A while back I actually wrote a tool for Rickrolling people several months ago: http://brokenthings.org/ based on poisoned link redirection. It works well enough. The only way to avoid redirector tricks is to follow redirectors all the way to The Actual Page and then use *that* as the reference. Then, at least if the link is poisoned, it'll be obvious.
It's a little irritating to read all the comments about how this is really easy, standard industry practice, etc. Please give me a fucking break.
Suppose you're running a church newsletter. You're not computer-literate. You want to send a newsletter. You write out the names of church members and their mailing addresses on a sheet of paper, and accidentally leave it at the copy shop. This is legal.
Now, you do the same thing on a computer that you keep locked in your church. You use it to print out labels, you put the labels on envelopes, and you put the envelopes in the mail. Is it really reasonable that you've broken the law here? Most of this information is available in public databases anyway. You don't know "encryption" from your asshole. Your computer runs Windows 98, and there's no network.
To my mind, if "creating a list on paper" is legal, "creating a list in a computer" should be too. If you want to hit %%loss or misuse%% of personal information, write a law that does that. Penalize a lack of security, don't legislate what security is, because every situation is not the same.
I'm a former "Yahoo", and I've got to say that I spent much of my time hoping someone would buy the company, if only to mindwipe the boneheaded middle and upper management.
They could've been the AOL in an AOL/Time Warner sandwich — that "gem" that someone else paid too much for.
Now? Forget it. I did.
Yahoo search surrendered the search biz when they agreed to send search marketing results through google. Even with the Department of Justice shooting that down, well, it's a hell of a statement when even your competitor chooses The Other Guy.
The "Oh, the consumer can switch it off" line is utter and complete fucking bullshit.
Yes, you can turn off DRM. Yes, Zion can shut down the machines in the basement. What happens then? Applications that used to work stop, asking you politely to "Please enable DRM" and offering to tell you how. More polite dialog boxes pop up: "You need to be running DRM to use this application" or "This feature requires DRM support (where available)".
You're given the choice between owning your own computer and being owned. Think this is paranoid fantasy? Try turning off cookies and javascript on your average user's machine. They're be completely fucked, with a big cloud of "turn cookies on" sites that simply do not work. Compliance or Else: That is the promise of DRM.
Haha, very funny. You want to know what a military contract means? It means that the private firm will get PAID. It's not much of a stretch to blame this on privatization. Sure, government agencies aren't much better, but they're a bit less of a hodge-podge of security policies and standards. Emphasis on the "bit".
The article even suggests the answer. It may be illegal for a librarian to tell you he or she's been visited by the FBI, but it's not illegal for one to tell you he or she hasn't been.
Start compiling a list of where the librarians answer like they're in a spy movie and where they go "huh?". Publish it. Ask for the official "we have not been visited by the FBI letter", if you can get it.
If you can find where there's light, the darkness will also be visible.
This really reminds me of Philip K. Dick's short story "Second Variety", about a race of "claws" (both little choppy chainsaw robots and human-mimicking "bunker busters" who got you to invite them back home).
I really wish we just decided we weren't going to be the monsters who open this box. It's worse than the A-bomb. At least an A-bomb had a relatively confined kill zone.
I'm sure I'll be dead before things have a chance to get so bad, but why are we in such a hurry to do this?
No, this isn't flamebait. I'm glad that they might get out of the AD&D business, and back to writing original, interesting, and easy-to-use adventures. Baldur's Gate was ok, but it was too tied to what it tried to reproduce -- AD&D, without going all the way.
Fallout was excellent because it was a role-playing game, but it wasn't any RPG you'd ever seen, short of pen-and-paper. What made Fallout great were the multiple conversation paths and the options you'd get, based on how knowledable or personable you were. It also helped that it was structured, but not overwhelmingly linear.
Yes, it had flaws, but the gameplay more than made up for it, and that's what I want to see more of.
Is RedHat really a good idea? Sure, it's easy to install, but if history is any guide, it's pretty easy to own, too. Why not a more secure linux distribution, or even (ducking) FreeBSD?
Also, I don't think most parents would go for it, because their sprog won't be getting any computer (read: Microsoft) skills.
Oh, please. This is still a toy, because you only have encryption between the phone and the cellular provider. The NSA, if they want, can still try to intercept the signal once it gets to your phone company, or the FBI can get a court order (or not) and silently tap your sad ass, just as easily.
The NSA will break into cold sweats when there's backdoor-less phone-to-phone encryption with arbitrary and generally large keys using well-known and trusted cryptosystems. I don't think it's going to happen for a while.
"Old enough to hear obscenities"? How old is that, anyway? I know kids aren't allowed near rated R movies, but you can already hear "fuck" (The Seventh Day) and "shit" (Star Trek Generations) in PG-13 movies. I'm also guessing you can curse in public, even when kids are around. Yes, I know about that One Case where a guy was busted for swearing in front of a kid, but that's one case in one state.
The earlier the better, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with a little harsh language.
Duh. It's already here. The PCG-C1VN, Sony's Picturebook, was available in the US only a little after it was in Japan. This improves their previous record -- the PCG-C1 took almost a year to get to the US.
Remember all the talk of audio watermarking and the other (debatably) "unaudable" copy-identification techniques? Well, it's time to use those on your own music to screw this thing up. In its pure form, audio ID'ing is cool. It's like CDDB for mp3s. Download something, and you can be sure it's not some wanker who named all his stuff "Orbital - Peel Sessions", or whatever you're looking for.
But if you need to get around this? Bam. A tool that adds 0.5 seconds of silence will totally screw Relatable's algorithm, last I checked. Past that, it's the same old story -- a war between the modifiers and the filterers. Napster's gone from being somewhat useful to totally useless. Long live Gnutella and Freenet.
The real problem with eye-movement-based systems is that, when you're looking at something, your eye is often focused on a point near the object, and not the object itself.
That's why this technology is currently only being used by people with disabilities, and the "buttons" are huge.
Let me get this straight: the telomeres are nature's Copy Protection? At least we know now that the number of lawyers the RIAA and MPAA can throw at someone is finite.
Slashdot Mirror
A while back I actually wrote a tool for Rickrolling people several months ago:
http://brokenthings.org/
based on poisoned link redirection. It works well enough. The only way to avoid redirector tricks is to follow redirectors all the way to The Actual Page and then use *that* as the reference. Then, at least if the link is poisoned, it'll be obvious.
It's a little irritating to read all the comments about how this is really easy, standard industry practice, etc. Please give me a fucking break.
Suppose you're running a church newsletter. You're not computer-literate. You want to send a newsletter. You write out the names of church members and their mailing addresses on a sheet of paper, and accidentally leave it at the copy shop. This is legal.
Now, you do the same thing on a computer that you keep locked in your church. You use it to print out labels, you put the labels on envelopes, and you put the envelopes in the mail. Is it really reasonable that you've broken the law here? Most of this information is available in public databases anyway. You don't know "encryption" from your asshole. Your computer runs Windows 98, and there's no network.
To my mind, if "creating a list on paper" is legal, "creating a list in a computer" should be too. If you want to hit %%loss or misuse%% of personal information, write a law that does that. Penalize a lack of security, don't legislate what security is, because every situation is not the same.
Finally we a place where you can find rootkits and backdoor installers for your iPhone.
Every time I read "Cal Tech", I cringe. "Caltech", please.
It's on the check-out page.
$19 extra for a remote, which seems reasonable enough.
I'm a former "Yahoo", and I've got to say that I spent much of my time hoping someone would buy the company, if only to mindwipe the boneheaded middle and upper management.
They could've been the AOL in an AOL/Time Warner sandwich — that "gem" that someone else paid too much for.
Now? Forget it. I did.
Yahoo search surrendered the search biz when they agreed to send search marketing results through google. Even with the Department of Justice shooting that down, well, it's a hell of a statement when even your competitor chooses The Other Guy.
He's running from the FBI. Guns aren't that hard to get.
You'd expect the Large Hardon Collider to be near body temperature, yes?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/25/overture_buys_fasts_web_search/
Overture bought FAST's search arm before Yahoo in turn bought Overture.
Now they grew a new arm, and are selling that one to Microsoft?
Outstanding.
Mostly a vertical pattern of three dots in the middle right side of the screen.
They drove me fucking nuts, because I thought they were part of some Tyler Durden-esque message. Fucknazis.
The "Oh, the consumer can switch it off" line is utter and complete fucking bullshit.
Yes, you can turn off DRM. Yes, Zion can shut down the machines in the basement. What happens then? Applications that used to work stop, asking you politely to "Please enable DRM" and offering to tell you how. More polite dialog boxes pop up: "You need to be running DRM to use this application" or "This feature requires DRM support (where available)".
You're given the choice between owning your own computer and being owned. Think this is paranoid fantasy? Try turning off cookies and javascript on your average user's machine. They're be completely fucked, with a big cloud of "turn cookies on" sites that simply do not work. Compliance or Else: That is the promise of DRM.
Haha, very funny. You want to know what a military contract means? It means that the private firm will get PAID. It's not much of a stretch to blame this on privatization. Sure, government agencies aren't much better, but they're a bit less of a hodge-podge of security policies and standards. Emphasis on the "bit".
The article even suggests the answer. It may be illegal for a librarian to tell you he or she's been visited by the FBI, but it's not illegal for one to tell you he or she hasn't been.
Start compiling a list of where the librarians answer like they're in a spy movie and where they go "huh?". Publish it. Ask for the official "we have not been visited by the FBI letter", if you can get it.
If you can find where there's light, the darkness will also be visible.
I really wish we just decided we weren't going to be the monsters who open this box. It's worse than the A-bomb. At least an A-bomb had a relatively confined kill zone.
I'm sure I'll be dead before things have a chance to get so bad, but why are we in such a hurry to do this?
No, this isn't flamebait. I'm glad that they might get out of the AD&D business, and back to writing original, interesting, and easy-to-use adventures. Baldur's Gate was ok, but it was too tied to what it tried to reproduce -- AD&D, without going all the way.
Fallout was excellent because it was a role-playing game, but it wasn't any RPG you'd ever seen, short of pen-and-paper. What made Fallout great were the multiple conversation paths and the options you'd get, based on how knowledable or personable you were. It also helped that it was structured, but not overwhelmingly linear.
Yes, it had flaws, but the gameplay more than made up for it, and that's what I want to see more of.
Is RedHat really a good idea? Sure, it's easy to install, but if history is any guide, it's pretty easy to own, too. Why not a more secure linux distribution, or even (ducking) FreeBSD?
Also, I don't think most parents would go for it, because their sprog won't be getting any computer (read: Microsoft) skills.
Oh, please. This is still a toy, because you only have encryption between the phone and the cellular provider. The NSA, if they want, can still try to intercept the signal once it gets to your phone company, or the FBI can get a court order (or not) and silently tap your sad ass, just as easily.
The NSA will break into cold sweats when there's backdoor-less phone-to-phone encryption with arbitrary and generally large keys using well-known and trusted cryptosystems. I don't think it's going to happen for a while.
It's not "unplugged from the Internet", it's "unplugged". As in unpowered.
"Old enough to hear obscenities"? How old is that, anyway? I know kids aren't allowed near rated R movies, but you can already hear "fuck" (The Seventh Day) and "shit" (Star Trek Generations) in PG-13 movies. I'm also guessing you can curse in public, even when kids are around. Yes, I know about that One Case where a guy was busted for swearing in front of a kid, but that's one case in one state.
The earlier the better, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with a little harsh language.
Duh. It's already here. The PCG-C1VN, Sony's Picturebook, was available in the US only a little after it was in Japan. This improves their previous record -- the PCG-C1 took almost a year to get to the US.
Christ, was I the only one hoping this egomaniac would store his attitude in the fucking overhead bin?
Remember all the talk of audio watermarking and the other (debatably) "unaudable" copy-identification techniques? Well, it's time to use those on your own music to screw this thing up. In its pure form, audio ID'ing is cool. It's like CDDB for mp3s. Download something, and you can be sure it's not some wanker who named all his stuff "Orbital - Peel Sessions", or whatever you're looking for.
But if you need to get around this? Bam. A tool that adds 0.5 seconds of silence will totally screw Relatable's algorithm, last I checked. Past that, it's the same old story -- a war between the modifiers and the filterers. Napster's gone from being somewhat useful to totally useless. Long live Gnutella and Freenet.
The real problem with eye-movement-based systems is that, when you're looking at something, your eye is often focused on a point near the object, and not the object itself.
That's why this technology is currently only being used by people with disabilities, and the "buttons" are huge.
California's now offering internet service over powerlines, too.
Unfortunately, it's only about 16 bits per month.
Off... Off... Back on... Off. Back on again. Off... Off... Back on again...
Let me get this straight: the telomeres are nature's Copy Protection? At least we know now that the number of lawyers the RIAA and MPAA can throw at someone is finite.