or more likely the scheme is just so utterly useless that nobody noticed the cd is "protected". After all, I really fail to see how they can make a cd unrippable without also breaking a standalone cd player's digital output.
Even if they make something that my cd-rom drive doesn't like, I can still just connect the digital out on my cd player to the spdif in on my sound card. WHOOPS, did I just get a perfect digital copy? MY BAD! --
No, you don't want an expert witness who will say all that, you want one who will tell the jury "it caused no damages". You want one that will end up proving that "it makes a PIII-350 act like a PIII-349".
It's the prosecutions job to prove that the operating systems involved are poorly designed, with schedulers that allow idle priority processes to use so much CPU as to be noticeable to the user.
Even so, almost all computers today are overpowered for 99.9% of the tasks for which they're called upon. A usage study could easily show that a horrid scheduling algorithm that allows idle priority processes to suck CPU would have negligable effect on the users who were using the machine. If the time difference to say... spell-check a document in word, or render a web page, is unmeasurable, or under.1sec, it becomes very difficult to prove damages. Hell, with the right lawyer it might even be possible to prove malicious prosecution and get compensated for this horrible event. --
Think about the number of websites you've visited in your lifetime. Now find the percentage of them that had value to you. I'm betting it's a small single digit
percentage. Thus, you become automatically discouraged from using new resources, because the fact of the matter is, most websites are useless to most people.
If somebody found a magically convenient, fraud-resistent method of managing micropayments, they'd succeed only on making users tentative to look in new places for content, thus making it even harder to run an independant website. After all, why check out www.indymedia.org if you know that www.cnn.com seems to provide reasonable news coverage? --
Try using a different town name. The USPS lets you use Rochester instead of Rochester Hills, in fact it's the default city name for your area according to them. Maybe if you use that town name you can dodge a shoddy town database. --
I have the PC in my home studio racked right with my music gear in my Edit Center. If you're looking to put a rack into your abode, without it looking ghetto, check out Middle Atlantic's offerings. You can find a lot of the stuff that high-end consumer audio installers use there, for a much more reasonable price.
They make a standalone 24U isolated rack that might be just what the doctor ordered. --
Well, okay, you fucked up, what needs to be done is to kill the insanely high proposed penalties.
First thing to do, find out how much bandwidth a dnet client uses to crack N keys, and deduce how much bandwidth was actually used. Then you can show what the actual bandwidth cost was, this will be a much smaller number than $400k. Then you need to find out what kind of contract they have to pay for the bandwidth. If it's unmetered, you can probably show that the effective cost of the usage was $0.00, as it certainly didn't use enough bandwidth to require a connection upgrade.
Secondly, you'll need an expert witness familiar with process scheduling to explain why the dnet client doesn't reduce the computing power of the machines, and thus there was no cost incurred by diminishing the value of the machines for their intended use.
Lastly, beg, borrow and steal enough money to pay for a truly talented lawyer. Hopefully with some luck, the prosecutor on this case will be making coffee for the rest of his life. --
If California's energy crisis turns computers into pricey paperweights and makes AA batteries as scarce as vacuum tubes, Tom Wyman will still be able to perform vital calculations such as finding the square root of 144 or figuring the value of 2 to the power of 10.
Are American's today really so uneducated that they can't find the square root of 144, or the value of 2^10 without using a calculator?
Apparently the author thinks these are otherwise unsolveable mathematical mysteries... I sincerely hope he's not representative of the average man. --
There's a large number of fundamental problems that I have with this system. If the DMV had a legal agreement that my facial mapping could only be used for identity verification, during the process of getting a new license, I wouldn't have the slightest problem with this scheme.
The problem is that American governments feel free to sell every little piece of data that they're legally allowed to sell. I don't want to walk into a store and have them know who I am. Tell a marketing person that they could find out the name and address of every single person who walked into their store, and watch their eyes light up.
This is a technology that's extremely prone to abuse, and they're not offering any evidence that they won't engage in these abuses at a future date.
Nice troll btw, but according to a joint study between the American Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Cambridge University, Britain has higher rates of robbery, assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft than the United States. Additionally, Britain's crime rates are going up, while America's crime rates are going down. And this doesn't even touch Britain's high rate of home invasion. Guess that whole camera thing is working wonderfully, eh? --
Like most things in mozilla, this works soemtimes and not others. Example: it works the first time I go to weather.com, but if I leave and go back (I think that's the sequence) a damn X10 popup appears.
Nope, can't reproduce it. Perhaps the problem has been fixed? Surely you can point me at the bug ID that you filed when you discovered this behaviour, so I can see if it's closed. --
Mozilla's Configurable Security Policies document explains how you can create groups of sites with variable access to create new windows, use javascript alerts, etc.
Well, I attempted to fill in some of his blanks, and took five minutes to write the PHP regular expression example. I was going to post it here, to perhaps inspire somebody to one-up me, so that the slashdot community might actually do something useful.
Instead I fought the lameness filter, despite using the 'code' type, and generally proved that Taco can't code for shit.
This is exactly why automatic censorship software is a terrible idea, and must be stopped.
And to top it off, when I attempted to submit this message, I received a screen saying: 'This comment has been submitted already, 276169 hours , 30 minutes ago. No need to try again.' Apparently I posted this message earlier... in 19 fuckin 70. --
No offense, but anybody who uses identd as any form of identification is just very very gullible. On windows boxes, it's a virtual guarantee that the identd response will be faked. On unix machines, it's pretty much a guarantee that the identd response can be overriden by each individual user via a.fakeid or.noident file.
All that you accomplish by requiring an identd daemon, is that every user have another potentially vulnerable network port open. It gives every single sysadmin one more thing to take care of. A quick bugtraq vulnerability search shows that there have been five identd-related security issues since 1999, with the consequences ranging from DoS to execution of arbitrary code with group 0.
Why on earth would you want your users using a completely useless form of authentication, that exposes them to potential risks? --
We got our high-school computer labs admin password the old fashioned way too. By rifling through his desk. Sure enough, we found the words 'lunch' and 'dinner' written on the inside cover of one of the manuals for no apparent reason. Admin password? breakfast. From then on we played a lot of networked doom. --
I think a product like Plaid's Paint for Plastic (here)
would probably work pretty well on a gameboy. RIT works fine on nylon, but it's not going to be able to do a decent job on hard plastics. --
printk is properly designed, for a routine which is designed to print out informational messages, and short errors. it is not properly designed for a debugging tool, despite the fact that it's the only officially acceptable kernel debugging tool in existance.
There's no way to put a large amount of text on screen atomically, thus if you have code with a bug that's getting called repeatedly you have a choice of:
limiting yourself to 1024 characters of information which is probably enough, but maybe not
calling printk multiple times, which depending on where it happens in the code, might make it possible to have a race between multiple printk's, making it difficult to pull the status information from each invocation, as they're mixed
or just install the kdb patch, and act like a programmer, not a cs100 student
I stand by my assertion that linux makes kernel debugging unneccessarily difficult, asserting the arrogant notion that only total kernel hackers know how to find or fix bugs.
what the fuck are you talking about? haven't you ever heard of DE-allocating memory?
my point about the limitations of printk is simply that it's NOT a debugging tool, and linus shouldn't pretend that it is.
the linux kernel is far from intuitive, it's kind of amazing that it works when you read the code, let alone that it works well. telling the developers that they should be allowed access to NO debugging tools other than a 1024 character print buffer just makes people's lives unneccessarily difficult.
Sure, it's fine if all you want to do is hack kernel code, but it sucks ass if you want to hack userland code, but need to fix a glitch in the kernel first. --
No, normal linux users don't use kernel debuggers. Normal linux users are almost identical to windows "power users", which is to say they're fairly competant at using other people's software. However, there's a large body of professional programmers who are extremely comfortable with debuggers, and know how to quickly diagnose problems with them, so that they can either fix the problems, or provide meaningful bug reports.
Secondly, removing informational messages provide an important function, in that they give you status updates as to the progress of the boot process. Thus, if the machine crashes due to a bug, where there is no error message, you have a clue where to start looking. --
ah yes, printk, which internally uses a 1K buffer and doesn't check for overruns. Apparently dynamic allocation is a new concept to Linus.
The whole "real men grok the code" idea is just arrogant and stupid. If your goal is to hack on the kernel, then yes you need to understand it deeply. However, if you just want to figure out why your linux 2.4.5 machine just panic'd after loopback mounting an iso image, then all you really need is a kernel debugger and some basic software engineering skills.
--
This idea is almost as good as when Linus decided that Linux shouldn't have a kernel debugger, that real men use printf. Now if your machine is booting and it just hangs, you'll know that it happened during the initialization of the... oh wait, you'll have no idea when it happened unless you're a "real kernel hacker" thus making it harder for normal people to figure out what to search the mailing lists for.
If the suggestion was to make the statements display only display if in a special verbose booting mode, that might be reasonable. Killing all messages, always, that's just dumb. --
Slashdot Mirror
Even if they make something that my cd-rom drive doesn't like, I can still just connect the digital out on my cd player to the spdif in on my sound card. WHOOPS, did I just get a perfect digital copy? MY BAD!
--
Seriously though, why on earth would anybody want to run an IRC server on a major network? Is it for the money, or is it just for the women?
--
I'm so surprised, copy protection that annoys the honest users, and doesn't do anything to stop piracy. Who could've seen it coming?
--
It's the prosecutions job to prove that the operating systems involved are poorly designed, with schedulers that allow idle priority processes to use so much CPU as to be noticeable to the user.
Even so, almost all computers today are overpowered for 99.9% of the tasks for which they're called upon. A usage study could easily show that a horrid scheduling algorithm that allows idle priority processes to suck CPU would have negligable effect on the users who were using the machine. If the time difference to say... spell-check a document in word, or render a web page, is unmeasurable, or under .1sec, it becomes very difficult to prove damages. Hell, with the right lawyer it might even be possible to prove malicious prosecution and get compensated for this horrible event.
--
If somebody found a magically convenient, fraud-resistent method of managing micropayments, they'd succeed only on making users tentative to look in new places for content, thus making it even harder to run an independant website. After all, why check out www.indymedia.org if you know that www.cnn.com seems to provide reasonable news coverage?
--
Try using a different town name. The USPS lets you use Rochester instead of Rochester Hills, in fact it's the default city name for your area according to them. Maybe if you use that town name you can dodge a shoddy town database.
--
They make a standalone 24U isolated rack that might be just what the doctor ordered.
--
First thing to do, find out how much bandwidth a dnet client uses to crack N keys, and deduce how much bandwidth was actually used. Then you can show what the actual bandwidth cost was, this will be a much smaller number than $400k. Then you need to find out what kind of contract they have to pay for the bandwidth. If it's unmetered, you can probably show that the effective cost of the usage was $0.00, as it certainly didn't use enough bandwidth to require a connection upgrade.
Secondly, you'll need an expert witness familiar with process scheduling to explain why the dnet client doesn't reduce the computing power of the machines, and thus there was no cost incurred by diminishing the value of the machines for their intended use.
Lastly, beg, borrow and steal enough money to pay for a truly talented lawyer. Hopefully with some luck, the prosecutor on this case will be making coffee for the rest of his life.
--
Apparently I need to re-read Bob's Quick guide to the apostrophe, you idiots.
--
If California's energy crisis turns computers into pricey paperweights and makes AA batteries as scarce as vacuum tubes, Tom Wyman will still be able to perform vital calculations such as finding the square root of 144 or figuring the value of 2 to the power of 10.
Are American's today really so uneducated that they can't find the square root of 144, or the value of 2^10 without using a calculator?
Apparently the author thinks these are otherwise unsolveable mathematical mysteries... I sincerely hope he's not representative of the average man.
--
The problem is that American governments feel free to sell every little piece of data that they're legally allowed to sell. I don't want to walk into a store and have them know who I am. Tell a marketing person that they could find out the name and address of every single person who walked into their store, and watch their eyes light up.
This is a technology that's extremely prone to abuse, and they're not offering any evidence that they won't engage in these abuses at a future date.
Nice troll btw, but according to a joint study between the American Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Cambridge University, Britain has higher rates of robbery, assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft than the United States. Additionally, Britain's crime rates are going up, while America's crime rates are going down. And this doesn't even touch Britain's high rate of home invasion. Guess that whole camera thing is working wonderfully, eh?
--
mozilla 0.9.2 keeps those settings with no problem. You're working around a problem that doesn't exist anymore.
--
Nope, can't reproduce it. Perhaps the problem has been fixed? Surely you can point me at the bug ID that you filed when you discovered this behaviour, so I can see if it's closed.
--
While you're not running mozilla, edit your prefs.js to say:
user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");
Then if you want to allow certain sites to open new windows, also add the lines:
user_pref("capability.policy.allowpopups.sites", "http://www.foo.com http://www.baz.org");p en", "sameOrigin");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowpopups.Window.o
Mozilla's Configurable Security Policies document explains how you can create groups of sites with variable access to create new windows, use javascript alerts, etc.
--
Slashdot: for all your self-rightous, hypocritical news!
--
and I would just like to note that you are GAY.
--
Instead I fought the lameness filter, despite using the 'code' type, and generally proved that Taco can't code for shit.
This is exactly why automatic censorship software is a terrible idea, and must be stopped.
And to top it off, when I attempted to submit this message, I received a screen saying: 'This comment has been submitted already, 276169 hours , 30 minutes ago. No need to try again.' Apparently I posted this message earlier... in 19 fuckin 70.
--
All that you accomplish by requiring an identd daemon, is that every user have another potentially vulnerable network port open. It gives every single sysadmin one more thing to take care of. A quick bugtraq vulnerability search shows that there have been five identd-related security issues since 1999, with the consequences ranging from DoS to execution of arbitrary code with group 0.
Why on earth would you want your users using a completely useless form of authentication, that exposes them to potential risks?
--
We got our high-school computer labs admin password the old fashioned way too. By rifling through his desk. Sure enough, we found the words 'lunch' and 'dinner' written on the inside cover of one of the manuals for no apparent reason. Admin password? breakfast. From then on we played a lot of networked doom.
--
I think a product like Plaid's Paint for Plastic (here) would probably work pretty well on a gameboy. RIT works fine on nylon, but it's not going to be able to do a decent job on hard plastics.
--
There's no way to put a large amount of text on screen atomically, thus if you have code with a bug that's getting called repeatedly you have a choice of:
I stand by my assertion that linux makes kernel debugging unneccessarily difficult, asserting the arrogant notion that only total kernel hackers know how to find or fix bugs.
--
what the fuck are you talking about? haven't you ever heard of DE-allocating memory?
my point about the limitations of printk is simply that it's NOT a debugging tool, and linus shouldn't pretend that it is.
the linux kernel is far from intuitive, it's kind of amazing that it works when you read the code, let alone that it works well. telling the developers that they should be allowed access to NO debugging tools other than a 1024 character print buffer just makes people's lives unneccessarily difficult.
Sure, it's fine if all you want to do is hack kernel code, but it sucks ass if you want to hack userland code, but need to fix a glitch in the kernel first.
--
Secondly, removing informational messages provide an important function, in that they give you status updates as to the progress of the boot process. Thus, if the machine crashes due to a bug, where there is no error message, you have a clue where to start looking.
--
The whole "real men grok the code" idea is just arrogant and stupid. If your goal is to hack on the kernel, then yes you need to understand it deeply. However, if you just want to figure out why your linux 2.4.5 machine just panic'd after loopback mounting an iso image, then all you really need is a kernel debugger and some basic software engineering skills.
--
If the suggestion was to make the statements display only display if in a special verbose booting mode, that might be reasonable. Killing all messages, always, that's just dumb.
--