Probably not, but you're still better off making sure you are running the latest of your choice of firmware (Tomato just released a new version a couple of weeks ago, go get it now!).
Doesn't hurt to make sure that you only allow https connections to the router's admin page (which means in Tomato that you'll get the inconvenient-but-useful "unverified certificate!" warning in Firefox that takes many ugly steps to get around, and as far as I know cannot be scripted), and setting a reasonably complex password.
And don't assume that your local network is "safe". Run software firewalls and avoid things like open network shares.
A few names that came up on the first page of a Google search in the UK are "Virgin Money", "PayPal TopUp Card", "Sterling Pre-Paid", "Freedom Prepaid", etc.
I was under the impression that prepaid credit cards were available in various stores (gas stations, drug stores, etc) in Europe, though I don't know if that also holds true in the UK.
Yes, but newspapers usually publish the letters with things like "W. T., Portland" or "John F., Buffalo". Enough to identify the letter to anyone who wants to respond, but not enough to identify the writer to any Tom, Dick, or Harry that wants to find them and hunt their family down for daring to hold an opposing viewpoint.
My local newspaper (total population about 15,000, circulation probably in the single-digit thousands) just uses first name and town, because first-name-last-initial might easily be enough to uniquely identify the writer. They also accept submissions that are published as anonymous, once the newspaper has validated the identity of the author (the piece is just attributed to "A Reader From (town)".
So there are easy mechanisms for allowing anonymity from the reading public while identifying the author as a unique individual so they can be removed from the discussion if they turn out to be a spammer, engage in illegal activities, or simply become intolerably rude.
Letters to the Editor are a different case, of course, because they are reviewed and edited. But you could easily make sure that someone's comments are tied to an account that you've made some attempt to confirm is a real person, so you can quickly "nuke them from the site" if they start misbehavin'.
I have to say, honestly, that I'm relieved when NoScript blocks out the comments section of most news media. While people's honest and earnest perspectives (particularly those I do not agree with) are often more interesting than the actual content of the story, they are frequently buried in so much hatred and spam that I've largely stopped trying to read them.
Even on Facebook feeds, where people by and large use their real name or something like it, there's a massive flood of hatred.
The only discussion boards that are readable are where the population is small enough that everyone "knows" everyone else and there's already a political bent on the part of the moderators (at which point those with opposing viewpoints just tend to quietly or loudly leave), and Slashdot.
If you want to post but not use your real name, buy a prepaid Visa and make up a reasonable-sounding name. Last I checked, prepaid Visas don't do a name check, because the money is already in the account.
As long as you pick a real-sounding name and not "Hugh Jass" or something, and you're not rude or spammy about it, you can post all you want under your pseudonym for the same buck everyone else pays.
It'll be enough effort that most of the spammers and trolls won't bother, since the account would be shut down too quickly to make it worth $1 per post.
Slashdot's moderation system is basically a meritocracy, or if you prefer to think of it this way, a syncophantocracy. Anyone who says a lot of things that the existing mods want to hear gets karma points and is then allowed to mod, eventually. If your viewpoints don't line up with the herd and you can't express them with a certain level of politeness, you're screwed.
But, overall, the system only sucks in that it's only marginally better than anything else out there. It's imperfect, but it relies on collective intelligence or ignorance as opposed to being the viewpoint of a small band of people. Still highly imperfect, but less imperfect than any other system I've heard of.
Sure, there are abusive mods, and there are bad moderations, but the bad moderations tend to be fixed over time, and the bad moderators tend to fail metamoderation and remove themselves from the moderation gene pool.
It still means that if you post an anti-(insert viewpoint here) and get a bunch of pro-(insert viewpoint here) moderators on your case, your post will be machine-gunned into oblivion soon. But, by and large, so will their moderator points.
I guess it's a matter of how much effort is available to work on the fork, and whether Oracle would allow such a beast to exist without a patent shitstorm of some type.
Does OpenSolaris fit a market niche that justifies a lot of effort on the part of unpaid and corporate-supported developers? And within that niche do its merits justify the potential risk of having to survive an onslaught of Larry's Lawyers?
There's a critical mass of people necessary to maintain such a fork and sustain its use, and I'm not convinced there's enough developer population to sustain a fork in the absence of support from Big Brother Oracle, and even less so in the face of its active opposition.
Linux? Sure. There are a lot of people who want it, including a lot of corporations interested in using it in embedded apps and distributions (RedHat, Ubuntu, Cisco, etc), and enough of them are willing to add to the kernel and other projects that there's more than enough critical mass of interested contributors to keep it running for, well, a very very long time. Even us non-corporate, non-developer user types can help write the occasional document or contribute test results, bug reports, a few bucks here and there, and user-to-user help to various portions of Linux and its ecosystem of applications. And many of us do as a form of payment for the tremendous gifts bestowed upon us by the OSS community as a whole.
But what niche does OpenSolaris fill, exactly, as an open source OS? How many corporations (other than Oracle) receive benefit from expanding it? How many people who can contribute to the codebase would be interested in using a non-corporate-backed fork? How many would run the risk of a future lawsuit over some aspect that may be dependent on something Oracle bought the rights to and slaps a patent on?
Would you bet your business on a fork of code whose trunk is owned by Oracle? Are there enough businesses that would do so that they'd spend their developers' wages contributing to the codebase?
I think if Oracle allows the board to close, the only "fork" going into OpenSolaris is the one referred to in the phrase "put a fork in it, it's done." OpenSolaris will quietly wither as it sits, unchanged, and all enhancements will get integrated into Pay-Solaris only.
And in a really big hurry, they'd learn that, in order to sell to me, they need to have their computers not acknowledge my presence in any way.
Of course, that would just mean that my preferences would be updated to "use more subtle advertising on this dumb fuck so he's fooled into thinking we left him alone" and trigger my sense of superiority over the brainwashed hoi polloi which, of course, means I'd be more susceptible to the subtle advertising and buy more shit from them.
You need to reread the snippet you quoted, very carefully this time, and go for comprehension of what was said.
People who don't want to pay to play your games are never going to pay to play your games.
People who want to play the game but are unwilling or unable to pay for it are very much included in the "people who don't want to pay to play" category.
The problem with DRM is that it takes a lot of us who were formerly in the "willing to pay to play" category and, because of the restrictions imposed by draconian DRM solutions, puts us in the "no longer interested in risking spending more time getting the game working than we spend actually playing it" category.
I have not purchased a game in some time (Myst: Uru was my last game purchase), and after having to go out and find and purchase an old DVD player because the game refused to play on a DVD drive capable of burning (lest it be copied, I guess), and dealing with SecuROM and a reinstall of my OS so I could burn music CDs from music I had purchased, and God only knows what other dumbfuckery I've had to cope with over the years, I decided I had had enough of having my system fucked with every time I wanted to spend $60 for a few weeks of entertainment.
I'd love to try a few games out here and there, and my wife and I used to be heavily into puzzle-type games (Myst series, Obsidian, Sanitarium, etc), and I used to enjoy an occasional FPS LANFest, but eventually I decided I pretty much needed a separate computer from the one that did my finances and email so I could reload the OS after each game to wipe out the latest crap introduced by the DRM. And, of course, that meant buying another $175 copy of Windows XP because, guess what? It had DRM too.
I decided bicycling and kayaking sounded like more fun.
Judging from the reviews I've seen based on a quick glance, there isn't a good UN-cracked version as well. Maybe people saw what it was like and decided that even free was too expensive.
Before you go all flamey about the fact that I don't even know what the game is... It's a joke, son.
For years, games have worked through the sale of the initial game and then the sale of "expansion packs" later on to keep the game fresh. This will be sold to you as an improvement because the expansion packs will be available for you to buy more often.
Look at WoW. How much does the game cost? I didn't buy it, so I don't know. But at the moment, the "Battle Chest" version is around $40 on Amazon. Plus there are a few $30 expansion packs that seem to have come out since the "Battle Chest" version (which is itself the original WoW plus an expansion pack). How much gaming do you get for your $40? From the packaging, 15 days' worth. Then your guest pass runs out and you need to pay $15 a month thereafter. Plus at least a couple more $30 expansion packs, then a couple more new ones each year to stay current.
I don't begrudge them their money - it's a game, fercrissake, and people can decide whether they want to spend the money on it or not. No one's holding a magical Sword of Incantation to your head. You want what they got, you pay what they want. Otherwise, find better uses for your entertainment dollars.
It's not like it's a necessity like a Big Mac or Cable on a big flatscreen TV or a $10 Starbucks Triple Soy Latte Mocaccino with toasted Madagascar Cinnamon or something.
It not only ensures that DRM is fully active, but that the user must pretty much be online to play or at least access content, and that the licenses pretty much cannot be resold.
Oh, and that the "warez" versions will be ever more valuable to the end user than the legitimate versions, of course.
Let's not forget that this is way the hell out in the ocean, many miles from land. You can't just send out skimmers like we can for the oil spill, because (a) something that small really has no business being that far out and (b) there's no way you can have enough fuel on board to get there and back, so you'd need a lot of logistics work.
It's not impossible, just impractical, and given that it's not on anyone's drive to work no one thinks about it. It's "way the fuck over there". The NIMBY crowd is happy because there are no backyards nearby. Cleaning it up is unprofitable and the amount of effort is way out of proportion with the accolades any group would ever hope to get from undertaking such a monumental effort.
Imagine the reaction: "Wow! The ocean looks the same as it did before! I feel so good about that $10 billion we spent!"
I'm not saying it's not worth doing, only that making people believe it's worth doing is goddamned hard. They don't see the chemicals entering their food chain, because CNN/Fox don't show it as a graphic on the 6 o'clock spews. We have other disasters closer to home that will keep people's attention and sell more ads for plastic shit (that then gets thrown into the ocean, of course).
So an all-out effort and solving the problem ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
However, who says we have to solve the problem in a year, or a decade? How about affordable, smaller-scale, longer-term, less dramatic attempts?
Example: some form of solar-powered autonomous robotic skimmer that can skim the plastic and compress it into bricks, and/or use it as fuel directly? There'd be no real rush to the project, so you could build a relatively small number of them, drop them in the middle of the mess, and have them at least start to make a dent in it. Even if each robot could only clean up a few hundred square meters a day and make a few bricks, it's crap taken out of the water that used to be in the water. It's not dramatic, it's just a bunch of real-life Wall-E's out there getting shit cleaned up.
They could operate slowly enough that any fish could swim out of the net with no problems, while plastic particles rather lack any kind of mobility last I checked.:)
The correct term is "data breach", not "data breech."
A "breech" is either a pair of short pants ("breeches"), the hind end of the body or a birth where the baby is coming out backward ("breech birth"), or the rear of the barrel of a firearm.
So the term "data breech" means short pants made from data, data that is coming out of a system backward, or the back end of an Ethernet cable, I suppose.
This teaching moment sponsored a chunk of my karma from the inevitable "Offtopic" and "Troll" mods this post will undoubtedly earn me.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not, but you're still better off making sure you are running the latest of your choice of firmware (Tomato just released a new version a couple of weeks ago, go get it now!).
Doesn't hurt to make sure that you only allow https connections to the router's admin page (which means in Tomato that you'll get the inconvenient-but-useful "unverified certificate!" warning in Firefox that takes many ugly steps to get around, and as far as I know cannot be scripted), and setting a reasonably complex password.
And don't assume that your local network is "safe". Run software firewalls and avoid things like open network shares.
A few names that came up on the first page of a Google search in the UK are "Virgin Money", "PayPal TopUp Card", "Sterling Pre-Paid", "Freedom Prepaid", etc.
I was under the impression that prepaid credit cards were available in various stores (gas stations, drug stores, etc) in Europe, though I don't know if that also holds true in the UK.
Confirmed on Amazon. My apologies - I stand corrected.
Apparently the press coverage of them was so high that I assumed there were a lot more of them. :)
Yes, but newspapers usually publish the letters with things like "W. T., Portland" or "John F., Buffalo". Enough to identify the letter to anyone who wants to respond, but not enough to identify the writer to any Tom, Dick, or Harry that wants to find them and hunt their family down for daring to hold an opposing viewpoint.
My local newspaper (total population about 15,000, circulation probably in the single-digit thousands) just uses first name and town, because first-name-last-initial might easily be enough to uniquely identify the writer. They also accept submissions that are published as anonymous, once the newspaper has validated the identity of the author (the piece is just attributed to "A Reader From (town)".
So there are easy mechanisms for allowing anonymity from the reading public while identifying the author as a unique individual so they can be removed from the discussion if they turn out to be a spammer, engage in illegal activities, or simply become intolerably rude.
Letters to the Editor are a different case, of course, because they are reviewed and edited. But you could easily make sure that someone's comments are tied to an account that you've made some attempt to confirm is a real person, so you can quickly "nuke them from the site" if they start misbehavin'.
I have to say, honestly, that I'm relieved when NoScript blocks out the comments section of most news media. While people's honest and earnest perspectives (particularly those I do not agree with) are often more interesting than the actual content of the story, they are frequently buried in so much hatred and spam that I've largely stopped trying to read them.
Even on Facebook feeds, where people by and large use their real name or something like it, there's a massive flood of hatred.
The only discussion boards that are readable are where the population is small enough that everyone "knows" everyone else and there's already a political bent on the part of the moderators (at which point those with opposing viewpoints just tend to quietly or loudly leave), and Slashdot.
If you want to post but not use your real name, buy a prepaid Visa and make up a reasonable-sounding name. Last I checked, prepaid Visas don't do a name check, because the money is already in the account.
As long as you pick a real-sounding name and not "Hugh Jass" or something, and you're not rude or spammy about it, you can post all you want under your pseudonym for the same buck everyone else pays.
It'll be enough effort that most of the spammers and trolls won't bother, since the account would be shut down too quickly to make it worth $1 per post.
Slashdot's moderation system is basically a meritocracy, or if you prefer to think of it this way, a syncophantocracy. Anyone who says a lot of things that the existing mods want to hear gets karma points and is then allowed to mod, eventually. If your viewpoints don't line up with the herd and you can't express them with a certain level of politeness, you're screwed.
But, overall, the system only sucks in that it's only marginally better than anything else out there. It's imperfect, but it relies on collective intelligence or ignorance as opposed to being the viewpoint of a small band of people. Still highly imperfect, but less imperfect than any other system I've heard of.
Sure, there are abusive mods, and there are bad moderations, but the bad moderations tend to be fixed over time, and the bad moderators tend to fail metamoderation and remove themselves from the moderation gene pool.
It still means that if you post an anti-(insert viewpoint here) and get a bunch of pro-(insert viewpoint here) moderators on your case, your post will be machine-gunned into oblivion soon. But, by and large, so will their moderator points.
I guess it's a matter of how much effort is available to work on the fork, and whether Oracle would allow such a beast to exist without a patent shitstorm of some type.
Does OpenSolaris fit a market niche that justifies a lot of effort on the part of unpaid and corporate-supported developers? And within that niche do its merits justify the potential risk of having to survive an onslaught of Larry's Lawyers?
There's a critical mass of people necessary to maintain such a fork and sustain its use, and I'm not convinced there's enough developer population to sustain a fork in the absence of support from Big Brother Oracle, and even less so in the face of its active opposition.
Linux? Sure. There are a lot of people who want it, including a lot of corporations interested in using it in embedded apps and distributions (RedHat, Ubuntu, Cisco, etc), and enough of them are willing to add to the kernel and other projects that there's more than enough critical mass of interested contributors to keep it running for, well, a very very long time. Even us non-corporate, non-developer user types can help write the occasional document or contribute test results, bug reports, a few bucks here and there, and user-to-user help to various portions of Linux and its ecosystem of applications. And many of us do as a form of payment for the tremendous gifts bestowed upon us by the OSS community as a whole.
But what niche does OpenSolaris fill, exactly, as an open source OS? How many corporations (other than Oracle) receive benefit from expanding it? How many people who can contribute to the codebase would be interested in using a non-corporate-backed fork? How many would run the risk of a future lawsuit over some aspect that may be dependent on something Oracle bought the rights to and slaps a patent on?
Would you bet your business on a fork of code whose trunk is owned by Oracle? Are there enough businesses that would do so that they'd spend their developers' wages contributing to the codebase?
I think if Oracle allows the board to close, the only "fork" going into OpenSolaris is the one referred to in the phrase "put a fork in it, it's done." OpenSolaris will quietly wither as it sits, unchanged, and all enhancements will get integrated into Pay-Solaris only.
Speaking of initializations, is LSD the new initialization for "Light and Sound Device"?
And in a really big hurry, they'd learn that, in order to sell to me, they need to have their computers not acknowledge my presence in any way.
Of course, that would just mean that my preferences would be updated to "use more subtle advertising on this dumb fuck so he's fooled into thinking we left him alone" and trigger my sense of superiority over the brainwashed hoi polloi which, of course, means I'd be more susceptible to the subtle advertising and buy more shit from them.
You need to reread the snippet you quoted, very carefully this time, and go for comprehension of what was said.
People who don't want to pay to play your games are never going to pay to play your games.
People who want to play the game but are unwilling or unable to pay for it are very much included in the "people who don't want to pay to play" category.
The problem with DRM is that it takes a lot of us who were formerly in the "willing to pay to play" category and, because of the restrictions imposed by draconian DRM solutions, puts us in the "no longer interested in risking spending more time getting the game working than we spend actually playing it" category.
I have not purchased a game in some time (Myst: Uru was my last game purchase), and after having to go out and find and purchase an old DVD player because the game refused to play on a DVD drive capable of burning (lest it be copied, I guess), and dealing with SecuROM and a reinstall of my OS so I could burn music CDs from music I had purchased, and God only knows what other dumbfuckery I've had to cope with over the years, I decided I had had enough of having my system fucked with every time I wanted to spend $60 for a few weeks of entertainment.
I'd love to try a few games out here and there, and my wife and I used to be heavily into puzzle-type games (Myst series, Obsidian, Sanitarium, etc), and I used to enjoy an occasional FPS LANFest, but eventually I decided I pretty much needed a separate computer from the one that did my finances and email so I could reload the OS after each game to wipe out the latest crap introduced by the DRM. And, of course, that meant buying another $175 copy of Windows XP because, guess what? It had DRM too.
I decided bicycling and kayaking sounded like more fun.
Judging from the reviews I've seen based on a quick glance, there isn't a good UN-cracked version as well. Maybe people saw what it was like and decided that even free was too expensive.
Before you go all flamey about the fact that I don't even know what the game is... It's a joke, son.
Why would they go and do a silly thing like that?
For years, games have worked through the sale of the initial game and then the sale of "expansion packs" later on to keep the game fresh. This will be sold to you as an improvement because the expansion packs will be available for you to buy more often.
Look at WoW. How much does the game cost? I didn't buy it, so I don't know. But at the moment, the "Battle Chest" version is around $40 on Amazon. Plus there are a few $30 expansion packs that seem to have come out since the "Battle Chest" version (which is itself the original WoW plus an expansion pack). How much gaming do you get for your $40? From the packaging, 15 days' worth. Then your guest pass runs out and you need to pay $15 a month thereafter. Plus at least a couple more $30 expansion packs, then a couple more new ones each year to stay current.
I don't begrudge them their money - it's a game, fercrissake, and people can decide whether they want to spend the money on it or not. No one's holding a magical Sword of Incantation to your head. You want what they got, you pay what they want. Otherwise, find better uses for your entertainment dollars.
It's not like it's a necessity like a Big Mac or Cable on a big flatscreen TV or a $10 Starbucks Triple Soy Latte Mocaccino with toasted Madagascar Cinnamon or something.
But this is hardly a new business model.
Yes, it's the "DRM of a thousand cuts".
It not only ensures that DRM is fully active, but that the user must pretty much be online to play or at least access content, and that the licenses pretty much cannot be resold.
Oh, and that the "warez" versions will be ever more valuable to the end user than the legitimate versions, of course.
You'll hear an authoritative voice say, "GO TO CHURCH! SAY YOUR PRAYERS DAILY! TITHE! TITHE!"
(with apologies/thanks to Berke Breathed)
Did you know that everyone's binaural frequencies are separated by Kevin Bacon's by only 6Hz? No, really, it's true!
No, silly, band will be illegal. It'll be the "gateway" to music.
It could lead to dancing.
Let's not forget that this is way the hell out in the ocean, many miles from land. You can't just send out skimmers like we can for the oil spill, because (a) something that small really has no business being that far out and (b) there's no way you can have enough fuel on board to get there and back, so you'd need a lot of logistics work.
It's not impossible, just impractical, and given that it's not on anyone's drive to work no one thinks about it. It's "way the fuck over there". The NIMBY crowd is happy because there are no backyards nearby. Cleaning it up is unprofitable and the amount of effort is way out of proportion with the accolades any group would ever hope to get from undertaking such a monumental effort.
Imagine the reaction: "Wow! The ocean looks the same as it did before! I feel so good about that $10 billion we spent!"
I'm not saying it's not worth doing, only that making people believe it's worth doing is goddamned hard. They don't see the chemicals entering their food chain, because CNN/Fox don't show it as a graphic on the 6 o'clock spews. We have other disasters closer to home that will keep people's attention and sell more ads for plastic shit (that then gets thrown into the ocean, of course).
So an all-out effort and solving the problem ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
However, who says we have to solve the problem in a year, or a decade? How about affordable, smaller-scale, longer-term, less dramatic attempts?
Example: some form of solar-powered autonomous robotic skimmer that can skim the plastic and compress it into bricks, and/or use it as fuel directly? There'd be no real rush to the project, so you could build a relatively small number of them, drop them in the middle of the mess, and have them at least start to make a dent in it. Even if each robot could only clean up a few hundred square meters a day and make a few bricks, it's crap taken out of the water that used to be in the water. It's not dramatic, it's just a bunch of real-life Wall-E's out there getting shit cleaned up.
They could operate slowly enough that any fish could swim out of the net with no problems, while plastic particles rather lack any kind of mobility last I checked. :)
"Caution: Do not attempt this maneuver if the temperature is below 0C/32F!"
Brilliant episode. I'm so glad Futurama is back!
I find your argument... compelling. :)
Yes, they'll also have fold-out legs and be convertible to a chair, to maintain the proper form factor for a good toss.
The correct term is "data breach", not "data breech."
A "breech" is either a pair of short pants ("breeches"), the hind end of the body or a birth where the baby is coming out backward ("breech birth"), or the rear of the barrel of a firearm.
So the term "data breech" means short pants made from data, data that is coming out of a system backward, or the back end of an Ethernet cable, I suppose.
This teaching moment sponsored a chunk of my karma from the inevitable "Offtopic" and "Troll" mods this post will undoubtedly earn me.
vigilatteism
People making their own espresso-and-steamed-milk-based beverages? Savages!
(I know what word you meant, but I liked the typo better.)
I think you have that reversed.
(disclaimer: I use and absolutely love GIMP)