these are the guys who were involved in the Flowgo story from last April:
Under the auspices of their newly founded company, Intellitech Web Solutions, the three devised a plan to strip the visible front end off the toolbar, leaving only its snooping back end in place.
According to former Intellitech employees, the company also polished up some code designed to automatically and silently install the mutated toolbar when an Internet user viewed a specially designed Web page.
"At that point, it started to become a virus," said a former staffer who worked on the project.
Last March, Intellitech began to seed the Internet with copies of the backdoor program, using specially designed pop-up ads it purchased at sites, including the family entertainment portal Flowgo.com.
In violation of Flowgo's policy, the pop-ups automatically sent visitors to another site, where, according to virus researchers, special code exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and forced the spyware onto users' computers.
I remember some friends who were all worked in a radar shop in the Navy. Too small a statisitical sample, of course, but one of their complaints was that everyone who worked on that equipment only had girls for children. No boys.
fast forward to a highly networked environment in the same general frequency range...
I have just got to imagine that using the microwave in this fashion is going to void the warrenty.
now on slightly related topic
When food, (containing water, a very efficient absorber), is placed in a microwave field having a frequency of 2.4 5GHz, virtually all the microwave energy is converted to heat.
Now this raises all sorts of interesting safety questions about wireless networking, as well as the current generation of wireless telephones I see down at Staples, etc.
And so we see the mentality that brings us Palladium.
do you think that if they are doing this with X-Box, that they won't do something similar with Palladium?
It is all that trademark control of the user experience thing happening all over again.
rumors of earlier photographs
on
World's First Photo
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
for a while there has been the theory that the Shroud of Turin is in fact a primitive photograph created by Renaissance Uber Geek Leonardo Da Vinci, via Camera Obscura and natural chemicals. There are other candidates as well.
Grain of salt not provided. This quickly wanders off into the land of wierdos, as there is also a lot of political infighting in the land of psuedo science. The Idea of the Shroud being a hoax is politically loaded.
This related item has to do with Something that was Online-Tonight last night. [You can listen to the entire show, or just the relevant hour, conveniently archived online and nicely labelled]
It seems that the the Deal that Yahoo struck with the RIAA a while back has an awful lot to do with the back room shennaniganns that were somewhat implicate in the CARP arrangement.
This deserves major news coverage of it's own.
Kurt Hanson of Save Internet Radio has a letter that he received from Mark Cuban, former owner of audionet.com/broadcast.com/Yahoo! Broadcast on how the Yahoo!-RIAA deal was structured. Read the entire letter here.
Bottom line:
The voluntary royalty deal between Yahoo! and the RIAA that the Librarian of Congress announced as his template for the entire industry last week was a deal crafted by Yahoo! to shut out small webcasters and decrease competition.
The villian in this story is not Yahoo! (They were simply being savvy businesspeople!) The villian is the CARP process by which this anti-broadcaster, anti-small-webcaster deal became the template for the industry
As Mark Cuban says, they didn't want percent-of-revenue pricing art Broadcast.com Why? Because "it meant every "Tom , Dick, and Harry" webcaster could come in and undercut our pricing because we had revenue and they didn't".
End Result? We probably need to start screaming at Congress again.
wow, that's a website for freaks. [...]
I'm all for speculation, but when you start making up crap like that site, you give everyone a bad name and a bad taste.
Yep that's the problem.
With the hundreds of hobbyists pouring over the thousands of Nasa Mars photos, they are sure to find some wierd things.
But unfortunately, the fruitcakes are the ones who will be most dedicated to promoting their agenda, etc. When the weirdos get a hold of it, watch out! NASA has received more than it's share of heart burn from these guys.
Take for example this news story from a couple of weeks ago where a relatively recent collision spawned a family of asteroids. This story combines well with this one on the BBC, which goes into the comet that killed off the Dinosaurs. It note how something fundamental changed in the Solar system 65 Million years ago.
This starts to coordinate well with this proposition, that something destroyed a planet back then, but the wacko elements on the site make the whole proposition less palettable.
Interesting mars photos all the same. I have no explanation, yet.
Arthur C. Clarke decided to make an idiot of himself by backing these claims.
As I recall, I believe he said that the pictures were anamolus enough that they should be investigated. Without saying specically that he gave creedance, but that something weird was going one
Banyan Trees
yep I recall those. that's what you get for messing with photographs at the limits of resolution with data bordering on the noise floor.
but that still doesn't make the original photos any less interesting. With the hundreds of hobbyists pouring over the thousands of Nasa Mars photos, they are sure to find some wierd things.
of course, their explanations may be weird too, but that is a separate issue.
Of course, elements from the fringe have been arguing there is/has been water there for ages. It seems that it is only now the the official scientists are starting to say "well, there could be", or even "look at our new discovery."
Examples of how strange this get are seen here. Ignoring the junk science nonsense, the pictures are interesting. If you scroll about halfway down, there is one mars photo, conveniently linked to the nasa archive, that looks for all the world like an actual sea shore. So much so it is startling.
Of course, the real scientists are taking their sweet time coming to any conclusions (insert plausible reason here), which is driving the hobbyists and others right up a wall.
I recall the story from a few months back where the guy built a super sized game boy, using a oversized monchrome LCD screen his dug up, among other things.
I always wondered what he did with the thing after the novelty of playing the game wore off.
at least he could salvage the screen for something like this
It almost sounds like they went to see Minority Report, (which opened this week) and were so sold on the system seen there that they decided on going with the system over beers at the Friday Night get-together.
See? it's the wave of the future! It's even in the movies
I find it refreshing that artist such as Spielberg are able to shine some sort of light on these issues, engcouraging debate, and hopefully taking some of the wind out of the sails of those that do not see the danger and bad side effects of their proposed solutions.
Some of the scenes of targeted marketing, projecting ads towards you as you walk down the hallway, all tailored just for yuo are pretty spooky.
some of the depicted technology looks downrigt creepy. and that is just from the marketing side, nevermind the government side.
Scientists are still assesing the odds on this, as far as what is something to freak about, and why isn't.
a number of the Near Ear Orbit tracking pages are properly showing distances not only in Astronomical Units, but also in Lunar distances. This is because for close earth passage the fractions get unweildy, and people freak out at terribly small numbers. That said, a million miles is roughly 4 lunar distances, the sun is somewhat under 400 lunar distances away, etc. It's a good yard stick because people can think with it.
odd factoid: since the moon is about 2,000 miles in diameter, this lets you estamate how big the earth would be in the sky if you were standing on the Moon. The Moon is smaller than the distance across of North America or the Nation of Brazil. Imagine an appropriately sized globe in the sky, and there you go.
This object did come kinda close. If you make the analogy of the average height of a human equals the size of the earth (5 to 6 feet), then the moon is roughly 200 feet away. In this scenario, the asteroid is roughly like a very high speed BB Pellet (or smaller) wizzing by at a distance of 30 ft or so.
Distance estimates I saw said about one sixth the distance of earth to the moon, about 40,000 miles (reports I saw in Sky and Telescope here, pretty diagram included)
Veterans in Combat are much more non-chalant than civilians about the risks of small high speed objects in the space about them. Of course, they usually have the option to duck.
If they were productive in Win3.1 and W5.0, why should they be forced to upgrade? You talk about their desire to keep working without interruption like it's a bad thing, like they should upgrade because YOU feel they should, not because they do.
I didn't force them.
My attitude is if it is not broke, don't fix it.
If I recall correctly it had something to do with workiing with docs in word 6 or 7 or 8 format.
Plus the idiot in the corner getting all hot and bothered for the latest widget. All without asking the question, "Why?" Of course, now MS has this new upgrade to slavery program, agree to upgrade every two years, or pay much much more.
In some cases, like at the height of the Browser wars, new versions of Netscape every several months was exciting. New features that were in fact useful, etc.
On the other hand, I still know of people who would still be on Windows 3.1 and word 5.0 if they were not forced to "upgrade" for one reason or another.
heck, even look at webpages. With the new privacy statement implemetations in IE 6.0 people coding in basic HTML will tend to be locked out because the browser will generate an ominous error message about a lack of a privacy policy. The Current implementations of P3P are a legal minefield, so much so that at least one person has advocated dis-avowing p3p altogether, just for your corporate safety.
Version fatigue comes in when the new bells and whistles do not obviously justify the changes needed in work habits, and do not expand the core functionality in a useful and meaningful way.
there are only so many ways to re-invent the wheel.
Microsoft, for example, has got itself on a treadmill, because it has to come out with a new version, regardless of worth, every several years. This has irritated me so much that I hope they trip on the treadmill, fall, and do serious damage to themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I mas making a reference to those people who worry about the environmental effects of electromagnetic radiation. I can see them having a bird once they figure this out.
I remember some friends who were all worked in a radar shop in the Navy. Too small a statisitical sample, of course, but one of their complaints was that everyone who worked on that equipment only had girls for children. No boys.
fast forward to a highly networked environment in the same general frequency range ...
now on slightly related topic
When food, (containing water, a very efficient absorber), is placed in a microwave field having a frequency of 2.4 5GHz, virtually all the microwave energy is converted to heat.
Now this raises all sorts of interesting safety questions about wireless networking, as well as the current generation of wireless telephones I see down at Staples, etc.
Spec page here:
http://www.xentex.com/voyager/techspecs.html
note the resolution specs
Yep It is too small. the specs say
Resolution: 1024 pixel(H) x 768 pixel(V)
Color16 Bits.
So each panel is 512(H) x 768(V)
I can see it in some cases, but other wise ....
Which is why one of the links in the comment also cited other people as possible creators, with a similar camera obscura technique.
but you know this already.
do you think that if they are doing this with X-Box, that they won't do something similar with Palladium?
It is all that trademark control of the user experience thing happening all over again.
See the various links one, two, three.
Grain of salt not provided. This quickly wanders off into the land of wierdos, as there is also a lot of political infighting in the land of psuedo science. The Idea of the Shroud being a hoax is politically loaded.
Thus we can get an internal Microsoft definiition of Security:
making the world safe for Microsoft or a means by which competition to Microsoft can be locked out.
yeh, this is cynical. don't know where I would get such an attitude. maybe I should change my brand of coffee.
being able to trace the source on something means responsibility can be assigned.
Probably the features should be availble with the default setting of these features turned off.
I also imagine that such features would be spoofable, somehow.
[shrug]
2002-02-12 14:54:27 Operating Systems for Robots (articles,programming) (rejected)
being summer, maybe folks have time to read now.
;-)
Link - Online Tonight
It seems that the the Deal that Yahoo struck with the RIAA a while back has an awful lot to do with the back room shennaniganns that were somewhat implicate in the CARP arrangement.
This deserves major news coverage of it's own.
Kurt Hanson of Save Internet Radio has a letter that he received from Mark Cuban, former owner of audionet.com/broadcast.com/Yahoo! Broadcast on how the Yahoo!-RIAA deal was structured. Read the entire letter here.
Bottom line:
- The voluntary royalty deal between Yahoo! and the RIAA that the Librarian of Congress announced as his template for the entire industry last week was a deal crafted by Yahoo! to shut out small webcasters and decrease competition.
- The villian in this story is not Yahoo! (They were simply being savvy businesspeople!) The villian is the CARP process by which this anti-broadcaster, anti-small-webcaster deal became the template for the industry
- As Mark Cuban says, they didn't want percent-of-revenue pricing art Broadcast.com Why? Because "it meant every "Tom , Dick, and Harry" webcaster could come in and undercut our pricing because we had revenue and they didn't".
End Result? We probably need to start screaming at Congress again.Yep that's the problem.
With the hundreds of hobbyists pouring over the thousands of Nasa Mars photos, they are sure to find some wierd things.
But unfortunately, the fruitcakes are the ones who will be most dedicated to promoting their agenda, etc. When the weirdos get a hold of it, watch out! NASA has received more than it's share of heart burn from these guys.
Take for example this news story from a couple of weeks ago where a relatively recent collision spawned a family of asteroids. This story combines well with this one on the BBC, which goes into the comet that killed off the Dinosaurs. It note how something fundamental changed in the Solar system 65 Million years ago.
This starts to coordinate well with this proposition, that something destroyed a planet back then, but the wacko elements on the site make the whole proposition less palettable.
Interesting mars photos all the same. I have no explanation, yet.
As I recall, I believe he said that the pictures were anamolus enough that they should be investigated. Without saying specically that he gave creedance, but that something weird was going one
Banyan Trees
yep I recall those. that's what you get for messing with photographs at the limits of resolution with data bordering on the noise floor.
but that still doesn't make the original photos any less interesting. With the hundreds of hobbyists pouring over the thousands of Nasa Mars photos, they are sure to find some wierd things.
of course, their explanations may be weird too, but that is a separate issue.
Examples of how strange this get are seen here. Ignoring the junk science nonsense, the pictures are interesting. If you scroll about halfway down, there is one mars photo, conveniently linked to the nasa archive, that looks for all the world like an actual sea shore. So much so it is startling.
Of course, the real scientists are taking their sweet time coming to any conclusions (insert plausible reason here), which is driving the hobbyists and others right up a wall.
I always wondered what he did with the thing after the novelty of playing the game wore off.
at least he could salvage the screen for something like this
See? it's the wave of the future! It's even in the movies
This compares with the 20th Century castles site, which also has this item that would make a good lair.
and which is a real item
Some of the scenes of targeted marketing, projecting ads towards you as you walk down the hallway, all tailored just for yuo are pretty spooky.
some of the depicted technology looks downrigt creepy. and that is just from the marketing side, nevermind the government side.
the ultimate in spam, everywhere you go.
Balancing a pile of shivering metal on a pillar of flame is not all that easy.
After all, they don't call it rocket science for nothing.
I didn't force them.
My attitude is if it is not broke, don't fix it.
If I recall correctly it had something to do with workiing with docs in word 6 or 7 or 8 format.
Plus the idiot in the corner getting all hot and bothered for the latest widget. All without asking the question, "Why?" Of course, now MS has this new upgrade to slavery program, agree to upgrade every two years, or pay much much more.
[ptuuuoagh]
On the other hand, I still know of people who would still be on Windows 3.1 and word 5.0 if they were not forced to "upgrade" for one reason or another.
heck, even look at webpages. With the new privacy statement implemetations in IE 6.0 people coding in basic HTML will tend to be locked out because the browser will generate an ominous error message about a lack of a privacy policy. The Current implementations of P3P are a legal minefield, so much so that at least one person has advocated dis-avowing p3p altogether, just for your corporate safety.
Version fatigue comes in when the new bells and whistles do not obviously justify the changes needed in work habits, and do not expand the core functionality in a useful and meaningful way.
there are only so many ways to re-invent the wheel.
Microsoft, for example, has got itself on a treadmill, because it has to come out with a new version, regardless of worth, every several years. This has irritated me so much that I hope they trip on the treadmill, fall, and do serious damage to themselves.
Time to hack the old kitchen Microwave oven, and make a do it yourself home made radar.
Best to rig it for a pickup truck, so you have the space to do a phased array on the roof of a shell.
Miniturization is going to be a pain, though.
Side benefit -- smoking police speed trap radars.
or public burnings of Bill Gates in Effigy or something.
Should get his attention.