I think the trick would require controlling (or at least being able to spoof requests from) a large number of IP addresses. While I am not an expert at TCP/IP, I'm mostly sure there's enough handshaking overhead in establishing a TCP connection that I don't think you'd be able to spoof connections from an arbitrary IP address. However, someone with access to routers that are responsible for a large range of IP addresses, on the other hand...
Anyone wanna take bets on how long before we see a random technician at a random backbone provider get in trouble for spoofing ad hits?
I hate to break it to you, but you seem to be harkening back to an idealistic time that never was. Decitful business practices are nothing new. If they were, we wouldn't already have such things as:
Laws against fraud
Underwriters Laboratory
the Better Business Bureau
Truth-in-advertising laws
Consumer Reports
Ralph Nader
Sure the Internet is providing a new avenue for many past practices, and the information-centric focus does create greater opportunity for "fudging", but this isn't anything that hasn't happened before.
They're needed because they have to have numbers to show to their advertisers. An ad that's being viewed by 4 million people has significantly more value, and thus has a higher cost, than one that's only being viewed by 2 million people. If someone is willing to take the hosting site's word at face value with regard to eyeball real-estate, then I've got some banner ads (and a bridge) to sell them.
From the article: "I don't think the I.O.C. can be seen in any way limiting speech about the Olympics."
I think that quote succinctly sums up the IOC's total detatchment from reality. It reminds me of a Big Brotherish double-speak where claiming the total absence of a transgression makes it so.
Err, if 6.2 is running great, why bother updating? RedHat is generally pretty good at making security updates available for a number of older versions (I believe they're still providing them for the 5.x systems, although it wouldn't surprise me if those soon hit the "too old to support" barrier).
Traditionally, the x.0 RedHat releases have been rough, the x.1 releases have been a bit better, and the x.2 releases actually run fairly smoothly. Unless there's a killer feature in 7.0 that you absolutely *need*, consider putting a damper on the mindless upgrade mania. (Besides, odds are that if there's such a killer feature that you need, you'll have manually installed it, already...)
When John Perry Barlow toured Africa a couple of years ago, he showed a nomad tribesman the Internet from his laptop. Immediately the guy realised he could market his wares (rock salt and animal skins) to anyone in the world using this technology.
Nonono... If he *really* got it, he'd want to write up a business plan for selling rock salt and animal skins on the Internet and then get rich off of venture capital.
Seriously, though, would selling rock salt like that be competitive? It seems that there'd be tremendous effort in mining the salt and dragging it to somewhere that you can ship it from. Sounds like the sort of thing that a company with a technological advantage (i.e. infrastructure for moving rock salt around, nearby fleet of trucks for shipping, etc.) would win out on.
However, to be fair, I do think he was on to something with the idea of selling the animals skins. Animal skins are a lower availability item, and unless they're being raised in captivity, still require the same human effort of manually hunting down an animal. Furthermore, unlike rock salt, you can have a substanial amount of value contained in a moderate amount of weight. So I think there's definite potential there.
But mainly I felt I had to chime in on the rock salt issue. It seems that no one is immune from the "if we sell it over the Internet, it must be profitable" mentality. However, IANAMBA so take my words with a grain of (rock) salt.
When I interned at Microsoft last year, we had a number of people there from India, but they had no problems writing and speaking English. Furthermore, things like message text tend to hit numerous eyeballs.
I suspect that in this case, they've decided to treat the text like something akin to a newspaper headline -- leaving out the indefinite articles makes it quicker to visual scan. You aren't supposed to delibrately read a message box title, but rather just skim it.
The solution isn't to try to blow it up, because those pieces are all still moving in the same direction
If I remember my high-school physics correctly, blowing something up (i.e. only internal forces) causes the center of mass to continue in the same direction. Which means the average of all the pieces of the asteroid will still "hit" the Earth, even though each individual piece winds up going around.
Also, since you're in space, you've got the whole inertia thing working in your favor. As long as you impart some seperating force to the asteroid, each piece should continue drifting away from the central mass, as long as your asteroid isn't big enough to have its own gravitational force. And the further from Earth that you denote the asteroid, the more time you've got for the pieces to drift apart.
However, IANAAstroPhysicist and ICBW.
...and an off-topic note: How many people out there were able to predict that the first post they'd see upon entering the thread was an unfunny reference to either Armageddon or Deep Impact, modded up as funny?
While the parody issue is certainly worth considering, I'm worried that that won't stop the IOC. They've already exceeded other bounds (such as restricting a trademark to a certain domain), so it's entirely possible that the fact that it's a parody won't deter them from going after these guys. Furthermore, the fact that it's a parody doesn't make them immune to strong-arm tactics, which the IOC certainly has the resources to employ.
So anyway, my whole point is that the RIAA has been going after individual students for at least 3 years now. This is the first I've heard of a confiscated computer though.
From my reading of the article, it appears that the computer confiscation was the act of the University, rather than the RIAA. Anything beyond getting a given site taken down really isn't going to benefit the RIAA -- a multi-million dollar judgement against a poor college student isn't even worth the time it'd take to file the suit, much less the legal fees. Furthermore, while criminal charges might serve as a deterrant, it wastes time-and-effort that could be spent more "profitably" locating other infringing sites and sending cease-and-desists.
One potential problem with adding TV tuners is that you'll be adding an additional load to a soft realtime system. Suddenly, TiVo would have to worry about rating how many tuners can be supported by a set of MPEG encoding chips and how much throughput you can get through the harddrive, etc. Plus, you've pretty much blown the complexity out of the consumer electronics niche (which, while not necessarily a bad thing, isn't the most profitable way to go).
A slightly simpler solution might be adding inter-TiVo communication capability (as well as making the service pricing more multi-unit friendly). I know I'd be much more tempted to buy a second unit if I didn't have to worry about manually shuffling programming conflicts between the two.
I'm not a shrink, but wouldn't this kind of interaction help the rehabilitation of inmates or similar?
While I can see how it could work as a role-playing exercise (in the shrink sense, rather than the D&D sense), if there's one thing I've learned from interaction in the Sims, it's that life is silly and tedious. For a few days after a long Sim session, I'll tend to look at everything in life as just attempting to raise/lower my own version of the personal attribute bars that the Sims have. It's rather disenchanting.
Why not just spend the extra money and buy the large capacity tivo.
For a little over $300 ($500 when you include the programming), I wound up with a 91-hour capacity TiVo. In comparison, the largest commercial available TiVo is a 30-hour unit, with a 60-hour coming out Real Soon Now. The 30-hour unit also costs about $300 post rebate (checking the price on Amazon).
The breakdown: 14-hour Philips TiVo from Circuit City: $300 Circuit City rebate on 14-hour Tivo: -$100 Rebate from TiVo: -$100 60 gig Maxtor from 123cdc.com: $214
So for the "cost" of a voided warranty and a little extra shipping, I wound up with three times the capacity. And I had fun in the process. Furthermore, some of the people in the TiVo Underground managed to get Circuit City to pricematch Sears, resulting in a $200 TiVo with $200 in rebates (i.e. free). They also got staples.com (physical locations only -- their online site doesn't carry the 60 gig Maxtor) to pricematch 123cdc.com and then used a coupon code to knock another $50 off the price.
The word "hacker" will probably now acquire a legal definition,
From the Attorney General's press release:
The charges are the first under a Michigan law which makes the unauthorized alteration, damage or use of a computer system a felony.
While I did dislike the AG's misuse of the term, I don't think "hacker" is going to acquire any sort of a legal definition. Rather, I suspect it'll be somewhat akin to the term "drugs", which depending on context can refer to any medication or to "illegal drugs". However, when it comes to legalese, it gets referred to as a "controlled substance".
I'm curious how much effort it took them to come up with a name that was available. I have this vision of some poor guy at UNC with a pot of coffee spending hours with 'whois' trying to find something unregistered that fit into their new theme.
There are days when I cynically think that it can only get worse, as more people get on the Net and register their own domains. And there are other days when I think it's only a matter of time before the domain squatting starts to wind down as more gTLDs are opened up and people get away from the magic "dot com" obsession.
This means that for every 13k customers they bilk this way, they earn $1000.
Bilk? They're selling an item for the price that they advertised to that consumer. While the multiple pricing issue is questionable, they did offer the item for sale at a given price, the consumer found that deal agreeable, the consumer accepted the offer, money changed hands, and so forth.
Would you consider it bilking if they had, instead, sent out coupons for an extra N% off to random Amazon customers and then offered refunds to all the customers who didn't receive the coupons?
My guess to a solution would be to fiddle with DNS and tie it into the NAT. When a machine in your local network does a lookup for a server out on the Net, you assign that server a "fake" IPv4 address and return that as the DNS result. You also make sure to set the DNS expiration and NAT expiration to the same values. Then, whenever the router doing NAT gets a packet for the fake IPv4 that the server's borrowing, you translate it.
WAP is a userland phenomenon. [...] this stuff has nothing to do with Linux
Linux does have some userland-uses. Five or six stories ago on slashdot, they mentioned that IBM's working on a Linux-based wristwatch. On top of my TV is a consumer electronics device running Linux. Linux may not be to the point of being able to pander to the point-click-drool crowd, but it's certainly more than just a server OS.
Actually, from the analysis mentioned in this Slashdot article, the BeamIt protocol was *not* easily hackable. It asked for a hash of a random part of the CD. Pretty much the only attacks against the system were external to the actual BeamIt authentication (such as beaming a borrowed CD or swapping BeamIt accounts).
Actually, I just tried visiting amazon via lynx with cookies disabled and got the lowest price (based on the new.com article that was mentioned earlier).
Either Amazon's killed the price variation mentioned (which might be good publicity to do with the mentioned items -- everyone'll read the article, check the items in question, and decide they must be getting the best price) or leaving cookies off gets you the best price (although I haven't tried to actually buy stuff with cookies off; it may not work).
While I know cracking is a bad thing, I think some of these guys should get an award for creative thinking.
Creative? Nothing personal, but you've got pretty low standards for creativity. Using an IRC channel, you've got a single point of failure. It also becomes not too difficult to watch the channel and send out "your system has been compromised" mail to the various affected people.
If I wanted to do something like that, I'd probably use Usenet. Come up with a simple algorithm where messages get hashed into IP addresses to be flooded -- use something where it's not too difficult to invent a realistic-looking message that would contain a given target address. Then use something non-unique for the trigger mechanism (say, any e-mail address with 27 characters and 9 vowels). The downside is that with Usenet, you're dealing with a much more public mechanism, but the upside is that you've got much less central authority to stop an attack. And the added kicker is that you can't just go around accusing everyone with a matching e-mail address of being a cracker (but it'd still be to the cracker's benefit to do it from a disposable account).
The difference is that embedded image tags within an HTML document are something that someone who's familiar with the technology expects. That's the whole point of a Hyper-Text Markup: it references other documents.
Comparing a Word document retrieving arbitrary objects off the web to an HTML document retrieving arbitrary objects off the web is like comparing a shock from a defective toaster to a shock from sticking a fork in an outlet.
Imagine the joy that one station would feel if it caught another doctoring footage and the shit storm that would erupt.
Actually, something like this has already happened. When the OJ debacle first started, two news magazines featured the police mug shot as their cover photo. The catch is that one of them altered the picture to give him a more thug-like appearance.
This is even scarier when you consider that, despite all rationale arguments against it, superficials things like someone's appearance do affect people's opinions. For example, there's a famous debate between JFK and Nixon that was broadcast over both television and radio. At the time, Nixon wasn't looking so hot. Those who heard the debate over radio tended to feel Nixon did a better job during the debate, while those who saw it on TV felt JFK did a better job. When you couple this with the idea of real-time video manipulation, it's nearly impossible not get some serious paranoia going.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone wanna take bets on how long before we see a random technician at a random backbone provider get in trouble for spoofing ad hits?
Sure the Internet is providing a new avenue for many past practices, and the information-centric focus does create greater opportunity for "fudging", but this isn't anything that hasn't happened before.
They're needed because they have to have numbers to show to their advertisers. An ad that's being viewed by 4 million people has significantly more value, and thus has a higher cost, than one that's only being viewed by 2 million people. If someone is willing to take the hosting site's word at face value with regard to eyeball real-estate, then I've got some banner ads (and a bridge) to sell them.
"I don't think the I.O.C. can be seen in any way limiting speech about the Olympics."
I think that quote succinctly sums up the IOC's total detatchment from reality. It reminds me of a Big Brotherish double-speak where claiming the total absence of a transgression makes it so.
Um, the same kind of moron who knows how to get the MD5SUMS directly from a trusted source?
Traditionally, the x.0 RedHat releases have been rough, the x.1 releases have been a bit better, and the x.2 releases actually run fairly smoothly. Unless there's a killer feature in 7.0 that you absolutely *need*, consider putting a damper on the mindless upgrade mania. (Besides, odds are that if there's such a killer feature that you need, you'll have manually installed it, already...)
Nonono... If he *really* got it, he'd want to write up a business plan for selling rock salt and animal skins on the Internet and then get rich off of venture capital.
Seriously, though, would selling rock salt like that be competitive? It seems that there'd be tremendous effort in mining the salt and dragging it to somewhere that you can ship it from. Sounds like the sort of thing that a company with a technological advantage (i.e. infrastructure for moving rock salt around, nearby fleet of trucks for shipping, etc.) would win out on.
However, to be fair, I do think he was on to something with the idea of selling the animals skins. Animal skins are a lower availability item, and unless they're being raised in captivity, still require the same human effort of manually hunting down an animal. Furthermore, unlike rock salt, you can have a substanial amount of value contained in a moderate amount of weight. So I think there's definite potential there.
But mainly I felt I had to chime in on the rock salt issue. It seems that no one is immune from the "if we sell it over the Internet, it must be profitable" mentality. However, IANAMBA so take my words with a grain of (rock) salt.
I suspect that in this case, they've decided to treat the text like something akin to a newspaper headline -- leaving out the indefinite articles makes it quicker to visual scan. You aren't supposed to delibrately read a message box title, but rather just skim it.
If I remember my high-school physics correctly, blowing something up (i.e. only internal forces) causes the center of mass to continue in the same direction. Which means the average of all the pieces of the asteroid will still "hit" the Earth, even though each individual piece winds up going around.
Also, since you're in space, you've got the whole inertia thing working in your favor. As long as you impart some seperating force to the asteroid, each piece should continue drifting away from the central mass, as long as your asteroid isn't big enough to have its own gravitational force. And the further from Earth that you denote the asteroid, the more time you've got for the pieces to drift apart.
However, IANAAstroPhysicist and ICBW.
While the parody issue is certainly worth considering, I'm worried that that won't stop the IOC. They've already exceeded other bounds (such as restricting a trademark to a certain domain), so it's entirely possible that the fact that it's a parody won't deter them from going after these guys. Furthermore, the fact that it's a parody doesn't make them immune to strong-arm tactics, which the IOC certainly has the resources to employ.
From my reading of the article, it appears that the computer confiscation was the act of the University, rather than the RIAA. Anything beyond getting a given site taken down really isn't going to benefit the RIAA -- a multi-million dollar judgement against a poor college student isn't even worth the time it'd take to file the suit, much less the legal fees. Furthermore, while criminal charges might serve as a deterrant, it wastes time-and-effort that could be spent more "profitably" locating other infringing sites and sending cease-and-desists.
A slightly simpler solution might be adding inter-TiVo communication capability (as well as making the service pricing more multi-unit friendly). I know I'd be much more tempted to buy a second unit if I didn't have to worry about manually shuffling programming conflicts between the two.
While I can see how it could work as a role-playing exercise (in the shrink sense, rather than the D&D sense), if there's one thing I've learned from interaction in the Sims, it's that life is silly and tedious. For a few days after a long Sim session, I'll tend to look at everything in life as just attempting to raise/lower my own version of the personal attribute bars that the Sims have. It's rather disenchanting.
For a little over $300 ($500 when you include the programming), I wound up with a 91-hour capacity TiVo. In comparison, the largest commercial available TiVo is a 30-hour unit, with a 60-hour coming out Real Soon Now. The 30-hour unit also costs about $300 post rebate (checking the price on Amazon).
The breakdown:
14-hour Philips TiVo from Circuit City: $300
Circuit City rebate on 14-hour Tivo: -$100
Rebate from TiVo: -$100
60 gig Maxtor from 123cdc.com: $214
So for the "cost" of a voided warranty and a little extra shipping, I wound up with three times the capacity. And I had fun in the process. Furthermore, some of the people in the TiVo Underground managed to get Circuit City to pricematch Sears, resulting in a $200 TiVo with $200 in rebates (i.e. free). They also got staples.com (physical locations only -- their online site doesn't carry the 60 gig Maxtor) to pricematch 123cdc.com and then used a coupon code to knock another $50 off the price.
However, they released their kernel modifications here.
From the Attorney General's press release:
While I did dislike the AG's misuse of the term, I don't think "hacker" is going to acquire any sort of a legal definition. Rather, I suspect it'll be somewhat akin to the term "drugs", which depending on context can refer to any medication or to "illegal drugs". However, when it comes to legalese, it gets referred to as a "controlled substance".
There are days when I cynically think that it can only get worse, as more people get on the Net and register their own domains. And there are other days when I think it's only a matter of time before the domain squatting starts to wind down as more gTLDs are opened up and people get away from the magic "dot com" obsession.
Bilk? They're selling an item for the price that they advertised to that consumer. While the multiple pricing issue is questionable, they did offer the item for sale at a given price, the consumer found that deal agreeable, the consumer accepted the offer, money changed hands, and so forth.
Would you consider it bilking if they had, instead, sent out coupons for an extra N% off to random Amazon customers and then offered refunds to all the customers who didn't receive the coupons?
My guess to a solution would be to fiddle with DNS and tie it into the NAT. When a machine in your local network does a lookup for a server out on the Net, you assign that server a "fake" IPv4 address and return that as the DNS result. You also make sure to set the DNS expiration and NAT expiration to the same values. Then, whenever the router doing NAT gets a packet for the fake IPv4 that the server's borrowing, you translate it.
Linux does have some userland-uses. Five or six stories ago on slashdot, they mentioned that IBM's working on a Linux-based wristwatch. On top of my TV is a consumer electronics device running Linux. Linux may not be to the point of being able to pander to the point-click-drool crowd, but it's certainly more than just a server OS.
Actually, from the analysis mentioned in this Slashdot article, the BeamIt protocol was *not* easily hackable. It asked for a hash of a random part of the CD. Pretty much the only attacks against the system were external to the actual BeamIt authentication (such as beaming a borrowed CD or swapping BeamIt accounts).
Actually, I just tried visiting amazon via lynx with cookies disabled and got the lowest price (based on the new.com article that was mentioned earlier).
Either Amazon's killed the price variation mentioned (which might be good publicity to do with the mentioned items -- everyone'll read the article, check the items in question, and decide they must be getting the best price) or leaving cookies off gets you the best price (although I haven't tried to actually buy stuff with cookies off; it may not work).
Creative? Nothing personal, but you've got pretty low standards for creativity. Using an IRC channel, you've got a single point of failure. It also becomes not too difficult to watch the channel and send out "your system has been compromised" mail to the various affected people.
If I wanted to do something like that, I'd probably use Usenet. Come up with a simple algorithm where messages get hashed into IP addresses to be flooded -- use something where it's not too difficult to invent a realistic-looking message that would contain a given target address. Then use something non-unique for the trigger mechanism (say, any e-mail address with 27 characters and 9 vowels). The downside is that with Usenet, you're dealing with a much more public mechanism, but the upside is that you've got much less central authority to stop an attack. And the added kicker is that you can't just go around accusing everyone with a matching e-mail address of being a cracker (but it'd still be to the cracker's benefit to do it from a disposable account).
Comparing a Word document retrieving arbitrary objects off the web to an HTML document retrieving arbitrary objects off the web is like comparing a shock from a defective toaster to a shock from sticking a fork in an outlet.
Actually, something like this has already happened. When the OJ debacle first started, two news magazines featured the police mug shot as their cover photo. The catch is that one of them altered the picture to give him a more thug-like appearance.
This is even scarier when you consider that, despite all rationale arguments against it, superficials things like someone's appearance do affect people's opinions. For example, there's a famous debate between JFK and Nixon that was broadcast over both television and radio. At the time, Nixon wasn't looking so hot. Those who heard the debate over radio tended to feel Nixon did a better job during the debate, while those who saw it on TV felt JFK did a better job. When you couple this with the idea of real-time video manipulation, it's nearly impossible not get some serious paranoia going.