I think had he managed to get one disc tray, one power button, one power supply, etc. and got it to recognize which system it should pump AV out of people would have been impressed. at this point he may as well have taped the two systems together and stuffed them into a new case.
you realize that, whether by our own fault or not, there will come a day (maybe sooner than later) that will *need* to be able to establish ourselves on another planet in order for the species to continue, right? and further, by trying to control the environment we may just make things worse if it turns out that these fluctuations that have always occurred regardless of our presence are required to keep things in check.... aka damned if we, damned if we don't. so our ONLY option of survival in the long run is that "large enough space craft"...
no. this is simply wrong. even if i don't finish a game i enjoy it has nothing to do with it being too long. the vast majority of the time it is becuase real life interferes with my gaming activities for a long enough period of time that i forget the game controls and don't feel like starting over for the sake of re-learning (though, i recently did exactly that for oblivion).
further, games are about the adventure of getting to the end, not the end itself. sure, having a good end is the cherry on top, but nothing more. actually, oblivion would be a perfect example: i logged about 130 hours on my first play through, a few years ago. at some point i got too busy and by the time i had gaming time again i forgot how to play and was enticed by a newer game. but, becuase oblivion was SO epic i'm willing to go back and play it again in anticipation of the new release - skyrim. so, super long game that i never finished leads to purchase of next release. go figure (?) and here i thought it was common sense.
I thought that the 6-degrees was a MAXIMUM, not an "average" as the article suggests. if we step it back to an "average" value then it isn't really very impressive.
further, maybe they should employ someone with a brain (you know, those people you pay as little as possible) to do the actual webcrawl + math to determine this more thoroughly than having laymen guess at paths to random people...
yes. its against the EULA, but there is a LOT of RMT in eve. e.g. a Russian RMT site got hacked and it was found they made something like $250,000 over the previous 8 or so months... and i would imagine most of the goods sold were generated by macro's
I played eve for about a year, and these types of scams were advertised constantly.... and nearly NO ONE bought into them - mostly for the simple reason that everyone knows everything in the game is a scam.... (and there are much better scams too) so how in the world did this one become successful? only thing i can think is from the influx of newer players who don't know any better.
funny that i just encouraged linux IF going to edu env. but i have to disagree that linux is harder to screw up. sure, command line only centos will work for years regardless of what you do to it. but on X11+ubuntu (and gentoo) i've had my share of problems. the worst part is that near all have been entirely random; worked fine, normal use, reboot => get an error and pushed to a limited shell env (can't remember the name of the shell, but it only has like 20 commands or something crazy) and in a few of those cases i was completely unable to recover the system and had to reinstall....
even just getting drivers to work correctly can be a pain. I once had a wireless card that would get unmounted every time i locked the computer... it was an entirely one-off situation and i couldn't find anyone who knew wtf was going on... but i was able to make a script that ran at login to mount the damn thing again... but with that said, the ability to make such scripts with ease is the very thing that makes linux awesome IMHO
if being donated for a child to OWN the system, then i agree. but if it will be used an education environment then i think ubuntu would be a better option. they don't need "most games" in that environment. further, kids shouldn't grow up thinking windows is the only option that exists, and the "educational" software available on linux (for free no less) is vastly more available/abundant than on windows. plus, i would imagine that for most/. readers the first experience they had with computers was DOS, at least having to start everything from it. the idea that a modernized linux distro would be too complicated for them is somewhat ridiculous.
file hundreds of semi-bogus law suits and extort millions from hard working business owners: $600,000
download a few songs from bit torrent: $1,900,000 (http://www.switched.com/2009/06/19/woman-fined-1-9-million-for-downloading-24-songs/) sounds reasonable.
exactly. i can't get why companies don't realize what these types of actions do for their sales. i'll *probably* still buy the game... but considering that it was previously a "definitely" i think they should take heed and get the lawyers under a rope or two. 'cause i'm sure we're not the only ones who let things like this effect our purchasing decisions.
go ahead and trademark " '???' for use on internet based forums and SMS/IM messages" while you're at it. you should be able to cover a good percentage of the worlds population in law suits at that point.
if it is the only way to avoid persecution (from employers, as the present case stands) then yes, i think he would.
IMO facebook is the staple example for why anonymity NEEDS to exist. there are so many topics i do not bother discussing on IT because of the chance that a future employer could look at my stance poorly. this includes everything from politics to religion to simply negative emotions. and if we intend to keep the internet as an open forum where ideas are discussed freely (which in turns increases the amount of people understanding and thinking critically about such topics) then there needs to be options for anonymity. to me, this is more essential than the ability to annoy people on a street corner after having purchased a permit (our present form of "liberty". rather, we presently have a forum where target audiences are reached by even simplest of man, and ideas are discussed without anything held back because there is nothing to fear from doing so (at anywhere but facebook)
i can say whatever i want about a public figure verbally, on a stage, radio or even TV. but the moment i send those words over this interweb thingy everyone keep going on about its considered stalking/harassment? i love our laws!
which wouldn't surprise me as making things point to some other likely suspect is exactly what i would do if i were performing acts like hacking the CIA....
while i agree with you in theory, the problem becomes that ANY amount electronic tomfoolery is considered illegal. and thus the need to use scripts and compromised machines is required if you wish to stay out of prison/pay damages. further, while 20 people is enough to physically block a business, it would take vastly more people hitting F5 to have the same effect. I think the more appropriate use case is if there are more people who are just as against the topic as the hacker. but how could that be measured....
as for CAD - i used to be a structural engineer before i got into technology and yes, if you MUST use autodesk's autocad then you're screwed. but there are several GNU CAD products out there; if you are willing to learn them. and anything you need to open in autodesk can simply be converted. even if you have to buy ONE copy to do the conversions... however, the problem i ran into was there were no mathcad or RISA-type products available. but there are plenty of GNU FEA/FEM softwares and excel based solutions that *most* anything you needed to do could be done in linux.
so, its not impossible.... it just takes a lot of research and re-training you;re entire staff to be able to use linux+these other softwares. which is a fairly tall order....
pay cuts wouldn't put a dent in that cluster F. more importantly, government salaries for politicians are fairly low; considering what they are in charge of... the obvious #1 problem is the wars which we are in. but, in my experience, private contracts (read: not contract workers) would likely be the second most offensive. the entire budgetary process is not setup to work efficiently with such a system. when trying to curb spending departments will needlessly increase the scope of work beyond what is actually required just to force the money to come out of different budget. then, towards the end of the fiscal year, they will spend on unnecessary things so they don't loose budget for the following year... how about we take a "costs vary, deal with it" approach? add that with pressure from constituents for who a contract goes to, and who is allowed to even bid, regardless of the cost... and we have a real problem: we no longer have a true bid system to get the best bang for our tax dollars. the third problem would be the bailout. it was performed all wrong. never should CEO's have been enabled to lay off thousands of workers and collect large bonuses on the tax payers dime. while #3 is said and done, and we will NEVER get that money back.... working on the first 2 would key to setting us on the right track.
however, agreed on the "voters and no one else" bit. moreover, i don't get why people don't understand that consumers are the ONLY reason any of us have jobs. not investors. not business owners... they ALL rely on you and me buying stuff to stay in business; in one way or another. so if we wanted to add steam to the train, those are the people they (the gov AND businesses) should have turned to for it. but i would say it's too late now.
i could still solder in a connection:) want real security? strong magnets + hammer + steamroller + dog urine + >2000 degree inferno. that should do the trick. no one will EVER get the info off that drive again:)
both you and the article point out that it will somehow work via obscurity... that the "typical user" simply doesn't have the knowledge to circumvent such a system. while that maybe true at the moment it will very rapidly change. people learn what they need to learn to do what they want. and the best part is that they don;t even have to "understand" anything - users will follow cookbook how-to's, learn to use apps that happen to accomplish the desired result or even simply have that one computer literate buddy of theirs set them up.....
point being, it will NOT be effective. because regardless of what people know NOW they are capable of adapting.
i would like to disagree:) terrorists get their point across by bombing, holding hostages, killing people, etc. anything short of that is simply activism. calling it anything worse is more of a matter of people being too ignorant to come up with a better counter argument - and too naive to realize what effects such statement could have. to be clear, the term activism itself implies that people are taking actions to accomplish their goal - basically a step up from a protester; who merely talks about the problem. we seem to have been made sheep by the thought that anything more than talking is bad. which, IMHO is the exact reason popular opinion means nearly nothing to our government anymore.
so.. no. just because some people may like to use the term "terrorism" against actions that they don't agree with, it doesn't make it a true statement.
no. you are basically saying that people should be locked away and lives ruined on something of a statistical hunch.
chances are != guarantee. keep in mind that we are talking about real human lives here. possibly even yours! and while it is true that people in the west do frequently get convicted with nothing more than circumstantial evidence (mounting or not) this is simply an unfortunate side effect of poor legal representation and the general ignorance/fear/elitism of the public at large.
further, the mere fact that police tracked these teens using cell phone records is disgusting to me. THAT is proof positive that we need to push back against all of this anti-privacy BS IMO.
replying to myself FTW... moreover - of all the things this group might accomplish, hardening the internet from REAL terrorist attacks WILL be one of them. admins are no longer taking the threat lightly; and holes are being closed all over the place. this is a good thing. and at least it is being done someone(s) who doesn't have the aim of causing true damage.
so... activism == terrorism now eh? nice to know.......
short of them causing actual human harm (death etc) they are just activists. pulling stunts that get attention does NOT equal terrorist attacks. its simply good marketing. and YOU ought to be happy that *someone* is standing up for your freedoms. allowing the ability for the government to control your ability to communicate is not a matter which should not be taken lightly.
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I think had he managed to get one disc tray, one power button, one power supply, etc. and got it to recognize which system it should pump AV out of people would have been impressed. at this point he may as well have taped the two systems together and stuffed them into a new case.
you realize that, whether by our own fault or not, there will come a day (maybe sooner than later) that will *need* to be able to establish ourselves on another planet in order for the species to continue, right? and further, by trying to control the environment we may just make things worse if it turns out that these fluctuations that have always occurred regardless of our presence are required to keep things in check. ... aka damned if we, damned if we don't. so our ONLY option of survival in the long run is that "large enough space craft" ...
no. this is simply wrong. even if i don't finish a game i enjoy it has nothing to do with it being too long. the vast majority of the time it is becuase real life interferes with my gaming activities for a long enough period of time that i forget the game controls and don't feel like starting over for the sake of re-learning (though, i recently did exactly that for oblivion).
further, games are about the adventure of getting to the end, not the end itself. sure, having a good end is the cherry on top, but nothing more. actually, oblivion would be a perfect example: i logged about 130 hours on my first play through, a few years ago. at some point i got too busy and by the time i had gaming time again i forgot how to play and was enticed by a newer game. but, becuase oblivion was SO epic i'm willing to go back and play it again in anticipation of the new release - skyrim. so, super long game that i never finished leads to purchase of next release. go figure (?) and here i thought it was common sense.
i'm not entirely certain, but i think the saying "dog-eat-dog" world.
I thought that the 6-degrees was a MAXIMUM, not an "average" as the article suggests. if we step it back to an "average" value then it isn't really very impressive.
further, maybe they should employ someone with a brain (you know, those people you pay as little as possible) to do the actual webcrawl + math to determine this more thoroughly than having laymen guess at paths to random people...
yes. its against the EULA, but there is a LOT of RMT in eve. e.g. a Russian RMT site got hacked and it was found they made something like $250,000 over the previous 8 or so months... and i would imagine most of the goods sold were generated by macro's
I played eve for about a year, and these types of scams were advertised constantly.... and nearly NO ONE bought into them - mostly for the simple reason that everyone knows everything in the game is a scam.... (and there are much better scams too) so how in the world did this one become successful? only thing i can think is from the influx of newer players who don't know any better.
funny that i just encouraged linux IF going to edu env. but i have to disagree that linux is harder to screw up. sure, command line only centos will work for years regardless of what you do to it. but on X11+ubuntu (and gentoo) i've had my share of problems. the worst part is that near all have been entirely random; worked fine, normal use, reboot => get an error and pushed to a limited shell env (can't remember the name of the shell, but it only has like 20 commands or something crazy) and in a few of those cases i was completely unable to recover the system and had to reinstall....
even just getting drivers to work correctly can be a pain. I once had a wireless card that would get unmounted every time i locked the computer... it was an entirely one-off situation and i couldn't find anyone who knew wtf was going on... but i was able to make a script that ran at login to mount the damn thing again... but with that said, the ability to make such scripts with ease is the very thing that makes linux awesome IMHO
if being donated for a child to OWN the system, then i agree. but if it will be used an education environment then i think ubuntu would be a better option. they don't need "most games" in that environment. further, kids shouldn't grow up thinking windows is the only option that exists, and the "educational" software available on linux (for free no less) is vastly more available/abundant than on windows. plus, i would imagine that for most /. readers the first experience they had with computers was DOS, at least having to start everything from it. the idea that a modernized linux distro would be too complicated for them is somewhat ridiculous.
file hundreds of semi-bogus law suits and extort millions from hard working business owners: $600,000
download a few songs from bit torrent: $1,900,000 (http://www.switched.com/2009/06/19/woman-fined-1-9-million-for-downloading-24-songs/)
sounds reasonable.
exactly. i can't get why companies don't realize what these types of actions do for their sales. i'll *probably* still buy the game... but considering that it was previously a "definitely" i think they should take heed and get the lawyers under a rope or two. 'cause i'm sure we're not the only ones who let things like this effect our purchasing decisions.
go ahead and trademark " '???' for use on internet based forums and SMS/IM messages" while you're at it. you should be able to cover a good percentage of the worlds population in law suits at that point.
if it is the only way to avoid persecution (from employers, as the present case stands) then yes, i think he would.
IMO facebook is the staple example for why anonymity NEEDS to exist. there are so many topics i do not bother discussing on IT because of the chance that a future employer could look at my stance poorly. this includes everything from politics to religion to simply negative emotions. and if we intend to keep the internet as an open forum where ideas are discussed freely (which in turns increases the amount of people understanding and thinking critically about such topics) then there needs to be options for anonymity. to me, this is more essential than the ability to annoy people on a street corner after having purchased a permit (our present form of "liberty". rather, we presently have a forum where target audiences are reached by even simplest of man, and ideas are discussed without anything held back because there is nothing to fear from doing so (at anywhere but facebook)
so, when i start blocking access to the internet, via my hand, will get charged as a terrorist?
i can say whatever i want about a public figure verbally, on a stage, radio or even TV. but the moment i send those words over this interweb thingy everyone keep going on about its considered stalking/harassment? i love our laws!
There are indications that they have the wrong guy: http://www.dailytech.com/Exclusive+British+Police+Duped+by+LulzSec+Into+Arresting+the+Wrong+Guy/article22280.htm
which wouldn't surprise me as making things point to some other likely suspect is exactly what i would do if i were performing acts like hacking the CIA....
while i agree with you in theory, the problem becomes that ANY amount electronic tomfoolery is considered illegal. and thus the need to use scripts and compromised machines is required if you wish to stay out of prison/pay damages. further, while 20 people is enough to physically block a business, it would take vastly more people hitting F5 to have the same effect. I think the more appropriate use case is if there are more people who are just as against the topic as the hacker. but how could that be measured....
there are several GNU accounting apps available for linux. i've used a couple for tracking/auditing my bank accounts. http://linas.org/mirrors/www.aerospacesoftware.com/2003.06.21/GNU_Cash_for_Business_users_Howto_Guide.html is the first hit on google...
as for CAD - i used to be a structural engineer before i got into technology and yes, if you MUST use autodesk's autocad then you're screwed. but there are several GNU CAD products out there; if you are willing to learn them. and anything you need to open in autodesk can simply be converted. even if you have to buy ONE copy to do the conversions... however, the problem i ran into was there were no mathcad or RISA-type products available. but there are plenty of GNU FEA/FEM softwares and excel based solutions that *most* anything you needed to do could be done in linux.
so, its not impossible.... it just takes a lot of research and re-training you;re entire staff to be able to use linux+these other softwares. which is a fairly tall order....
pay cuts wouldn't put a dent in that cluster F. more importantly, government salaries for politicians are fairly low; considering what they are in charge of... the obvious #1 problem is the wars which we are in. but, in my experience, private contracts (read: not contract workers) would likely be the second most offensive. the entire budgetary process is not setup to work efficiently with such a system. when trying to curb spending departments will needlessly increase the scope of work beyond what is actually required just to force the money to come out of different budget. then, towards the end of the fiscal year, they will spend on unnecessary things so they don't loose budget for the following year... how about we take a "costs vary, deal with it" approach? add that with pressure from constituents for who a contract goes to, and who is allowed to even bid, regardless of the cost... and we have a real problem: we no longer have a true bid system to get the best bang for our tax dollars. the third problem would be the bailout. it was performed all wrong. never should CEO's have been enabled to lay off thousands of workers and collect large bonuses on the tax payers dime. while #3 is said and done, and we will NEVER get that money back.... working on the first 2 would key to setting us on the right track.
however, agreed on the "voters and no one else" bit. moreover, i don't get why people don't understand that consumers are the ONLY reason any of us have jobs. not investors. not business owners... they ALL rely on you and me buying stuff to stay in business; in one way or another. so if we wanted to add steam to the train, those are the people they (the gov AND businesses) should have turned to for it. but i would say it's too late now.
i could still solder in a connection :) want real security? strong magnets + hammer + steamroller + dog urine + >2000 degree inferno. that should do the trick. no one will EVER get the info off that drive again :)
both you and the article point out that it will somehow work via obscurity... that the "typical user" simply doesn't have the knowledge to circumvent such a system. while that maybe true at the moment it will very rapidly change. people learn what they need to learn to do what they want. and the best part is that they don;t even have to "understand" anything - users will follow cookbook how-to's, learn to use apps that happen to accomplish the desired result or even simply have that one computer literate buddy of theirs set them up.....
point being, it will NOT be effective. because regardless of what people know NOW they are capable of adapting.
i would like to disagree :)
terrorists get their point across by bombing, holding hostages, killing people, etc. anything short of that is simply activism. calling it anything worse is more of a matter of people being too ignorant to come up with a better counter argument - and too naive to realize what effects such statement could have. to be clear, the term activism itself implies that people are taking actions to accomplish their goal - basically a step up from a protester; who merely talks about the problem. we seem to have been made sheep by the thought that anything more than talking is bad. which, IMHO is the exact reason popular opinion means nearly nothing to our government anymore.
so.. no. just because some people may like to use the term "terrorism" against actions that they don't agree with, it doesn't make it a true statement.
no. you are basically saying that people should be locked away and lives ruined on something of a statistical hunch.
chances are != guarantee. keep in mind that we are talking about real human lives here. possibly even yours! and while it is true that people in the west do frequently get convicted with nothing more than circumstantial evidence (mounting or not) this is simply an unfortunate side effect of poor legal representation and the general ignorance/fear/elitism of the public at large.
further, the mere fact that police tracked these teens using cell phone records is disgusting to me. THAT is proof positive that we need to push back against all of this anti-privacy BS IMO.
replying to myself FTW...
moreover - of all the things this group might accomplish, hardening the internet from REAL terrorist attacks WILL be one of them. admins are no longer taking the threat lightly; and holes are being closed all over the place. this is a good thing. and at least it is being done someone(s) who doesn't have the aim of causing true damage.
so... activism == terrorism now eh? nice to know.... ...
short of them causing actual human harm (death etc) they are just activists. pulling stunts that get attention does NOT equal terrorist attacks. its simply good marketing. and YOU ought to be happy that *someone* is standing up for your freedoms. allowing the ability for the government to control your ability to communicate is not a matter which should not be taken lightly.