That's all well and good, but if the police suspect you enough to seize your PC, they're going to take such heavy use of encryption as an indication that they may well be on to something after all. They certainly aren't going to take "no, you can't have my password" for an answer, and may well charge you with wasting police time and possibly withholding evidence (although that might be pretty hard to make stick as they don't know for sure that there is any evidence), interfering with an investigation, etc.
At the very, very best, if you manage to hold out and they finally give up and let you go, you'll be on their List of known troublemakers, and will be in the frame again in the future should anything happen that could potentially have been down to someone like you.
The bottom line is that unless you genuinely have something to hide, cooperating with the police is always a hell of a lot less painful than not doing so. If you *do* have something to hide, and they know it, then by the time they have you and your PC, encryption isn't going to help anyway, unless the penalties for whatever it is are higher than what you'll get for not surrendering your key.
If you were Microsoft and cared about this, would you explicitly state that it was fixed by a given update?
Personally I deplore anything that makes it less likely that any given user is going to keep their machine properly patched and up to date; each machine that's behind on its patches is another machine that's (even more) vulnerable to being zombified, and frankly, I get quite enough spam as it is.
Around here, C# is a silly thing to ask a question about.
Which is a shame, as it's a pretty nice language backed up by a comprehensive framework. If it weren't for the fact that it's from MS and therefore automatically evil in the eyes of so many people here, I think it would be rather more popular.
that particular book was a good primer on the syntax of C# - which is surely important - and not that great a primer on the actual functionality of Visual Studio.
That's probably because it's called "Learning C#" and not "Learning to Develop C# with Visual Studio". Other IDEs are available, such as the open source #Develop, and Borland's C# Builder. The.NET Framework SDK also ships with all the tools you need to compile and debug C#, and combined with Nant (a.NET port of Ant) may well be sufficient for small-scale development work or those who dislike IDEs.
The only great thing about Microsoft development is the tools you have to do it with.
Plus the size of the potential user base, the amount of information available on MSDN, the sheer number of forums and other user-driven resources... In fact, coming from a Java background, Visual Studio is one of the weakest points of developing for Windows, it really doesn't hold a candle to IDEs like Eclipse or even JBuilder in many areas. (Not that either of those IDEs are anything like perfect)
As an end-user why can't I extend applications by simply dragging and dropping features from one application to another? i.e. Dragging a search box from one app to another.
That would be difficult to achieve between apps written against a single API by a coordinated team of developers writing them with such a feature in mind. To do it between arbitrary apps written by a random collection of (mostly) volunteer/part time developers targetting various APIs is utterly impracticable.
Taking just your example of search, how would that work, dragging and dropping a search feature from (say) a text editor, and on to a photo management application? Or a music player? It's a great, sci-fi sounding idea, but I really can't see it being practical except in extremely limited situations.
This is pretty far off topic, but I remember a similar thing here in the UK a few years ago (ok, probably 10 or more years...). One of the sleazier tabloids had "discovered" this 15 year old girl with huge boobs, and was teasing its readership with scantily-clad pictures of her in the run-up to her 16th birthday (age of sexual consent in the UK). I remember the day before they ran with a large photo of her on the front page, bare-chested apart from a finger covering each nipple, and a headline something like "Tomorrow she's TOPLESS!".
Meanwhile, they were joining in the general tabloid frenzy about paedophiles.
That day the last dregs of my respect for the British tabloids withered and died (not that there was much left by then anyway).
1) This was settled out of court, so no precedent 2) This was about claiming to own copyright when you don't, which is explicitly in violation of the DMCA; the "MAFIAA" actually work on behalf of the legal copyright holders, and so it's doubtful that that provision would apply
Don't forget that it doesn't have to be a driver for a real, physical device. As long as you code against the appropriate API/spec, you can load pretty much anything as a driver. That's the way that most (all?) copy prevention software for games works, for example, as well as CD emulation tools like Daemon Tools.
We're not necessarily talking about a compromised NVidia driver, but a plain malicious piece of software.
The registrars don't seem to have any interest in solving the problem; after all, they're getting paid plenty of money for lots of domains that they otherwise wouldn't be selling.
Assume that I am a registrar. Now, explain to me exactly what this problem is that I should be solving, and why it is in my interests to solve it.
Can't do it? That's because there *is* no problem, not for the registrars. "But it'll improve surfing experience for end users!" is true (I hate typo-squatters as much as the next rabidly-anti typo-squatting person), but irrelevant to the registrars.
I wonder what they plan to do in five years time when the entire namespace has been registered and the only people selling domains are domain squatters and resellers?
Live off the renewal fees. If they stopped selling obviously-crap names, they'd make less money now (sales) *and* in the future (renewals).
I appreciate your position, but the registrars have nothing to gain and everything to lose from clamping down on this.
That's all true and all good stuff, but has nothing at all to do with streaming movies, which is what the GP was referring to. I also can't see the difference between downloading an ISO over HTTP and streaming a movie over HTTP. Both involve transferring a number of bytes over TCP/IP with an initial connection mediated by a given protocol; they even use the same port. In short, unless the ISP is sniffing your HTTP headers and specifically looking for requests for media-related file extensions, or caching and inspecting your downloads, they're not going to know the difference.
P2P is a different matter; it uses different ports, different protocols (often using UDP rather than/as well as TCP/IP) and generally involves a large number of connections and a lot of upstream bandwidth. That's not what was being talked about though.
Any company with half a gram of common sense would rather you pirated their software than use a competing product. Of course they'd also rather you paid for their software, but given the choice of course they'll value install base for themselves over install base for a competitor.
I really don't see how this is news, or that there's really anything to discuss.
For those not in the know (as the wiki article doesn't seem to mention it), a "27B stroke 6" is a form that Harry Tuttle says he'd have to fill in before he could do anything to help, even if your apartment is on fire. (I forget the exact quote, but it's something like "I couldn't even give you a glass of water if your apartment was on fire without filling in a 27B/6 first")
Can't people read between the lines or do I have to spell out even the bleedin' obvious?
You're posting on a site full of techies, well known for their pedantry and exhaustive attention to detail*, and you're surprised that people are pulling you up because you didn't spell out exactly what's happening but left a little to interpretation?
(* And yet so often unwilling to use correct grammar, punctuation and spelling, apparently believing that it doesn't matter; the irony is not lost on me...)
I know the god-game genre isn't exactly huge, but Populous is generally credited with being the first; how can you ignore a game that created an entire genre?
Actually, I thought it was the other way around - not that all internet addresses start with a., but that they *end* with a dot (which is left off, of course) - so "slashdot.org" could equally well be written "slashdot.org.". Thus http://./ would indeed be the default website of the root DNS servers (were such a thing possible), but because it's missing the domain name before it, not after it.
In fact, typing "slashdot.org." into both IE7 and Firefox2 gets you to slashdot, while typing "http://.slashdot.org" gets you a DNS name lookup error.
I'm a Brit, and it's definitely not unknown for people here to say "March 14th" as well as "14th of March". I have heard that explanation before, but like another poster, I suspect that the spoken form follows the written, rather than the other way around.
Dell could sell such systems cheaper not only because of the lacking windows system but also because they would not have to offer support for OS issues.
I'm not so sure that it would be cheaper. I don't imagine that OS support goes much beyond a script covering common issues, with a final catch-all of "back up your files and restore from CD/recovery partition". Selling without an OS also means losing the money from third-parties to bundle their adware pre-installed (e.g. the links to sign up with online services & ISPs, Norton 60 day trials, etc). They may also end up paying more for their Windows licences from MS, who are likely to be rather displeased with Dell selling systems that encourage piracy (MS has leant on OEMs before not to sell naked PCs as people will buy them then installed pirated copies of Windows (which of course some will)).
To my mind, it's not so much that he didn't have any credentials, as it is that he lied and claimed that he did. If he lied about that, what else has he lied about? How can I trust the article now?
The SI prefixes kilo, mega, etc were in use long before they were used by the computing industry. Even within the industry, the SI prefixes are used when talking about mass storage and transmission speeds - the M in 100Mbps is 10^3, not 2^20, and similarly for hard drives.
Now personally I think that mebi, kibi, and the others sound stupid and would never use them myself, but I at least acknowledge the reality that megabyte means both 10^3bytes and 2^20bytes depending on the context, and as such is ambiguous.
Pretty high - generally what happens is that you come up with a nice acronym then "retrofit" an expansion to it, or you have a partial name (something like "Autonomous Space Repair Operation"), someone notices that the initials are *almost* a nice acronym, then you tweak the name to make it fit.
In my experience, it's extremely rare that someone comes up with a name then realises that it also makes for a nice, snappy acronym.
Everyone has a price. Not everyone with the technical ability to do this agrees with you. Some people care far more about the technical challenge of implementing the system than the uses to which it will be put. Some people sincerely believe that it's necessary. Some people simply don't believe that it will ever be misused.
I'm guessing they hired developers from other countries just like MS does, they have no adversions to spying on the american people
Yes, because the only people on earth to object to this sort of thing are American; everyone else would pay to be given the chance to participate, especially if it meant spying on Americans. Bigot.
I don't care what they were paid... for most of us it wouldn't be enough!
No, for you, it wouldn't be enough; plenty of people would set aside whatever misgivings they had (if any) if enough money was waved at them. Do not make the mistake of believing that everyone thinks as you do; they do not. You have been seduced by a small, non-representative cross-section of the population who post to slashdot, mouthing off on a website with no comeback and who aren't in that situation and likely never have been.
Would I do it? I don't know. I'd like to think not, but I suspect that if enough money was offered, I'd say yes. Money isn't everything, but it sure as hell makes life easier; it would be very easy to think "If I don't do it, someone else will, so I might as well see that me and mine are taken care of".
The definition he's using of "coward" is essentially either the "I'm a troll" one or the "I know you're right so I'm going to counter your argument in the only way I know how, with mindless name-calling" one.
Both YouTube and MySpace are insanely popular. You don't like them (and no, nor do I particularly) but I think the company is probably willing to take that hit.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all well and good, but if the police suspect you enough to seize your PC, they're going to take such heavy use of encryption as an indication that they may well be on to something after all. They certainly aren't going to take "no, you can't have my password" for an answer, and may well charge you with wasting police time and possibly withholding evidence (although that might be pretty hard to make stick as they don't know for sure that there is any evidence), interfering with an investigation, etc.
At the very, very best, if you manage to hold out and they finally give up and let you go, you'll be on their List of known troublemakers, and will be in the frame again in the future should anything happen that could potentially have been down to someone like you.
The bottom line is that unless you genuinely have something to hide, cooperating with the police is always a hell of a lot less painful than not doing so. If you *do* have something to hide, and they know it, then by the time they have you and your PC, encryption isn't going to help anyway, unless the penalties for whatever it is are higher than what you'll get for not surrendering your key.
That's why it's called "evidence" and not "irrefutable proof".
If you were Microsoft and cared about this, would you explicitly state that it was fixed by a given update?
Personally I deplore anything that makes it less likely that any given user is going to keep their machine properly patched and up to date; each machine that's behind on its patches is another machine that's (even more) vulnerable to being zombified, and frankly, I get quite enough spam as it is.
Around here, C# is a silly thing to ask a question about.
.NET Framework SDK also ships with all the tools you need to compile and debug C#, and combined with Nant (a .NET port of Ant) may well be sufficient for small-scale development work or those who dislike IDEs.
Which is a shame, as it's a pretty nice language backed up by a comprehensive framework. If it weren't for the fact that it's from MS and therefore automatically evil in the eyes of so many people here, I think it would be rather more popular.
that particular book was a good primer on the syntax of C# - which is surely important - and not that great a primer on the actual functionality of Visual Studio.
That's probably because it's called "Learning C#" and not "Learning to Develop C# with Visual Studio". Other IDEs are available, such as the open source #Develop, and Borland's C# Builder. The
The only great thing about Microsoft development is the tools you have to do it with.
Plus the size of the potential user base, the amount of information available on MSDN, the sheer number of forums and other user-driven resources... In fact, coming from a Java background, Visual Studio is one of the weakest points of developing for Windows, it really doesn't hold a candle to IDEs like Eclipse or even JBuilder in many areas. (Not that either of those IDEs are anything like perfect)
How do they access DX10 features in the Source engine on XP?
They don't, those features simply won't be available, just as things like HDR aren't available to people with cards that don't support them.
Remember, "$foo will support $bar" is different to "$foo will require $bar".
As an end-user why can't I extend applications by simply dragging and dropping features from one application to another? i.e. Dragging a search box from one app to another.
That would be difficult to achieve between apps written against a single API by a coordinated team of developers writing them with such a feature in mind. To do it between arbitrary apps written by a random collection of (mostly) volunteer/part time developers targetting various APIs is utterly impracticable.
Taking just your example of search, how would that work, dragging and dropping a search feature from (say) a text editor, and on to a photo management application? Or a music player? It's a great, sci-fi sounding idea, but I really can't see it being practical except in extremely limited situations.
This is pretty far off topic, but I remember a similar thing here in the UK a few years ago (ok, probably 10 or more years...). One of the sleazier tabloids had "discovered" this 15 year old girl with huge boobs, and was teasing its readership with scantily-clad pictures of her in the run-up to her 16th birthday (age of sexual consent in the UK). I remember the day before they ran with a large photo of her on the front page, bare-chested apart from a finger covering each nipple, and a headline something like "Tomorrow she's TOPLESS!".
Meanwhile, they were joining in the general tabloid frenzy about paedophiles.
That day the last dregs of my respect for the British tabloids withered and died (not that there was much left by then anyway).
Nice theory, just two little holes:
1) This was settled out of court, so no precedent
2) This was about claiming to own copyright when you don't, which is explicitly in violation of the DMCA; the "MAFIAA" actually work on behalf of the legal copyright holders, and so it's doubtful that that provision would apply
Don't forget that it doesn't have to be a driver for a real, physical device. As long as you code against the appropriate API/spec, you can load pretty much anything as a driver. That's the way that most (all?) copy prevention software for games works, for example, as well as CD emulation tools like Daemon Tools.
We're not necessarily talking about a compromised NVidia driver, but a plain malicious piece of software.
The registrars don't seem to have any interest in solving the problem; after all, they're getting paid plenty of money for lots of domains that they otherwise wouldn't be selling.
Assume that I am a registrar. Now, explain to me exactly what this problem is that I should be solving, and why it is in my interests to solve it.
Can't do it? That's because there *is* no problem, not for the registrars. "But it'll improve surfing experience for end users!" is true (I hate typo-squatters as much as the next rabidly-anti typo-squatting person), but irrelevant to the registrars.
I wonder what they plan to do in five years time when the entire namespace has been registered and the only people selling domains are domain squatters and resellers?
Live off the renewal fees. If they stopped selling obviously-crap names, they'd make less money now (sales) *and* in the future (renewals).
I appreciate your position, but the registrars have nothing to gain and everything to lose from clamping down on this.
That's all true and all good stuff, but has nothing at all to do with streaming movies, which is what the GP was referring to. I also can't see the difference between downloading an ISO over HTTP and streaming a movie over HTTP. Both involve transferring a number of bytes over TCP/IP with an initial connection mediated by a given protocol; they even use the same port. In short, unless the ISP is sniffing your HTTP headers and specifically looking for requests for media-related file extensions, or caching and inspecting your downloads, they're not going to know the difference.
P2P is a different matter; it uses different ports, different protocols (often using UDP rather than/as well as TCP/IP) and generally involves a large number of connections and a lot of upstream bandwidth. That's not what was being talked about though.
Any company with half a gram of common sense would rather you pirated their software than use a competing product. Of course they'd also rather you paid for their software, but given the choice of course they'll value install base for themselves over install base for a competitor.
I really don't see how this is news, or that there's really anything to discuss.
For those not in the know (as the wiki article doesn't seem to mention it), a "27B stroke 6" is a form that Harry Tuttle says he'd have to fill in before he could do anything to help, even if your apartment is on fire. (I forget the exact quote, but it's something like "I couldn't even give you a glass of water if your apartment was on fire without filling in a 27B/6 first")
Can't people read between the lines or do I have to spell out even the bleedin' obvious?
You're posting on a site full of techies, well known for their pedantry and exhaustive attention to detail*, and you're surprised that people are pulling you up because you didn't spell out exactly what's happening but left a little to interpretation?
(* And yet so often unwilling to use correct grammar, punctuation and spelling, apparently believing that it doesn't matter; the irony is not lost on me...)
I know the god-game genre isn't exactly huge, but Populous is generally credited with being the first; how can you ignore a game that created an entire genre?
(And no Elite either? For shame)
Actually, I thought it was the other way around - not that all internet addresses start with a ., but that they *end* with a dot (which is left off, of course) - so "slashdot.org" could equally well be written "slashdot.org.". Thus http://./ would indeed be the default website of the root DNS servers (were such a thing possible), but because it's missing the domain name before it, not after it.
In fact, typing "slashdot.org." into both IE7 and Firefox2 gets you to slashdot, while typing "http://.slashdot.org" gets you a DNS name lookup error.
I don't think my headlights count as extra energy
Why on earth not? Do they not use any energy?
I'm a Brit, and it's definitely not unknown for people here to say "March 14th" as well as "14th of March". I have heard that explanation before, but like another poster, I suspect that the spoken form follows the written, rather than the other way around.
Dell could sell such systems cheaper not only because of the lacking windows system but also because they would not have to offer support for OS issues.
I'm not so sure that it would be cheaper. I don't imagine that OS support goes much beyond a script covering common issues, with a final catch-all of "back up your files and restore from CD/recovery partition". Selling without an OS also means losing the money from third-parties to bundle their adware pre-installed (e.g. the links to sign up with online services & ISPs, Norton 60 day trials, etc). They may also end up paying more for their Windows licences from MS, who are likely to be rather displeased with Dell selling systems that encourage piracy (MS has leant on OEMs before not to sell naked PCs as people will buy them then installed pirated copies of Windows (which of course some will)).
To my mind, it's not so much that he didn't have any credentials, as it is that he lied and claimed that he did. If he lied about that, what else has he lied about? How can I trust the article now?
The SI prefixes kilo, mega, etc were in use long before they were used by the computing industry. Even within the industry, the SI prefixes are used when talking about mass storage and transmission speeds - the M in 100Mbps is 10^3, not 2^20, and similarly for hard drives.
Now personally I think that mebi, kibi, and the others sound stupid and would never use them myself, but I at least acknowledge the reality that megabyte means both 10^3bytes and 2^20bytes depending on the context, and as such is ambiguous.
Pretty high - generally what happens is that you come up with a nice acronym then "retrofit" an expansion to it, or you have a partial name (something like "Autonomous Space Repair Operation"), someone notices that the initials are *almost* a nice acronym, then you tweak the name to make it fit.
In my experience, it's extremely rare that someone comes up with a name then realises that it also makes for a nice, snappy acronym.
Everyone has a price. Not everyone with the technical ability to do this agrees with you. Some people care far more about the technical challenge of implementing the system than the uses to which it will be put. Some people sincerely believe that it's necessary. Some people simply don't believe that it will ever be misused.
I'm guessing they hired developers from other countries just like MS does, they have no adversions to spying on the american people
Yes, because the only people on earth to object to this sort of thing are American; everyone else would pay to be given the chance to participate, especially if it meant spying on Americans. Bigot.
I don't care what they were paid... for most of us it wouldn't be enough!
No, for you, it wouldn't be enough; plenty of people would set aside whatever misgivings they had (if any) if enough money was waved at them. Do not make the mistake of believing that everyone thinks as you do; they do not. You have been seduced by a small, non-representative cross-section of the population who post to slashdot, mouthing off on a website with no comeback and who aren't in that situation and likely never have been.
Would I do it? I don't know. I'd like to think not, but I suspect that if enough money was offered, I'd say yes. Money isn't everything, but it sure as hell makes life easier; it would be very easy to think "If I don't do it, someone else will, so I might as well see that me and mine are taken care of".
The definition he's using of "coward" is essentially either the "I'm a troll" one or the "I know you're right so I'm going to counter your argument in the only way I know how, with mindless name-calling" one.
Both YouTube and MySpace are insanely popular. You don't like them (and no, nor do I particularly) but I think the company is probably willing to take that hit.