Between the DRM Rootkit, DRM, extra copy protection on Sony Pictures DVD's, and now a rootkit on a Thumb Drive, the movement to Don't buy SONY is growing. It shows in their financials.
Note Net income 2005 ending March 31 was 1,523,693 in 2006- 1,050,736, and in 2007- 1,073,788. This is a downturn of almost a full third in one year.
For the most part they are moving away from being a manufacture to an investment firm much like the Sears Roebuck catalog store is now mostly The Discover Card financial services.
SONY's Capital Expenditures was less than their Investments in 2005. In short, they invested heavily in investments. As Net income dropped, they invested less and Capital Expenditures remained fairly steady from 2005-2007. In short, they are down in sales of products, invested in investments, and still have a falling net income.
For the year ending March of 2006 Total Cash Flow From Operating Activities was 3,398,793 while Total Cash Flows From Financing Activities was 3,058,844. We like to think of SONY as a manufacture of video games consoles and other consumer goods. In reality, that is only half the business.
Note all numbers are in thousands as noted on the webpage.
Do you think the drop in 2006 right after the 2005 November rootkit was just coincidence?
Security researchers beginning with Mark Russinovich in October 2005 have described the program as functionally identical to a rootkit: a software program used by computer hackers to conceal unauthorised activities on a computer system.
I think there might be some connection to the rootkit and net income loss of 1/3rd might show a relationship. In the year ending March 31 2007, Total Cash Flow From Operating Activities still has not recovered to the 2005 level.
When using such a system the meter will spin backwards when it is producing more power than is needed.
Check your local code and power company. In some local areas, power sold back to the utility from co-generation, is to be metered and purchased at wholesale instead of retail. Running the meter backwards may be in violation of local policy. Check first.
Right from the page in your link.. "But imagine a system where your electricity meter actually goes backwards, yes that's right these people put electricity back into the grid! The Utility companies are doing everything they can to stop this practise, which is why people are taking the law into their own hands."
In my dad's case, he simply designed to use less of the public power and reduce his bill. Many of the grid connected inverters shut down if the grid goes down.
Again a quote from your link; "We further resolve that our renewable energy systems will be safe and will not harm utility workers, our neighbors, or our environment."
This often means a parallel connected inverter feeding the grid shuts down with the lack of grid power. These inverters do not island (running disconnected) when the grid goes down. Very few grid connected inverters bypass a critical load and continue running in the absense of the grid. We studied the options. Buying power at $0.12/KWH and selling power at $0.025 was a farce. It was better to buy batteries and buy back our own power from us. If the battery in/out has a 50% loss, the cost differential still made economic sense.
Many systems that cut the expense of the batteries by using the grid as a battery to store excess power and provide power later are subject to grid outages taking them down completely. Even in bright sunshine, a grid outage typicaly provides a complete AC blackout in spite of a PV system. This is unacceptable for stable UPS power.
Here is a typical grid tie inverter showing the lack of any way to provide power in the event of a utility outage. The requriement for anit-islanding will shut down this entire system in the event of a utility outage. There is no battery or critical load connection.
you can get good solar panels for heating water, quite cheap. you can even diy one. they're much more efficient than solar panels for generating electricity.
Absolutely true. I guess it is time to fill you in on the rest of the installation. There is a limited amount of roof realestate. My folks are snowbirds and spend much of the time on the road on their RV. The house for the most part needed to be self maintaining. The house is heated with hot water. There is a solar collector feeding a 5,000 gallon storage tank. It contains a heat exchanger to pre-heat the water to the water heater. In the summer the system runs in the neighborhood of 185 degrees F. You can take as long of a shower as you like. If you are in too long you need to mix in more cold water as the tank temperature creeps up from 130 to 180.
In the winter after a week of cold overcast weather, the solar system drops to a tank temperature of 75 to 85 degrees. It maintains the indoor temperature to above 50 degrees without paying a dime for additional heat from the utility. The PV side of things is to shed most of the rest of the away from home costs including security lights, freezer, refrigerator, circulation pumps, thermostats, and hot water radiator blower.These loads were what deturmined the size of the system. It was sized to run unattended through the winter. In the summer days are longer with less overcast days. The needs for lights drops so the power is then there for the computers. When home for the holidays, building a fire in the boiler brings up the house temperature nicely, but for efficiency very little heat is dumped into storage. Boosting 75 to 85 degree water to 130 degrees for showers is money saving.
They knew they exceeded the supply capacity. Using PV for heat is a waste. Using PV to run the pumps in the country is a safety move. Power outages in a no PV setup would result in frozen water pipes in the winter and spoiled food in the spring, summer, and fall. The PV/heat collection ratio was taken into careful consideration.
If you were away from home for 2 months on a trip anytime of the year, what is the worst that could happen to you in a power failure that lasted 3 days to a week? Don't forget to count spoiled food or frozen water pipes. In my folks situation an extended outage has little impact anytime of the year.
My dad has one of these in his house. When the batteries are topped off, it kicks over an auxiliary load (part of the rest of the house such as freezer and some additional lights) and when that drops the charge, it switches the auxiliary load back to shore power. His computers used for video editing of home movies is on the solar system 24/7. The solar system and windmill is his UPS. His system provides about 30% of his total load. It still doesn't pick up the electric water heater, electric stove, electric dryer, etc. It just isn't big enough yet.
He sized the system to never have a surplus. The idea of buying power retail and paying for a bi-directional installation (cogen) and selling at wholesale rates didn't make any sense.
This is the RIAA. We have a court order for you to give up her full name, address, etc.
Just like the rest of your cases, you have failed to state a claim. Please list at least one song which you own the copyright to and the date and time of the alleged infringement.
Sneakernet is nowhere near the threat the internet and P2P is. Letting you actual friends borrow your music is a far cry from those gits who want to share music with the 5 million people on the internet.
Are you serious?
I'll race you. The first one with a 60 gig collections wins. I'll compare notes at 6:00 tonight. You just use P-P on any.edu LAN. I'll just check with friends and not use the LAN.
Universal is curiouse if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether.edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down.
I wonder if they have any idea how much has moved from slow P-P and moved to much faster bulk transfers via sneakernet and darknet?
Wow, you have Zen? May I borrow it for 20 minutes. I'll throw on some music..
A Linux Box, Gnomad2 libnjb and libmtp are your friends. A big portable USB drive is even better. Most of this flies under the radar.
My duaghter was away at boarding school last year. She has no credit card. She had very limited trips to town. She does have a 30 Gig Zen. Somehow without buying any music, she managed to get it full of music, pictures, and 10 full length movies. The campus does not have P-P on their locked down network. Student access online was heavily filtered and monitored. Nobody was able to leave a P-P client running on the shared PC. Most important, she did not have any way to purchase that quantity of media at retail prices.
Some students with laptops and no network connection on the other hand became repositories of media for the dorm. Anytime anybody went home on break and came back with a loaded iPod was when the library grew with new material. All the sneakernet is under the radar. The RIAA knows it happens, and they know it can't be monitored and controlled because it isn't directly seen.
Maybe in the future as she moves into adulthood and works into a way to have an income, she may become a customer, but she like many see the overinflated prices for the trivial amounts of content dribbled out for the hard earned money and she will have to make her own purchasing decisions.
When she reaches that age, I hope the RIAA has had a change of heart and does something to their public relations campaigh. As they now look like the shoot first 600 lb gorilla, they are doing little to convince anybody to do business with their member partners.
SSH tunneling... Use an RDP client... VPN to internet based host... Host file hacks... Proxy viewers like google...
You can't stop a determined person from viewing stuff online. So, change the person, not the technology...
My rebel kid found my whitelist router a little hard to get past. When he was grounded, the connection passed IP addresses for the school site and nothing else. Hosts hacks would have failed to resolve. (No admin privileges) Direct IP entry was null routed. SSH tunneling and proxy viewers were far and few in the whitelist. VPN also null routed.
School work inproved after a tantrum on the restrictions.
At my house, all outgoing traffic passes through an OpenWRT firewall, which redirects all web traffic to my caching proxy. It logs all accesses. I get reports. If I see something "unusual", I bring my kids in and have them explain it. I TALK TO THEM. It's useless to try to mechanically block their access, but if they know that EVERYTHING they do IS monitored (and they do), they seem to act responsibly.
As the password keeper on the router, use a filtered DNS. ScrubIT comes to mind as that is the one I use. On the client machine (the kids) set up DHCP and don't provide administrator privileges. Scan the logs for too many hits to the ScrubIT nastygram page.
The text on the page simply has their logo and the text; "PAGE HAS BEEN SCRUBBED!
www.----.com is actively being scrubbed. Don't think it should be? Let us know"
Most DNS entries for bad locations will come up to 67.138.54.100 instead of the bad site. The filter is not just for porn. It also filters known malware sites and sources of RIAA MPAA trolls such as The Pirate Bay. If you insist on still going there, white list it in your hosts file. Most anonymous proxies are also blocked.
For this to work, the user should not be able to edit the hosts file, boot anywhere but the hard drive, and not have administrator privileges.
In user testing before deploying on the family, I found that it works well without being too restrictive. For example many photography sites with some nudes are not filtered, but most explicit sex is filtered. I followed a couple known malware links with evil scripting in some email (tested on Ubuntu) and most were blocked. It does not filter links given as just an IP address, so it is not 100%
Blocking the firehose of porn, lawsuit trolls, and malware is a good thing.
In June, a penetration testing firm planted 20 infected USB drives in the bathrooms and parking lots of a busy credit union. It was a simple, non-technical exploit -- and also one of the most effective of the year. Out of the 20 drives, 15 were inserted into PCs by curious credit union employees. If the infection hadn't been benign, the entire business might have gone up in smoke.
The account of this exploit -- perpetrated by one of our own columnists, Steve Stasiukonis, vice president and founder of Secure Network Technologies Inc. -- was by far our best-read story of the year. It exposed a frequently-overlooked vulnerability in most organizations, and it brought forth a whole range of vendors and products that are now attempting to close the hole.
We figured we would try something different by baiting the same employees that were on high alert. We gathered all the worthless vendor giveaway thumb drives collected over the years and imprinted them with our own special piece of software. I had one of my guys write a Trojan that, when run, would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user's computer, and then email the findings back to us.
Such a justification would be necessary for it to pass muster under 'rule of reason' analysis mandated by the US Supreme Court.
The RIAA has goofed big time on this one. What they were doing was marginal at best. Now with the litigation campaign and the examination of the law as a result is starting to bring down the house of cards. I think they goofed on the litigation campaign in hopes everyone would roll over and play dead. I don't think they expected a fight with intelligent people who could see the flaws in their assertions.
They played the lottery trying to get shady practices cemented as standard operating practices. They played the gamble that the defendants would fold as the cheap option. They gambled and stand a good chance of getting copyright law handed to them on a platter with shady practices exposed as a big RICO problem.
Hmm, care to prove me wrong? How many open source projects enforce monitoring or hidden updates about which there is no choice on users?
How many sys admins sandbox systems and take notice when an unusual connection request happens? Take for example any secure installation.. An application making a connection attempt through a whitelist proxy will trip alarms and create logs.
Logs NTP time update OK, VPN to Co-Location site, OK, Admin ran connections to Red Hat update.. Check I did check for updates..OK. IM client connecting to 254.36.21.5:1260 Firewalled at proxy!! IP not in whitelist. Ding!!!!
Open source software by nature is OPEN including the source code. Unexpected functions in software is often caught in either sandboxes or secured test environments. There many be some untested untrusted binary only stuff out there, but most safe stuff in public repositories is well examined before considered safe and modified or deleted if found unsafe. Closed source binaries are much more likely to contain this crud because it is easier to slip in and hide unfriendly code. It can only be discovered by what it does, not by a code exam. Vista is the prime example today of this. It wasn't found by a code audit. It can't be found by a code audit. Only it's behavior gave it away.
You laugh. But those 5.25" disks really can fly. It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.
Dude, you don't want my PC DOS 5. It is on 3.5 inch disks. You want to borrow my MS DOS 3.20. Would you rather borrow my CPM disks? Those 8 inch disks go even further.
Many people only take the cost of creating and distributing the media into account when discussing artificial high prices, but fail to consider the amount of labor and risk that go into the true product conveyed through that media.
Fully agreed. On the flip side is the market and percieved value of the product. You may have spent 15 years working on a totaly bug free super app for my old Kaypro CPM machine and you think 15 years of hard labor is worth 100K per year for 15 years and try to sell me that product for 1.5 million, but I will realise the Kaypro CPM is obsolete and I can make do with a buggy copy of Excell on Windows XP for a small fraction of the cost.
The end user could care less what effort went into creation. All they want to know is what good is it to me and what does it cost. From there they look at all the vendors offerings and pick something suitable. A good many software engineers lose sight of that. It may be better to sell at $30 a copy and go for volume to sell 1,000 copies instead of holding out for a retail price of $300 per copy and selling 2 copies.
Your choice.. $600 or $30,000. Jacking up the price does not always maximize profit regardless of how much blood sweat and tears you pump into a product.
Ever lost a dongle off a laptop? Dongles are very effective. A dongle is the prime flag that a manufacture is way over proud of his creation and will protect his baby at all costs. By the way, if you want to use that baby, it'll cost an arm, a leg, and your firstborn.
In a nutshell, a dongle sends me packing to the other guys. I don't do dongles. They almost always come with very high price software for a niche market with a poor support staff. The dongle is another built in point of failure. I want software that works, not easly broken low reliability software.
On top of that, if your main user base is business users, most of them will sit in a protected environment which probably won't let your program phone home even if it tries.
My home LAN hands out DHCP address that are blocked at the router. It is one of the few things I do to keep leaches off the wireless by dropping them in unroutable space. Only machines with a proper static address can get through the gateway. This has caused problems with many software packages that phone home before permitting you to set up the network connection.
Bzzzzt! Right answer, but not in the way you are thinking. If the price isn't right, the anti-piracy stuff making it difficult does get them to be legal. Often getting legal is simply using a competitor's product.
When MS Office started introducing copy protection and CD Keys (early versions of Works didn't use a CD key), I moved to Star Office by Sun Microsystems. Now I am almost completely on Open Office on Ubuntu and Freespire. The days of picking up a pirated copy of the newer version of DOS are long behind me. I've gone legal. I've also gone away.
Close answer. It should be the same as a newspaper or magazine. It should be cheaper to simply buy your own copy than the time and effort requried to rip, crack and burn a duplicate. You can do a copyright violation on an entire newspaper. What's stopping you? Other items with artificial high prices and low manufacturing (duplication) costs are the most pirated items. Low cost items are rarely duplicated.
You could ask you neighbor to videotape the season of (name your show) so you don't have to pay for a premium channel, but the labor and delay is enough of a burden that it is simply easier to add the channel to your package.
Over done copy protection on the other hand burdens not the pirate, but the customer. Do you or your kids have an MP3 player. Ever try to rip a DRM'ed CD or DL purchased track to the wrong player? iTunes to an RCA Lyra or a protected WMA to an iPod? DRM kills sales. High prices encourage piracy. See where I am going...
Drop the artificial high prices and DRM and sales goes up while piracy goes down. Inexpensive DVD's are priced at the sweet spot. The drive to either DL or copy a rental is diminished by the fact I can simply pick up many of them at 4 for $20 at Blockbuster.
CD sales on the other hand are suffering artificial scarcity, excessive DRM, high prices, and massive piracy due to the above. Finding a few pirates to make examples of hasn't slowed down piracy much. The record companies need to find a new business model to face the cost to fill a 40 Gig iPod. Demand is there for bulk content. They dribble it out like it was high priced Champagne. It is easly duplicated at prices less than cheap beer. Do the math. The incentive to beat the high price is extreme.
but I never, repeat NEVER, click on banner ads or anything like that.
I do when the ad is revelant, informative, quiet, unobtrusive, and sponsors my favorite webpages sometimes gets clicked. For example, without product place banner ads from Think Geek, I would not have found "Got Root" and "I read your email" T shirts. I whitelist (remove from hosts file) some ad servers because they do a nice job. Flash advertisements are on the other hand dead meat.
It sponsors Slashdot, behaves, revelant to the tech industry (Geeks) and doesn't cover anything. If slashdot tried to do Flash cover the page advertisements like the Yahoo home page is doing now, the ad server would hit the bin in a heartbeat. (yes I sometimes turn off the hosts file and enable flash to check the state of affairs.)
Slashdot Mirror
Total Cash Flow From Operating Activities
So how long did it take you to null-route the 2 DNS addresses? It took me less than 5 minutes.
Are you kidding?
Between the DRM Rootkit, DRM, extra copy protection on Sony Pictures DVD's, and now a rootkit on a Thumb Drive, the movement to Don't buy SONY is growing. It shows in their financials.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cf?s=SNE&annual
Note Net income 2005 ending March 31 was 1,523,693 in 2006- 1,050,736, and in 2007- 1,073,788. This is a downturn of almost a full third in one year.
For the most part they are moving away from being a manufacture to an investment firm much like the Sears Roebuck catalog store is now mostly The Discover Card financial services.
SONY's Capital Expenditures was less than their Investments in 2005. In short, they invested heavily in investments. As Net income dropped, they invested less and Capital Expenditures remained fairly steady from 2005-2007. In short, they are down in sales of products, invested in investments, and still have a falling net income.
For the year ending March of 2006 Total Cash Flow From Operating Activities was 3,398,793 while Total Cash Flows From Financing Activities was 3,058,844. We like to think of SONY as a manufacture of video games consoles and other consumer goods. In reality, that is only half the business.
Note all numbers are in thousands as noted on the webpage.
Do you think the drop in 2006 right after the 2005 November rootkit was just coincidence?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Copy_Protection
Security researchers beginning with Mark Russinovich in October 2005 have described the program as functionally identical to a rootkit: a software program used by computer hackers to conceal unauthorised activities on a computer system.
I think there might be some connection to the rootkit and net income loss of 1/3rd might show a relationship. In the year ending March 31 2007, Total Cash Flow From Operating Activities still has not recovered to the 2005 level.
Is it safe to SEED again?
Not yet. The RIAA didn't drop the complaint. They just amended it.
In the meantime, fly under the radar. Swap USB drives.
When using such a system the meter will spin backwards when it is producing more power than is needed.
Check your local code and power company. In some local areas, power sold back to the utility from co-generation, is to be metered and purchased at wholesale instead of retail. Running the meter backwards may be in violation of local policy. Check first.
Right from the page in your link..
"But imagine a system where your electricity meter actually goes backwards, yes that's right these people put electricity back into the grid! The Utility companies are doing everything they can to stop this practise, which is why people are taking the law into their own hands."
In my dad's case, he simply designed to use less of the public power and reduce his bill. Many of the grid connected inverters shut down if the grid goes down.
Again a quote from your link;
"We further resolve that our renewable energy systems will be safe and will not harm utility workers, our neighbors, or our environment."
This often means a parallel connected inverter feeding the grid shuts down with the lack of grid power. These inverters do not island (running disconnected) when the grid goes down. Very few grid connected inverters bypass a critical load and continue running in the absense of the grid. We studied the options. Buying power at $0.12/KWH and selling power at $0.025 was a farce. It was better to buy batteries and buy back our own power from us. If the battery in/out has a 50% loss, the cost differential still made economic sense.
Many systems that cut the expense of the batteries by using the grid as a battery to store excess power and provide power later are subject to grid outages taking them down completely. Even in bright sunshine, a grid outage typicaly provides a complete AC blackout in spite of a PV system. This is unacceptable for stable UPS power.
Here is a typical grid tie inverter showing the lack of any way to provide power in the event of a utility outage. The requriement for anit-islanding will shut down this entire system in the event of a utility outage. There is no battery or critical load connection.
http://www.alphasolar.com/alpha_solar_079.htm
This is typical of most small grid tie systems.
you can get good solar panels for heating water, quite cheap. you can even diy one. they're much more efficient than solar panels for generating electricity.
Absolutely true. I guess it is time to fill you in on the rest of the installation. There is a limited amount of roof realestate. My folks are snowbirds and spend much of the time on the road on their RV. The house for the most part needed to be self maintaining. The house is heated with hot water. There is a solar collector feeding a 5,000 gallon storage tank. It contains a heat exchanger to pre-heat the water to the water heater. In the summer the system runs in the neighborhood of 185 degrees F. You can take as long of a shower as you like. If you are in too long you need to mix in more cold water as the tank temperature creeps up from 130 to 180.
In the winter after a week of cold overcast weather, the solar system drops to a tank temperature of 75 to 85 degrees. It maintains the indoor temperature to above 50 degrees without paying a dime for additional heat from the utility. The PV side of things is to shed most of the rest of the away from home costs including security lights, freezer, refrigerator, circulation pumps, thermostats, and hot water radiator blower.These loads were what deturmined the size of the system. It was sized to run unattended through the winter. In the summer days are longer with less overcast days. The needs for lights drops so the power is then there for the computers. When home for the holidays, building a fire in the boiler brings up the house temperature nicely, but for efficiency very little heat is dumped into storage. Boosting 75 to 85 degree water to 130 degrees for showers is money saving.
They knew they exceeded the supply capacity. Using PV for heat is a waste. Using PV to run the pumps in the country is a safety move. Power outages in a no PV setup would result in frozen water pipes in the winter and spoiled food in the spring, summer, and fall. The PV/heat collection ratio was taken into careful consideration.
If you were away from home for 2 months on a trip anytime of the year, what is the worst that could happen to you in a power failure that lasted 3 days to a week? Don't forget to count spoiled food or frozen water pipes. In my folks situation an extended outage has little impact anytime of the year.
What you are looking for is here;
http://www.outbackpower.com/
My dad has one of these in his house. When the batteries are topped off, it kicks over an auxiliary load (part of the rest of the house such as freezer and some additional lights) and when that drops the charge, it switches the auxiliary load back to shore power. His computers used for video editing of home movies is on the solar system 24/7. The solar system and windmill is his UPS. His system provides about 30% of his total load. It still doesn't pick up the electric water heater, electric stove, electric dryer, etc. It just isn't big enough yet.
He sized the system to never have a surplus. The idea of buying power retail and paying for a bi-directional installation (cogen) and selling at wholesale rates didn't make any sense.
just let me know when they provide a nuclear option
It's a little expensive and has lots of regulations for it, but that's old tech dating back to the 1950's.
http://www.nuc.umr.edu/nuclear_facts/spacepower/spacepower.html
This is the RIAA. We have a court order for you to give up her full name, address, etc.
Just like the rest of your cases, you have failed to state a claim. Please list at least one song which you own the copyright to and the date and time of the alleged infringement.
I don't respond to phishing.
Sneakernet is nowhere near the threat the internet and P2P is. Letting you actual friends borrow your music is a far cry from those gits who want to share music with the 5 million people on the internet.
.edu LAN. I'll just check with friends and not use the LAN.
Are you serious?
I'll race you. The first one with a 60 gig collections wins. I'll compare notes at 6:00 tonight. You just use P-P on any
Universal is curiouse if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether .edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down.
I wonder if they have any idea how much has moved from slow P-P and moved to much faster bulk transfers via sneakernet and darknet?
Wow, you have Zen? May I borrow it for 20 minutes. I'll throw on some music..
A Linux Box, Gnomad2 libnjb and libmtp are your friends. A big portable USB drive is even better. Most of this flies under the radar.
My duaghter was away at boarding school last year. She has no credit card. She had very limited trips to town. She does have a 30 Gig Zen. Somehow without buying any music, she managed to get it full of music, pictures, and 10 full length movies. The campus does not have P-P on their locked down network. Student access online was heavily filtered and monitored. Nobody was able to leave a P-P client running on the shared PC. Most important, she did not have any way to purchase that quantity of media at retail prices.
Some students with laptops and no network connection on the other hand became repositories of media for the dorm.
Anytime anybody went home on break and came back with a loaded iPod was when the library grew with new material. All the sneakernet is under the radar. The RIAA knows it happens, and they know it can't be monitored and controlled because it isn't directly seen.
Maybe in the future as she moves into adulthood and works into a way to have an income, she may become a customer, but she like many see the overinflated prices for the trivial amounts of content dribbled out for the hard earned money and she will have to make her own purchasing decisions.
When she reaches that age, I hope the RIAA has had a change of heart and does something to their public relations campaigh. As they now look like the shoot first 600 lb gorilla, they are doing little to convince anybody to do business with their member partners.
How to bypass EVERY filtering engine out there...
SSH tunneling...
Use an RDP client...
VPN to internet based host...
Host file hacks...
Proxy viewers like google...
You can't stop a determined person from viewing stuff online. So, change the person, not the technology...
My rebel kid found my whitelist router a little hard to get past. When he was grounded, the connection passed IP addresses for the school site and nothing else. Hosts hacks would have failed to resolve. (No admin privileges) Direct IP entry was null routed. SSH tunneling and proxy viewers were far and few in the whitelist. VPN also null routed.
School work inproved after a tantrum on the restrictions.
At my house, all outgoing traffic passes through an OpenWRT firewall, which redirects all web traffic to my caching proxy. It logs all accesses. I get reports. If I see something "unusual", I bring my kids in and have them explain it. I TALK TO THEM. It's useless to try to mechanically block their access, but if they know that EVERYTHING they do IS monitored (and they do), they seem to act responsibly.
As the password keeper on the router, use a filtered DNS. ScrubIT comes to mind as that is the one I use. On the client machine (the kids) set up DHCP and don't provide administrator privileges. Scan the logs for too many hits to the ScrubIT nastygram page.
The text on the page simply has their logo and the text;
"PAGE HAS BEEN SCRUBBED!
www.----.com is actively being scrubbed.
Don't think it should be? Let us know"
Most DNS entries for bad locations will come up to 67.138.54.100 instead of the bad site. The filter is not just for porn. It also filters known malware sites and sources of RIAA MPAA trolls such as The Pirate Bay. If you insist on still going there, white list it in your hosts file. Most anonymous proxies are also blocked.
For this to work, the user should not be able to edit the hosts file, boot anywhere but the hard drive, and not have administrator privileges.
In user testing before deploying on the family, I found that it works well without being too restrictive. For example many photography sites with some nudes are not filtered, but most explicit sex is filtered. I followed a couple known malware links with evil scripting in some email (tested on Ubuntu) and most were blocked. It does not filter links given as just an IP address, so it is not 100%
Blocking the firehose of porn, lawsuit trolls, and malware is a good thing.
How does unauthorized code even get into a financial institutions systems?
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=113460&print=true
No. 1: The Thumb Drive Caper
In June, a penetration testing firm planted 20 infected USB drives in the bathrooms and parking lots of a busy credit union. It was a simple, non-technical exploit -- and also one of the most effective of the year. Out of the 20 drives, 15 were inserted into PCs by curious credit union employees. If the infection hadn't been benign, the entire business might have gone up in smoke.
The account of this exploit -- perpetrated by one of our own columnists, Steve Stasiukonis, vice president and founder of Secure Network Technologies Inc. -- was by far our best-read story of the year. It exposed a frequently-overlooked vulnerability in most organizations, and it brought forth a whole range of vendors and products that are now attempting to close the hole.
We figured we would try something different by baiting the same employees that were on high alert. We gathered all the worthless vendor giveaway thumb drives collected over the years and imprinted them with our own special piece of software. I had one of my guys write a Trojan that, when run, would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user's computer, and then email the findings back to us.
That was just one of many ways to do it.
Such a justification would be necessary for it to pass muster under 'rule of reason' analysis mandated by the US Supreme Court.
The RIAA has goofed big time on this one. What they were doing was marginal at best. Now with the litigation campaign and the examination of the law as a result is starting to bring down the house of cards. I think they goofed on the litigation campaign in hopes everyone would roll over and play dead. I don't think they expected a fight with intelligent people who could see the flaws in their assertions.
They played the lottery trying to get shady practices cemented as standard operating practices. They played the gamble that the defendants would fold as the cheap option. They gambled and stand a good chance of getting copyright law handed to them on a platter with shady practices exposed as a big RICO problem.
Hmm, care to prove me wrong? How many open source projects enforce monitoring or hidden updates about which there is no choice on users?
How many sys admins sandbox systems and take notice when an unusual connection request happens? Take for example any secure installation.. An application making a connection attempt through a whitelist proxy will trip alarms and create logs.
Logs NTP time update OK, VPN to Co-Location site, OK, Admin ran connections to Red Hat update.. Check I did check for updates..OK. IM client connecting to 254.36.21.5:1260 Firewalled at proxy!! IP not in whitelist. Ding!!!!
Open source software by nature is OPEN including the source code. Unexpected functions in software is often caught in either sandboxes or secured test environments. There many be some untested untrusted binary only stuff out there, but most safe stuff in public repositories is well examined before considered safe and modified or deleted if found unsafe. Closed source binaries are much more likely to contain this crud because it is easier to slip in and hide unfriendly code. It can only be discovered by what it does, not by a code exam. Vista is the prime example today of this. It wasn't found by a code audit. It can't be found by a code audit. Only it's behavior gave it away.
How can i install it on windows? It is not in the FAQ :(
;-)
Hmmm.. Let me do a quick Google search.. Linux programs.. in Windows..
Ok here
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Running+Linux+in+a+Windows+directory&btnG=Google+Search
If you have Vista or Office 2007, don't worry. You already have the Windows version and don't need the Linux version. Enjoy.
I can't help you if you need the crack for the Windows version. You will have to search for that on your own.
You laugh. But those 5.25" disks really can fly. It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.
Dude, you don't want my PC DOS 5. It is on 3.5 inch disks. You want to borrow my MS DOS 3.20. Would you rather borrow my CPM disks? Those 8 inch disks go even further.
I have a copy of DOS 5 in the box. I had to visit the video to see if this was IBM's PC DOS or Microsoft's MS DOS.
DOS 5 is too generic for a title.
Many people only take the cost of creating and distributing the media into account when discussing artificial high prices, but fail to consider the amount of labor and risk that go into the true product conveyed through that media.
Fully agreed. On the flip side is the market and percieved value of the product. You may have spent 15 years working on a totaly bug free super app for my old Kaypro CPM machine and you think 15 years of hard labor is worth 100K per year for 15 years and try to sell me that product for 1.5 million, but I will realise the Kaypro CPM is obsolete and I can make do with a buggy copy of Excell on Windows XP for a small fraction of the cost.
The end user could care less what effort went into creation. All they want to know is what good is it to me and what does it cost. From there they look at all the vendors offerings and pick something suitable. A good many software engineers lose sight of that. It may be better to sell at $30 a copy and go for volume to sell 1,000 copies instead of holding out for a retail price of $300 per copy and selling 2 copies.
Your choice.. $600 or $30,000. Jacking up the price does not always maximize profit regardless of how much blood sweat and tears you pump into a product.
But at least the hassle is effective
Ever lost a dongle off a laptop? Dongles are very effective. A dongle is the prime flag that a manufacture is way over proud of his creation and will protect his baby at all costs. By the way, if you want to use that baby, it'll cost an arm, a leg, and your firstborn.
In a nutshell, a dongle sends me packing to the other guys. I don't do dongles. They almost always come with very high price software for a niche market with a poor support staff. The dongle is another built in point of failure. I want software that works, not easly broken low reliability software.
On top of that, if your main user base is business users, most of them will sit in a protected environment which probably won't let your program phone home even if it tries.
My home LAN hands out DHCP address that are blocked at the router. It is one of the few things I do to keep leaches off the wireless by dropping them in unroutable space. Only machines with a proper static address can get through the gateway. This has caused problems with many software packages that phone home before permitting you to set up the network connection.
It's enough to eventually get them to be legal.
Bzzzzt! Right answer, but not in the way you are thinking. If the price isn't right, the anti-piracy stuff making it difficult does get them to be legal. Often getting legal is simply using a competitor's product.
When MS Office started introducing copy protection and CD Keys (early versions of Works didn't use a CD key), I moved to Star Office by Sun Microsystems. Now I am almost completely on Open Office on Ubuntu and Freespire. The days of picking up a pirated copy of the newer version of DOS are long behind me. I've gone legal. I've also gone away.
None.
Close answer. It should be the same as a newspaper or magazine. It should be cheaper to simply buy your own copy than the time and effort requried to rip, crack and burn a duplicate. You can do a copyright violation on an entire newspaper. What's stopping you? Other items with artificial high prices and low manufacturing (duplication) costs are the most pirated items. Low cost items are rarely duplicated.
You could ask you neighbor to videotape the season of (name your show) so you don't have to pay for a premium channel, but the labor and delay is enough of a burden that it is simply easier to add the channel to your package.
Over done copy protection on the other hand burdens not the pirate, but the customer. Do you or your kids have an MP3 player. Ever try to rip a DRM'ed CD or DL purchased track to the wrong player? iTunes to an RCA Lyra or a protected WMA to an iPod? DRM kills sales. High prices encourage piracy. See where I am going...
Drop the artificial high prices and DRM and sales goes up while piracy goes down. Inexpensive DVD's are priced at the sweet spot. The drive to either DL or copy a rental is diminished by the fact I can simply pick up many of them at 4 for $20 at Blockbuster.
CD sales on the other hand are suffering artificial scarcity, excessive DRM, high prices, and massive piracy due to the above. Finding a few pirates to make examples of hasn't slowed down piracy much. The record companies need to find a new business model to face the cost to fill a 40 Gig iPod. Demand is there for bulk content. They dribble it out like it was high priced Champagne. It is easly duplicated at prices less than cheap beer. Do the math. The incentive to beat the high price is extreme.
but I never, repeat NEVER, click on banner ads or anything like that.
I do when the ad is revelant, informative, quiet, unobtrusive, and sponsors my favorite webpages sometimes gets clicked. For example, without product place banner ads from Think Geek, I would not have found "Got Root" and "I read your email" T shirts. I whitelist (remove from hosts file) some ad servers because they do a nice job. Flash advertisements are on the other hand dead meat.
As an example at the top of this page is an advertisement for Dice advertising tech jobs. It's URL is http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/982522/dice_q107_jobsuck2_728x90_NT.gif.
It sponsors Slashdot, behaves, revelant to the tech industry (Geeks) and doesn't cover anything. If slashdot tried to do Flash cover the page advertisements like the Yahoo home page is doing now, the ad server would hit the bin in a heartbeat. (yes I sometimes turn off the hosts file and enable flash to check the state of affairs.)
Don't you think that's a little steep?
Nope.. Little isn't the proper adjitive.