Re:No matter how careful you are, you aren't enoug
on
ID Theft Made Easy
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· Score: 1
I saw the clerk write down my license plate and I asked them for the paper when I left.
Although I agree with 99.9% of everything you stated, the license plate number bit I can not. It is on the back and/or front of your car. ANYONE can write that down, not just the gas station operator. I understand the more information someone has the better the chance they can steal your identity but it would require some form of DMV/Police access to get any information from the license plate. I treat that like a house/street number. Anyone can follow you home and write that information down along with the rest of your license plate numbers as well. Think about your neighbors. You have access to all of their licence plate numbers, their full names and their house number. That is not enough to steal their identity. Hell, even if I had their CC in my hand, I could not steal their identity, I could proably use that specific card until it was cancelled but I would not be able to get more cards in their name or apply for any new credit against them with it.
Wether or not anyone has lust over Motorolas products or not, they produce and sell cutting edge products that just about everyone in the world with electricity uses and have been for many many years. Their sales and products have nothing to do with lust for a brand name or a single product. Even with no lust, the products they make still sell in large quantities. Lust is not required for them to make a sale. IMHO, they are in a completely different business that does not require lust like the market that Apple is in. Adopting Apples practices is not required for them to sell products. That was my point.
It depends on the product. In this case, I think Apple is right. Motorola doesn't have much experience with releasing consumer products that people lust for... Apple does.
Apple has one of the best inventory records in the tech industry. Motorola should listen them.
You Apple fanbois kill me, it is comical. To even try to compare the position of these two companies seems very odd. Apple wraps existing technology into their own design, companies like Motorola make the technology, they are two different companies with two different goals.
Apple has had ONE general consumer hit product, the iPod line. Motorola has been in existance for over 75 years. They made/make ICs, cell phones (since 1983), cable modems, cable boxes, probably every portable radio carried by every company and every emergency service in the US, the first "portable" walkie-talkies in the 40's, the first 4:3 color television picture tube, Neil Armstrongs voice was heard from the moon over a Motorola designed radio, embedded processors for video games, chips inside digital cameras, electronics for the automotive industry, some of the first televisions home radios and car radios, pagers and more. You probably have at least two things within your sight right now that have something made by Motorola in them. Excitement or not, they are selling and developing products.
Oh, I said fanbios, I guess you can mod me down now.
Each cable system is different but I believe to knock you down to the very basic low end service level, they have to install an actual notch filter in-line with your cable run to the house. This will filter out anything but the "basic" channels. I'm sure they will eventually get around to doing that so your free channels may end at some point. Maybe the systems have changed over the years but at least that is how it used to be done.
I'm sure there are many ways. This link is a little dated but still worth a read. You can create different printers on a Samba machine and print to them from any computer on the network, the resulting file is dropped into a Samba share.
At work, I have a Samba server setup with a PDF, jpeg, tiff, gp4 fax, and several other "printers" that I can print documents to from any Win machine and have them converted.
Basically building on the above link, create multiple printers and use gs and switches to your desire. For jpeg I use gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -r300x300, for g4 fax I use gs -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -r100x100 and so on (man gs or google for other options). Works great.
what's really the point is that vonage let them believe that 911 would work perfectly - which it didn't.
How did you determine that statement? I did not see that in the links from the article (although I may have missed it) and I see no way anyone could have deduced that from the information Vonage supplies on their web page. Regardless, I am about to jump to VOIP for my house and I NEVER got the impression from a single VOIP company I researched yet that 911 service would work perfectly if at all. In fact, each companies policy I've read clearly stated that 911 was an issue and also clearly stated there was problems with the 911 system for VOIP and what some of the potential workarounds and pitfalls were. Even though I have not switched to VOIP yet, I've already discussed with my family the potential 911 issues (the system itself, broadband going down, power going out etc..) and our own workarounds for when we do switch. I do not know all of the details in this specific case referenced in the story but IMHO, it sounds like someone trying to blame someone else for themselves for a risk they have chosen and not being prepared for the side effects.
I actually got out of the white box business for that exact reason. I point people to Dell's rotating outragous deals, the Sunday paper ads, or a link or site I may see on a deal site. They get an above average deal, I look all right because I gave them some good advice, and I am no longer bothered with their various PC problems. My car and house work is shared pretty evenly give and take across all of my friends;)
That is not a valid reason to crack a system which has been working quite well for a while now. I am not for, against, justifing or promoting anything. I am simply stating a fact. When you build a system that is supposed to be secure, you better not rely on any type of obscurity or hidden feature because it WILL be found and it WILL be bypassed by someone.
I don't want to end up having to get a modchip for my computer just because dicks like him are circumventing existing methods.
Your anger is displaced. Hardware protection in computers will only be forced on you if it becomes a law. It will only become a law if the hardware and software companies lobby enough. They are the ones you should be angry at. The fact that you find a specific in use DRM system acceptable but decide that any further restrictions would be unacceptable is the exact point that people have been stating for years! Where do you draw the line? Many have stated they want no DRM, some are happy with a little, some have no idea what DRM is but eventually they will and they will be just as pissed off as you are now. For the majority, it will be too late. For every dickhead you get pissed off at for cracking something, there are 5000 other dickheads that others get pissed off at for supporting companies that use any DRM systems at all like the one in iTMS. If no one supported DRM in any manner, companies would not feel inclined to continue to push it and expand it every chance they get. As the DRM gets more and more refined and restrictive, you will be trapped and stuck using that system as it gets worse. Wait another 10 years when regular old non DRM audio cds are no longer produced and you are forced to stick with one company or pay per play. People have been trying to point this out for years with DRM. Little by little, your rights to copyrighted material are fading away and you are supporting it.
There will always be another "dickhead" out there to take over where the previous one left off. Many people have said it before, many will say it in the future. Either way, you need to understand that security through obscurity does not work.
It takes minimal skill and a basic knowledge of tools and mechanical principals to change a timing belt, replace brakes, or a wheel bearing on *most* cars as well. That does not mean everyone is going to run out and do it themselves. Some people are not comfortable with performing work that others consider basic.
Maybe there survey included actual ip addresses and not just asking someone if they were owned? They are not comparing percentage of PCs that are owned vs not owned, they are looking at percentage of the owned computers in each country vs total owned. You could get higher accuracy but still very questionable.
I bet Symantec recognized weaker sales of their software in the UK and needed a PR boost to increase sales. That could explain the resolution of the figures and why they simply did not round them both off to 25%.
I got the typical box at the top that "Firefox has blocked a popup, click here to edit the popup options" Maybe they use different methods different times? I use FF all the time at work and home and I can not remember the last time I got a single popup. I use the Flash blocker/control plugin as well so maybe the newer flash popups I've heard about from others are not an issue for me either. What I would like is a method to actually let the flash animations run but only once and no loop. I looked for a method to default to that but gave up with no solution.
Is your XP Pro machine a domain member? With XP Pro, fast user switching is not allowed when the computer is a member of a domain, this may explain why two people can not be logged in at the same time.
I understand your concerns but there really is no need to make this more complex then is needed unless your goal is to maintain a very specific brightness within a certain tolerance. That may seem like a reasonable goal to achieve but you have to consider anyone with a window in a plain old office has changes in light levels throughout the day and it does not seem to cause any issues. Considering this system brings in that same light in relative brightness from the outside to people without an existing window, what would be the difference? I hope you are not impling that people in offices with windows now are effected every time a cloud goes by. I have a simple tier light in my living room that I paid $45 at Lowes. It has a light sensor. It comes on automatically when my living room gets to a certain brightness and gets brighter as the ambient light goes down. Nothing tricky, no computers, no central computer required. It only has one adjustment knob to adjust the max brightness. I actually have it adjusted very low so it really only comes on when it is "dark" in the house and it only gives off enough light as a large night light would (so when I get home at night, my house is not pitch black). Of course this is an incendescent light that is dimmable, maybe flourescent lights that are more commmon in the office environment would require something a little more elaborate but not have to be as technically involved that it needs to be computer controlled.
What lights are you refering to with different startup times? I know of quite a few types myself but I have never seen them used in an office as the primary lighting.
I collect my email to my own IMAP server via fetchmail so it does not really matter to what the host server is running. What does matter is if the host supports some type of secure login instead of just plain text password. fastmail.fm supports secure IMAP access on their free accounts. I've been using them for a while with no problems. I'm sure there are others.
a system that would turn on the electric lights in a building if there isn't enough sunlight.
That's not something "hard" to work on, all it takes is a photosensor. You can by the raw parts for pennies or get self contained pre wired and UL approved units that will switch up to like a 1000W resistive load for about $10 USD. Our office has motion sensors built into the switches, stop moving for 15 minutes and the lights shut off, it would proably take an extra few dollars to adapt that controler to also measure and use existing light level into the logic.
Heating and cooling options..
on
Sunlight in a Tube
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Off topic here but I have been wondering about an alternate heating/cooling system for a while and have found no information on this concept. Since this article is about energy saving, I assume people interested in that may be reading and may be able insight as to if this method would work...
Use alternate cooling/heating for the outdoor portions of a freon based cooling/heat pump system with water from underground. Underground temperature is usually quite stable at 55F. Basically, 55F degree water or a different cooling medium like car antifreeze (or some other product more environmentally friendly) at this temperature would be much more efficient at cooling/heating the condenser then using 80+ air or 30- air in the winter or summer. You could have an underground tank with a cooling medium in it that could act as a heat dump and pump the relatively warm or cold fluid up to the the existing outdoor unit for cooling. It would also be much quieter depending on design as you would not need a fan. I assume digging a hole and placing a concrete tank under the ground with a volume required consistent with your heating/cooling needs would be much cheaper in the long run then using a standard heat pump and air cooling. Obviosuly concrete is not the best conductor of heat but a steel tank may be better. Again, I have not calculated anything out so maybe my idea is out to lunch. I know I read a story about Toronto using cold water from the bottom of lake Ontario or Erie for summer cooling so progress has been in that direction, just not for home use or as an addition to typical home heat pump use.
Maybe I have been lucky but I see less then 5 attempts to my port 22 a day. I only allow accounts with existing keys (no password auth) and only from a few source ip addresses access but I can still see all of the attempts that fail. You can always see the trends by port and attack by browsing the internet storm center. See how you compare to the averages or you can look up specific port related issues from the other links on that page.
I am confused to what you are refering too (XP? W2K? MS Firewall?) so I may be talking about something else. Either way.. You SHOULD be able to select individual adapters that are and are not firewalled. I can on my XP machine for any number of adapters and it works fine. Local network, wireless, dialup, and my DSL connection are all independently controlled. In fact, we take it a step further on our work computers and use policies and scripts that any interface that is connected to our network will have the firewall off for that specific adapter. If it is not specifically attached to our network, the firewall is on. This allows full unfirewalled access to the machines by use or our various systems when people are in the office, dialed into our modem pool, or authenticated to our office wireless and full firewall when they are somewhere else on any other network using the same adapters.
Everyone of your examples is clearly an illegal act everywhere in the US, going to a strip club in your off time is NOT. I'm sorry you can not grasp the point of this thread and see the difference between your examples and mine. You actually interview people?
I understand your claims and I was in the military for 10 years myself (got out on my own;)), point is still, these requirements are well known way in advance and well documented and published for all to see from the day you enter the military. They are not going to keep people around that are borderline useless or had some disipline problems in the past which IMHO is the only reason someone should ever reach high year tenure. I don't give much weight to your claim of only poor test scores being the only cause. There are other ways for any commanding officer to promote someone that he/she wants to keep in the military.
I thought a lot more was illegal then really is. I found this somewhat related page from Monster. Either way, asking questions like that will raise a considerable suspicion and not something I think any company would like to get involved defending.
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I saw the clerk write down my license plate and I asked them for the paper when I left.
Although I agree with 99.9% of everything you stated, the license plate number bit I can not. It is on the back and/or front of your car. ANYONE can write that down, not just the gas station operator. I understand the more information someone has the better the chance they can steal your identity but it would require some form of DMV/Police access to get any information from the license plate. I treat that like a house/street number. Anyone can follow you home and write that information down along with the rest of your license plate numbers as well. Think about your neighbors. You have access to all of their licence plate numbers, their full names and their house number. That is not enough to steal their identity. Hell, even if I had their CC in my hand, I could not steal their identity, I could proably use that specific card until it was cancelled but I would not be able to get more cards in their name or apply for any new credit against them with it.
Wether or not anyone has lust over Motorolas products or not, they produce and sell cutting edge products that just about everyone in the world with electricity uses and have been for many many years. Their sales and products have nothing to do with lust for a brand name or a single product. Even with no lust, the products they make still sell in large quantities. Lust is not required for them to make a sale. IMHO, they are in a completely different business that does not require lust like the market that Apple is in. Adopting Apples practices is not required for them to sell products. That was my point.
It depends on the product. In this case, I think Apple is right. Motorola doesn't have much experience with releasing consumer products that people lust for... Apple does.
Apple has one of the best inventory records in the tech industry. Motorola should listen them.
You Apple fanbois kill me, it is comical. To even try to compare the position of these two companies seems very odd. Apple wraps existing technology into their own design, companies like Motorola make the technology, they are two different companies with two different goals.
Apple has had ONE general consumer hit product, the iPod line. Motorola has been in existance for over 75 years. They made/make ICs, cell phones (since 1983), cable modems, cable boxes, probably every portable radio carried by every company and every emergency service in the US, the first "portable" walkie-talkies in the 40's, the first 4:3 color television picture tube, Neil Armstrongs voice was heard from the moon over a Motorola designed radio, embedded processors for video games, chips inside digital cameras, electronics for the automotive industry, some of the first televisions home radios and car radios, pagers and more. You probably have at least two things within your sight right now that have something made by Motorola in them. Excitement or not, they are selling and developing products.
Oh, I said fanbios, I guess you can mod me down now.
Each cable system is different but I believe to knock you down to the very basic low end service level, they have to install an actual notch filter in-line with your cable run to the house. This will filter out anything but the "basic" channels. I'm sure they will eventually get around to doing that so your free channels may end at some point. Maybe the systems have changed over the years but at least that is how it used to be done.
I'm sure there are many ways. This link is a little dated but still worth a read. You can create different printers on a Samba machine and print to them from any computer on the network, the resulting file is dropped into a Samba share.
At work, I have a Samba server setup with a PDF, jpeg, tiff, gp4 fax, and several other "printers" that I can print documents to from any Win machine and have them converted.
Basically building on the above link, create multiple printers and use gs and switches to your desire. For jpeg I use gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -r300x300, for g4 fax I use gs -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -r100x100 and so on (man gs or google for other options). Works great.
what's really the point is that vonage let them believe that 911 would work perfectly - which it didn't.
How did you determine that statement? I did not see that in the links from the article (although I may have missed it) and I see no way anyone could have deduced that from the information Vonage supplies on their web page. Regardless, I am about to jump to VOIP for my house and I NEVER got the impression from a single VOIP company I researched yet that 911 service would work perfectly if at all. In fact, each companies policy I've read clearly stated that 911 was an issue and also clearly stated there was problems with the 911 system for VOIP and what some of the potential workarounds and pitfalls were. Even though I have not switched to VOIP yet, I've already discussed with my family the potential 911 issues (the system itself, broadband going down, power going out etc..) and our own workarounds for when we do switch.
I do not know all of the details in this specific case referenced in the story but IMHO, it sounds like someone trying to blame someone else for themselves for a risk they have chosen and not being prepared for the side effects.
I actually got out of the white box business for that exact reason. I point people to Dell's rotating outragous deals, the Sunday paper ads, or a link or site I may see on a deal site. They get an above average deal, I look all right because I gave them some good advice, and I am no longer bothered with their various PC problems. ;)
My car and house work is shared pretty evenly give and take across all of my friends
That is not a valid reason to crack a system which has been working quite well for a while now.
I am not for, against, justifing or promoting anything. I am simply stating a fact. When you build a system that is supposed to be secure, you better not rely on any type of obscurity or hidden feature because it WILL be found and it WILL be bypassed by someone.
I don't want to end up having to get a modchip for my computer just because dicks like him are circumventing existing methods.
Your anger is displaced. Hardware protection in computers will only be forced on you if it becomes a law. It will only become a law if the hardware and software companies lobby enough. They are the ones you should be angry at. The fact that you find a specific in use DRM system acceptable but decide that any further restrictions would be unacceptable is the exact point that people have been stating for years! Where do you draw the line? Many have stated they want no DRM, some are happy with a little, some have no idea what DRM is but eventually they will and they will be just as pissed off as you are now. For the majority, it will be too late.
For every dickhead you get pissed off at for cracking something, there are 5000 other dickheads that others get pissed off at for supporting companies that use any DRM systems at all like the one in iTMS. If no one supported DRM in any manner, companies would not feel inclined to continue to push it and expand it every chance they get. As the DRM gets more and more refined and restrictive, you will be trapped and stuck using that system as it gets worse. Wait another 10 years when regular old non DRM audio cds are no longer produced and you are forced to stick with one company or pay per play. People have been trying to point this out for years with DRM. Little by little, your rights to copyrighted material are fading away and you are supporting it.
There will always be another "dickhead" out there to take over where the previous one left off. Many people have said it before, many will say it in the future. Either way, you need to understand that security through obscurity does not work.
It takes minimal skill and a basic knowledge of tools and mechanical principals to change a timing belt, replace brakes, or a wheel bearing on *most* cars as well. That does not mean everyone is going to run out and do it themselves. Some people are not comfortable with performing work that others consider basic.
Maybe there survey included actual ip addresses and not just asking someone if they were owned? They are not comparing percentage of PCs that are owned vs not owned, they are looking at percentage of the owned computers in each country vs total owned. You could get higher accuracy but still very questionable.
I bet Symantec recognized weaker sales of their software in the UK and needed a PR boost to increase sales. That could explain the resolution of the figures and why they simply did not round them both off to 25%.
Using this proprietary disc is the same reason piracy doesn't exist in the Gamecube.
I wonder if Sega thought that too, think Dreamcast...
I got the typical box at the top that "Firefox has blocked a popup, click here to edit the popup options" Maybe they use different methods different times? I use FF all the time at work and home and I can not remember the last time I got a single popup. I use the Flash blocker/control plugin as well so maybe the newer flash popups I've heard about from others are not an issue for me either. What I would like is a method to actually let the flash animations run but only once and no loop. I looked for a method to default to that but gave up with no solution.
Is your XP Pro machine a domain member? With XP Pro, fast user switching is not allowed when the computer is a member of a domain, this may explain why two people can not be logged in at the same time.
I understand your concerns but there really is no need to make this more complex then is needed unless your goal is to maintain a very specific brightness within a certain tolerance. That may seem like a reasonable goal to achieve but you have to consider anyone with a window in a plain old office has changes in light levels throughout the day and it does not seem to cause any issues. Considering this system brings in that same light in relative brightness from the outside to people without an existing window, what would be the difference? I hope you are not impling that people in offices with windows now are effected every time a cloud goes by.
I have a simple tier light in my living room that I paid $45 at Lowes. It has a light sensor. It comes on automatically when my living room gets to a certain brightness and gets brighter as the ambient light goes down. Nothing tricky, no computers, no central computer required. It only has one adjustment knob to adjust the max brightness. I actually have it adjusted very low so it really only comes on when it is "dark" in the house and it only gives off enough light as a large night light would (so when I get home at night, my house is not pitch black). Of course this is an incendescent light that is dimmable, maybe flourescent lights that are more commmon in the office environment would require something a little more elaborate but not have to be as technically involved that it needs to be computer controlled.
What lights are you refering to with different startup times? I know of quite a few types myself but I have never seen them used in an office as the primary lighting.
I collect my email to my own IMAP server via fetchmail so it does not really matter to what the host server is running. What does matter is if the host supports some type of secure login instead of just plain text password. fastmail.fm supports secure IMAP access on their free accounts. I've been using them for a while with no problems. I'm sure there are others.
a system that would turn on the electric lights in a building if there isn't enough sunlight.
That's not something "hard" to work on, all it takes is a photosensor. You can by the raw parts for pennies or get self contained pre wired and UL approved units that will switch up to like a 1000W resistive load for about $10 USD. Our office has motion sensors built into the switches, stop moving for 15 minutes and the lights shut off, it would proably take an extra few dollars to adapt that controler to also measure and use existing light level into the logic.
That is exactly what I was looking for...
Off topic here but I have been wondering about an alternate heating/cooling system for a while and have found no information on this concept. Since this article is about energy saving, I assume people interested in that may be reading and may be able insight as to if this method would work...
Use alternate cooling/heating for the outdoor portions of a freon based cooling/heat pump system with water from underground. Underground temperature is usually quite stable at 55F. Basically, 55F degree water or a different cooling medium like car antifreeze (or some other product more environmentally friendly) at this temperature would be much more efficient at cooling/heating the condenser then using 80+ air or 30- air in the winter or summer. You could have an underground tank with a cooling medium in it that could act as a heat dump and pump the relatively warm or cold fluid up to the the existing outdoor unit for cooling. It would also be much quieter depending on design as you would not need a fan. I assume digging a hole and placing a concrete tank under the ground with a volume required consistent with your heating/cooling needs would be much cheaper in the long run then using a standard heat pump and air cooling. Obviosuly concrete is not the best conductor of heat but a steel tank may be better. Again, I have not calculated anything out so maybe my idea is out to lunch. I know I read a story about Toronto using cold water from the bottom of lake Ontario or Erie for summer cooling so progress has been in that direction, just not for home use or as an addition to typical home heat pump use.
Maybe I have been lucky but I see less then 5 attempts to my port 22 a day. I only allow accounts with existing keys (no password auth) and only from a few source ip addresses access but I can still see all of the attempts that fail. You can always see the trends by port and attack by browsing the internet storm center. See how you compare to the averages or you can look up specific port related issues from the other links on that page.
You are 100% correct. Once we finally roll out SP2, it will be tuned to something better then just "off" when on the local network.
I am confused to what you are refering too (XP? W2K? MS Firewall?) so I may be talking about something else.
Either way.. You SHOULD be able to select individual adapters that are and are not firewalled. I can on my XP machine for any number of adapters and it works fine. Local network, wireless, dialup, and my DSL connection are all independently controlled. In fact, we take it a step further on our work computers and use policies and scripts that any interface that is connected to our network will have the firewall off for that specific adapter. If it is not specifically attached to our network, the firewall is on. This allows full unfirewalled access to the machines by use or our various systems when people are in the office, dialed into our modem pool, or authenticated to our office wireless and full firewall when they are somewhere else on any other network using the same adapters.
Everyone of your examples is clearly an illegal act everywhere in the US, going to a strip club in your off time is NOT. I'm sorry you can not grasp the point of this thread and see the difference between your examples and mine. You actually interview people?
I understand your claims and I was in the military for 10 years myself (got out on my own ;)), point is still, these requirements are well known way in advance and well documented and published for all to see from the day you enter the military. They are not going to keep people around that are borderline useless or had some disipline problems in the past which IMHO is the only reason someone should ever reach high year tenure. I don't give much weight to your claim of only poor test scores being the only cause. There are other ways for any commanding officer to promote someone that he/she wants to keep in the military.
I thought a lot more was illegal then really is. I found this somewhat related page from Monster. Either way, asking questions like that will raise a considerable suspicion and not something I think any company would like to get involved defending.