is the first place I go to search, and the search bar is the second. (The awesome bar surprised me the other day with googly results because I mis-moused and hadn't changed firefox's default search provider. That's how un-awesomed I am by that turd of innovation.)
In any event, I will continue to try to use them.
Me, too. Google had many years of being the most powerful engine on the planet, and counted me amongst their legions of devoted followers, but with their pervasive google-analytics scripts on every third page on the web, doubleclick banners everywhere, and who knows what else tracking people, I'm throwing my lot in with anyone who even pretends to offer me some privacy (real or imagined.) I'm hoping that with more use, ddg will be able to grow.
Their search results aren't quite as current as Google, but they seem somewhat more relevant. It could be the Bing engines. It could be that the spammer's link farms are so finely tuned to google's Page Rank that they're not as attractive to different ranking algorithms. Or it could be that they just don't have the spidering capacity to fill their servers with the worthless crap yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I see you missed the link to http://logicalmedia.com/ then, as OONI has them identified as an "affiliate network" site. That's advertiser-speak for "advertiser".
Maybe they're on the list because they stiffed T-Mobile for overage charges or something.
The chat log at the bottom clearly shows they're just looking for mud to rake. The low-paid chat support guy isn't going to know that stuff to start with, and the ooni moron just keeps repeating himself as if it will make him look smarter.
Well, the T-Mobile guy was repeatedly hitting the button for "Canned Reply #17" and "Canned Reply #13" anyway. The whole thing reminded me of Eliza talking to Eliza.
... censorware tends to break in interesting ways, even when it's not by design.
In web development circles this is known as the "clbuttic mistake". ;-)
Anybody else have fun when they discovered filters that would naively drop the naughty letters, but wasn't recursive? "You're full of shshitit!" would yield the desired epithet anyway.
I copied it (made a slight edit)!! Whatcha gonna do about it?
Thank you for it, of course. I was struggling to rhyme and missed the obvious past tense of the phrase that fit the rest of the stanza anyway. Nicely done.
A long long time ago
I can still remember how
That number used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those lawyers dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But March 14th made me shiver
With every digit I'd deliver
Bad news in the courtroom
I couldn't take one more suit
I can't remember if I cried
When I read the judges opines
But something touched me deep inside
The day the copyright died.
Bye, bye to copyrighted Pi
Drove my Chevy to the courthouse where the lawyers would fight
But them good ole boys were thinking common sense was all right
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die
It's an application specific device. I could use such things for industrial or commercial applications like the GP mentioned: ticketing, sales, proofing. I agree with you that the average tablet owner would never want one.
Actually, if you price them out, the commercial supplies come in at exactly the same cost / mL as consumer cartridge ink. I've only compared Canon ink to their commercial inkjet printers, but commercial prices range from about $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL (PFI-103MBK, 130 mL tank, about $45-$140 retail). Small format cartridges, (BCI-6BK 14.5mL, $5-$15 retail), cost anywhere from $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL.
The difference is that a printing shop charges their customers enough to cover all their costs and make a profit. If ink prices go up, so do customer prices. A customer is far more price sensitive, as they see those ink prices directly.
Occam's razor. The simplest answer is usually correct. That drives an awful lot of investigations.
Despite the twists and turns that you see in TV crime dramas, most real world bad guys aren't quite that clever at hiding all of their tracks. Sure, they're going to hide the obvious ones they know they're leaving. They will use hacked proxies to deliver their code. They'll use sophisticated command and control networks to make sure nobody can track them back to the actual box making the inputs. They'll have a l33t Fast DNS setup to avoid takedowns.
But this level of sophistication in some aspects of tracking prevention doesn't mean they covered every other attribute perfectly. The author might be reading this on Slashdot right now and saying "oh, crap, I never thought they'd reverse engineer it to figure out I used my boss' old OO C library! Dammit!"
Or not. This could be a total red herring, bait cleverly dragged across the trail to distract the investigators further. But as an investigator, you have to start somewhere, and this is as good as anyplace. They'll probably never find box zero, so there's not much else to go on at this stage.
I don't think the article implied that this framework was pre-existing or not. They don't know. It could have been a custom written framework to help the author(s) specifically build this virus. Rudimentary OO C frameworks are easy enough to write from scratch.
What they saw was a regular pattern common across many different functions in the binary, which suggested that the same source was used to create it throughout the code. And if the source code is that regular, either the author is a serial copy-paster (which implies bad coder, which the rest of the code provides evidence that he isn't), or the more likely answer is that macros were used to produce it.
They are probably hoping it's a particular OO C framework that's been used elsewhere, but not far and wide. They might be able to fingerprint the libraries that are in use around the world, and further narrow down the list of suspects. They might be able to compare this to different published software package fingerprints to see if any are a potential match. Maybe they'll find out it was downloaded from sourceforge, which leaves a short list of only a few thousand people or IP addresses who've ever downloaded it before (depending on what kinds of logs the servers and ISPs kept.)
The chances are really good that it won't lead straight to a specific Joe Ocaml of 123 Main Street, Fairview, Connecticut. The chances are high that it won't give them anything useful at all. But if there's even a 1% chance it might tell them exactly who wrote it? That's totally worth it to pursue the leads, especially since it's so little work to run that small bit of investigation.
If you continue carrying your wallet in your hip pocket, you risk damaging the sciatic nerve bundle that serves your leg. That creates a condition called sciatica. It's characterized by long term hip and leg pain and/or numbness that really isn't any fun at all. I strongly recommend you move your wallet to your front pocket today, and never again carry it in your hip pocket. Your ass and leg pain won't abate immediately, but over time it might get better. For me, it took a few months after moving the wallet before the pain was mostly gone, but years later I still have occasional pain from it. Certain kinds of chair seats seem to aggravate it.
The wallet in the front pocket isn't so bad once you get used to the new location. As a bonus, it's slightly more secure from pickpockets.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical doctor, nor do I play one on Slashdot. If you want real medical advice, go see a real medical doctor.
You mean like the Nokia magnetic-tattoo-that-alerts-you-to-a-ring patent they just filed? http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/03/nokia-files-patent-for-haptic-feedback-tattoo/
There's the benefit of making your phone the target of hackers everywhere. The reason mobile malware hasn't been nearly as successful as PC malware is there hasn't been enough profit motive. Just wait until mobile phones all have wallets that could give thieves access to billions of dollars of credit. You want incentive to create malware? You'll get scads of professionally written free malware.
There's also the convenience benefit of using a cell phone to pay. Instead of all that hard work of getting your card out of your wallet and swiping it, you simply get out your phone, unlock the keypad with your simple code, find the simple wallet app and tap on it, simply wait for it to load and to prompt you for your PIN, then you simply tap your phone on the NFC reader! Simple, no?
Finally, there's the privacy benefit. If you use Google Wallet, now Google can complete their trifecta of intelligence gathering. They'll know what you search for, they'll know where you surfed to research the thing, and now they'll know when you walked into a brick and mortar store and bought it at retail even after all that on-line research. Google will know everything about commerce everywhere. And if you tell them you're opting out, they won't maintain that association with you, just your habits. How much more privacy could you want?
Was that enough benefit for you?
The answer is we need more negative reinforcement.
We need people to sue because they removed literature from our children's hands, depriving them of a quality education. We need every non-nutjob parent in that class to sue the schoolboard because they fired a valuable teacher that was really connecting with their children. We need the school boards to learn that throwing the teacher under the bus has worse consequences by a factor of 20 than defending them against that one useless waster of free oxygen. Until we stop rolling over as parents of children who are getting screwed over by these bad school boards, we will continue to have nutjobs selecting the pablum they feed our kids.
I don't care about the crazy soccer moms here. I care that the school board is failing utterly at their job. They are supposed to insulate teachers from crazy parents. They are supposed to be rational, and say "Yes, Mrs. Smith, we heard you, but we leave individual book assignments to the teachers. If you're unhappy with the content the public education system provides, take your child down the street to the private school that more closely matches your morals. Yes, we know it's expensive, but that's your choice."
And yes, a vocal minority of outraged parents (bonded together by a common hatred of porn / literature / science / logic / foreign accents / whatever) will put up their own flat-earth candidate, and will get that school board member fired. Term limits of one would prevent them from worrying about it too much.
Instead, what this school board did is told all their teachers "you're going to get fired for teaching anything that goes against the arbitrary capricious whims of any nutcake parent." And they told every nutcake parent in the district "want to get that unmarried pregnant teacher fired? Just accuse her of having dyed her hair, we're just as crazy as you and we'll fire her for you." That board may as well not exist for all the good they're doing their school system.
Absolutely, they have certain products that are very accessible. Their towers are great to work on, and shows exactly the kind of nice accessibility design that we all know they're capable of. And that shows the contrast, and makes my point. They are perfectly capable of creating a phone with a replaceable battery. If they made an iDevice with a replaceable battery, I expect it would be magically socketed, it would be impossible to install in an incorrect polarity, it would have recessed contacts so it couldn't be accidentally shorted. It would probably even have a little SPD-like chip with a serial number and manufacture date so the device would know the voltage and capacity for charging reasons, and wouldn't accept counterfeit batteries (probably for claims of safety reasons.)
Apple is perfectly capable of producing this engineered to a finer degree than any company has ever made a replaceable battery device before. Yet they don't. The only logical reason for them to be so DIY-hostile is to entice users to throw away their old phones and trade up about the same time as their batteries are showing signs of wear. That's the outward sign of a company who thinks they own their users, not one who thinks they owe their customers.
Thank you for the laugh I desperately needed this morning!
so bigfoot is real... that's what you're trying to say?
bigfoot is indeed real, unless declared integer.
It's only a clue, not an answer. But it's one data point more than they had before. And they need somewhere to start looking for the author.
OO C is very interesting. C++ developers are a dime a dozen (OK, it's 2012, we're four for a quarter.) And you can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting a C coder. But OO C developers are a subset of a subset of people. Nobody who sets out to write a virus for the first time says "I should download a four year old compiler for a language I know nothing about and start writing my virus." They don't read in their copy of "Virus Creation Lab for Dummies" book where it says to torrent a copy of Visual Studio 2008, then download some GNU OO C framework for it. This is a tool that a limited set of experts uses for their day jobs. Possibly it's something a laid off software engineer would still have on his home machine. It might be code generated by a custom library that some gaming house wrote for their own internal stuff, and that by pattern matching with commercial software products they might be able to find the company of origin. They can go back and figure out who they fired in the last three years, and who now is driving the Ferrari. Maybe there's an OO C Google Group this guy participates in. Maybe he published a bogus "please help me with my homework" question on stackoverflow, and they can match some source code to some object code.
Or maybe it doesn't help find the guy today, but tomorrow if they haul a potential perpetrator before a judge, they can provide as corroborating evidence to the jury that the person who wrote this code was very specialized in his knowledge of this esoteric tool, and the defendant worked with this tool every day.
Whatever that clue might be, it could be useful knowledge to someone hunting down the author. Either way, it certainly has value.
Let me get this straight: you're defending Apple's "thin and light" design on the one hand, but on the other you think Apple's engineers are so stupid and incompetent that they can't design the case to be thin and light while still permitting the users to replace the battery and screen? There is no universe where that argument even makes sense.
Instead of trying to convince you that the current case is designed to be anything but a repair-bill-generator for Apple technicians, I'll present the evidence for the further loathing Apple demonstrates for their DIY customers in just two words: pentalobular screws. If Apple gave even ONE shit about user access, we would never have seen them add these tiny abortions to an existing consumer product. Yet there you go.
And this certainly isn't Apple's first attempt to treat their customers like stupid money cows to be milked on an annual basis. They use their vertical integration monopoly to have software changes drive people to buy upgrades. iOS4 pretty much rendered every iPhone 3 and older useless. And if you set the wayback machine to the 1980s, you may recall the original Macintosh case had to be opened with specialty extra long Torx screwdrivers that Apple wouldn't sell you. Want an upgrade? Go to an authorized Macintosh repair center, you filthy vermin customer, and spend your money on us.
Apple is like the goblin race in the Harry Potter movies. They think they can collect money from you for the hardware but they somehow really still own it because they made it. And as long as the fanbois are so busy trading in their iPad 2s for iPad 3s (to get that extra 512MB of RAM for only an additional $599) they'll get away with it.
Hell of a business model, don't you think?
I contracted at a utility that had a knee-high pile of ancient Compaq 386 laptops in their radio communications shop. When I offered to dispose of them the guys told me they had a half-million dollar radio tower which used configuration software that would **ONLY** run under MS DOS 3 on a 386 CPU. The manufacturer had been gobbled up by some other company and had no intention of re-writing software for a product that they no longer made. They kept that pile for 14 years, until the tower was finally replaced.
Lemme have a "Yay" for GW-BASIC and TSRs!
<crickets>
OK, then, let me have the system maintenance contractor's paycheck. Yay!
It doesn't take an insider source to figure that out. They included "d'oh" last year, and there's no reason to treat internet-memes differently than TV-memes.
Depending on your definition of "internet-meme" some already made it on there, for example lol.
How disappointing. I just checked out cromulent. Apparently that word isn't as cromulent as I thought it was.
He's already guilty of the crimes he committed before, and he has not yet completed his sentence for those crimes. He's on parole after being released early from prison. Actually, he's on parole for a second time, after having violated the terms of his parole earlier and going back to prison for an additional year and a hafl.
One of the terms of his parole is that he must not have a mobile phone. Another one of the terms is that any passwords, encryption, to any information whatsoever that he has, he will immediately provide the means to access that data upon demand of his parole officer. He denied to his parole officer that he had a mobile phone, but his parole officer found it and seized it. The parole officer had every right to do so under the terms of his parole. He's also refused to provide the account and password information to access it, even though he agreed to provide it as a condition of his early release. So he's already in violation of two of the terms of his parole, and for that alone he gets to go back to prison. There is no additional trial needed -- he has already been found guilty of his original crimes. The terms of parole have nothing to do with "innocent until proven guilty." That bit of justice ended with his verdict. He is guilty.
As far as these new allegations and crimes go, he needs to stand trial for them. But he's already a convicted felon who was let loose from prison too early, twice. "Wholly innocent" is not a factual statement one uses to describe this felon.
So you think "run of the mill pimps" somehow deserve a pass on human trafficking? Is that because they're too numerous to arrest? They have too much evidence against cops, judges, and politicians? Or is it because they just traffic in "hoes", not "people"?
The Ars article mentions a woman who he locked in the trunk of a car to prevent her escape. In what corner of the world do you live in where would that be dismissed as "run of the mill"? What kinds of people are willing to accept that behavior? Is it because she's not your daughter or sister, so it's OK that a pimp keeps her on the streets?
I agree that law enforcement often overstates their case, and try to throw a dozen charges at someone in hopes that one might stick. But this is the signed statement of an agent who interviewed a witnesses who directly observed the convicted parolee texting women who then appeared and delivered money to him throughout the evening. That's plenty of evidence to at least ask a judge to issue a search warrant for the phone. The judge could say no, of course, but this affidavit doesn't seem out of line for such requests.
He's already violating the terms of his parole agreement by not divulging his password to the FBI. The guy could certainly rot in jail for the rest of his sentence, with no more effort on anyone's part. But if additional crimes have been committed, they should be tried as well.
Are you saying that trial and error isn't appropriate for a system that cannot fail even one time?
I think it'd be very appropriate to build reactor control software with tests. Lots of tests. Lots and lots of tests. And you can simulate every device out there, you can simulate what happens when pressure builds or releases unexpectedly, you can simulate what happens when the operator pours his pepsi down the control panel and provides you with non-sensible inputs, etc.
Matter of fact, I can't see any other way to build safety critical software. Not just testing the hell out of it, but designing it to be testable in the first place.
I've been using ddg.gg a lot lately and trying as hard as I can to like it.
I like what they say about not tracking users, and if they hold to that, they'll get major positive marks in my book.
That's exactly what I've done, and the position I hold. I went so far as to change ddg to be my home page in all my browsers, instead of Google. For me, a new home page is the first place I go to search, and the search bar is the second. (The awesome bar surprised me the other day with googly results because I mis-moused and hadn't changed firefox's default search provider. That's how un-awesomed I am by that turd of innovation.)
In any event, I will continue to try to use them.
Me, too. Google had many years of being the most powerful engine on the planet, and counted me amongst their legions of devoted followers, but with their pervasive google-analytics scripts on every third page on the web, doubleclick banners everywhere, and who knows what else tracking people, I'm throwing my lot in with anyone who even pretends to offer me some privacy (real or imagined.) I'm hoping that with more use, ddg will be able to grow.
Their search results aren't quite as current as Google, but they seem somewhat more relevant. It could be the Bing engines. It could be that the spammer's link farms are so finely tuned to google's Page Rank that they're not as attractive to different ranking algorithms. Or it could be that they just don't have the spidering capacity to fill their servers with the worthless crap yet.