Ahhhh, I was wondering what all these "first post" comments were about. I mean who has the time for that, and to what ends? Now I understand; It's a honey pot! Very crafty indeed. (no, I am not being sarcastic, and yes... I must be new here).
Or a more plausible explanation, that this has nothing at all to do with Skype, and the Syrian government could have used any means they desired to send someone an executable and then ask them to run it...
When I read the title, I am thinking a specific exploit in Skype was used to push the malware, when in reality all they did was send an executable and asked them to run it. As a Skype user, the former would be of great concern to me, while the later is not.
I think a better title would have been, "Syrian Government Uses Social Engineering To Push Malware To Activists."
Unless you're willing to allege (and, preferably, to prove) that a non-trivial percentage of the votes are physically corrupted/subverted/whatever, then these various corporations and private interests very much do represent the thoughts and will of the American people who bother to vote.
Yes, I did read the rest of your post; my point is that the vote -- assuming it is a fair one -- turns out overwhelmingly to favour the status quo.
What if the system was rigged by design so that your choices on who to vote for weren't really choices at all (at least in any practical sense)?
Is it possible then, that they do not represent the will of the people? It seems no matter what are "choices" are, it's always a vote for the status quo.
Hi Pat, long time Slackware user here. Sorry to hear you're having server trouble. It seems like I'm about due for another box set. My tee-shirt could probably use a replacement too (although I might upgrade to the polo if you still have them).
Bingo! Slackware was very easy to package into your own custom distro. We used it to build a light weight kiosk terminals that would boot off a 512 mb thumb drive.
All you had to do to create individual software packages was put the files you needed in a folder (EG --install-directory), then run pkgtools on it. Drop all the packages you want into the appropriate folder on the installation media, and you were done. Of course there was a lot more to Slackware that made it easily customizable like this, but I guess you would have to actually use it like this to appreciate the simplicity of Slackware.
My friend used to tell me that Slackware was for hackers, and Debian is for hippies. I've grown to understand this much more over the years.:)
I used to work for a large corporation in the financial sector. There whole deal was "information based strategy," which for us, meant a lot of hard-line policies that under no circumstance can an exception be made. No amount of "let me talk to your manager" would get you anywhere, even if what was being asked made total sense for the situation. It was simply an issue of risk management. I imagine that other large corporations operate in the same way. Frustrating, I know.
I don't really get what the big deal is. Why would you want to continually run a background process like that? Wouldn't a better solution be to suspend the process, then wake it up if it receives a push notification? This way, the only process that needs to continually run is some kind of centralized message dispatcher, rather than leaving your battery life to the whims of every app you install on the device. At least that is how I would go about implementing this kind of a system...
Oh, and for the record, we develop in Eclipse on Windows 7. The Mac mini sits in the corner until we're ready to push a release. The only thing it does is run a little utility to upload the binary to the app store, a function that can easily be done as part of the web based dashboard used to enter in all the other information about the app. Apple CHOSE not to do this so they could extract more money from developers. Thanks Apple!
[end rant]
Also don't forget that if you develop a enterprise applications, you need 2 iOS developer licenses. One to distribute internally, and one to put it up on the Volume Purchasing Programming. Oh, and if you want to test your release, you also need to sign up to the VPP yourself, purchase the app from yourself, and pay apple $3 for every copy you "sell" to yourself. I feel like the whole thing was set up to extract money from us every chance they get...
2) (US) An issue regarded as potentially debatable, but no longer practically applicable. Although the idea may still be worth debating and exploring academically, and such discussion may be useful for addressing similar issues in the future, the idea has been rendered irrelevant for the present issue.
I don't see how you could think downloading a torrent then going through the hassle of entering credit card details is a "better service" than downloading the same torrent without the payment part.
Even if the method of obtaining a product took exactly the same amount of effort whether you did it legally or illegally, I don't see how adding a payment on top of that could ever could compete with the free (pirate) method. Unless of course, your mythical indie artist (that no one has ever heard of because it's totally underground man) found some way for it to take zero or negative effort to pay for something, with the money automagically coming out of your account, then also providing the extra labor it took to earn the money for that payment. Then maybe we will truly have a system where the legal version can compete with the pirate version.
This is not true at all. Pirating is a big hassle. I have to search around to find a working copy, then hope it works without crashing all the time, or running very slow because the crack isn't passive (needs to "listen" to and modify values in memory while the game is being played). And you can just forget about bug fixes or content updates. It would be much less of a hassle if I could just go buy the game off their website, and play it wherever/whenever I want. If I can save a couple hours by spending $50, then I am coming out ahead.
Oh, and if you really bought Shogun (I can only assume you mean "Total War: Shogun 2", since Total War: Shogun isn't on Steam, being released 3 years before it existed), you would know it's neither developed nor published by EA, but by The Creative Assembly and SEGA respectively.
Yes, of course I meant Shogun 2. And yes, you are correct, Creative Assembly is owned by SEGA, not EA. My apologies for the brain-fart.
You sound like a crazy ex-girlfriend who stalks her ex boyfriends on Facebook, sends suggestive texts trying to break up their new relationships, then beats the shit out of their car with a baseball bat, before being committed to a psychiatric ward; but it's ok, he really, really deserved it for dumping you because you were a crazy bitch.
I strongly recommend it for anyone into scifi. The acting and production quality is not at all what I was expecting for a crowed-sourced production. Give these guys your support!
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this.
I am a pirate, and proud of it. I would also consider myself to be one of the most generous persons I know with their money. I will download a DVD in a heart beat, but I also bought a $25 optional ticket to L5, a crowd-sourced scifi series (well soon to be series, one episode made so far...). For this $25, I was able to stream the video from their website, or download it directly via HTTP or torrent. I was happy to spend this money. note: this is just one example, I don't mean to say this one act alone makes me a generous person.
Awhile back, I made the stupid mistake of actually purchasing a game I liked from a big studio (Shogun Total War). I had downloaded the torrent, and decided that it was worth supporting the artists/programmers that created it, so I later purchased it through steam and deleted the cracked copy. I cannot play the purchased version of this game without internet due to the DRM ( I know steam has offline mode, but it always gives me the tough-shit message), and my internet goes down rather frequently. These guys punished me for paying them money!! Lesson learnt, thanks EA games.
You want to stop piracy? Then start providing a better service than the friggin' pirates! I would happily pay money for such a service, and I know many pirates who share my sentiments.
Eclipse beats the shit out of VS. And don't even get me started on that god awful MySQL management studio. What, is this the 90's? You know your product sucks when a PHP based web interface does it 100 time better...
I normally wouldn't lay it on so thick, but obvious shill is obvious. Good god man, don't they teach you subtly in shill class?
If it makes you feel any better, I only mod up comments that I disagree with, or ones that brought up a point I didn't think of myself. Assuming the comment-er made a good point of course...
I would have modded you up had I the points. It was an interesting perspective. Thanks.
Not on the Asus Transformer it doesn't! The difference in usability is astounding.
- You can access number keys without having to switch screens
- The auto correct is opt-in, meaning you have to click the word for it to replace, rather than doing it automatically like the iPad
- The auto correct gives you a list of words to choose from, rather than just one
- You can type by swiping your finger across they keyboard in the shape that hits most of the letters in the word. It will guess the word you mean and present a list up top to choose from. It almost always get's the word I want in the first or second option. It is much faster than pecking away on the keys.
Sorry to go off on another rant, but the soft key board on the iPad is the biggest piece of shit ever, and it gets touted like it's the pinnacle of usability! It really makes my blood boil...
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhhh, I was wondering what all these "first post" comments were about. I mean who has the time for that, and to what ends? Now I understand; It's a honey pot! Very crafty indeed. (no, I am not being sarcastic, and yes... I must be new here).
Or a more plausible explanation, that this has nothing at all to do with Skype, and the Syrian government could have used any means they desired to send someone an executable and then ask them to run it...
When I read the title, I am thinking a specific exploit in Skype was used to push the malware, when in reality all they did was send an executable and asked them to run it. As a Skype user, the former would be of great concern to me, while the later is not.
I think a better title would have been, "Syrian Government Uses Social Engineering To Push Malware To Activists."
But then, finding ways to circumvent stupid-ass rules is a moral imperative in itself.
True that.
Unless you're willing to allege (and, preferably, to prove) that a non-trivial percentage of the votes are physically corrupted/subverted/whatever, then these various corporations and private interests very much do represent the thoughts and will of the American people who bother to vote.
Yes, I did read the rest of your post; my point is that the vote -- assuming it is a fair one -- turns out overwhelmingly to favour the status quo.
What if the system was rigged by design so that your choices on who to vote for weren't really choices at all (at least in any practical sense)?
Is it possible then, that they do not represent the will of the people? It seems no matter what are "choices" are, it's always a vote for the status quo.
Hi Pat, long time Slackware user here. Sorry to hear you're having server trouble. It seems like I'm about due for another box set. My tee-shirt could probably use a replacement too (although I might upgrade to the polo if you still have them).
Cheers, and thanks for all the fish!
Debian is for hippies. Get your priorities straight man!
Bingo! Slackware was very easy to package into your own custom distro. We used it to build a light weight kiosk terminals that would boot off a 512 mb thumb drive.
All you had to do to create individual software packages was put the files you needed in a folder (EG --install-directory), then run pkgtools on it. Drop all the packages you want into the appropriate folder on the installation media, and you were done. Of course there was a lot more to Slackware that made it easily customizable like this, but I guess you would have to actually use it like this to appreciate the simplicity of Slackware.
My friend used to tell me that Slackware was for hackers, and Debian is for hippies. I've grown to understand this much more over the years. :)
There = their
I used to work for a large corporation in the financial sector. There whole deal was "information based strategy," which for us, meant a lot of hard-line policies that under no circumstance can an exception be made. No amount of "let me talk to your manager" would get you anywhere, even if what was being asked made total sense for the situation. It was simply an issue of risk management. I imagine that other large corporations operate in the same way. Frustrating, I know.
I don't really get what the big deal is. Why would you want to continually run a background process like that? Wouldn't a better solution be to suspend the process, then wake it up if it receives a push notification? This way, the only process that needs to continually run is some kind of centralized message dispatcher, rather than leaving your battery life to the whims of every app you install on the device. At least that is how I would go about implementing this kind of a system...
Oh, and for the record, we develop in Eclipse on Windows 7. The Mac mini sits in the corner until we're ready to push a release. The only thing it does is run a little utility to upload the binary to the app store, a function that can easily be done as part of the web based dashboard used to enter in all the other information about the app. Apple CHOSE not to do this so they could extract more money from developers. Thanks Apple! [end rant]
Also don't forget that if you develop a enterprise applications, you need 2 iOS developer licenses. One to distribute internally, and one to put it up on the Volume Purchasing Programming. Oh, and if you want to test your release, you also need to sign up to the VPP yourself, purchase the app from yourself, and pay apple $3 for every copy you "sell" to yourself. I feel like the whole thing was set up to extract money from us every chance they get...
Entrepreneur is also a good career path for the INTP/J types, assuming you get yourself a good ENTJ mouth piece ;)
Why don't you tell him yourself. He is here, posting comments. What great achievements have you made to call this person an idiot?
2) (US) An issue regarded as potentially debatable, but no longer practically applicable. Although the idea may still be worth debating and exploring academically, and such discussion may be useful for addressing similar issues in the future, the idea has been rendered irrelevant for the present issue.
I have only ever heard it used in this form...
I don't see how you could think downloading a torrent then going through the hassle of entering credit card details is a "better service" than downloading the same torrent without the payment part.
Even if the method of obtaining a product took exactly the same amount of effort whether you did it legally or illegally, I don't see how adding a payment on top of that could ever could compete with the free (pirate) method. Unless of course, your mythical indie artist (that no one has ever heard of because it's totally underground man) found some way for it to take zero or negative effort to pay for something, with the money automagically coming out of your account, then also providing the extra labor it took to earn the money for that payment. Then maybe we will truly have a system where the legal version can compete with the pirate version.
This is not true at all. Pirating is a big hassle. I have to search around to find a working copy, then hope it works without crashing all the time, or running very slow because the crack isn't passive (needs to "listen" to and modify values in memory while the game is being played). And you can just forget about bug fixes or content updates. It would be much less of a hassle if I could just go buy the game off their website, and play it wherever/whenever I want. If I can save a couple hours by spending $50, then I am coming out ahead.
Oh, and if you really bought Shogun (I can only assume you mean "Total War: Shogun 2", since Total War: Shogun isn't on Steam, being released 3 years before it existed), you would know it's neither developed nor published by EA, but by The Creative Assembly and SEGA respectively.
Yes, of course I meant Shogun 2. And yes, you are correct, Creative Assembly is owned by SEGA, not EA. My apologies for the brain-fart.
You sound like a crazy ex-girlfriend who stalks her ex boyfriends on Facebook, sends suggestive texts trying to break up their new relationships, then beats the shit out of their car with a baseball bat, before being committed to a psychiatric ward; but it's ok, he really, really deserved it for dumping you because you were a crazy bitch.
What? I don't even...
Thank you. I will commit this one to memory.
PS: here is the direct link to the L5 episode (stream or download).
http://vodo.net/l5
I strongly recommend it for anyone into scifi. The acting and production quality is not at all what I was expecting for a crowed-sourced production. Give these guys your support!
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this.
I am a pirate, and proud of it. I would also consider myself to be one of the most generous persons I know with their money. I will download a DVD in a heart beat, but I also bought a $25 optional ticket to L5, a crowd-sourced scifi series (well soon to be series, one episode made so far...). For this $25, I was able to stream the video from their website, or download it directly via HTTP or torrent. I was happy to spend this money. note: this is just one example, I don't mean to say this one act alone makes me a generous person.
Awhile back, I made the stupid mistake of actually purchasing a game I liked from a big studio (Shogun Total War). I had downloaded the torrent, and decided that it was worth supporting the artists/programmers that created it, so I later purchased it through steam and deleted the cracked copy. I cannot play the purchased version of this game without internet due to the DRM ( I know steam has offline mode, but it always gives me the tough-shit message), and my internet goes down rather frequently. These guys punished me for paying them money!! Lesson learnt, thanks EA games.
You want to stop piracy? Then start providing a better service than the friggin' pirates! I would happily pay money for such a service, and I know many pirates who share my sentiments.
Eclipse beats the shit out of VS. And don't even get me started on that god awful MySQL management studio. What, is this the 90's? You know your product sucks when a PHP based web interface does it 100 time better...
I normally wouldn't lay it on so thick, but obvious shill is obvious. Good god man, don't they teach you subtly in shill class?
How did you type all that in under a minute? You must be the fastest typer EVER!
If it makes you feel any better, I only mod up comments that I disagree with, or ones that brought up a point I didn't think of myself. Assuming the comment-er made a good point of course...
I would have modded you up had I the points. It was an interesting perspective. Thanks.
Thanks for the tip. I'll remember that for next time.
Not on the Asus Transformer it doesn't! The difference in usability is astounding.
- You can access number keys without having to switch screens
- The auto correct is opt-in, meaning you have to click the word for it to replace, rather than doing it automatically like the iPad
- The auto correct gives you a list of words to choose from, rather than just one
- You can type by swiping your finger across they keyboard in the shape that hits most of the letters in the word. It will guess the word you mean and present a list up top to choose from. It almost always get's the word I want in the first or second option. It is much faster than pecking away on the keys.
Sorry to go off on another rant, but the soft key board on the iPad is the biggest piece of shit ever, and it gets touted like it's the pinnacle of usability! It really makes my blood boil...