Stuxnet wasn't espionage, it was an attempt to destroy things.
It also was not targeted at China. Stuxnet is not a reason for China to attack us. I would argue that stealing classified information and destruction of hardware are pretty similar in the eyes of the government. They are both attacks.
So, no, I don't think this is the first salvo, nor are your links, as I think that we've likely had this capacity for quite some time. It seems likely.
I don't think it's likely. US Cyber Command was created in 2009. The government had its head buried in the sand for quite a while with regard to the need for offensive and defensive computer experts. They certainly weren't organized under a central command, it seemed more like each department had their own IT responsible for their own network security, like a corporation, and that was it. Meanwhile, China was proactively training their soldiers how to get into networks, steal files, and leave undetected. The way I see it, the majority of the US' capability in that area has been reactionary, not proactive. I don't think our government saw computers as a weapon until very recently, much later than China. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Israel was taking that more seriously than we were for several years. Our government and military leaders are not exactly brilliant engineers and scientists. The people leading our military got their experience from things like Grenada and the Persian Gulf war, offensive computer capabilities were not part of their training or experience.
I work at a Very Large Company (who must remain nameless.) We've got Solaris boxes that were last rebooted in the 90's. Yes. Really. Running Solaris 2.6, even.
I'm willing to hazard a guess who you work for. Let's see.. you're running servers that have an OS that was released in 1997, and apparently you haven't rebooted them since. Almost like your company is stuck in the mid- to late-90s. You're the only Slashdotter I've seen with an AOL instant messenger screen name in their profile. That can't be a coincidence. You work for AOL. They have you designing the latest Free CD labels.
They still sold enough copies to crash their servers, so they have a giant pile of money to make them feel better about all the bad reviews they're getting.
Not necessarily. Maybe they were using a single Dell R910, or maybe they had 10,000 virtual servers. Do we know exactly what their server infrastructure was which couldn't handle the load, or how many copies they sold?
But yeah, I did miss the point. It got bad reviews because the servers were down, the servers were down because that many people were trying to use them, so the bad reviews obviously didn't have any impact on the people who had already bought it.
This is probably the best thing that could have happened to SimCity 5 in order to save the SimCity franchise.
What? No, the best thing that could have happened for the SimCity franchise was for SimCity 5 to be released with no major bugs or problems like the online requirement. EA's decisions are what caused the problems. EA could have made different decisions, and those problems wouldn't exist. Those are all manufactured problems. If I was a programmer at Maxis and this was my project, I would be pissed. I hope more of them speak out.
Giving the game social or online aspects and requiring an internet connection at all times are not the same. You should still be able to play the game if you're offline, it would just tell you that the online features are not currently active because you're offline. It sounds to me like they added the social features as an afterthought to help justify the online requirement, not that the online requirement came from the social features.
The reason for all that was because too many people bought it and it crashed their servers!
And another way to say that would be that the reason it happened was because the game was required to connect to a server in the first place in order to play. If it didn't need to connect, then there wouldn't be overloaded servers, would there?
A boycott is still the way to go. Here's what happens with a "Gamers' Bill of Rights": hours, days, weeks, months, etc, spent working on the language, gauging support among various publishers, educating the public, etc. The result is that EA says they aren't going to support it, using the same type of reverse logic that companies originally used to call DRM a feature ("it helps you manage your rights!"). In the end, EA still does whatever they want to do, and people are still left with the option to either buy their stuff, or not.
I enjoyed the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, I was disappointed when Mass Effect 3 was only available via EA's Origin service, and not Steam. I bought it anyway, played through it a couple times, and that was it. That's the last game from them I'll buy, they can release the next Dragon Age and say that everyone who pre-orders gets a free blowjob and I'll still tell them to shove it up their collective ass. They've lost my trust in a way that I'm simply not willing to give it back, there are too many other good games out there for me to give a shit about what EA is releasing. It would literally require an entire change of management and a completely new approach to publishing games that would get me to give them another look. Life is too short to try and figure out how EA is trying to screw me with their new game.
I see it more as "Hmm, EA is pretty big, and they are leaving the PC sector. Without their competition, there is more of a market for us."
I seriously doubt that many gaming companies base their decisions on what EA does, thankfully. The fact is that there are a lot of PC gamers, there are a lot of PC game developers, and the developers who like making games and who like playing games on PCs will continue to make games for PCs. Let EA leave, they certainly aren't getting any more of my dollars. I'll buy games from people who aren't going to assume I'm a criminal.
Not sure if this is good for the PC games industry, or bad. It's good, because games with bad DRM shouldn't succeed. It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again.
This is good for PC gaming, because it means strategies like this will not succeed in the marketplace. The best outcome of this would be EA losing a ton of money on SimCity. Hopefully EA withdraws from the PC gaming market and focuses on only producing console titles, that would also be a win. EA is not a friend to PC gamers, we don't need them. PC gaming is much, much larger than EA. PC gaming will succeed because of companies like Valve, and because of the developers and fans who use things like Kickstarter to get their games funded (speaking of which, where the hell is Star Command?). PC gaming will succeed in spite of companies like EA, not because of them. I would love it if companies who start their game design by including DRM left the PC market, it will become a bigger market for the developers that want to make great games.
Opera Mini is a wrapper. Opera Mobile is a full-fledged browser, I even have it send a desktop user agent string and it will render pages meant for a desktop just fine, with the speed that Opera users come to expect.
While I would like to see Opera get the recognition it deserves as a good browser, I'm actually OK with it being "obscure". To me that means virtually no chance that there will be attacks targeted at the browser itself. I have plugins on click-to-play, don't have Java plugins or Acrobat even installed, and I feel just fine using Opera on any site.
Obviously the sandboxed JVM browser plugin has various issues, but the slander against the entire Java platform is getting repetitive.
As far as I see it, there are 2 major problems. One is that the name "Java" refers to too many things. Vulnerabilities get found in the Java browser plugins, and get reported as "Java vulnerabilities". Even my boss (who is no longer a programmer, and has no experience with Java, even though he runs a tech company) heard about Twitter, Facebook, Apple, et. al. getting attacked because of "Java" (specifically, the browser plugin components), and that caused him to recommend to one of our customers that they have their vendor rewrite their (server-side) Java software in another language, and saying that he didn't want to install Tomcat because of security issues. It's simple confusion among the vast majority of the public, who don't know what Java is. If they called the browser plugins something other than whatever they call them now, with a unique name, then media may correctly report that the problems are in the browser plugins and not simply problems with "Java".
That's one reason. Like I said, I think there are 2 major reasons. The other reason is this. Like it or not, the Java browser plugins are crap and get exploited way too often for people not to notice. Their naming scheme gives all of Java a bad rap, but the browser plugins actually do deserve the shit reputation that they have. They have earned it.
That would mean removing all recognition of married couples. That would mean that a spouse who doesn't work would be considered as below the poverty line in terms of taxes and eligible for government assistance, that people cannot make medical decisions for their spouse, etc. It doesn't really make sense to do that. The fact is that civil, secular marriage is a very real thing that people engage in, there's no point in trying to close the barn door on that one. What we can do at this point is make sure that those same privileges apply to all married people, and that any two people can enter into a consensual marriage regardless of things like their sexual orientation, religion, race, etc.
But now you're talking about marriage specifically, which is just a subset of gay rights. There are still laws on the books which make homosexual behavior illegal, that's also part of the problem. There are still anti-sodomy laws, for example. If you want to talk about things that the government has no business being involved in, let's start with consensual sex between adults and move on from there. Gay rights isn't just about marriage, it's about society not singling out a group of people for additional regulations or laws because of their sexual orientation.
I would have thought someone would have asked why array_unique takes a parameter by value, and sort by reference.
Regardless, it's obvious what that code is doing. I would argue those 2 lines are even clearer than the other examples, even though they aren't consistent.
(the likely answer to your question though is that sort was part of the language before they added the array_ functions)
why is someone so up in arms about an openly anti-gay guy?
Why is someone so up in arms about a guy who openly doesn't want black people to be free? Why is someone so up in arms about a guy who openly doesn't want women to be able to vote? Why is someone so up in arms about a guy who openly advocates against interracial marriage?
The times, my friend, they are a-changing. Gay rights is a civil rights issue, plain and simple. The question is whether or not it is acceptable for society to discriminate against gay people. A quick glance back at history will tell you which side is going to be the winning side, in case you want to ignore the obvious trend in public polling. Card is actively advocating in favor of discrimination, and that's what people have a problem with. I don't need to claim to be a fan of Queen or have a black friend to be in favor of civil rights, regardless of which group we're talking about. I'm in favor of civil rights because it is objectively the morally right thing to do. So, naturally, I have a problem with people who openly advocate against the right thing to do.
If you want to know what wangles are, what throbbing is, the valid range of "HowMuch", what the returned status codes are... well, you're off to StackExchange to see if anybody's managed to figure it out.
This is also the current state of the majority of the "documentation" at pear.php.net (generated automatically, from equally bad source comments). I especially like when they say that a certain package has been deprecated without specifying what is replacing it.
It's fake because it's South Korea. This is in the actual statement from TPB.
What do you mean, are you talking about the TPB statement which reads, in part, "And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information." To me, that sounds like a description of North Korea, not South Korea.
Slashdot Mirror
plain ol "vadican.va" doesn't work
Well, http://www.vadican.va/ doesn't work either.
Stuxnet wasn't espionage, it was an attempt to destroy things.
It also was not targeted at China. Stuxnet is not a reason for China to attack us. I would argue that stealing classified information and destruction of hardware are pretty similar in the eyes of the government. They are both attacks.
So, no, I don't think this is the first salvo, nor are your links, as I think that we've likely had this capacity for quite some time. It seems likely.
I don't think it's likely. US Cyber Command was created in 2009. The government had its head buried in the sand for quite a while with regard to the need for offensive and defensive computer experts. They certainly weren't organized under a central command, it seemed more like each department had their own IT responsible for their own network security, like a corporation, and that was it. Meanwhile, China was proactively training their soldiers how to get into networks, steal files, and leave undetected. The way I see it, the majority of the US' capability in that area has been reactionary, not proactive. I don't think our government saw computers as a weapon until very recently, much later than China. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Israel was taking that more seriously than we were for several years. Our government and military leaders are not exactly brilliant engineers and scientists. The people leading our military got their experience from things like Grenada and the Persian Gulf war, offensive computer capabilities were not part of their training or experience.
Stuxnet, discovered in 2010, was hardly the first salvo to be fired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1098961-1,00.html
I work at a Very Large Company (who must remain nameless.) We've got Solaris boxes that were last rebooted in the 90's. Yes. Really. Running Solaris 2.6, even.
I'm willing to hazard a guess who you work for. Let's see.. you're running servers that have an OS that was released in 1997, and apparently you haven't rebooted them since. Almost like your company is stuck in the mid- to late-90s. You're the only Slashdotter I've seen with an AOL instant messenger screen name in their profile. That can't be a coincidence. You work for AOL. They have you designing the latest Free CD labels.
They still sold enough copies to crash their servers, so they have a giant pile of money to make them feel better about all the bad reviews they're getting.
Not necessarily. Maybe they were using a single Dell R910, or maybe they had 10,000 virtual servers. Do we know exactly what their server infrastructure was which couldn't handle the load, or how many copies they sold?
But yeah, I did miss the point. It got bad reviews because the servers were down, the servers were down because that many people were trying to use them, so the bad reviews obviously didn't have any impact on the people who had already bought it.
EA is just either incompetent or too cheap to pay for the sort of infrastructure their always-on DRM requires.
What do you mean "either/or"? Why can't they be both incompetent AND cheap? And greedy? And malicious?
This is probably the best thing that could have happened to SimCity 5 in order to save the SimCity franchise.
What? No, the best thing that could have happened for the SimCity franchise was for SimCity 5 to be released with no major bugs or problems like the online requirement. EA's decisions are what caused the problems. EA could have made different decisions, and those problems wouldn't exist. Those are all manufactured problems. If I was a programmer at Maxis and this was my project, I would be pissed. I hope more of them speak out.
Giving the game social or online aspects and requiring an internet connection at all times are not the same. You should still be able to play the game if you're offline, it would just tell you that the online features are not currently active because you're offline. It sounds to me like they added the social features as an afterthought to help justify the online requirement, not that the online requirement came from the social features.
The reason for all that was because too many people bought it and it crashed their servers!
And another way to say that would be that the reason it happened was because the game was required to connect to a server in the first place in order to play. If it didn't need to connect, then there wouldn't be overloaded servers, would there?
A boycott is still the way to go. Here's what happens with a "Gamers' Bill of Rights": hours, days, weeks, months, etc, spent working on the language, gauging support among various publishers, educating the public, etc. The result is that EA says they aren't going to support it, using the same type of reverse logic that companies originally used to call DRM a feature ("it helps you manage your rights!"). In the end, EA still does whatever they want to do, and people are still left with the option to either buy their stuff, or not.
I enjoyed the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, I was disappointed when Mass Effect 3 was only available via EA's Origin service, and not Steam. I bought it anyway, played through it a couple times, and that was it. That's the last game from them I'll buy, they can release the next Dragon Age and say that everyone who pre-orders gets a free blowjob and I'll still tell them to shove it up their collective ass. They've lost my trust in a way that I'm simply not willing to give it back, there are too many other good games out there for me to give a shit about what EA is releasing. It would literally require an entire change of management and a completely new approach to publishing games that would get me to give them another look. Life is too short to try and figure out how EA is trying to screw me with their new game.
There needs to be some way of specifically telling companies: We don't want to be abused.
The current favored method appears to be reviews on Amazon.
I see it more as "Hmm, EA is pretty big, and they are leaving the PC sector. Without their competition, there is more of a market for us."
I seriously doubt that many gaming companies base their decisions on what EA does, thankfully. The fact is that there are a lot of PC gamers, there are a lot of PC game developers, and the developers who like making games and who like playing games on PCs will continue to make games for PCs. Let EA leave, they certainly aren't getting any more of my dollars. I'll buy games from people who aren't going to assume I'm a criminal.
Did you see Amazon yanked it because it received so many bad reviews?
What??? No, I didn't hear that! Where can I learn more about it?! Maybe I'll head over to Slashdot and see if they have a post about it!
Not sure if this is good for the PC games industry, or bad. It's good, because games with bad DRM shouldn't succeed. It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again.
This is good for PC gaming, because it means strategies like this will not succeed in the marketplace. The best outcome of this would be EA losing a ton of money on SimCity. Hopefully EA withdraws from the PC gaming market and focuses on only producing console titles, that would also be a win. EA is not a friend to PC gamers, we don't need them. PC gaming is much, much larger than EA. PC gaming will succeed because of companies like Valve, and because of the developers and fans who use things like Kickstarter to get their games funded (speaking of which, where the hell is Star Command?). PC gaming will succeed in spite of companies like EA, not because of them. I would love it if companies who start their game design by including DRM left the PC market, it will become a bigger market for the developers that want to make great games.
Opera Mini is a wrapper. Opera Mobile is a full-fledged browser, I even have it send a desktop user agent string and it will render pages meant for a desktop just fine, with the speed that Opera users come to expect.
While I would like to see Opera get the recognition it deserves as a good browser, I'm actually OK with it being "obscure". To me that means virtually no chance that there will be attacks targeted at the browser itself. I have plugins on click-to-play, don't have Java plugins or Acrobat even installed, and I feel just fine using Opera on any site.
Obviously the sandboxed JVM browser plugin has various issues, but the slander against the entire Java platform is getting repetitive.
As far as I see it, there are 2 major problems. One is that the name "Java" refers to too many things. Vulnerabilities get found in the Java browser plugins, and get reported as "Java vulnerabilities". Even my boss (who is no longer a programmer, and has no experience with Java, even though he runs a tech company) heard about Twitter, Facebook, Apple, et. al. getting attacked because of "Java" (specifically, the browser plugin components), and that caused him to recommend to one of our customers that they have their vendor rewrite their (server-side) Java software in another language, and saying that he didn't want to install Tomcat because of security issues. It's simple confusion among the vast majority of the public, who don't know what Java is. If they called the browser plugins something other than whatever they call them now, with a unique name, then media may correctly report that the problems are in the browser plugins and not simply problems with "Java".
That's one reason. Like I said, I think there are 2 major reasons. The other reason is this. Like it or not, the Java browser plugins are crap and get exploited way too often for people not to notice. Their naming scheme gives all of Java a bad rap, but the browser plugins actually do deserve the shit reputation that they have. They have earned it.
That would mean removing all recognition of married couples. That would mean that a spouse who doesn't work would be considered as below the poverty line in terms of taxes and eligible for government assistance, that people cannot make medical decisions for their spouse, etc. It doesn't really make sense to do that. The fact is that civil, secular marriage is a very real thing that people engage in, there's no point in trying to close the barn door on that one. What we can do at this point is make sure that those same privileges apply to all married people, and that any two people can enter into a consensual marriage regardless of things like their sexual orientation, religion, race, etc.
But now you're talking about marriage specifically, which is just a subset of gay rights. There are still laws on the books which make homosexual behavior illegal, that's also part of the problem. There are still anti-sodomy laws, for example. If you want to talk about things that the government has no business being involved in, let's start with consensual sex between adults and move on from there. Gay rights isn't just about marriage, it's about society not singling out a group of people for additional regulations or laws because of their sexual orientation.
I would have thought someone would have asked why array_unique takes a parameter by value, and sort by reference.
Regardless, it's obvious what that code is doing. I would argue those 2 lines are even clearer than the other examples, even though they aren't consistent.
(the likely answer to your question though is that sort was part of the language before they added the array_ functions)
why is someone so up in arms about an openly anti-gay guy?
Why is someone so up in arms about a guy who openly doesn't want black people to be free?
Why is someone so up in arms about a guy who openly doesn't want women to be able to vote?
Why is someone so up in arms about a guy who openly advocates against interracial marriage?
The times, my friend, they are a-changing. Gay rights is a civil rights issue, plain and simple. The question is whether or not it is acceptable for society to discriminate against gay people. A quick glance back at history will tell you which side is going to be the winning side, in case you want to ignore the obvious trend in public polling. Card is actively advocating in favor of discrimination, and that's what people have a problem with. I don't need to claim to be a fan of Queen or have a black friend to be in favor of civil rights, regardless of which group we're talking about. I'm in favor of civil rights because it is objectively the morally right thing to do. So, naturally, I have a problem with people who openly advocate against the right thing to do.
If you want to know what wangles are, what throbbing is, the valid range of "HowMuch", what the returned status codes are... well, you're off to StackExchange to see if anybody's managed to figure it out.
This is also the current state of the majority of the "documentation" at pear.php.net (generated automatically, from equally bad source comments). I especially like when they say that a certain package has been deprecated without specifying what is replacing it.
Since people are pissing on PHP, might as well add their version:
$output = array_unique($input);
sort($output);
It's fake because it's South Korea. This is in the actual statement from TPB.
What do you mean, are you talking about the TPB statement which reads, in part, "And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information." To me, that sounds like a description of North Korea, not South Korea.
Who the hell is Kevin Rodman?