I was stuck with this same question, a lot of our clients, art gallerys, adult entertainment, etc. all needed self-publishing (basically so they'd leave us, their site designers, alone), I didn't find anything that fit the layout of their sites (I didn't want to change the overall look) so I started writing something that was somewhat flexible in terms of layout.
All I knew, well, was asp so it's written for IIS, and uses some PHP for file uploads and Graphicsmagic (spawn of ImageMagick) for image manipulation. It works directly with the file system and text files, no database.
If I had to do it over I might say use MySQL but I wanted to make it work pretty much anywhere, and I knew the file system object so... Anyway I started about 9 months ago and it should be finished any day now... really. Nearly done. So that's the only problem with DIY, you have to be fast, or really dedicated. IMHO A content management system is not THAT easy...
who needs it when we have portable local FM broadcasting add-ons (let's see, like here). I'd love to see a crowd with many people useing these, you could just browse from person to person listening to what they're listening to.
Has anyone ever used one of these things? does it work well?
Comments are well taken, I was -=furious=- at my ISP (Speakeasy, what hath become of thou? You were once so good!). I also blamed the reporting agency somewhat, we use a legitimate reply-to address which we check regularly, a legitimate DNS registration with working contact information, we don't obscure our mail headers in any way and we use an opt-in only list with confirmation and an unsubscribe feature. The most simple check into our organization would have shown we weren't spamming.
The responses are correct, spamcops were a small part of the problem, most of the responsibility was with our ISP (and of course the brain surgeon that reported us). I'll not post grumpy stuff before my morning coffee again, promise:)
"A false complaint to their domain registrar led to all primary DNS information being pulled."
That's funny because a false complaint against us by spamcop led to all our servers being off the net for a day last year. They did ZERO research on the complaint and took it straight to our ISP (rather than trying to contact us by our abundant and up-to-date contact info available in our emails and on our websites). Their conduct was beyond reckless, it was vicious.
I'm all for good anti-spam but those guys can bite me. Serves them right IMHO.
I need help with Gator! One of my clients is hooked on it - it has, literally, hundreds of his passwords for god knows what websites, and he can't function without it. I know you can export and import the password file (as I had to do when I rebuilt his PC, god it pained me to install gator on a PC) but is there any way to extract the URL/Login/Password combinations? I spent a little time looking on Google but found nothing. Any help is welcome.
Since when has there been any liability issues if a driver messes up a system? I'd have sued ATI, NVIDIA, VIA, Intel, and, oh, pretty much everyone who's ever written a driver that has gone titsup on my box. OH, yea, and Microsoft for their jet drivers, and probably for Access' ODBC drivers too. God, the list goes on.
Of course, they're asking me to install the driver first, right? Otherwise, it's illegal as hell, I believe.
That is the most brilliant anti-copy technology I've ever heard of - simply produce music so bad no one wants to copy it! I think the RIAA is on to you though, only the next release of a solo spice girl project will tell....
I'm pretty sure you're right, they can't be turned off, without, as one poster suggested, destroying the tag (not sure that's even possible in a real-world situation). I looked into them for a project but was dissapointed in the read range (which is good news for privacy concerns) and the readers are still pretty expensive. If anyone knows about turning rfid tags on and off please post? I'm sure many people would be interested.
for that fact, what's the difference between DivX, divX:) and mpeg4? I always thought they were pretty much the same, just different implementations of the same compression algorythms...
When I was a hiring manager I liked psinapse because, while I got very few resumes from them, every one was a good candidate for the job opening (they sent almost no crud) - Since I've been freelance I've done a job for them as well, they were easy to work with and very supportive. Small company, but nice.
from the article: "Another link allows you to send e-mail to friends so they can download a copy of the song playable for 10 days..."
So they're actually setting up file sharing software on your PC (or do they mean the song is attached in the email? AND the software for playing it?). That's pretty sweet.
You know they'll be burned on this, there is simply no way a cd can play in a cd player and not be ripped. But at least, what, 3 or 4 years after napster, they're finally starting to get it.
Does anyone have more details on the software that's being installed or the file sharing properties?
Well, OK, here's my perspective. I consider myself a responsible member of the community, I hate spam and do not consider myself a spammer. I do admin a mailing list for local clubs, flyers, free admissions, party announcements (about 4 emails a month) - it's all opt-in at the club's websites; however, we used to not have a confirmation (but we always used a legit reply to address, never hid ourselves and always unsubscribed people). After a run-in with a spam complaint, we added confirmation.
So it's opt-in and confirmed. Only about 4,500 people on the list. And in the last 60 days we've received about 30 spam complaints, all from the AOL "click the box if this is spam" thingy that AOL started a few months ago. ALL FROM PEOPLE WHO I KNOW SIGNED UP FOR OUR LIST. There's nothing shady, no sneaky email snatch. We say if you want us to send you mail, give us your email address, that's all.
When we got our first complaint, it came through spamcops, our ISP immediately shut down both our locations (including my house and our webserver which hosts a dozen sites including political sites and art galleries...). From one, unsubstantiated complaint. Unverified. And our ISP didn't even inform us first! Spamcops didn't tell us who complained (so we couldn't remove them from our list). The ISP restored our service afer a day but it was STUPID.
The reason they could shut us down was because we DIDN'T HIDE, nothing forged, all above-the-board. At the time I'd not even considered that someone might sign a third party up to our list (because we lacked confirmation), it was a small thing, local stuff, and, you know, I still doubt that was the case. The clubs are 'adult' and I suspect someone's wife found they were on the list and bitched him out, he said no, honey, I didn't ask for these emails, look, I'm reporting them.
OK, so lesson learned, we now have confirmation (thanks to the lovely folks at mailermailer.com) and our list is so fucking opt-in'd it's unbelievable, but we STILL GET SPAM COMPLAINTS FROM AOL LUSERS (none from a non-aol address since that one time, hell, it was prob. someone from AOL who contacted spamcops).
I'm rambling, but doesn't anyone else see this is insane? It's a clasic case of "they came for the jews, but I wasn't a jew so I said nothing".
I'm not a spammer. But this law scares me. What do you use the internet for, and how long until someone comes after you?
Re:RTFA... old technology
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 1
Very well put. Sorry I already replied in this thread and can't give you mod points, so I have to just give props.
Criminal tracking wile on parole, if parole times are 'reasonable', is probably acceptable. Tracking convicted criminals for life isn't. After you've done the crime and served the crime, in theory, that kind of puts you back into the innocent camp again, doesn't it?
Re:I don't want to believe this, but I do anyway
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
An 'average' RFID tag/reader combo will barely read at 20cm in ideal conditions (no metal). So I give you my devide, I call it AIR (tm). Simply fill the room with a spray can full of AIR(tm) and disable all those pesky tags.
Seriously, RFID is an improvement on bar code scanners, the potential for abuse is there because the tags can be quite small and the reader can be less obvious than a CueCat but it's still, essentially, the same kind of technology. Maybe RFID technology will improve dramatically and an average reader will be able to work at 1m, someday, but for now your 50' radius is safely proscribed.
That's exactly why the chances of a zero-day exploit are higher on open source software than closed source *ouch*
I was wondering about that the other day, it seems like it's been a long time since an exploit was revealed by looking at how a virus works (a -1 day exploit?). Almost all worm and many viruses nowadays are exploiting holes that a patch already exists for, or simply aren't exploiting holes.
It's also weird that security holes seem to appear in such a regular pattern across the lifespan of the OS. Shouldn't a ton of exploits appear near the OS launch, then diminishing, less damaging ones later? Doesn't seem like that's the way it works though...
lol, not at the same time. I'm just saying the document lifecycle in document-heavy offices is different than your average "I use it at my local real estate office" or whatever. Lots of people access the document over time and it seems each of them has a different idea how to edit (one interesting thing about Word is there's always 2 or 3 different ways of doing what, in the end, appears identical (work flow homophomes?) but under the skin are really different). I like choice but if MS stuck with one-way-to-do-every-action we'd have a lot fewer problems with these kind of documents.
I rtfa and it was pretty light - more questions for anyone who's used Star Office in a professional environment - hows the automation (does it have anything equivelant, or, hopefully, better, than useful-but-bugriddled VBA?) How's the interoperability with MSWord documents? Can you go from Word to OOo/StarOffice and back a hundred times in a large document that 20 people have edited in 70 different ways, with embedded graphics, tables, etc. U know, does it WORK?
I'm as close to an expert in MS Office as anyone (outside Woody of WOPR and the lovely lady behind slipstick), I write VBA (when I have to) and have taught classes in the thing. And I hate it. It's truely a horrible product, MS tried to do too much and failed to get the important things right (like, say, making sure that if you have 1,000 large documents on a network storage device, none of them experience format-wrenching corruption at any point over thier lifespan. With Word, anywhere from 1 - 10 (yea, that's.1 - 1%, which is a lot if you have a half million documents) of them will).
Have any large, document-oriented shops (like, say a law firm, or pharmeceutical company, or something) ever done a real, hard test, both on the suite and its interoperablity with MS stuff?
Curious, because I've tried, and failed, to argue this against our graphics guy, do you, or anyone else, have an arguement against flash that outweighs the fact that it's the only way to reliably do animation effects in a browser. The alternative, javascript on the client, is just too horrible to mention.
Now the obvious arguement, you don't need animations in a web page, doesn't cut it, because, well, he's the designer, and he says he needs animations. I'm the programmer, he kind of trumps me on design issues.
And flash MX has gotten somewhat better about playing, a little, like a decent html page, at least it talks to search engines.
Me, I run a PIII 450 and I hate the way a simple flash page pegs my CPU. Curiously, it does that to my athlon 1.4 as well, but, um, you know, the page needs animations.
Do you have a good idea of how farking far it is from Las Vegas to Los Angeles? Around 230 miles, that means an average speed of 23 mph over shitty conditions. How could you possibly build anything with enough of a power supply to go that far, that fast, and keep it under 100 lbs?
I just mean to say, they're thinking big for a reason. It's a long, fast track they've layed out.
well, I would buy them short. It's tricky, you have to pick the option length right, but basically if you have a short position and the stock tanks from $30 - $1 per share you make $29 per share.
Well, you write to your favorite reporters. I've written to The Register before and gotten a good response. Next, you write a letter to the editor and send them to your favorite news outlets. Do some research and find a voter's rights group and use their resources/voulenteer; and, lastly, you put on a chicken suit, attach a bungie cord to your back, set yourself on fire and jump off the most publicly visible spot you can find. When they finally get you down, presuming you survive the fire, you'll be face to face with hundreds of reporters. Improvise.
Prediction: Wars between political campaigns and hackers over the 1337 space of the voting booth results in Ohio registering over 30 billion votes in the next Presidential election, with Luke Skywalker edging out both Dean and Bush, and the Democratic candidate coming in a distant 4th.
Speaking of lawyers, now that the SCO execs dumped stock already, the lawyers are the only ones left making money on this miserable situation. For example, SCO's main law firm and especially their Partner-In-Bed (is that an official term?) w/ SCO, Mark Heise in the Miami office.
but quite frankly most Microsoft security patches do exactly what they're designed to do
How do you know? Seriously. The documentation is so piss poor, you can rarely tell wtf the patches are supposed to do. Furthermore, it's just not true - patches screw stuff up all the time - maybe not 50% of the time but I'd say at least.5% of all patch applications do significant damage. Across large numbers of PCs that's a pretty big percentage.
You know, this question may not be solved simply by technology. There are some fancy network configuration suggestions here, all good I'm sure, but what if you just had good, freely available tech support (maybe on every-other floor of the dorm have a 'trained' tech guy like you have an RA) that can help people help themselves? Minimize the viruses, then deal with the ones that still occur with Tiger Ninja Networking Technique.
That and free backup space on the University server and you should have a decent environment to download music in.
So true, I used to recommend Dell to my clients but not any more. The last batch of opterons I installed had crippleware installed that actually started to crash, badly, when the users tried to open.jpg files (this was the default build straight from Dell). And then there's the aol crap. It's like getting commercials when you go to the movies, I BOUGHT this computer, paid a premium b/c it's Dell, and I expect it to come without ADs like it's an EMACHINE or something.
And the default install of MS Office is horrible. And the wireless takes over 1 minute after login is complete to connect to a 64 bit encrypted network (still can't figure that one out). And...
Slashdot Mirror
I was stuck with this same question, a lot of our clients, art gallerys, adult entertainment, etc. all needed self-publishing (basically so they'd leave us, their site designers, alone), I didn't find anything that fit the layout of their sites (I didn't want to change the overall look) so I started writing something that was somewhat flexible in terms of layout.
... really. Nearly done. So that's the only problem with DIY, you have to be fast, or really dedicated. IMHO A content management system is not THAT easy...
All I knew, well, was asp so it's written for IIS, and uses some PHP for file uploads and Graphicsmagic (spawn of ImageMagick) for image manipulation. It works directly with the file system and text files, no database.
If I had to do it over I might say use MySQL but I wanted to make it work pretty much anywhere, and I knew the file system object so... Anyway I started about 9 months ago and it should be finished any day now
who needs it when we have portable local FM broadcasting add-ons (let's see, like here). I'd love to see a crowd with many people useing these, you could just browse from person to person listening to what they're listening to.
Has anyone ever used one of these things? does it work well?
Comments are well taken, I was -=furious=- at my ISP (Speakeasy, what hath become of thou? You were once so good!). I also blamed the reporting agency somewhat, we use a legitimate reply-to address which we check regularly, a legitimate DNS registration with working contact information, we don't obscure our mail headers in any way and we use an opt-in only list with confirmation and an unsubscribe feature. The most simple check into our organization would have shown we weren't spamming.
:)
The responses are correct, spamcops were a small part of the problem, most of the responsibility was with our ISP (and of course the brain surgeon that reported us). I'll not post grumpy stuff before my morning coffee again, promise
"A false complaint to their domain registrar led to all primary DNS information being pulled."
That's funny because a false complaint against us by spamcop led to all our servers being off the net for a day last year. They did ZERO research on the complaint and took it straight to our ISP (rather than trying to contact us by our abundant and up-to-date contact info available in our emails and on our websites). Their conduct was beyond reckless, it was vicious.
I'm all for good anti-spam but those guys can bite me. Serves them right IMHO.
I need help with Gator! One of my clients is hooked on it - it has, literally, hundreds of his passwords for god knows what websites, and he can't function without it. I know you can export and import the password file (as I had to do when I rebuilt his PC, god it pained me to install gator on a PC) but is there any way to extract the URL/Login/Password combinations? I spent a little time looking on Google but found nothing. Any help is welcome.
Since when has there been any liability issues if a driver messes up a system? I'd have sued ATI, NVIDIA, VIA, Intel, and, oh, pretty much everyone who's ever written a driver that has gone titsup on my box. OH, yea, and Microsoft for their jet drivers, and probably for Access' ODBC drivers too. God, the list goes on.
Of course, they're asking me to install the driver first, right? Otherwise, it's illegal as hell, I believe.
That is the most brilliant anti-copy technology I've ever heard of - simply produce music so bad no one wants to copy it! I think the RIAA is on to you though, only the next release of a solo spice girl project will tell....
I'm pretty sure you're right, they can't be turned off, without, as one poster suggested, destroying the tag (not sure that's even possible in a real-world situation). I looked into them for a project but was dissapointed in the read range (which is good news for privacy concerns) and the readers are still pretty expensive. If anyone knows about turning rfid tags on and off please post? I'm sure many people would be interested.
for that fact, what's the difference between DivX, divX:) and mpeg4? I always thought they were pretty much the same, just different implementations of the same compression algorythms...
When I was a hiring manager I liked psinapse because, while I got very few resumes from them, every one was a good candidate for the job opening (they sent almost no crud) - Since I've been freelance I've done a job for them as well, they were easy to work with and very supportive. Small company, but nice.
from the article:
"Another link allows you to send e-mail to friends so they can download a copy of the song playable for 10 days..."
So they're actually setting up file sharing software on your PC (or do they mean the song is attached in the email? AND the software for playing it?). That's pretty sweet.
You know they'll be burned on this, there is simply no way a cd can play in a cd player and not be ripped. But at least, what, 3 or 4 years after napster, they're finally starting to get it.
Does anyone have more details on the software that's being installed or the file sharing properties?
Well, OK, here's my perspective. I consider myself a responsible member of the community, I hate spam and do not consider myself a spammer. I do admin a mailing list for local clubs, flyers, free admissions, party announcements (about 4 emails a month) - it's all opt-in at the club's websites; however, we used to not have a confirmation (but we always used a legit reply to address, never hid ourselves and always unsubscribed people). After a run-in with a spam complaint, we added confirmation.
So it's opt-in and confirmed. Only about 4,500 people on the list. And in the last 60 days we've received about 30 spam complaints, all from the AOL "click the box if this is spam" thingy that AOL started a few months ago. ALL FROM PEOPLE WHO I KNOW SIGNED UP FOR OUR LIST. There's nothing shady, no sneaky email snatch. We say if you want us to send you mail, give us your email address, that's all.
When we got our first complaint, it came through spamcops, our ISP immediately shut down both our locations (including my house and our webserver which hosts a dozen sites including political sites and art galleries...). From one, unsubstantiated complaint. Unverified. And our ISP didn't even inform us first! Spamcops didn't tell us who complained (so we couldn't remove them from our list). The ISP restored our service afer a day but it was STUPID.
The reason they could shut us down was because we DIDN'T HIDE, nothing forged, all above-the-board. At the time I'd not even considered that someone might sign a third party up to our list (because we lacked confirmation), it was a small thing, local stuff, and, you know, I still doubt that was the case. The clubs are 'adult' and I suspect someone's wife found they were on the list and bitched him out, he said no, honey, I didn't ask for these emails, look, I'm reporting them.
OK, so lesson learned, we now have confirmation (thanks to the lovely folks at mailermailer.com) and our list is so fucking opt-in'd it's unbelievable, but we STILL GET SPAM COMPLAINTS FROM AOL LUSERS (none from a non-aol address since that one time, hell, it was prob. someone from AOL who contacted spamcops).
I'm rambling, but doesn't anyone else see this is insane? It's a clasic case of "they came for the jews, but I wasn't a jew so I said nothing".
I'm not a spammer. But this law scares me. What do you use the internet for, and how long until someone comes after you?
Very well put. Sorry I already replied in this thread and can't give you mod points, so I have to just give props.
Criminal tracking wile on parole, if parole times are 'reasonable', is probably acceptable. Tracking convicted criminals for life isn't. After you've done the crime and served the crime, in theory, that kind of puts you back into the innocent camp again, doesn't it?
An 'average' RFID tag/reader combo will barely read at 20cm in ideal conditions (no metal). So I give you my devide, I call it AIR (tm). Simply fill the room with a spray can full of AIR(tm) and disable all those pesky tags.
Seriously, RFID is an improvement on bar code scanners, the potential for abuse is there because the tags can be quite small and the reader can be less obvious than a CueCat but it's still, essentially, the same kind of technology. Maybe RFID technology will improve dramatically and an average reader will be able to work at 1m, someday, but for now your 50' radius is safely proscribed.
That's exactly why the chances of a zero-day exploit are higher on open source software than closed source *ouch*
I was wondering about that the other day, it seems like it's been a long time since an exploit was revealed by looking at how a virus works (a -1 day exploit?). Almost all worm and many viruses nowadays are exploiting holes that a patch already exists for, or simply aren't exploiting holes.
It's also weird that security holes seem to appear in such a regular pattern across the lifespan of the OS. Shouldn't a ton of exploits appear near the OS launch, then diminishing, less damaging ones later? Doesn't seem like that's the way it works though...
lol, not at the same time. I'm just saying the document lifecycle in document-heavy offices is different than your average "I use it at my local real estate office" or whatever. Lots of people access the document over time and it seems each of them has a different idea how to edit (one interesting thing about Word is there's always 2 or 3 different ways of doing what, in the end, appears identical (work flow homophomes?) but under the skin are really different). I like choice but if MS stuck with one-way-to-do-every-action we'd have a lot fewer problems with these kind of documents.
I rtfa and it was pretty light - more questions for anyone who's used Star Office in a professional environment - hows the automation (does it have anything equivelant, or, hopefully, better, than useful-but-bugriddled VBA?) How's the interoperability with MSWord documents? Can you go from Word to OOo/StarOffice and back a hundred times in a large document that 20 people have edited in 70 different ways, with embedded graphics, tables, etc. U know, does it WORK?
.1 - 1%, which is a lot if you have a half million documents) of them will).
I'm as close to an expert in MS Office as anyone (outside Woody of WOPR and the lovely lady behind slipstick), I write VBA (when I have to) and have taught classes in the thing. And I hate it. It's truely a horrible product, MS tried to do too much and failed to get the important things right (like, say, making sure that if you have 1,000 large documents on a network storage device, none of them experience format-wrenching corruption at any point over thier lifespan. With Word, anywhere from 1 - 10 (yea, that's
Have any large, document-oriented shops (like, say a law firm, or pharmeceutical company, or something) ever done a real, hard test, both on the suite and its interoperablity with MS stuff?
Curious, because I've tried, and failed, to argue this against our graphics guy, do you, or anyone else, have an arguement against flash that outweighs the fact that it's the only way to reliably do animation effects in a browser. The alternative, javascript on the client, is just too horrible to mention.
Now the obvious arguement, you don't need animations in a web page, doesn't cut it, because, well, he's the designer, and he says he needs animations. I'm the programmer, he kind of trumps me on design issues.
And flash MX has gotten somewhat better about playing, a little, like a decent html page, at least it talks to search engines.
Me, I run a PIII 450 and I hate the way a simple flash page pegs my CPU. Curiously, it does that to my athlon 1.4 as well, but, um, you know, the page needs animations.
Any support is welcome...
Do you have a good idea of how farking far it is from Las Vegas to Los Angeles? Around 230 miles, that means an average speed of 23 mph over shitty conditions. How could you possibly build anything with enough of a power supply to go that far, that fast, and keep it under 100 lbs?
I just mean to say, they're thinking big for a reason. It's a long, fast track they've layed out.
Prediction: no one wins until 2006.
well, I would buy them short. It's tricky, you have to pick the option length right, but basically if you have a short position and the stock tanks from $30 - $1 per share you make $29 per share.
Well, you write to your favorite reporters. I've written to The Register before and gotten a good response. Next, you write a letter to the editor and send them to your favorite news outlets. Do some research and find a voter's rights group and use their resources/voulenteer; and, lastly, you put on a chicken suit, attach a bungie cord to your back, set yourself on fire and jump off the most publicly visible spot you can find. When they finally get you down, presuming you survive the fire, you'll be face to face with hundreds of reporters. Improvise.
This is a great question, btw, mod parent up...
Prediction: Wars between political campaigns and hackers over the 1337 space of the voting booth results in Ohio registering over 30 billion votes in the next Presidential election, with Luke Skywalker edging out both Dean and Bush, and the Democratic candidate coming in a distant 4th.
Speaking of lawyers, now that the SCO execs dumped stock already, the lawyers are the only ones left making money on this miserable situation. For example, SCO's main law firm and especially their Partner-In-Bed (is that an official term?) w/ SCO, Mark Heise in the Miami office.
but quite frankly most Microsoft security patches do exactly what they're designed to do
.5% of all patch applications do significant damage. Across large numbers of PCs that's a pretty big percentage.
How do you know? Seriously. The documentation is so piss poor, you can rarely tell wtf the patches are supposed to do. Furthermore, it's just not true - patches screw stuff up all the time - maybe not 50% of the time but I'd say at least
You know, this question may not be solved simply by technology. There are some fancy network configuration suggestions here, all good I'm sure, but what if you just had good, freely available tech support (maybe on every-other floor of the dorm have a 'trained' tech guy like you have an RA) that can help people help themselves? Minimize the viruses, then deal with the ones that still occur with Tiger Ninja Networking Technique.
That and free backup space on the University server and you should have a decent environment to download music in.
So true, I used to recommend Dell to my clients but not any more. The last batch of opterons I installed had crippleware installed that actually started to crash, badly, when the users tried to open .jpg files (this was the default build straight from Dell). And then there's the aol crap. It's like getting commercials when you go to the movies, I BOUGHT this computer, paid a premium b/c it's Dell, and I expect it to come without ADs like it's an EMACHINE or something.
And the default install of MS Office is horrible. And the wireless takes over 1 minute after login is complete to connect to a 64 bit encrypted network (still can't figure that one out). And...
Dell is SO FIRED.