Re:Anybody have torrent links?
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Although the main site was completely unresponsive, and the primary mirrors as well, quite a few of the secondary mirrors were pretty good. The progeny link worked for me.
Evolution scientists are now using mathematics to describe the "fitness landscapes" created by small changes to a creatures DNA. The idea is that swapping one allele (think of it as the smallest segment of DNA that does something - the characters of DNA, rather than the line segments of a vector font) either gives the organism a slight advantage or a slight disadvantage. Swapping allele for allele - stepping across the fitness landscape - across several generations gets the organism to the local maxima - the point of highest fitness that you can get to through incremental steps. However, local maxima are not necessarily global maxima, just like the tallest hill in Kansas doesn't measure up to the Rocky Mountains. Sometimes you have to swap alleles that give an organism a disadvantage - take them through a local valley - to get to a close maxima better than your local maxima. So, what appears to be a disadvantage in one generation can be the start of finding a better advantage - you just don't know until the organism goes through a few generations of environmental pressure.
We can do even better in software (and other human tasks) than evolution, because we can make larger jumps and have an idea where we want to go and how to get there. It's the difference between getting a roadmap and driving from Lawrence, KS to Denver, and starting in Lawrence, closing your eyes, walking for a hour, and measuring your altitude. However, the risk is still the same - without a good idea where you are going, you can end up worse than you were. Think how social engineers thought communism and fascism were good ideas for societies, "if people would just implement it correctly". Thank goodness we have software models that let up abandon bad projects.
I'd agree that rewriting from scratch is bad - if you have to jump to the re-write right away. But we all know the rule of 3, at least for Microsoft - don't jump on until the third release. DOS 3.0, DOS 3.3, Windows 3.1, NT 4.0 Service Pack 3.0, Internet Explorer 3.0, etc. etc. It's the same with the other technologies - wait at you local maxima until the new maxima is proven to be significantly better.
However, "We're doing pretty good here" is a lousy reason to stay at a local maxima. Cochroaches are pretty successful biologically and evolutionarily, but I like the features we gave up to get to Human status.
Umberto Eco is one of my favorite authors, and an academic in the field of semiotics. Semiotics is a bit hard to define, but a quick definition is the study of how humans use signs and language to communicate. My thought was, if this obviously intellegent and interesting author can devote whole books to semiotics, there might be something to it.
After some searching, I found
Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.
It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.
I liken XP instead to just-in-time manufacturing (a manufacturing process that was popularized by analyzing why Japan was kicking US butt in terms of product cycles)... it is not, nor can it be, the absolute solution, but it may well be a valuable signpost on the way to consistent goal-meeting.
I had the same impression, but for different reasons. At the university (engineering school), Japan's manufacturing process was analyzed in terms of quality control. They used randomized techniques to select product to test, design criteria to test the product, and statistical analysis to determine if there was a problem. It was all existing theory, mostly developed by Western academics, but Japan was one of the first places where they could actually get management to put the theory into practice.
I wonder if programmers would be less critical of ideas like XP if Control Theory were a required course for a Computer Science degree. That class gave me a huge respect for feedback loops, constant sampling, and finding proper and measurable metrics to gauge improvement.
The Tech museum in San Jose had an exhibit like this (about 3 years ago?). They had a little rover model running around in a simulated Martian crater. Visitors could control the rover remotely through a closed circuit TV and joystick setup. It was quite fun.
I think this is a new, autonomous exhibit, not the remote control ones from other museums.
The Houston Space Center has the remote control one, which me and the wife visited when we were on a pilgramage to Ikea (damn your fashionable and reasonably priced Nordic furniture! Why won't you build a store more than 50 miles from a port!).
I played with the joystick part, which allowed two rovers to compete to roll a ball into a goal. It was a somewhat low-res screen, and I thought it was a computer game ("why did they bother with 3D models if they were only going to show a nearly top-down view?"). It was only later that I saw the real models, and realized that I was remote controlling the robots. It was a very strange feeling, like realizing that something you read about in a Sci-Fi book has suddenly come to life.
If you go to the Houston Space Center, try to find one of the many discounts to get in. My Southwest Airlines frequent flyer card got me in cheaply, even though I drove to Houston.
Actually, this was a pretty cool find. I guess you were right. Find out here who owns what...
No documents in Who Owns What were found that match your query of Slashdot.
Everyone knows that OSDN owns the major media company Slashdot! Or are you saying (gasp!) that Slashdot isn't a major media company? Or that trying to figure out who owns an Internet company is like keeping track of who is dating whom in your local high school?
Forcing compliance with a license isn't an available remedy for copyright violation. Period. Hence, a court will never force someone to release their application's code. That court *may* impose monitary damages, attourney's fees, or stop further distribution of the work until the infringing portion is removed -- but it will never require code to be released.
'The term "financial gain" includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.'
It may be possible for an attorney to argue that the thing that was stolen was the sharing of the source code, and that a proper remedy for paying back "financial loss" would be to open the offending source code.
I'd be just as happy, however, if lawyers put the kind of ridiculous price tags on open source code as closed source gets in hacker trials. "Yes your honor, we normally give it away for free, but it represents the work of 10,000 programmer hours, who could have gotten $500/hour rates if they chose to spend their free time making software as a private contractor, but instead decided to recieve alternate financial gain in the form of future copyrighted works. The only fair thing to do is pay them with cash, at 5x the normal rate for punitive purposes."
There's more than one way to do it (4 orientations, each with two states)
If mine is still a glider, I can say "that's just my style", the way that different programmers can code the same thing and have the source come out completely differently.
Impressive as it is, it requires a whole foundation (a simulator for Conway's Life), just like Linux needs the GNU tools to compile and to be useful. And, just like GNU/Linux, everyone will ignore or disregard ESR's contribution once it becomes popular.
If you put more than one glider, of different orientations, on the same Life domain, they will either interact to do amazing things, ignore each other, or anihilate each other - just like different hacker's code!
And, of course, different hackers will say "the default sucks", and change the orientation, make fancier gliders, etc., which will work for them but not for anyone else, bringing shouts of "diversity if good!" and "why can't everyone just work on the same logo!"
Okay... Windows Messenger is a horrible, horrible feature and I hate how it's enabled by default. Still, Control Panel-->Admin Tools-->Services-->Windows Messnger. Then pick "disable". Not terribly intuitive, but incredibly easy to do... and if you type "disable Windows Messenger" in Google there are ZILLIONS of results telling you how to do this.
Maybe Windows XP Home is different, but the option there is:
Control Panel-->Admin Tools-->Services-->Messnger
There are a number of good sites telling you what whose services are, what they do, and suggesting if you should change from the default settings. Here is one of my favorites.
No, my biggest fear is the SCO will somehow manage to slip away, at the last moment, from the much spectacular death they are running full-speed towards, and they will somehow manage to survive and hide in a small hole somewhere.
I agree. It's possible Bill Gates is making some room in his pocket for SCO, right next to his wallet. That could prolong a messy and pointless lawsuit for a few decades...
ahhh.. yes i was waiting for that point to be made... you forget the public library!
Yes! Just take MIT Course 0-101: How to Hack. It will teach you how to get past a locked-down Windows box, how to install Cygwin, and how to get a decent set of programming tools, so that you actually do the assignments for the other courses.
Sorry, you still need an actual open computer to take a lot of programming courses. The library will be good for some of it, but to get the vital practice you need a computer. Luckily, you can buy a WalMart PC running Linux after only about a month of working minimum wage part-time!
If you can't deal with a CEO plugging his virus-infected laptop into your network, that only goes to show that your internal security and antivirus measures suck. Your network won't be secure and reliable unless you can prevent virus infections from spreading internally.
Yes, everyone knows management should be on their own subnet, firewalled from the rest of the world, with similar but crippled servers (email doesn't allow executables or PowerPoint attachments, DNS blocks playboy.com et al, etc.).
And shouldn't all laptops and wirelessly connected devices be on their own firewalled subnet? They really are a different beast to manage than a computer that you expect to be plugged into a wall 24/7.
Teacher:... And now, you make no money at all, because your album is availible for download on the Internet!
Kid1: Huh? You can download music from the Internet?
Kid2: Yeah, just Google for Kazza.
Nerd: Don't use plain Kazaa - they can track your IP address, and all those ads are annoying.
Kid2: Huh?
Nerd: You need a different P2P app with anonymizing features.
Kid1 and 2: Huh?
Nerd: If you use Kazaa, you might get into trouble, and your parents may take away your computer.
Kid1 and Kid2: What should you use?
Nerd: Here, write this down...
Note: I'm suggesting that a nerd in the class educate the other children. None of you high-school or older nerds should go down to the schoolyard saying "Psst - hey kid, wanna anonymizing P2P app? First CD is free..."
Is this the birthdate of the user, or of the computer?
I'd say it's for the user - mine was accurate enough, but my laptop's was not:
The compatibility issues that have been hounding you lately will magically seem to resolve themselves. Now is a good time to purchase new hardware, especially if you've been putting it off. The discipline you need to finally put your dreams and goals to work is at hand. Seek out an unconventional partnership. Despite personality differences, find the common denominator in professional relationships -- you're going to need help to accomplish your goals. Although your sign likes to be productive, your schedule has been challenging, even for you. Your hard work has not gone unnoticed, however. You've proven yourself and will have a chance to enjoy a bit of freedom and autonomy. Enjoy!
The laptop (born on Sept 11, 2000) has been all but useless after installing gcc 3.3.1-r2 from the gentoo ~x86 tree. The compatibility issues are NOT resolving themselves magically - I'm reinstalling gentoo from scratch, without the ~x86 tree.
However, I'm hopeful my laptop will avoid "unconventional partnerships" in the near future. Please stay away, openssh bug!
Anyone have luck getting the 2.6 kernels to run w/ Gentoo? It appears kernel module auto-loading isn't working for me, and devfs thinks I need SCSI stuff (but isn't picking it up in the kernel build dependancies).
I don't see where the submitter gets off claiming that MR introduced us to *any* new cinematic technique, except perhaps for the fight scene with 200 Agent Smiths and not only was that done poorly but the whole thing could have been avoided if only Neo had done another one of his Superman jumps. In other words, it was gratuitous.
In a slightly related note, I remember watching Matrix Reloaded in the movie theater and thinking, "OK, this scene is CG, this one is real". Part of the thrill of the first movie was that none of it looked CG, even the bullet-time stuff. In retrospective, the distortion effects from bullets were obviously CG, but they still felt real.
However, when I saw the same movie at IMAX a month or so later, the CG scenes looked much more impressive, much more "real". Even the 200 Agent Smiths scene looked very un-CG, and I enjoyed the movie much more than the first time I saw it.
Is there some sort of resolution difference that makes one look better than the other? I've noticed the same thing with other movies, when a special effects scene looks good in the theater, but it looks like a green screen on T.V.
As long as I'm ranting - why would the Key Maker be safe once Neo, Morpheus, and the rest get to a land phone, after the highway scene? Wouldn't he still be in the Matrix, and still be hunted by Agents? Or did I just miss a plot point?
That was terrible! Ads on the page, pop-under ads, and pop-away ads (which pop up when you leave the site). I'm feeling a little less sympathy for Register.com now.
I got about 4 pop-* ads before my browser crashed. Thank you, Mozilla Java Bug!
If you were actually a pro musician you wouldn't. When someone downloads your music for $nothing, you aren't getting nothing out of it. You're getting free marketing. Good exposure is priceless.
I thought the "Good exposure is priceless" argument went out the window with the dot com crash. Even the great unknown musician who's trying to make a name for himself gets paid something by all those bars.
Microsoft are MORONS. The fix for this particular worm required SP2 or greater. That is 8 hours and 10 minutes over dialup.
Windowsupdate is a god send for people with broadband but MS are going to be required to send CDs in the mail if they want to keep dial-up users up to speed.
Windows Update has an Automatic Updates feature that downloads updates in the background. It uses a service called Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to check for updates and download using idle bandwidth. While you are typing Slashdot comments, the connection is idle, and BITS can use this idle time to download updates. It can download part of it, and restart when you reconnect. So, unless your ISP charges you by the bit, you wouldn't notice it. Sure, it will take a while to get the update (weeks?), but you'll eventually get it.
Dial-up users aren't the weak link in the chain anyway - broadband users with insecure computers are, and are the reason these worms spread to rapidly.
There is an API for BITS if you are interested in making a self-updating application for Windows:
I am a U.S. university student who has recently come across 2 remote exploits for a homework program used by colleges nationwide.
Come across? Like you woke up one morning and found them in your mailbox, between credit card offers?
Both vulnerabilities allow students to give themselves arbitrary scores, and possibly execute arbitrary code. To further emphasize the scope of this vulnerability, I have written and -selftested proof-of-concept exploit code.
Now I'm thinking - did you have a legal copy of the software you were "testing"? If not, do you know the person/entity who has the legal copy? Did you get their permission to poke around?
I would expect the litigation or academic discipline, if you pursued your experiment without a legal copy, or at least the permission of the person who owned the licensed copy. Or at least asked a professor to act as advisor for your experiments.
As an ethical geek, what do -you- do?
Ask permission from the target company before pursuing exploits.
I may be reading too much into the poster's brief notes (or maybe the poster's name), but I have a feeling that there are several illegal (and possibly unethical) things that have been done so far. The best way to avoid a situation like this is to plan to be ethical, legal, and open from the beginning. Get the company's permission, the schools permission, etc., and no one will be suprised when you get some results. Otherwise, they may say "Thank you, now please come to court in two weeks", and you have little recourse except to hire a lawyer.
Which the poster should probably do, anyway. It's a shame - with the proper authorization, this could have been an interesting senior project.
Does any of this help with a Linux driver for the Linksys WPC54G PCMCIA card (or for that matter, the PCI card)? It's one of the reasons I still need Windows on my laptop.
Are there any good resources for the general strategy needed to make drivers for a card where the manufacturer isn't giving out any good information? I might be willing to work on some project to get this card working under Linux.
i strongly disagree. the matrix REQUIRES the ability to have a massive number of concurrent users and to effectively constrain administrator rights away from the majority of them. It clearly isnt windows.
All computers worked perfectly in the first Matrix. However, this gave people entirely too much time to thing about the real nature of reality.
A much improved system is one where technology constantly causes minor frustrations (blue screens, bad interfaces, etc.), or creates new tasks (creating filters for SPAM, cataloging MP3s) to distract people from thinking about reality. The minor flaws are so distracting that you never notice the fundamental flaws.
An improvement is a system that, on the surface, acts Correctly, seldom crashing or failing in obvious ways. However, at the core, ever action the user wants to accomplish requires such a understanding of the minutia, down to configuration file syntax and even the source code, that all production and contemplation halts in a never-ending recursive spiral of editing litle text files. The user is getting nothing done, yet he blames himself for lack of knowledge, rather than the system for a horrible (but technically correct) interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the main site was completely unresponsive, and the primary mirrors as well, quite a few of the secondary mirrors were pretty good. The progeny link worked for me.
We can do even better in software (and other human tasks) than evolution, because we can make larger jumps and have an idea where we want to go and how to get there. It's the difference between getting a roadmap and driving from Lawrence, KS to Denver, and starting in Lawrence, closing your eyes, walking for a hour, and measuring your altitude. However, the risk is still the same - without a good idea where you are going, you can end up worse than you were. Think how social engineers thought communism and fascism were good ideas for societies, "if people would just implement it correctly". Thank goodness we have software models that let up abandon bad projects.
I'd agree that rewriting from scratch is bad - if you have to jump to the re-write right away. But we all know the rule of 3, at least for Microsoft - don't jump on until the third release. DOS 3.0, DOS 3.3, Windows 3.1, NT 4.0 Service Pack 3.0, Internet Explorer 3.0, etc. etc. It's the same with the other technologies - wait at you local maxima until the new maxima is proven to be significantly better.
However, "We're doing pretty good here" is a lousy reason to stay at a local maxima. Cochroaches are pretty successful biologically and evolutionarily, but I like the features we gave up to get to Human status.
After some searching, I found Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.
It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.
I had the same impression, but for different reasons. At the university (engineering school), Japan's manufacturing process was analyzed in terms of quality control. They used randomized techniques to select product to test, design criteria to test the product, and statistical analysis to determine if there was a problem. It was all existing theory, mostly developed by Western academics, but Japan was one of the first places where they could actually get management to put the theory into practice.
I wonder if programmers would be less critical of ideas like XP if Control Theory were a required course for a Computer Science degree. That class gave me a huge respect for feedback loops, constant sampling, and finding proper and measurable metrics to gauge improvement.
I think this is a new, autonomous exhibit, not the remote control ones from other museums.
The Houston Space Center has the remote control one, which me and the wife visited when we were on a pilgramage to Ikea (damn your fashionable and reasonably priced Nordic furniture! Why won't you build a store more than 50 miles from a port!).
I played with the joystick part, which allowed two rovers to compete to roll a ball into a goal. It was a somewhat low-res screen, and I thought it was a computer game ("why did they bother with 3D models if they were only going to show a nearly top-down view?"). It was only later that I saw the real models, and realized that I was remote controlling the robots. It was a very strange feeling, like realizing that something you read about in a Sci-Fi book has suddenly come to life.
If you go to the Houston Space Center, try to find one of the many discounts to get in. My Southwest Airlines frequent flyer card got me in cheaply, even though I drove to Houston.
No documents in Who Owns What were found that match your query of Slashdot.
Everyone knows that OSDN owns the major media company Slashdot! Or are you saying (gasp!) that Slashdot isn't a major media company? Or that trying to figure out who owns an Internet company is like keeping track of who is dating whom in your local high school?
Ah, but as Linus recently noted, U.S. copyright law has an interesting definition of financial gain:
It may be possible for an attorney to argue that the thing that was stolen was the sharing of the source code, and that a proper remedy for paying back "financial loss" would be to open the offending source code.I'd be just as happy, however, if lawyers put the kind of ridiculous price tags on open source code as closed source gets in hacker trials. "Yes your honor, we normally give it away for free, but it represents the work of 10,000 programmer hours, who could have gotten $500/hour rates if they chose to spend their free time making software as a private contractor, but instead decided to recieve alternate financial gain in the form of future copyrighted works. The only fair thing to do is pay them with cash, at 5x the normal rate for punitive purposes."
If mine is still a glider, I can say "that's just my style", the way that different programmers can code the same thing and have the source come out completely differently.
Impressive as it is, it requires a whole foundation (a simulator for Conway's Life), just like Linux needs the GNU tools to compile and to be useful. And, just like GNU/Linux, everyone will ignore or disregard ESR's contribution once it becomes popular.
If you put more than one glider, of different orientations, on the same Life domain, they will either interact to do amazing things, ignore each other, or anihilate each other - just like different hacker's code!
And, of course, different hackers will say "the default sucks", and change the orientation, make fancier gliders, etc., which will work for them but not for anyone else, bringing shouts of "diversity if good!" and "why can't everyone just work on the same logo!"
I think ESR might be on to something.
Any other starving college students remember the biodegradable corn-based packing material? Just add salt!
Maybe Windows XP Home is different, but the option there is:
Control Panel-->Admin Tools-->Services-->Messnger
There are a number of good sites telling you what whose services are, what they do, and suggesting if you should change from the default settings. Here is one of my favorites.
I agree. It's possible Bill Gates is making some room in his pocket for SCO, right next to his wallet. That could prolong a messy and pointless lawsuit for a few decades...
Yes! Just take MIT Course 0-101: How to Hack. It will teach you how to get past a locked-down Windows box, how to install Cygwin, and how to get a decent set of programming tools, so that you actually do the assignments for the other courses.
Sorry, you still need an actual open computer to take a lot of programming courses. The library will be good for some of it, but to get the vital practice you need a computer. Luckily, you can buy a WalMart PC running Linux after only about a month of working minimum wage part-time!
Yes, everyone knows management should be on their own subnet, firewalled from the rest of the world, with similar but crippled servers (email doesn't allow executables or PowerPoint attachments, DNS blocks playboy.com et al, etc.).
And shouldn't all laptops and wirelessly connected devices be on their own firewalled subnet? They really are a different beast to manage than a computer that you expect to be plugged into a wall 24/7.
Kid1: Huh? You can download music from the Internet?
Kid2: Yeah, just Google for Kazza.
Nerd: Don't use plain Kazaa - they can track your IP address, and all those ads are annoying.
Kid2: Huh? Nerd: You need a different P2P app with anonymizing features.
Kid1 and 2: Huh?
Nerd: If you use Kazaa, you might get into trouble, and your parents may take away your computer.
Kid1 and Kid2: What should you use?
Nerd: Here, write this down...
Note: I'm suggesting that a nerd in the class educate the other children. None of you high-school or older nerds should go down to the schoolyard saying "Psst - hey kid, wanna anonymizing P2P app? First CD is free..."
I'd say it's for the user - mine was accurate enough, but my laptop's was not:
The compatibility issues that have been hounding you lately will magically seem to resolve themselves. Now is a good time to purchase new hardware, especially if you've been putting it off. The discipline you need to finally put your dreams and goals to work is at hand. Seek out an unconventional partnership. Despite personality differences, find the common denominator in professional relationships -- you're going to need help to accomplish your goals. Although your sign likes to be productive, your schedule has been challenging, even for you. Your hard work has not gone unnoticed, however. You've proven yourself and will have a chance to enjoy a bit of freedom and autonomy. Enjoy!
The laptop (born on Sept 11, 2000) has been all but useless after installing gcc 3.3.1-r2 from the gentoo ~x86 tree. The compatibility issues are NOT resolving themselves magically - I'm reinstalling gentoo from scratch, without the ~x86 tree.
However, I'm hopeful my laptop will avoid "unconventional partnerships" in the near future. Please stay away, openssh bug!
I, for one, can now overthrow our quantum computer masters!
Anyone have luck getting the 2.6 kernels to run w/ Gentoo? It appears kernel module auto-loading isn't working for me, and devfs thinks I need SCSI stuff (but isn't picking it up in the kernel build dependancies).
In a slightly related note, I remember watching Matrix Reloaded in the movie theater and thinking, "OK, this scene is CG, this one is real". Part of the thrill of the first movie was that none of it looked CG, even the bullet-time stuff. In retrospective, the distortion effects from bullets were obviously CG, but they still felt real.
However, when I saw the same movie at IMAX a month or so later, the CG scenes looked much more impressive, much more "real". Even the 200 Agent Smiths scene looked very un-CG, and I enjoyed the movie much more than the first time I saw it.
Is there some sort of resolution difference that makes one look better than the other? I've noticed the same thing with other movies, when a special effects scene looks good in the theater, but it looks like a green screen on T.V.
As long as I'm ranting - why would the Key Maker be safe once Neo, Morpheus, and the rest get to a land phone, after the highway scene? Wouldn't he still be in the Matrix, and still be hunted by Agents? Or did I just miss a plot point?
I got about 4 pop-* ads before my browser crashed. Thank you, Mozilla Java Bug!
I thought the "Good exposure is priceless" argument went out the window with the dot com crash. Even the great unknown musician who's trying to make a name for himself gets paid something by all those bars.
Does it have realistic plague-spreading algorithms? Please post website with screenshots, design documents.
Windowsupdate is a god send for people with broadband but MS are going to be required to send CDs in the mail if they want to keep dial-up users up to speed.
Windows Update has an Automatic Updates feature that downloads updates in the background. It uses a service called Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to check for updates and download using idle bandwidth. While you are typing Slashdot comments, the connection is idle, and BITS can use this idle time to download updates. It can download part of it, and restart when you reconnect. So, unless your ISP charges you by the bit, you wouldn't notice it. Sure, it will take a while to get the update (weeks?), but you'll eventually get it.
Dial-up users aren't the weak link in the chain anyway - broadband users with insecure computers are, and are the reason these worms spread to rapidly.
There is an API for BITS if you are interested in making a self-updating application for Windows:
Come across? Like you woke up one morning and found them in your mailbox, between credit card offers?
Both vulnerabilities allow students to give themselves arbitrary scores, and possibly execute arbitrary code. To further emphasize the scope of this vulnerability, I have written and -selftested proof-of-concept exploit code.
Now I'm thinking - did you have a legal copy of the software you were "testing"? If not, do you know the person/entity who has the legal copy? Did you get their permission to poke around?
I would expect the litigation or academic discipline, if you pursued your experiment without a legal copy, or at least the permission of the person who owned the licensed copy. Or at least asked a professor to act as advisor for your experiments.
As an ethical geek, what do -you- do?
Ask permission from the target company before pursuing exploits.
I may be reading too much into the poster's brief notes (or maybe the poster's name), but I have a feeling that there are several illegal (and possibly unethical) things that have been done so far. The best way to avoid a situation like this is to plan to be ethical, legal, and open from the beginning. Get the company's permission, the schools permission, etc., and no one will be suprised when you get some results. Otherwise, they may say "Thank you, now please come to court in two weeks", and you have little recourse except to hire a lawyer.
Which the poster should probably do, anyway. It's a shame - with the proper authorization, this could have been an interesting senior project.
Are there any good resources for the general strategy needed to make drivers for a card where the manufacturer isn't giving out any good information? I might be willing to work on some project to get this card working under Linux.
All computers worked perfectly in the first Matrix. However, this gave people entirely too much time to thing about the real nature of reality.
A much improved system is one where technology constantly causes minor frustrations (blue screens, bad interfaces, etc.), or creates new tasks (creating filters for SPAM, cataloging MP3s) to distract people from thinking about reality. The minor flaws are so distracting that you never notice the fundamental flaws.
An improvement is a system that, on the surface, acts Correctly, seldom crashing or failing in obvious ways. However, at the core, ever action the user wants to accomplish requires such a understanding of the minutia, down to configuration file syntax and even the source code, that all production and contemplation halts in a never-ending recursive spiral of editing litle text files. The user is getting nothing done, yet he blames himself for lack of knowledge, rather than the system for a horrible (but technically correct) interface.