You are not alone. There are a couple of things to watch out for besides crack.exe and email attachments, and some of them are silent, but when you run unprotected you KNOW when something isn't right speed-wise. Then it's a matter of running an AV, spybot and rootkit revealer to see what you've caught. Having a router limits the damage that can be done by nasty raw internet attacks on your exposed IP interface. Of course, if you get infected through an exploit in an application like Adobe acrobat or FF or Opera, then it's time to upgrade. If you run IE and Outlook then all bets are off and you deserve what you get (not you, just sayin').
The notion that "everything will eventually be broken" is one I do not share. If by "broken" you mean the technical cryptological definition of "finding a weakness", then I would agree. But flat-out broken, as in, "I can read all your encrypted messages", then no, I do not agree. Most breaks, certainly the more celebrated ones, have more to do with flawed implementation of the security system as a whole, rather than the vulnerability of the underlying crypto algos.
Before satellite TV hackers were shut down and forced off the internet, one of the largest providers had already evolved their security card mechanism to the point where nobody was getting "free TV" anymore. In fact, the earlier "free satellite TV", er, "solutions", worked by fooling the equipment and not by cracking any encryption. The same goes for many digital cable TV systems in use today in America, at least, that use "access cards" to control who gets what.
There have been some really lame attempts at security and encryption systems in the consumer space, such as that used on DVDs. Too many people have convinced themselves that just because good security is hard to do right, that nobody will ever do it right. Those people are in for a rude awakening before too long. Look at Vista (OK, don't look at it if you just ate lunch). It's been out for over a year and if anyone has devised a way to "break" the method by which it controls which device drivers are and are not allowed to load in a normal boot sequence, well, I haven't seen it yet.
And the Vista DRM and product activation stuff was done all without the benefit of TPM. In the PC arena, when TPM is ready for primetime and deployed on a widescale basis, many people will have to learn how to whistle a new tune as the fallacy of, "everything can and will be broken" becomes apparent.
The government doesn't need "to get" warrantless wiretaps. They need to GET a warrant. That's the whole point of warrantless surveillance. You don't need to GET anything. You just do it without any oversight. No one watches the watchers. If the think you should be monitored for any reason whatsoever they will do so. Our political leaders have let us down, and that's putting it mildly.
If this is true, what manner of natural selection explains Hannah Montana in US "culture"? 5 million little girls can't be wrong. If you want to argue Disney is manufacturing un-natural selection on American children, well.... OK.
Class Actions are almost worthless unless you're one of the lawyers involved. You get a $10 discount coupon you can use on your next purchase from Microsoft. The lawyers pocket millions. I wish there was a better way of dealing with rogue corporations' transgressions.
I bought and paid for a license for Adobe Acrobat v6. Where's my update? I have no plans whatsoever to pay for an upgrade that consists of bloatware just to get a security fix. The manufacturer, Adobe in this case, should be liable for this flaw since it has now been pointed out to them. For all vulnerable versions.
In "The Puzzle Palace", James Bamford lays out what NSA and CIA were up to back in the 60s and early 70s. Telecom companies were up to their eyeballs in illegal wiretaps back then. Operation Shamrock was one of the big programs. Furthermore, the AT&T of today bears almost no relationship at all to the AT&T of old. They have only the name in common. Blaze's sadness and disappointment is clueless at best.
The bad news is NSA shouldn't have this authority. By the time we're cooked it will be too late to jump out of the pot.
The good news is this will make it easier to get rid of DHS. I've never been a radical shrink-the-gov-to-nothing person, but DHS is a boondoggle of epic proportions. I hate the word "homeland". This isn't the 21st century of a European country, dammit, this is America. DHS's mission is to secure the nation? Isn't that what the Department of fucking DEFENSE is for? DHS is a wolf in sheep's clothing and a black hole for Congressional pork barrel spending. For every worthwhile undertaking they engage in there are 10 that serve only to enrich the wallets of those with the right connections. Put the Coast Guard back under the Transportation Department, or even DoD if it's that important (I think it is). Pick off the other tasks that really need doing and give them to DoD and the rest goes with the FBI. DHS... sayonara.
That sounds really dumb. Tools that can verify that software matches the specifications 100% in every case under every condition? For anything but the most rudimentary code I seriously doubt that. There was a relatively recent incident where a 777 gave warnings that it was going too fast and too slow, both at the same time. Attributed IIRC to a failed sensor and software not programmed to handle the error correctly. That blows the 100% software verification test suite right out of the water. If they really adopted that methodology they probably did it for economic reasons rather than safety.
"This is your automated pilot speaking. Sit back and enjoy your flight with us this afternoon on the first completely automatic airliner. Nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong... go wrong."
You have that backwards. The Seattle article is short and throws out first theories, all of which are speculation at this point. That's actually the good article. The second is from a Rupert Murdoch rag in London that actually attempts to grade the theories - now that's rank gossip, handicapping the failure scenarios with NO hard evidence for any of them. That kind of article actually encourages people to pick their favorite theory and run with it at the office water cooler. Facts be damned, that's Roopert Murdoch's modus operandi in all his bidniz endeavors.
What else do you expect from a Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch rag? Actual news with real reporting? Just wait, it will get worse as his stink infiltrates all corners of the Wall Street Journal.
Possibly incorrect grammatically, but it's the only obvious way to combine 3 homonyms into what passes for a sentence. Of course, someone saying that might be vehemently agreeing with you as well, "Right! Right! Right!". Sorting that out could be a mess. I've criticised the lack of progress on the speech recognition front for a decade. It's amazing how bad most speech recognition software is.
Here's a better test... Take a standard page of text (about 200 words). Scan it and run it through an OCR program. Then randomly grab people off the street and have them read the text out loud into a microphone. If the speech recognition outperforms the OCR'ed result then it's a success.
This is good news. I hope OSS speech recognition spurs some serious innovation. The field is still wide open for quality algorithms and software IMO.
If it wasn't so sad. There are a ton of places online where anyone can get email addresses for free. This initiative is useless since their kids can just get an email address their without their parents ever knowing about it. The lawmakers are even more clueless than the parents. It goes to show that they can't get it right even when they have the best intentions. Mix in some not-so-good intentions, and I'm not talking about the "predators" in this case, and you've got yourself one huge clusterfuck.
My gut tells me there will not be any MS-written USB 3.0 device drivers for Windows XP. Artificially making an OS "obsolete" by not providing drivers for new hardware is one way to accelerate the adoption of Vista. The code words that surround this new standard vis-a-vis Microsoft Windows reveal the inclusion of Vista-style DRM (e.g. "the HD era"). With that in mind I see MS declaring that USB 3.0 drivers for XP are technically "impossible" for reasons that will prove bogus. They may have legitimate business reasons for not providing drivers, but those won't be the reasons they trot out in public.
I'm still waiting for computers to be able to recognize speech, untrained and with a speaker-independent vocabulary range greater than a hundred or so recognizable patterns. One that can take dictation, get the grammar and punctuation right, capitalize words properly and distinguish between "right", "write" and "rite" (among others) depending on the context in which they're used.
Because I don't see them. Whether that's because I frequent sites without a lot of advertising or because I use adblock with Firefox, I don't know and, frankly, I don't care. My web surfing experience is not affected one way or another by ads or the lack thereof.
It's getting harder and harder to get meaningful results from even Google (which has been my home page on the internet since 1997). I'd like a way to set global preferences for Google searching where I could specify sites and filters from which I do not want any result hits under any circumstances whatsoever. about.com is a big time waster IMO and that's just the first one that comes to mind. Another is the site(s) that support spyware detectors. Search for anything computer related and you're bound to get multiple useless hits from their forums via Google. Google itself is a culprit in the form of Google Books. A great resource to be sure, but most of the time not relevant to information I am seeking. Just today I discovered that if I do a Google search for something and put either -"google books" or -inurl:books.google.com (or both) it has no effect whatsoever. It seems to be impossible to do a Google search and exclude Google Books from the results. At least -safari works as far as filtering out books from other sites. In general I would like to exclude anything at all that has to do with books from most of my searches. I've got nothing against books, but when I search the internet for information that is online I find hits that refer to books are of no use to me 99% of the time.
Google will probably never make it possible to selectively filter search results on a global basis. One of my near-term projects is going to be a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that approximates the ability to do it.
It might use firewire but the video is definitely not DV. It might be storable on firewire connected hard drives but that's hardly an application that's going to become mainstream. I'll stick by my claim that firewire, as a consumer interface, is never going to achieve widespread acceptance or success.
You can already see it in the vast number of external hard drives that are available from the major vendors. The previous generation had firewire as an optional interface on the high-end models. The new generation has jettisoned firewire in favor of eSATA. Another firewire application bites the dust.
Firewire is good technology, it just has no future beyond a small number of products. There are 3 big reasons for this. First, the consortium that controls the specs for audio-visual delivery over firewire (specs 61883 and AV/C) will not release information about their protocols unless you pay many hundreds of dollars for the specs. USB, an inferior technology IMO, has everything any programmer could ever want available for writing drivers and software. Good luck on that score with firewire.
The second big reason is most cable TV companies refuse to provide working firewire outputs from their set top boxes. The FCC mandated these, but most cable companies did not bother to comply. There is virtually no enforcement of this requirement. Lately more cable co's have been supplying set top boxes with firewire, but copy-prevention encryption forbids premium content from going out over firewire. There's a reason there is no Windows software to receive such a stream. There is software for Apple machines that will do this, but even that is limited to what the cable company lets you do. Moreover, many cable companies turn on the copy-prevention controls EVEN FOR CHANNELS THAT SHOULD NOT BE protected.
The third reason, only now becoming relevant, is the move to HDTV as opposed to SD. Video over firewire is typically encoded as a DV stream, and that is Standard Definition only.
So a new standard is probably needed at this point, but reasons 1 and 2 will ensure no decent software ever gets written to do anything useful with it. Not using Microsoft products. There are firewire drivers in XP that were crippled on purpose by MS to prevent your PC from broadcasting video out to firewire devices. Vista must be much, much worse in this regard, as will every future product and OS from Microsoft.
USB, on the other hand, is eating firewire's lunch even though it is an inferior technology. For that there is nobody to blame but the firewire consortium that controls the protocol specs. Don't believe me? Check it out. If you're developing shareware, freeware or even plain old open source software you have a high barrier to entry right there. They say everything is available on the internet. Not those specs! Not even on the p2p networks and that alone speaks volumes about the lack of interest in firewire.
Non-native English speakers always seem to screw this up. "Math" is singular AND plural in English. Nobody who speaks English as a first language ever says "maths". If your problem involves calculus, geometry and algebra then your effort involves "doing the math". If you have more than one problem then the effort to solve them all involves "doing the math".
"Maths" as a plural of something drives me up a wall. Almost as bad as "loose" instead of "lose", but non-native English speakers get a pass since they don't know any better. People who speak very good English non-natively all make this "maths" mistake. It's a sure way to tell if someone grew up speaking English or not.
Sorry for the rant. Happy hoidays and peace to everyone. But remember, in English the term "math" is never pluralized by adding an "s" to the end just as the word "mathematics" is never used in the singular by removing the "s". There's no such thing as "maths" or "mathematic".
The American TV show, "Chuck", features a young guy who works at "Buy More", which is clearly a ripoff of BB. I don't watch the show but my girlfriend had it on one night and called my attention to "Buy More" and asked if it reminded me of someplace. Change BB's color blue to green and voila! Buy More.
But that's OK for them to do that on national TV and get away with it on a weekly and ongoing basis. The reason is probably that the people who run and work at BB are infinitely more incompetent than the people who work at the fictional Buy More.
Slashdot Mirror
To Americans, at least, it's obvious. It hates our freedom.
You are not alone. There are a couple of things to watch out for besides crack.exe and email attachments, and some of them are silent, but when you run unprotected you KNOW when something isn't right speed-wise. Then it's a matter of running an AV, spybot and rootkit revealer to see what you've caught. Having a router limits the damage that can be done by nasty raw internet attacks on your exposed IP interface. Of course, if you get infected through an exploit in an application like Adobe acrobat or FF or Opera, then it's time to upgrade. If you run IE and Outlook then all bets are off and you deserve what you get (not you, just sayin').
The notion that "everything will eventually be broken" is one I do not share. If by "broken" you mean the technical cryptological definition of "finding a weakness", then I would agree. But flat-out broken, as in, "I can read all your encrypted messages", then no, I do not agree. Most breaks, certainly the more celebrated ones, have more to do with flawed implementation of the security system as a whole, rather than the vulnerability of the underlying crypto algos.
Before satellite TV hackers were shut down and forced off the internet, one of the largest providers had already evolved their security card mechanism to the point where nobody was getting "free TV" anymore. In fact, the earlier "free satellite TV", er, "solutions", worked by fooling the equipment and not by cracking any encryption. The same goes for many digital cable TV systems in use today in America, at least, that use "access cards" to control who gets what.
There have been some really lame attempts at security and encryption systems in the consumer space, such as that used on DVDs. Too many people have convinced themselves that just because good security is hard to do right, that nobody will ever do it right. Those people are in for a rude awakening before too long. Look at Vista (OK, don't look at it if you just ate lunch). It's been out for over a year and if anyone has devised a way to "break" the method by which it controls which device drivers are and are not allowed to load in a normal boot sequence, well, I haven't seen it yet.
And the Vista DRM and product activation stuff was done all without the benefit of TPM. In the PC arena, when TPM is ready for primetime and deployed on a widescale basis, many people will have to learn how to whistle a new tune as the fallacy of, "everything can and will be broken" becomes apparent.
The government doesn't need "to get" warrantless wiretaps. They need to GET a warrant. That's the whole point of warrantless surveillance. You don't need to GET anything. You just do it without any oversight. No one watches the watchers. If the think you should be monitored for any reason whatsoever they will do so. Our political leaders have let us down, and that's putting it mildly.
phr0m ?
If this is true, what manner of natural selection explains Hannah Montana in US "culture"? 5 million little girls can't be wrong. If you want to argue Disney is manufacturing un-natural selection on American children, well.... OK.
Class Actions are almost worthless unless you're one of the lawyers involved. You get a $10 discount coupon you can use on your next purchase from Microsoft. The lawyers pocket millions. I wish there was a better way of dealing with rogue corporations' transgressions.
I bought and paid for a license for Adobe Acrobat v6. Where's my update? I have no plans whatsoever to pay for an upgrade that consists of bloatware just to get a security fix. The manufacturer, Adobe in this case, should be liable for this flaw since it has now been pointed out to them. For all vulnerable versions.
In "The Puzzle Palace", James Bamford lays out what NSA and CIA were up to back in the 60s and early 70s. Telecom companies were up to their eyeballs in illegal wiretaps back then. Operation Shamrock was one of the big programs. Furthermore, the AT&T of today bears almost no relationship at all to the AT&T of old. They have only the name in common. Blaze's sadness and disappointment is clueless at best.
The bad news is NSA shouldn't have this authority. By the time we're cooked it will be too late to jump out of the pot.
The good news is this will make it easier to get rid of DHS. I've never been a radical shrink-the-gov-to-nothing person, but DHS is a boondoggle of epic proportions. I hate the word "homeland". This isn't the 21st century of a European country, dammit, this is America. DHS's mission is to secure the nation? Isn't that what the Department of fucking DEFENSE is for? DHS is a wolf in sheep's clothing and a black hole for Congressional pork barrel spending. For every worthwhile undertaking they engage in there are 10 that serve only to enrich the wallets of those with the right connections. Put the Coast Guard back under the Transportation Department, or even DoD if it's that important (I think it is). Pick off the other tasks that really need doing and give them to DoD and the rest goes with the FBI. DHS... sayonara.
I Am Legend
The book, not the movie. I am about as pro-science and innovation as you can get, but this is some scary shit. Pandora's Box times 1e80.
That sounds really dumb. Tools that can verify that software matches the specifications 100% in every case under every condition? For anything but the most rudimentary code I seriously doubt that. There was a relatively recent incident where a 777 gave warnings that it was going too fast and too slow, both at the same time. Attributed IIRC to a failed sensor and software not programmed to handle the error correctly. That blows the 100% software verification test suite right out of the water. If they really adopted that methodology they probably did it for economic reasons rather than safety.
"This is your automated pilot speaking. Sit back and enjoy your flight with us this afternoon on the first completely automatic airliner. Nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong... go wrong."
You have that backwards. The Seattle article is short and throws out first theories, all of which are speculation at this point. That's actually the good article. The second is from a Rupert Murdoch rag in London that actually attempts to grade the theories - now that's rank gossip, handicapping the failure scenarios with NO hard evidence for any of them. That kind of article actually encourages people to pick their favorite theory and run with it at the office water cooler. Facts be damned, that's Roopert Murdoch's modus operandi in all his bidniz endeavors.
What else do you expect from a
Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch rag? Actual news with real reporting? Just wait, it will get worse as his stink infiltrates all corners of the Wall Street Journal.
Write 'rite' right.
Possibly incorrect grammatically, but it's the only obvious way to combine 3 homonyms into what passes for a sentence. Of course, someone saying that might be vehemently agreeing with you as well, "Right! Right! Right!". Sorting that out could be a mess. I've criticised the lack of progress on the speech recognition front for a decade. It's amazing how bad most speech recognition software is.
Here's a better test... Take a standard page of text (about 200 words). Scan it and run it through an OCR program. Then randomly grab people off the street and have them read the text out loud into a microphone. If the speech recognition outperforms the OCR'ed result then it's a success.
This is good news. I hope OSS speech recognition spurs some serious innovation. The field is still wide open for quality algorithms and software IMO.
If it wasn't so sad. There are a ton of places online where anyone can get email addresses for free. This initiative is useless since their kids can just get an email address their without their parents ever knowing about it. The lawmakers are even more clueless than the parents. It goes to show that they can't get it right even when they have the best intentions. Mix in some not-so-good intentions, and I'm not talking about the "predators" in this case, and you've got yourself one huge clusterfuck.
My gut tells me there will not be any MS-written USB 3.0 device drivers for Windows XP. Artificially making an OS "obsolete" by not providing drivers for new hardware is one way to accelerate the adoption of Vista. The code words that surround this new standard vis-a-vis Microsoft Windows reveal the inclusion of Vista-style DRM (e.g. "the HD era"). With that in mind I see MS declaring that USB 3.0 drivers for XP are technically "impossible" for reasons that will prove bogus. They may have legitimate business reasons for not providing drivers, but those won't be the reasons they trot out in public.
I'm still waiting for computers to be able to recognize speech, untrained and with a speaker-independent vocabulary range greater than a hundred or so recognizable patterns. One that can take dictation, get the grammar and punctuation right, capitalize words properly and distinguish between "right", "write" and "rite" (among others) depending on the context in which they're used.
You say this already exists? On what planet?
Because I don't see them. Whether that's because I frequent sites without a lot of advertising or because I use adblock with Firefox, I don't know and, frankly, I don't care. My web surfing experience is not affected one way or another by ads or the lack thereof.
It's getting harder and harder to get meaningful results from even Google (which has been my home page on the internet since 1997). I'd like a way to set global preferences for Google searching where I could specify sites and filters from which I do not want any result hits under any circumstances whatsoever. about.com is a big time waster IMO and that's just the first one that comes to mind. Another is the site(s) that support spyware detectors. Search for anything computer related and you're bound to get multiple useless hits from their forums via Google. Google itself is a culprit in the form of Google Books. A great resource to be sure, but most of the time not relevant to information I am seeking. Just today I discovered that if I do a Google search for something and put either -"google books" or -inurl:books.google.com (or both) it has no effect whatsoever. It seems to be impossible to do a Google search and exclude Google Books from the results. At least -safari works as far as filtering out books from other sites. In general I would like to exclude anything at all that has to do with books from most of my searches. I've got nothing against books, but when I search the internet for information that is online I find hits that refer to books are of no use to me 99% of the time.
Google will probably never make it possible to selectively filter search results on a global basis. One of my near-term projects is going to be a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that approximates the ability to do it.
It might use firewire but the video is definitely not DV. It might be storable on firewire connected hard drives but that's hardly an application that's going to become mainstream. I'll stick by my claim that firewire, as a consumer interface, is never going to achieve widespread acceptance or success.
You can already see it in the vast number of external hard drives that are available from the major vendors. The previous generation had firewire as an optional interface on the high-end models. The new generation has jettisoned firewire in favor of eSATA. Another firewire application bites the dust.
So the truth now equals trolling. Interesting.
Firewire is good technology, it just has no future beyond a small number of products. There are 3 big reasons for this. First, the consortium that controls the specs for audio-visual delivery over firewire (specs 61883 and AV/C) will not release information about their protocols unless you pay many hundreds of dollars for the specs. USB, an inferior technology IMO, has everything any programmer could ever want available for writing drivers and software. Good luck on that score with firewire.
The second big reason is most cable TV companies refuse to provide working firewire outputs from their set top boxes. The FCC mandated these, but most cable companies did not bother to comply. There is virtually no enforcement of this requirement. Lately more cable co's have been supplying set top boxes with firewire, but copy-prevention encryption forbids premium content from going out over firewire. There's a reason there is no Windows software to receive such a stream. There is software for Apple machines that will do this, but even that is limited to what the cable company lets you do. Moreover, many cable companies turn on the copy-prevention controls EVEN FOR CHANNELS THAT SHOULD NOT BE protected.
The third reason, only now becoming relevant, is the move to HDTV as opposed to SD. Video over firewire is typically encoded as a DV stream, and that is Standard Definition only.
So a new standard is probably needed at this point, but reasons 1 and 2 will ensure no decent software ever gets written to do anything useful with it. Not using Microsoft products. There are firewire drivers in XP that were crippled on purpose by MS to prevent your PC from broadcasting video out to firewire devices. Vista must be much, much worse in this regard, as will every future product and OS from Microsoft.
USB, on the other hand, is eating firewire's lunch even though it is an inferior technology. For that there is nobody to blame but the firewire consortium that controls the protocol specs. Don't believe me? Check it out. If you're developing shareware, freeware or even plain old open source software you have a high barrier to entry right there. They say everything is available on the internet. Not those specs! Not even on the p2p networks and that alone speaks volumes about the lack of interest in firewire.
Non-native English speakers always seem to screw this up. "Math" is singular AND plural in English. Nobody who speaks English as a first language ever says "maths". If your problem involves calculus, geometry and algebra then your effort involves "doing the math". If you have more than one problem then the effort to solve them all involves "doing the math".
"Maths" as a plural of something drives me up a wall. Almost as bad as "loose" instead of "lose", but non-native English speakers get a pass since they don't know any better. People who speak very good English non-natively all make this "maths" mistake. It's a sure way to tell if someone grew up speaking English or not.
Sorry for the rant. Happy hoidays and peace to everyone. But remember, in English the term "math" is never pluralized by adding an "s" to the end just as the word "mathematics" is never used in the singular by removing the "s". There's no such thing as "maths" or "mathematic".
The American TV show, "Chuck", features a young guy who works at "Buy More", which is clearly a ripoff of BB. I don't watch the show but my girlfriend had it on one night and called my attention to "Buy More" and asked if it reminded me of someplace. Change BB's color blue to green and voila! Buy More.
But that's OK for them to do that on national TV and get away with it on a weekly and ongoing basis. The reason is probably that the people who run and work at BB are infinitely more incompetent than the people who work at the fictional Buy More.