For those of us afraid of hardware-based trustworthy computing, this is why it will not happen for a long, long time. More and more home users are going to be satisfied with the machines they have now until they break, and companies wishing to sell online content to them are just going to have to deal with the fact that they're not going to buy a new, trustworthy computer to access the content.
This isn't spyware at all... The Yahoo! toolbar doesn't do any spying or hijacking, and Flash doesn't require you to install it. You might install it by mistake if you're clicking through the install menu, but then you can just uninstall it right away.
If it were spyware, installing it would be mandatory, Flash might not disclose that it exists, it would interfere with your use of the browser and you couldn't just go to add/remove programs and take it off.
Exactly. Apparently he was annoyed when the company suggested he email the "abuse" email and "report himself." This seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me; obviously the "abuse@foo.com" gets routed to whatever department can secure foo.com. If I'm in a store, and I notice the emergency exit is open in a secluded corner next to valuable merchandise, and a cashier tells me she'll page a security guard to look into it, I don't assume I'm being arrested.
It looks like it just looks for files and file extensions stored in the extensions.ini file it installs. (It might use the registry normally; I'm on a work computer without admin access, so it might have just installed the ini for that reason).
Anyway, it looks for mp3s, wavs, even midis, and for some reason, rars and zips, as well as a bunch of specific programs, for which it has the name of the uninstaller listed. Interestingly, mirc is listed here, as is gluz.exe, which apparently is an HP printer configuration tool.
Also, it contains some byte strings which appear to be bytes that appear in the beginnings of specific audio and video formats, so if you rename foo.mp3 to foo.txt, it will still find it.
Of course, if you rename it to foo.txt, and put a padder 0 byte in the beginning, it won't find it. And if you rename foo.txt to foo.mp3, it will tell you to delete it. And if you use IRC, it will tell you to delete it.
Why do they keep bothering with DRM?? Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't have unbreakable encryption when it's the USER'S COMPUTER that has to do the decryption.
In most cases, the operator responds instantaneously with the requested data, notifying the poster whether the card is still active, its spending limit...
The author of the article doesn't seem to understand the concept of bots operating channels too well...
Is this the first time American suburban shopping malls have been used for piracy on a large scale? Obviously you can buy knockoff CDs, etc. on the streets of New York or Hong Kong, but I didn't expect to see it in the local mall.
It seems like these comments make it pretty clear that there is no censorship at Google.
The pictures used to be there because Google Image Search updates about every 6 months and includes pictures from Google News. The Abu Ghraib pics aren't in Google News anymore, and they're not 6 months old, so don't expect to find them on Google Image Search.
Same thing with World Series, Obama, etc. Someone mentioned seeing Obama Senate pics, but they're wrong: search for Barack Obama and get pictures of him in the State Senate.
The idea that Google would just cave to a Bush Administration request to block searches for Abu Ghraib is ludicrous. Google has no reason to give in. Also, notice when the linked forum discussion at AnandTech began. In October, a month before the election. The Bush Administration would not have risked the bad publicity of attempting to censor a high-profile news source like Google for such a pointless task right before an election. These pictures are widely available and have already been seen by anyone who might be interested in them, so attempting to restrict access then would only have hurt both Bush and Google.
Do a regular Google search for Abu Ghraib pictures. Notice that all the links, to sites like antiwar.com, contain exactly what you'd expect. Moreover, Google News even pops up at the top, linking to this Slashdot story. Now, if Google were interested in censorship, wouldn't it be a simple matter for them to tell their news-accumulating bots to flag all stories involving their name and words like "censorship" for a human to review before posting them?
No, this is the Illinois STATE Senate web site. Obama was a STATE Senator, in the Senate of the State of Illinois. Now, he represents the state of Illinois in the UNITED STATES Senate.
Well, you could use one of those DVD emulator programs (http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/Original-CD-CDRW-D VD-Emulator/3000-2646-10321215.html) and rip the entire thing to your hard drive, then install from there. I'm not sure of the details, but I'm sure it would be possible.
If Microsoft had released similar search feature, it would be one more nail in the coffin of poor security, no matter what user advisories they had given.
If Microsoft had produced this search feature, it would probably be integrated into Windows, turned on by default, and difficult to disable. If Microsoft produced something like this, where you would go to msn.com and download the MSN Desktop Search Wizard which sits noticably in your system tray and can easily be disabled/uninstalled, I doubt there would be any more complaints or that Slashdot would take them any more seriously. Using this tool to steal someone's data is about as sneaky as trying to look over their shoulder with a bright red SpyKids periscope.
Isn't this what the new Slashdot politics subsite is for? I don't see how this any specific technological issues(e.g, Diebold) that justifies inclusion on the main page.
It now forces all cancellations occur by phone, making it more difficult to cancel because of a long hold time.
Wish someone would force all submissions occur after proofreading...
A Conservative is a Liberal who got 0wned
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't think that distinction is surprising at all. Conservatives traditionally call for more government protection of property rights of all sorts, and liberals usually put less emphasis on property rights and more on other rights.
The two sides often disagree on what constitutes a "right," and this seems in line with usual liberal/conservative divisions.
It's Actually Called an "Algorithm" Challenge
on
Google Code Jam 2004
·
· Score: 1
If you go to topcoder.com and look at the leaderboard, etc., you'll see that this type of competition is actually classified as "algorithm." The site advertises "programming" contests in general, but the component contests are probably closer to what you had in mind as the ideal than what you and they both identify as "algorithm."
The difference, though, is that modern games could actually look good on a big screen, and they can involve massively larger numbers of players. Having a Super Nintendo tournament where 2-4 kids play at once while 200 watch an oversized, probably pixelated image doesn't sound very lucrative...
Re:The ALA continues to strip meaning from words
on
Top Banned Books of 2003
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't believe the ALA uses the term "banned" in their article. They (correctly) refer to the books as "challenged." This is a common mistake/propaganda device. Banned books would be those books that it used to actually be illegal to import and sell in the United States, like Ulysses and Naked Lunch, as in "banned in Boston." Challenged books are books that parents and teachers ask libraries to discard or not order. There's a very important difference, because even in the most conservative town in the United States, you can't get arrested for walking into the public library with Madonna's Sex. The worst they can do is tell you to put it away, and even that would be questionable under the 1st Amendment.
School libraries, obviously, are different, since they can claim disruption of the educational process or whatever, but it's still not the same as an outright ban, since the worst they can do is confiscate the book and tell the parents to come pick it up.
This is one of those topics the New York Times loves to beat to death. Whenever there's a slow news day, you can count on them to publish some article about one of the following three topics:
1. Those crazy kids and their "Instant Messengers."
2. Neurotic mothers in Westchester County paying thousands of dollars for private college counseling.
3. The wild and crazy things NYC bicycle messengers do to make deliveries.
I keep thinking there's an amazing parallel between Neal Stephenson and Thomas Pynchon. Both wrote a couple of fairly easy to read, shorter humorous novels (OK, Stephenson's are much easier to read than Pynchon's, but you get the point...)Then, they both wrote long but excellent novels involving math, sex, World War II and a million other things; obviously, Cryptonomicon was influenced by Gravity's Rainbow.
But then, they both started writing long, excessively cute historical/science fiction about the Enlightenment. Pynchon had Mason&Dixon, which, for those who haven't read it, featured Vladimir&Estragon versions of the surveyors, in addition to every historical figure from that era, some anachronisms and other weirdness (a talking dog, a Feng Shui master...) a "Reverend Cherrycoke" and some other not-so-funny jokes like that.
Similarly, Quicksilver, which I could not even begin to penetrate, makes the mistake of being too cute, yet simultaneously dry, with all the Harvard/MIT references and every possible plot from the era (Leibniz/Newton, pirates, Ben Franklin, puritanism, etc.) I think I might have been able to finish it if it weren't for all those references to the "Massachusetts Institute of Technickal Arts."
This is not only a duplicate, it's a poorly written rip-off of the other article. While the other article (in the Register, I believe), was obviously anti-Microsoft, this tabloidish piece doesn't even fully explain the stories.
There's a great service called mail2web that will allow you to access any pop3 via the web. Of course, that means you have to trust them not to read your email, so it's probably not good for a privacy freak, but they wouldn't use webmail anyway, would they?
I really don't think tuition is cheaper in the US than abroad, since many foreign countries fully or partially subsidize education to a much greater extent. I think most of Europe has free tuition, and tuition in the developing world and China is certainly lower. Even the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology costs a fraction of what MIT and Caltech charge. The United States schools are just considered the best in the world, especially for the hard sciences.
I don't think it's true that nobody has ever decreased regulation to harmonize with another country. I think that was the point of the various international copyright conventions, eliminating requirements like submitting a work to the national library of a particular country before it could be copyrighted.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us afraid of hardware-based trustworthy computing, this is why it will not happen for a long, long time. More and more home users are going to be satisfied with the machines they have now until they break, and companies wishing to sell online content to them are just going to have to deal with the fact that they're not going to buy a new, trustworthy computer to access the content.
This isn't spyware at all... The Yahoo! toolbar doesn't do any spying or hijacking, and Flash doesn't require you to install it. You might install it by mistake if you're clicking through the install menu, but then you can just uninstall it right away.
If it were spyware, installing it would be mandatory, Flash might not disclose that it exists, it would interfere with your use of the browser and you couldn't just go to add/remove programs and take it off.
You can look things up on answers.com.. They mirror wikimedia, as well as other dictionaries/encyclopedias.
Exactly. Apparently he was annoyed when the company suggested he email the "abuse" email and "report himself." This seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me; obviously the "abuse@foo.com" gets
routed to whatever department can secure foo.com. If
I'm in a store, and I notice the emergency exit is open in a secluded corner next to valuable merchandise, and a cashier tells me she'll page a security guard to look into it, I don't assume I'm being arrested.
It looks like it just looks for files and file extensions stored in the extensions.ini file it installs. (It might use the registry normally; I'm on a work computer without admin access, so it might have just installed the ini for that reason).
Anyway, it looks for mp3s, wavs, even midis, and for some reason, rars and zips, as well as a bunch of specific programs, for which it has the name of the uninstaller listed. Interestingly, mirc is listed here, as is gluz.exe, which apparently is an HP printer configuration tool.
Also, it contains some byte strings which appear to be bytes that appear in the beginnings of specific audio and video formats, so if you rename
foo.mp3 to foo.txt, it will still find it.
Of course, if you rename it to foo.txt, and put a padder 0 byte in the beginning, it won't find it. And if you rename foo.txt to foo.mp3, it will tell you to delete it. And if you use IRC, it will tell you to delete it.
Why do they keep bothering with DRM?? Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't have unbreakable encryption when it's the USER'S COMPUTER that has to do the decryption.
You know you can just change the expiration date on the day pass cookie and the day pass will never expire?
It's probably illegal, or something, but it's still funny.
In most cases, the operator responds instantaneously with the requested data, notifying the poster whether the card is still active, its spending limit...
The author of the article doesn't seem to understand the concept of bots operating channels too well...
I've seen this in a couple of local malls too...
Is this the first time American suburban shopping malls have been used for piracy on a large scale? Obviously you can buy knockoff CDs, etc. on the streets of New York or Hong Kong, but I didn't expect to see it in the local mall.
It seems like these comments make it pretty clear that there is no censorship at Google.
The pictures used to be there because Google Image Search updates about every 6 months and includes pictures from Google News. The Abu Ghraib pics aren't in Google News anymore, and they're not 6 months old, so don't expect to find them on Google Image Search.
Same thing with World Series, Obama, etc. Someone mentioned seeing Obama Senate pics, but they're wrong: search for Barack Obama and get pictures of him in the State Senate.
The idea that Google would just cave to a Bush Administration request to block searches for Abu Ghraib is ludicrous. Google has no reason to give in. Also, notice when the linked forum discussion at AnandTech began. In October, a month before the election. The Bush Administration would not have risked the bad publicity of attempting to censor a high-profile news source like Google for such a pointless task right before an election. These pictures are widely available and have already been seen by anyone who might be interested in them, so attempting to restrict access then would only have hurt both Bush and Google.
Do a regular Google search for Abu Ghraib pictures. Notice that all the links, to sites like antiwar.com, contain exactly what you'd expect. Moreover, Google News even pops up at the top, linking to this Slashdot story. Now, if Google were interested in censorship, wouldn't it be a simple matter for them to tell their news-accumulating bots to flag all stories involving their name and words like "censorship" for a human to review before posting them?
No, this is the Illinois STATE Senate web site. Obama was a STATE Senator, in the Senate of the State of Illinois. Now, he represents the state of Illinois in the UNITED STATES Senate.
Well, you could use one of those DVD emulator programs (http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/Original-CD-CDRW-D VD-Emulator/3000-2646-10321215.html) and rip the entire thing to your hard drive, then install from there. I'm not sure of the details, but I'm sure it would be possible.
If Microsoft had released similar search feature, it would be one more nail in the coffin of poor security, no matter what user advisories they had given.
If Microsoft had produced this search feature, it would probably be integrated into Windows, turned on by default, and difficult to disable. If Microsoft produced something like this, where you would go to msn.com and download the MSN Desktop Search Wizard which sits noticably in your system tray and can easily be disabled/uninstalled, I doubt there would be any more complaints or that Slashdot would take them any more seriously. Using
this tool to steal someone's data is about as sneaky as trying to look over their shoulder with a bright red SpyKids periscope.
Isn't this what the new Slashdot politics subsite is for? I don't see how this any specific technological issues(e.g, Diebold) that justifies inclusion on the main page.
It now forces all cancellations occur by phone, making it more difficult to cancel because of a long hold time.
Wish someone would force all submissions occur after proofreading...
I don't think that distinction is surprising at all. Conservatives traditionally call for more government protection of property rights of all sorts, and liberals usually put less emphasis on property rights and more on other rights.
The two sides often disagree on what constitutes a "right," and this seems in line with usual liberal/conservative divisions.
If you go to topcoder.com and look at the leaderboard, etc., you'll see that this type of competition is actually classified as "algorithm." The site advertises "programming" contests in general, but the component contests are probably closer to what you had in mind as the ideal than what you and they both identify as "algorithm."
The difference, though, is that modern games could actually look good on a big screen, and they can involve massively larger numbers of players. Having a Super Nintendo tournament where 2-4 kids play at once while 200 watch an oversized, probably pixelated image doesn't sound very lucrative...
I don't believe the ALA uses the term "banned" in their article. They (correctly) refer to the books as "challenged." This is a common mistake/propaganda device.
Banned books would be those books that it used to actually be illegal to import and sell in the United States, like Ulysses and Naked Lunch, as in "banned in Boston." Challenged books are books that parents and teachers ask libraries to discard or not order. There's a very important difference, because even in the most conservative town in the United States, you can't get arrested for walking into the public library with Madonna's Sex. The worst they can do is tell you to put it away, and even that would be
questionable under the 1st Amendment.
School libraries, obviously, are different, since they can claim disruption of the educational process or whatever, but it's still not the same as an outright ban, since the worst they can do is confiscate the book and tell the parents to come pick it up.
This is one of those topics the New York Times loves to beat to death. Whenever there's a slow news day, you can count on them to publish some article about one of the following three topics:
1. Those crazy kids and their "Instant Messengers."
2. Neurotic mothers in Westchester County paying thousands of dollars for private college counseling.
3. The wild and crazy things NYC bicycle messengers do to make deliveries.
I keep thinking there's an amazing parallel between Neal Stephenson and Thomas Pynchon. Both wrote a couple of fairly easy to read, shorter humorous novels (OK, Stephenson's are much easier to read than Pynchon's, but you get the point...)Then, they both wrote long but excellent novels involving math, sex, World War II and a million other things; obviously, Cryptonomicon was influenced by Gravity's Rainbow.
But then, they both started writing long, excessively cute historical/science fiction about the Enlightenment. Pynchon had Mason&Dixon, which, for those who haven't read it, featured Vladimir&Estragon versions of the surveyors, in addition to every historical figure from that era, some anachronisms and other weirdness (a talking dog, a Feng Shui master...) a "Reverend Cherrycoke" and some other not-so-funny jokes like that.
Similarly, Quicksilver, which I could not even begin to penetrate, makes the mistake of being too cute, yet simultaneously dry, with all the Harvard/MIT references and every possible plot from the era (Leibniz/Newton, pirates, Ben Franklin, puritanism, etc.) I think I might have been able to finish it if it weren't for all those references to the "Massachusetts Institute of Technickal Arts."
This is not only a duplicate, it's a poorly written rip-off of the other article. While the other article (in the Register, I believe), was obviously anti-Microsoft, this tabloidish piece doesn't even fully explain the stories.
There's a great service called mail2web that will allow you to access any pop3 via the web. Of course, that means you have to trust them not to read your email, so it's probably not good for a privacy freak, but they wouldn't use webmail anyway, would they?
I really don't think tuition is cheaper in the US than abroad, since many foreign countries fully or partially subsidize education to a much greater extent. I think most of Europe has free tuition, and tuition in the developing world and China is certainly lower. Even the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology costs a fraction of what MIT and Caltech charge. The United States schools are just considered the best in the world, especially for the hard sciences.
I don't think it's true that nobody has ever decreased regulation to harmonize with another country. I think that was the point of the various international copyright conventions, eliminating requirements like submitting a work to the national library of a particular country before it could be copyrighted.