I'm not so sure about that. Addressable memspace (using a signed pointer, which for some reason seems to be the norm) is 2 gigabytes with a 32-bit proc. My last box had 512M of RAM, I just upgraded it to 1G. I predict that less than a year from now, people will realize there is a 2G ceiling and start being uncomfortable about it.
Machines with more than 1G are rather common today. Servers will less than 1G are rather uncommon, at least new ones.
In one of the letter threads, he requires the scammer to identify himself on a photo, With His Chosen Password!. Of course, this password is carefully chosen in order to positively identify the business transaction partner.
Strange that nobody commented more on this. I think you're right on the money; having fun with tech in your youth is what produces top coders in your early career years.
I got this from their PR machinery yesterday on the topic. Should clear up any doubts on whether they deserve a second chance:
- cut here -
Dear Sir; Thank you for your email to Eurosales@belkin.com
Further to your email below please note that we are aware of the rumours about our 54g routers and are currently working to rectify the situation. Please note that these are only rumours. Belkin does not condone spam and you will not see this type of advertising from Belkin anywhere and certainly not on our products.
I do hope you understand that occasionally companies such as ourselves can be subject to malice and I assure you this is one of those situations.....I have attached a pdf. detailing the situation for your information.
If you have any further questions or concerns about Belkin products, please contact myself directly.
The PDF, although posted previously elsewhere, reads:
- cut again -
Does the Belkin Router send me Spam? NO.
Recently a group of privacy advocates have targeted Belkin Routers, claiming that Belkin Routers equipped with Parental Control send spam, unwanted advertisements and spyware to computers.
1. Belkin Parental Control Content Filtering is promoted on our 802.11g Wireless Router packages as an added value service included with purchase. Parental Control filtering enables our customers to block access from their network to specific websites; it is a content filter, nothing more.
2. During the installation process, the router produces a web page asking the owner of the router if they want to sign up for a free six-month trial of Belkin Parental Control, similar to common online product registration requests.
3. The Parental Control registration page is not spam, adware or spyware. It is part of the setup process of the router. It does not "hi-jack" the browser.
4. Belkin routers do not install spyware or adware, nor does Belkin have the ability to advertise to our customers using our routers as a conduit.
5. If a customer clicks "No Thanks" on the first prompt, the registration page for Parental Control signup will no longer appear.
Additional Information:
- The "No Thanks" button is not a trick button that will install spyware, etc. on the computer. If a customer is uneasy clicking "No Thanks" in the web page, to stop the reminder, you can navigate to the Internal web page of the Router, click on Parental Control and select "Don't Remind me Every 8 hours". This will stop the web page from ever being displayed again.
- If the browser window is closed without clicking "No Thanks", it will be displayed again after 8 hours has elapsed. Please note that this is not a browser pop-up, this means that the Parental Control web page will only be displayed if the user opens the browser. Again, clicking "No Thanks" will stop the web page from being displayed.
We sincerely hope that this information provides an explanation that meets your needs, if for any reason you would like to contact Belkin directly, please email your concerns to Kannynmc@belkin.com Regards, Kannyn MacRae Business Unit Manager, Networking Belkin Corporation
- cut here -
And if anyone missed the interesting stuff in Usenet NANAE, the "No thanks" button referenced above sent a signal FROM BELKIN TO THE ROUTER to reconfigure it to not show ads.
They have shown, and continue to show, an amazing lack of clue.
Saying that "Matrix Revolutions" is better than "Reloaded" is about like saying it is better than Adam Sandler's car.
Which, by the way, I do not agree with. It does not quite reach the level of genuine quality craftsmanship you get from hearing Mr. Sandler sing about his automobile...
We unintentionally overlooked the effect this feature would have. We never intended to compromise the trust of our customers
I'll ignore the effect above being a bad rewrite of public outrage, or more importantly, lost sales.
Instead:
If they didn't intend to compromise the trust, it means they didn't know they were doing so.
So, which other products that are shipping from Belkin today are compromising the trust of the users as we speak, without Belkin knowing about it?
This is a seriously big fuckup, and it has to be done either with full malicious intent or devastating incompetence. In the first case, apologies can be posted, the intent can be withdrawn, and the course changed.
It appears that Belkin they didn't have such an intent, and therefore, the only option remaining is that they are devastatingly incompetent.
My name is [name deleted], and I work as IT department manager for a medium sized company in [place deleted]. I write to you in light of the recent unveiling that Belkin are knowingly shipping routers that show commercials to the end users by hijacking HTTP connections.
I am not sure if the product manager, Eric Deming, who designed the product to not work as expected did so understanding the full consequences if - or, rather, when - this information would become public. The one reason Belkin's name has been held in high regard at the company I work for is because of dependability. When it turns out that Belkin is actively designing products to not work dependably, but instead display advertising at the user; that reputation of dependability... well... there's not much left of it. And, as you are aware, for every one of Belkin's products, there is a competing product.
It becomes much worse. It also turns out that Belkin has the ability to remotely modify the behavior of these routers. When I showed this fact to our network security people, they went ballistic and drove straight off to the local equipment store, only to come back two hours later with a bunch of boxes. 30 minutes later, there was a heap of discarded equipment in a disorderly pile in one corner of the networking room. The discarded items all carried the name "Belkin". I signed the receipt for the new equipment with a look, a sigh, and a nod.
To top it off, it seems that your Mr. Deming who designed this behavior believes that every outbound hijackable connection originates from somebody sitting at a computer and browsing the web. However, more important are the automated connections. What would happen if the backup for our commercial data, which is transmitted regularly over the Internet, instead was pushed to Belkin, due to this behavior? What would happen if virus or operating system upgrade connections were the ones hijacked? Heart defibrillating equipment has been mentioned - what would happen if the heart defibrillation monitor, trying to trigger the impulse with the charging equipment, is instead redirected to a Belkin advertisement? You know, telesurgery exists and does depend on a reliable Internet infrastructure, consisting of such boxes as yours.
This product has been designed to not work, despite charging good money for it. I lack words to describe how shameful this behavior is.
Additionally, if the Belkin corporate culture is one that allows such a technical atrocity to make it to the shelves for one product, then it is obvious it may happen again, or has already happened, for other products. However, rest assured that this company will never again buy another Belkin product as long as I run the IT department.
Apparently, the original series had the sound effects workshop up in arms -- Douglas Adams had given them all the instructions they needed, with the wit and clarity well matching the radio series as a whole.
If you were a sound engineer charged with producing fx, how would YOU react to the sound description of a typical office building flying through space, to pick one example?:-)
But that's Hollywood for you - you can't just make one great movie and leave it alone. You have to squeeze every dollar out of the franchise while you can!
I agree. Last time I was at a bookstore, I even noticed that Lord of the Rings, this masterpiece of an epic, is already out in book form.:-(
Pathetic what lengths commercialization will go to these days. There's just no leaving good movies alone anymore.
Nitroglycerin is a clear oily substance formed by adding nitrate groups to glycerin, a common base for lipids (fats). Nitroglycerin will even burn brightly (in fact, some dimwitted mine workers used it in their lamps, as it produced a better flame than ordinary lamp oil).
Gunpowder is a dry mixture of sulphur, saltpeter, and ordinary coal.
Gunpowder is a do-it-yourself-in-a-heartbeat recipe. Nitroglycerin is not. (Well, technically it's not very hard to make, but the process is far from safe.)
In any case, they are absolutely not to be confused with each other. That will result in anything from a major embarrasment to a Darwin Award.
I know that when it comes to law and corporation separately, there is no such thing as common sense. When law and corporation intermingle, things get even worse and there's no way of telling which way is up anymore.
Ok, so I'm not aware of who owns the GROUND the campus is located on. Specifically, I'm not aware who owns the ground which are not covered by buildings.
What I do know is that it's publicly accessible, and that it makes no sense to prohibit an employee from photographing trees which may be on campus grounds when any passer-by can do it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's some commitment to closing the 'digital divide'.
You need to see the state of Asia, I hear.
They are not closing it, they are opening it further. And the US is on the low end side of the divide.
That's the first question answered in the article. It's about an European swallow.
and the committee has acked the nomination. Dunno if he makes the finalists, but I sure as hell think he deserves one. :-)
it still has a lot of headroom left
I'm not so sure about that. Addressable memspace (using a signed pointer, which for some reason seems to be the norm) is 2 gigabytes with a 32-bit proc. My last box had 512M of RAM, I just upgraded it to 1G. I predict that less than a year from now, people will realize there is a 2G ceiling and start being uncomfortable about it.
Machines with more than 1G are rather common today. Servers will less than 1G are rather uncommon, at least new ones.
And it won't ever be mentioned again on slashdot.
You must be new here?
In one of the letter threads, he requires the scammer to identify himself on a photo, With His Chosen Password!. Of course, this password is carefully chosen in order to positively identify the business transaction partner.
:-)
Hilarious.
Men fan, det var ju _du_ :-) nar jag foljde lanken sag jag vem som lag bakom nicket...
/ DWA
Strange that nobody commented more on this. I think you're right on the money; having fun with tech in your youth is what produces top coders in your early career years.
What part of "not supported" was not understood?
The same "not supported" that Microsoft used as an excuse five years ago when some flavors of Windows crashed instantly when connected to Linux/Samba?
Yes, I think it is the same "not supported" that is not understood here.
I got this from their PR machinery yesterday on the topic. Should clear up any doubts on whether they deserve a second chance:
- cut here -
Dear Sir;
Thank you for your email to Eurosales@belkin.com
Further to your email below please note that we are aware of the rumours about our 54g routers and are currently working to rectify the situation. Please note that these are only rumours. Belkin does not condone spam and you will not see this type of advertising from Belkin anywhere and certainly not on our products.
I do hope you understand that occasionally companies such as ourselves can be subject to malice and I assure you this is one of those situations.....I have attached a pdf. detailing the situation for your information.
If you have any further questions or concerns about Belkin products, please contact myself directly.
Regards,
Liz Holland
PR & Trade Marketing Executive
Belkin Components
Tel: 01933 352152
Fax: 01933 312000
- cut here -
The PDF, although posted previously elsewhere, reads:
- cut again -
Does the Belkin Router send me Spam? NO.
Recently a group of privacy advocates have targeted Belkin Routers, claiming that Belkin Routers equipped with Parental Control send spam, unwanted advertisements and spyware to computers.
1. Belkin Parental Control Content Filtering is promoted on our 802.11g Wireless Router packages as an added value service included with purchase. Parental Control filtering enables our customers to block access from their network to specific websites; it is a content filter, nothing more.
2. During the installation process, the router produces a web page asking the owner of the router if they want to sign up for a free six-month trial of Belkin Parental Control, similar to common online product registration requests.
3. The Parental Control registration page is not spam, adware or spyware. It is part of the setup process of the router. It does not "hi-jack" the browser.
4. Belkin routers do not install spyware or adware, nor does Belkin have the ability to advertise to our customers using our routers as a conduit.
5. If a customer clicks "No Thanks" on the first prompt, the registration page for Parental Control signup will no longer appear.
Additional Information:
- The "No Thanks" button is not a trick button that will install spyware, etc. on the computer. If a customer is uneasy clicking "No Thanks" in the web page, to stop the reminder, you can navigate to the Internal web page of the Router, click on Parental Control and select "Don't Remind me Every 8 hours". This will stop the web page from ever being displayed again.
- If the browser window is closed without clicking "No Thanks", it will be displayed again after 8 hours has elapsed. Please note that this is not a browser pop-up, this means that the Parental Control web page will only be displayed if the user opens the browser. Again, clicking "No Thanks" will stop the web page from being displayed.
We sincerely hope that this information provides an explanation that meets your needs, if for any reason you would like to contact Belkin directly, please email your concerns to Kannynmc@belkin.com
Regards,
Kannyn MacRae
Business Unit Manager, Networking
Belkin Corporation
- cut here -
And if anyone missed the interesting stuff in Usenet NANAE, the "No thanks" button referenced above sent a signal FROM BELKIN TO THE ROUTER to reconfigure it to not show ads.
They have shown, and continue to show, an amazing lack of clue.
Saying that "Matrix Revolutions" is better than "Reloaded" is about like saying it is better than Adam Sandler's car.
Which, by the way, I do not agree with. It does not quite reach the level of genuine quality craftsmanship you get from hearing Mr. Sandler sing about his automobile...
We
unintentionally overlooked the effect this feature would have. We
never intended to compromise the trust of our customers
I'll ignore the effect above being a bad rewrite of public outrage, or more importantly, lost sales.
Instead:
If they didn't intend to compromise the trust, it means they didn't know they were doing so.
So, which other products that are shipping from Belkin today are compromising the trust of the users as we speak, without Belkin knowing about it?
This is a seriously big fuckup, and it has to be done either with full malicious intent or devastating incompetence. In the first case, apologies can be posted, the intent can be withdrawn, and the course changed.
It appears that Belkin they didn't have such an intent, and therefore, the only option remaining is that they are devastatingly incompetent.
Ummm, your backups are sent to a web-page?
No, not particularly. They are, however, sent to a repository that has a web service interface.
So it's port 80 alright.
Good afternoon.
My name is [name deleted], and I work as IT department manager for a medium sized company in [place deleted]. I write to you in light of the recent unveiling that Belkin are knowingly shipping routers that show commercials to the end users by hijacking HTTP connections.
I am not sure if the product manager, Eric Deming, who designed the product to not work as expected did so understanding the full consequences if - or, rather, when - this information would become public. The one reason Belkin's name has been held in high regard at the company I work for is because of dependability. When it turns out that Belkin is actively designing products to not work dependably, but instead display advertising at the user; that reputation of dependability... well... there's not much left of it. And, as you are aware, for every one of Belkin's products, there is a competing product.
It becomes much worse. It also turns out that Belkin has the ability to remotely modify the behavior of these routers. When I showed this fact to our network security people, they went ballistic and drove straight off to the local equipment store, only to come back two hours later with a bunch of boxes. 30 minutes later, there was a heap of discarded equipment in a disorderly pile in one corner of the networking room. The discarded items all carried the name "Belkin". I signed the receipt for the new equipment with a look, a sigh, and a nod.
To top it off, it seems that your Mr. Deming who designed this behavior believes that every outbound hijackable connection originates from somebody sitting at a computer and browsing the web. However, more important are the automated connections. What would happen if the backup for our commercial data, which is transmitted regularly over the Internet, instead was pushed to Belkin, due to this behavior? What would happen if virus or operating system upgrade connections were the ones hijacked? Heart defibrillating equipment has been mentioned - what would happen if the heart defibrillation monitor, trying to trigger the impulse with the charging equipment, is instead redirected to a Belkin advertisement? You know, telesurgery exists and does depend on a reliable Internet infrastructure, consisting of such boxes as yours.
This product has been designed to not work, despite charging good money for it. I lack words to describe how shameful this behavior is.
Additionally, if the Belkin corporate culture is one that allows such a technical atrocity to make it to the shelves for one product, then it is obvious it may happen again, or has already happened, for other products. However, rest assured that this company will never again buy another Belkin product as long as I run the IT department.
[signature]
Apparently, the original series had the sound effects workshop up in arms -- Douglas Adams had given them all the instructions they needed, with the wit and clarity well matching the radio series as a whole.
:-)
If you were a sound engineer charged with producing fx, how would YOU react to the sound description of a typical office building flying through space, to pick one example?
Language mix-up on my part. In my native tongue, the unspecified "coal" is the chemically pure element.
But that's Hollywood for you - you can't just make one great movie and leave it alone. You have to squeeze every dollar out of the franchise while you can!
:-(
I agree. Last time I was at a bookstore, I even noticed that Lord of the Rings, this masterpiece of an epic, is already out in book form.
Pathetic what lengths commercialization will go to these days. There's just no leaving good movies alone anymore.
Gun powder is Nitroglycerin.
Uhm, no.
Nitroglycerin is a clear oily substance formed by adding nitrate groups to glycerin, a common base for lipids (fats). Nitroglycerin will even burn brightly (in fact, some dimwitted mine workers used it in their lamps, as it produced a better flame than ordinary lamp oil).
Gunpowder is a dry mixture of sulphur, saltpeter, and ordinary coal.
Gunpowder is a do-it-yourself-in-a-heartbeat recipe. Nitroglycerin is not. (Well, technically it's not very hard to make, but the process is far from safe.)
In any case, they are absolutely not to be confused with each other. That will result in anything from a major embarrasment to a Darwin Award.
It was not TOO long ago that two states actually wrote into law the value of pi... and on top of that, an INCORRECT value.
Why would this be different?
The Nazi party name was NSDAP, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (please excuse any misspellings).
National Socialist German Labor Party.
Now again, how is that NOT socialist?
Once the rockets are up,
who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!
(...says Werner von Braun.)
It's not suicide, it's me who clicked that little "Bomb" button on the panel, next to the digging button.
:-)
They're cute when they blow.
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I do agree.
I know that when it comes to law and corporation separately, there is no such thing as common sense. When law and corporation intermingle, things get even worse and there's no way of telling which way is up anymore.
Ok, so I'm not aware of who owns the GROUND the campus is located on. Specifically, I'm not aware who owns the ground which are not covered by buildings.
What I do know is that it's publicly accessible, and that it makes no sense to prohibit an employee from photographing trees which may be on campus grounds when any passer-by can do it.