I was their customer, and at the time these messages started, I had just become eligible for a phone upgrade so I guess they might scan for former customers whose contracts have just reached that point.
I doubt there would be spam like we have now on email, the range is simply to short. But I can see supermarkets or similar companys using this to send you messages while in there store.
Precisely, but how is this not spam? Shops in the UK are already doing this with SMS. I now avoid walking past the Carphone Warehouse in Liverpool Street Station because of the SMS spam they've sent out as I walk past on a number of occasions.
In the rest of the world where the recipient is not paying for incoming calls or text messages, there are no special laws that make cell phones less attractive to spam than landlines. Since bluetooth spam is not costing you anything to receive in the US either, expect it to take off like SMS spam has in Europe.
So you're replying to one post with a reply to a different post saying something that has nothing to do with the post to which you are responding?
Perhaps you should have read the parent before making such allegations. The first paragraph was a quote from there. I don't know what happened to the italics, I must have mistyped something. Shit happens, get over it.
Somewhere else, a poster asks 'if the States is researching this, how are they different from China, Iraq, et all?' The answer is, they don't have a history of brutal and frivolous use of such things.
The citizens of Iraq, Vietnam, Hiroshima and Nagasaki might disagree with you there.
Was the Government funding studies involving flying airliners into skyscrapers and the pentagon prior to 9/11 so that it could be prepared in case terrorists did the same? If it was, you might have a point.
Defend against what attack? If this virus had not been developed, there would be nothing to defend against. And before you start rabbiting on about terrorists developing this virus themselves, if they have that ability (and that is a big if), how likely is it that they would develop this virus, and not some other variation of smallpox or other deadly virus?
What about the "Gator E-Wallet"? Technically it is a service/product.
It might be a service/product if someone knowingly installed it, and the ads only displayed while it was in use. But this thing piggybacks in on other unrelated programs and tries to install itself when you click on a link in a popup, expecting to be taken to a webpage. Any "services" or "products" that Gator/Claria installs alongside itself are straw men probably designed to get around some law somewhere.
Ad banners on websites that are placed there by the website owner are like TV advertising. In both cases, the advertising revenue is paying for content which you would otherwise have to pay for (or pay more for). Gator is something else entirely. There is no up side to Gator advertising. You don't get any free content in return. All the ad revenue goes straight into Gator/Claria's pocket.
Maybe they are right about it not being spyware (who knows what information it is sending back, but maybe it is none), but it is certainly SPAMware.
No. It is never acceptable for anyone to do anything on my computer without my express prior permission, end of story.
Nor is it acceptable for your computer to try to infect a server with a worm, which is the only circumstances that this honeypot will kick in. If your computer is spreading worms around the internet and some server tries to defend (and the rest of the world) itself against that using reasonable force to disable the worm, then I know who the jury are going to be siding with.
PS: This is not a "benevolent worm", it does not spread.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access/products/linux/ on this server.
If you think that's funny, they used to have a link on some page which was supposed to be to "SCO Intellectual Property". Clicking the link gave a 404 Not Found response. I wish I could find it now.
I don't know what the Mac does, but in Windows, the generic document icon is only used for files that are not associated with anything. As soon as you associate Mozilla with a file extension, those files get Mozilla's icon by default, so it is Windows' choice, not Mozilla's.
The other plus was that in addition to the instant feedback of the mini-display, I could also take a look at the shots every night on my laptop when I got back to the tent. This allowed me to do a lot of playing with the camera settings and still have a reasonable idea of what they were when I saw the photos.
Most digital cameras record all that sort of info with the image, so even if you don't get your images onto a PC until weeks later you can still see which settings worked and which didn't. All you need is some software to get at the EXIF metadata in jpeg and tiff files.
The GUI programs shouldn't have to do it that way. The OS should generate the icons for them, or at least use a generic document icon instead of the current default of using the program icon.
I think the factor depends a lot on the specific environment the software runs in. When this idea was first proposed, replacing software in the field meant shipping hard copies to users, and for embedded software, replacing PROMs, hence the 50-200 factor. These days the distribution medium is much more likely to be the internet, and at worst even upgrading an embedded system is a matter of plugging in a laptop and reflashing, so the factor might be much lower (5-50 maybe), but the principle still stands.
True, the window would have to have focus to grab "Print Screen" and stop it doing anything. Someone with access to MS Office 2003 might want to try that one.
Before the conspiracy theories start about Microsoft being able to do things their competitors can't because of their access to secret APIs, I'd like to point out that grabbing the Print Screen key for your own use is trivial, and there is no reason why Lotus Notes could not have done this.
Multimap is good, except it doesn't recognize old postcodes, which most businesses in W1 (West End London) still use on their websites. So you need to either use another map site that recognizes those, or go to Royal Mail to find out the new postcode for the address.
I'm sorry, but hungarian notation does not prevent stupid programmer mistakes. Typos creep in regardless of any conventions you use, the only thing that can catch them before the compile cycle is on the fly spell checking, which is rendered useless by hungarian notation. And as for type info, modern editors are perfectly capable of giving you the information without silly prefixes on every variable.
You can't lose your clipboard by highlighting text. The primary selection (that mouse-2 uses) and clipboard are different buffers in X. That's the theory anyway, though some apps no doubt get it wrong and use the wrong buffer.
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I was their customer, and at the time these messages started, I had just become eligible for a phone upgrade so I guess they might scan for former customers whose contracts have just reached that point.
Precisely, but how is this not spam? Shops in the UK are already doing this with SMS. I now avoid walking past the Carphone Warehouse in Liverpool Street Station because of the SMS spam they've sent out as I walk past on a number of occasions.
All the time, and if I hadn't registered my cell phone number with TPS (UK equivalent of the do not call list) a year ago, I'd be getting even more.
Don't spammers/telemarketers avoid spamming cell phones?
In the rest of the world where the recipient is not paying for incoming calls or text messages, there are no special laws that make cell phones less attractive to spam than landlines. Since bluetooth spam is not costing you anything to receive in the US either, expect it to take off like SMS spam has in Europe.
Not true, the source is openly available. It may be non-Free by the FSF definition, but it is certainly not closed.
Perhaps you should have read the parent before making such allegations. The first paragraph was a quote from there. I don't know what happened to the italics, I must have mistyped something. Shit happens, get over it.
The citizens of Iraq, Vietnam, Hiroshima and Nagasaki might disagree with you there.
Was the Government funding studies involving flying airliners into skyscrapers and the pentagon prior to 9/11 so that it could be prepared in case terrorists did the same? If it was, you might have a point.
Defend against what attack? If this virus had not been developed, there would be nothing to defend against. And before you start rabbiting on about terrorists developing this virus themselves, if they have that ability (and that is a big if), how likely is it that they would develop this virus, and not some other variation of smallpox or other deadly virus?
It might be a service/product if someone knowingly installed it, and the ads only displayed while it was in use. But this thing piggybacks in on other unrelated programs and tries to install itself when you click on a link in a popup, expecting to be taken to a webpage. Any "services" or "products" that Gator/Claria installs alongside itself are straw men probably designed to get around some law somewhere.
Don't Citroens have metric rims, which is why you need Michelin tyres on them?
Maybe they are right about it not being spyware (who knows what information it is sending back, but maybe it is none), but it is certainly SPAMware.
Nor is it acceptable for your computer to try to infect a server with a worm, which is the only circumstances that this honeypot will kick in. If your computer is spreading worms around the internet and some server tries to defend (and the rest of the world) itself against that using reasonable force to disable the worm, then I know who the jury are going to be siding with.
PS: This is not a "benevolent worm", it does not spread.
You don't have permission to access
If you think that's funny, they used to have a link on some page which was supposed to be to "SCO Intellectual Property". Clicking the link gave a 404 Not Found response. I wish I could find it now.
I don't know what the Mac does, but in Windows, the generic document icon is only used for files that are not associated with anything. As soon as you associate Mozilla with a file extension, those files get Mozilla's icon by default, so it is Windows' choice, not Mozilla's.
Most digital cameras record all that sort of info with the image, so even if you don't get your images onto a PC until weeks later you can still see which settings worked and which didn't. All you need is some software to get at the EXIF metadata in jpeg and tiff files.
The GUI programs shouldn't have to do it that way. The OS should generate the icons for them, or at least use a generic document icon instead of the current default of using the program icon.
And stop associating Mozilla with jpg and gif images by default. Its a webbrowser, not a graphics viewer!
I think the factor depends a lot on the specific environment the software runs in. When this idea was first proposed, replacing software in the field meant shipping hard copies to users, and for embedded software, replacing PROMs, hence the 50-200 factor. These days the distribution medium is much more likely to be the internet, and at worst even upgrading an embedded system is a matter of plugging in a laptop and reflashing, so the factor might be much lower (5-50 maybe), but the principle still stands.
True, the window would have to have focus to grab "Print Screen" and stop it doing anything. Someone with access to MS Office 2003 might want to try that one.
The really extreme Linux zealots are posting on Slashdot at -1. The really extreme SCO zealots are running the fucking company.
Before the conspiracy theories start about Microsoft being able to do things their competitors can't because of their access to secret APIs, I'd like to point out that grabbing the Print Screen key for your own use is trivial, and there is no reason why Lotus Notes could not have done this.
Multimap is good, except it doesn't recognize old postcodes, which most businesses in W1 (West End London) still use on their websites. So you need to either use another map site that recognizes those, or go to Royal Mail to find out the new postcode for the address.
I'm sorry, but hungarian notation does not prevent stupid programmer mistakes. Typos creep in regardless of any conventions you use, the only thing that can catch them before the compile cycle is on the fly spell checking, which is rendered useless by hungarian notation. And as for type info, modern editors are perfectly capable of giving you the information without silly prefixes on every variable.
You can't lose your clipboard by highlighting text. The primary selection (that mouse-2 uses) and clipboard are different buffers in X. That's the theory anyway, though some apps no doubt get it wrong and use the wrong buffer.
Top points for your "Normal American" display of geographical knowledge.