So many standards indeed. According to the article "The W3C is saying the answer is XForms. Microsoft is saying it's XAML. Macromedia is saying it's Flash MX. And Mozilla [along with Opera and Apple] is saying it's XUL."
OK. Lovely. It looks like the Internet Explorer vs. Netscape Navigator browser war is back with a vengeance, only with some new players. I think it's safe to say that Macromedia isn't going to get its way, and I hope we've all learnt our lessons about Microsoft's bait and switch tactics with standards by now. Yeah, right! I'm betting Microsoft will go with XAML, and everyone else will go with XUL only to add XAML support later because Microsoft will refuse to support XUL. <Sigh> It's going to be CSS and browser specific hacks all over again, isn't it?
I've not found one yet, although that it would clarify what specific issues might be is somewhat remote I think. Either it's not been posted anywhere yet because it's the weekend or this "Open Letter" is "open" in the same sense that Microsoft's shared source is "open". They don't understand the concept of open source code, so why should we expect them to understand the concept of an open letter?;)
Could somebody please explain what the problem with DHCP is? There certainly seem to be plenty of documents to enable openimplementations to me. Or are they talking about some proprietary Microsoft extension to DHCP that is rightly being ignored by everyone else?
No, they recognised the signs, there was even an interview with some of the tribesmen on TV where they explained this. In a similar vein there was a story about a young girl of who noticed that the sea had gone "all funny", realised that it might be what her geography teacher had told them about tsunami the previous term and got her family to flee. In both cases a "sixth sense" had nothing to do with it; it was just recognising the available signs for what they were and acting accordingly.
They should offer a downloadable bootable CD that verifies the checksums of all system files.
At first glance, it even seems like it would be fairly trivial to build one yourself assuming that you can maintain a clean set of files to generate checksums from. Once you have the files you can use the live distro and checksumming tool of your choice to do the comparisons and replace suspect files accordingly. However...
The obviously problem is going to be dealing with DLL hell, especially if you want to include third party DLLs in your scanning tool. There are dozens of legitimate versions of some DLLs out there, especially for widely deployed things like the expoitable GDI DLLs that were at the centre of a "critical" patch a few months ago. Best of all, some apps are coded to require specific versions of those files and refuse to work with other versions. Yes, that's appallingly broken and terrible design, but it does happen, and checking the embedded DLL version number is no help - what's to stop a rootkit replacing a DLL's with a version with an unused version number? How would you deal with an unknown version of a critical DLL in a known shared file directory for a third party vendor that wouldn't confuse a typical user? Ignore it, and risk missing a rootkit? Delete it, and risk breaking an application (providing an option to restore it being an obvious safety net)? Or give the user a choice they probably won't understand between the two previous options?
Actually, most *NIX rootkits have been intercepting system calls to the kernel and replacing common command tools that might be used to detect and remove them for ages. I haven't heard of one that can avoid detection by the likes of Chkrootkit and Rootkit Hunter yet, other than by being brand new of course. Naturally, that doesn't automatically mean that it's impossible to write one though.
If you're talking about common people, well, it's mostly the fault of the media which covers the issue as if there would be two equal sides in the story.
Well, if it's "common people" you are interested in, CNN is currently running a poll on its website, with the current results here. Even in the SUV loving, Kyoto vetoing USA it would appear that ~85% of the website readership believes that humans are at least partly responsible for global warming. Of course, you should apply Slashdot's standard poll disclaimer to CNN as well...
Usenet is still thriving and there still many very active groups out there, some of which actually have comments in them as opposed to "erotica", although there's still plenty of that too, of course. Better yet, now that October is nearly here at last, the signal to noise ratio should go up too. Sure, many ISPs might be giving up their own Usenet servers, but if they don't outsource to a dedicated provider like SuperNews or Giganews, you can always get an account with them yourself. Failing that, you can hunt around for one of the numerous free servers, and there's always Google Groups of course, but they often don't carry as broad a selection of groups.
The stated focus is on security, so presumably that means better pop-up blocking, protection from rogue active elements and so on. Hopefully there will also be resources devoted to addressing at least some of the more glaring instances of IE's deviations from the W3C's HTML and CSS standards. Even though I use Firefox exclusively, anything Microsoft does to help remove all those CSS coding hacks and keep people from inadvertantly becoming yet another node of a BotNet for those PC users yet to see the light is fine by me!
They have a rough translation from a Danish speaker so they should be pretty accurate. That's one of the things I really like about Groklaw, they *always* cite where translations have come from, and because of their global network of volunteers eventually get a proper translation from a native speaker. Their handling this kind of language translation issue is something that Groklaw excels at, and I wish more news sources would do the same.
Nowhere in the article does it state that the porn and video game bans are restricted to just minors.
Not directly, although it did seem to implied from the overall "thinking of the children" tone of the article, and it did mention "age groups". Of course, we've all seen how the cry of "Won't someone think of the children?" has been abused to leverage someone's own personal agenda across the board, regardless of age.
As to the porn angle, I couldn't agree more and said so in my original post. Immoral should not automatically imply illegal, which is the stance that China has adopted and is also the case to an even greater degree in India and many Islamic countries. I'm all for legal restrictions to hopefully only allow access to those mature enough to deal with the issues, but an outright ban is absurd. I'd put such legislation right up there with road speed regulations and copyright law; most people just don't care about the law. Besides, although this obviously doesn't apply to China, most of this kind of legislation is made on religious grounds, it's a sin and so on, so why not let God be the judge, hmm?
I'm sure we're going to get the usual "Chinese and enforced censorship" spiel here, but taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture what they Chinese have done is quite reasonable for their claimed goals. The Chinese government publishes a list of regulations for operating a Cybercafé, admittedly a strict list, but it's there, it's the law and you break it at your peril.
The main causes given for the closures is locating a Cybercafé right next to a school and allowing minors free access to pornography. What chance do you think a Cybercafé would have to continue trading in the EU, US etc. if it was found to be a magnet for truants and/or providing unfettered access to pornography to minors? They also restrict violent games to certain age groups, which is different to the age requirements we have on our computer game boxes, how exactly? Doom 3 is rated "18" in the UK for example, and companies can be prosecuted for breaking that restriction and selling the game to a minor. The same goes for logging all outbound access - you'd be insane not to log everything if you were running a Cybercafé in the event someone launched a cracking attempt from your premises.
OK, I do have concerns that these logs are going to be "auditted" by the Chinese government for what they might see as subversive elements, disloyal behaviour or whatever. The censorship of free access to information, even if it *is* pornography, should not be blocked - immoral and illegal should not automatically be the same thing. Still, at least the Chinese appear to understand that restricting Internet content is an internal matter and are making an effort to deal with it themselves instead of trying to ram their legislation down the throats of other nations. Now if only they would let their people have a larger say in what was and was not permitted...
I think maybe someone has the wrong end of the stick here. Microsoft's job ad states quite clearly that wants these people for the purpose of hunting for prior art. What possible use is that in the filing of patents when the accepted practice is to file anyway and let the USPTO and (if necessary) the courts decide whether it's valid or not.
I think it's far more likely that the purpose of these new employees is to help Microsoft invalidate patents that may be used against it such as the bogus Eolas patent a few months back. That of course begs the question, why do they think that this is going to be an issue since they also think that software patents are such a good idea? Unless, perhaps, they *know* they are invalidating patents, are afraid they will get sued and feel that the best defense is a good offense...
Maybe you should take a look at the article then since K-Meleon v0.8.2 is included in the comparison in the "Windows Browsers" section. It came out as slightly slower than IE6 in most tests except for the cold start, somewhat surprising given that IE6 is preloaded by the OS - I was expecting IE to ace the startup times on Windows.
Re:I can see the site being shut down
on
LokiTorrent Shut Down
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well several of the sites are claiming it was a "settlement" between the MPAA and Lowkee/Ed Webber. The general consensus seems to be that this entails handing over of the site, any logs and an unspecified amount of money to the MPAA and a promise not to do it again, or face further more severe sanctions. A jail sentence, or even a criminal prosecution, does not appear to be in the offing, although there *is* a court gagging order in effect. However, for a different take on what "settlement" might have been, check out this article, which should be especially of interest to the suck^H^H^H^H people who donated money.
I first saw this as an email when Windows '95 shipped, and it appears it was rehashed for the Windows '98 lauch too. Thanks to the lameness filter I can't post it directly so here is a link.
Actually, apart from using it as a shield against EM interference coming from Earth, there's not all that much to be gained from sticking a radio telescope on the moon. You'd have to either make it small enough to land intact, or build the thing in-situ as well, plus you'd have to relay any data around the moon, most likely via a satellite unless you want a second base station and someone laying a lot of fibre...
A better idea would be to build two orbiting radio telescopes in Earth's orbital path, on opposite sides of the sun and with the same orbital velocity as that of Earth. This essentially fixes the Earth and the two telescopes in place relative to each other and keeps line of sight communications between Earth and each of the satellites at all times. Massage the resultant data together via the wonders of very long baseline interferometry and you effectively have an single radio telescope the diameter of Earth's orbit.
I wouldn't be shocked at all if there's an LGA775 dual-core CPU.
The question then becomes one of how well the existing motherboards would cope of course. The ideal would be for it to be entirely transparent and the dual cores are handled by the CPU in a similar manner to hyperthreading. If that's not possible then we'd be looking at a BIOS update at least, and even then it might not be possible to maximise the benefit of dual cores with out a motherboard designed for the purpose.
In any case, with AMD in a similar situation with its own upcoming dual core CPUs, it's going to interesting to see how the two companies approach it. There's going to be some unhappy customers if one company manages to enable upgrades to dual cores on current motherboards and the other doesn't, that's for sure...
No, it's part of what NASA does. NASA has been coming up with detailed "what-if" proposals on all sorts of things since their inception. Almost every single one of them is written in the style of documenting an approach to solving a challenge that has already been set, in this case - how might we terraform Mars? The fact that we have no current technical means at our disposal to achieve that is immaterial. As time passes and our knowledge grows such plans get refined until they can either be achieved with a reasonable of success, or get archived and largely forgotten about.
There are numerous other examples of these documents in the public domain, including ones for building multigenerational starships to visit nearby stars using propulation systems that are still largely theoretical. If you read one the amount of detail and consideration of potential scenarios is *amazing*, you have to keep reminding yourself that this tech is still SciFi and not something you see every day. This is merely a timely release of such a proposal to coincide with the climate debate that the UK is hosting at the moment and the press has run with it.
Your original post and subsequent post state that while you were able to make the config change it wasn't surviving a restart of Firefox. I was saying that I could change the setting and that it was surviving the restart, but that it was making no difference anyway, which is slightly different. Hence the clarifications of "actual setting" and "supposedly disabled" in my post.
That was one of my first thoughts too. We keep hearing about how Microsoft's programs get exploited so frequently because of their market dominance, well now we may get a hint as to whether that is the case or not. Let's say your 10% is accurate (it seems reasonable to me) and keep in mind that a lot of those will have downloaded Firefox because of concerns with IE's security record.
A significant number of phishing attacks using this would kind of destroy the already dubious "most prevalent platform" argument in my book. However, what if there are no attempts to exploit it? 10% is a still pretty sizable userbase; there must be some fools in there waiting to help prove the adage about being parted from their money, and spam runs are cheap...
Well, changing the actual setting via about:config works OK for me with Firefox 1.0 on both MS Windows XP and Fedora Core 3 (both fully patched). However, even with IDN supposedly disabled in Firefox clicking on the links still takes me to the spoofed version of Paypal on both links, and I'm not seeing any of the URL bar glitches either. More worryingly, on the HTTPS site, the domain is also given as "www.paypal.com" by the padlock icon; you have to double click on the padlock and then view the certificate before you finally see that the site is actually "www.xn--pypal-4ve.com".
There's a small snag with that idea. Their boss, satellite TV equipment retailer Saad "Jay" Echouafni, did a runner despite being out on $750,000 bail and is currently on the FBI's most wanted list. Someone is going to have to find him and his assets before that approach will bear fruit.
Indeed. I suspect the FBI are actually after bigger game since according to the article "the author of the Agobot internet worm had provided a customized version of the program to Walker, who released it to create a botnet of approximately 10,000 computers." If there is a deal on the cards, then I suspect any reducation in sentence will depend on the arrest of the Agobot author.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. Lovely. It looks like the Internet Explorer vs. Netscape Navigator browser war is back with a vengeance, only with some new players. I think it's safe to say that Macromedia isn't going to get its way, and I hope we've all learnt our lessons about Microsoft's bait and switch tactics with standards by now. Yeah, right! I'm betting Microsoft will go with XAML, and everyone else will go with XUL only to add XAML support later because Microsoft will refuse to support XUL. <Sigh> It's going to be CSS and browser specific hacks all over again, isn't it?
I've not found one yet, although that it would clarify what specific issues might be is somewhat remote I think. Either it's not been posted anywhere yet because it's the weekend or this "Open Letter" is "open" in the same sense that Microsoft's shared source is "open". They don't understand the concept of open source code, so why should we expect them to understand the concept of an open letter? ;)
Could somebody please explain what the problem with DHCP is? There certainly seem to be plenty of documents to enable open implementations to me. Or are they talking about some proprietary Microsoft extension to DHCP that is rightly being ignored by everyone else?
No, they recognised the signs, there was even an interview with some of the tribesmen on TV where they explained this. In a similar vein there was a story about a young girl of who noticed that the sea had gone "all funny", realised that it might be what her geography teacher had told them about tsunami the previous term and got her family to flee. In both cases a "sixth sense" had nothing to do with it; it was just recognising the available signs for what they were and acting accordingly.
At first glance, it even seems like it would be fairly trivial to build one yourself assuming that you can maintain a clean set of files to generate checksums from. Once you have the files you can use the live distro and checksumming tool of your choice to do the comparisons and replace suspect files accordingly. However...
The obviously problem is going to be dealing with DLL hell, especially if you want to include third party DLLs in your scanning tool. There are dozens of legitimate versions of some DLLs out there, especially for widely deployed things like the expoitable GDI DLLs that were at the centre of a "critical" patch a few months ago. Best of all, some apps are coded to require specific versions of those files and refuse to work with other versions. Yes, that's appallingly broken and terrible design, but it does happen, and checking the embedded DLL version number is no help - what's to stop a rootkit replacing a DLL's with a version with an unused version number? How would you deal with an unknown version of a critical DLL in a known shared file directory for a third party vendor that wouldn't confuse a typical user? Ignore it, and risk missing a rootkit? Delete it, and risk breaking an application (providing an option to restore it being an obvious safety net)? Or give the user a choice they probably won't understand between the two previous options?
Actually, most *NIX rootkits have been intercepting system calls to the kernel and replacing common command tools that might be used to detect and remove them for ages. I haven't heard of one that can avoid detection by the likes of Chkrootkit and Rootkit Hunter yet, other than by being brand new of course. Naturally, that doesn't automatically mean that it's impossible to write one though.
Well, if it's "common people" you are interested in, CNN is currently running a poll on its website, with the current results here. Even in the SUV loving, Kyoto vetoing USA it would appear that ~85% of the website readership believes that humans are at least partly responsible for global warming. Of course, you should apply Slashdot's standard poll disclaimer to CNN as well...
Usenet is still thriving and there still many very active groups out there, some of which actually have comments in them as opposed to "erotica", although there's still plenty of that too, of course. Better yet, now that October is nearly here at last, the signal to noise ratio should go up too. Sure, many ISPs might be giving up their own Usenet servers, but if they don't outsource to a dedicated provider like SuperNews or Giganews, you can always get an account with them yourself. Failing that, you can hunt around for one of the numerous free servers, and there's always Google Groups of course, but they often don't carry as broad a selection of groups.
The stated focus is on security, so presumably that means better pop-up blocking, protection from rogue active elements and so on. Hopefully there will also be resources devoted to addressing at least some of the more glaring instances of IE's deviations from the W3C's HTML and CSS standards. Even though I use Firefox exclusively, anything Microsoft does to help remove all those CSS coding hacks and keep people from inadvertantly becoming yet another node of a BotNet for those PC users yet to see the light is fine by me!
They have a rough translation from a Danish speaker so they should be pretty accurate. That's one of the things I really like about Groklaw, they *always* cite where translations have come from, and because of their global network of volunteers eventually get a proper translation from a native speaker. Their handling this kind of language translation issue is something that Groklaw excels at, and I wish more news sources would do the same.
Not directly, although it did seem to implied from the overall "thinking of the children" tone of the article, and it did mention "age groups". Of course, we've all seen how the cry of "Won't someone think of the children?" has been abused to leverage someone's own personal agenda across the board, regardless of age.
As to the porn angle, I couldn't agree more and said so in my original post. Immoral should not automatically imply illegal, which is the stance that China has adopted and is also the case to an even greater degree in India and many Islamic countries. I'm all for legal restrictions to hopefully only allow access to those mature enough to deal with the issues, but an outright ban is absurd. I'd put such legislation right up there with road speed regulations and copyright law; most people just don't care about the law. Besides, although this obviously doesn't apply to China, most of this kind of legislation is made on religious grounds, it's a sin and so on, so why not let God be the judge, hmm?
The main causes given for the closures is locating a Cybercafé right next to a school and allowing minors free access to pornography. What chance do you think a Cybercafé would have to continue trading in the EU, US etc. if it was found to be a magnet for truants and/or providing unfettered access to pornography to minors? They also restrict violent games to certain age groups, which is different to the age requirements we have on our computer game boxes, how exactly? Doom 3 is rated "18" in the UK for example, and companies can be prosecuted for breaking that restriction and selling the game to a minor. The same goes for logging all outbound access - you'd be insane not to log everything if you were running a Cybercafé in the event someone launched a cracking attempt from your premises.
OK, I do have concerns that these logs are going to be "auditted" by the Chinese government for what they might see as subversive elements, disloyal behaviour or whatever. The censorship of free access to information, even if it *is* pornography, should not be blocked - immoral and illegal should not automatically be the same thing. Still, at least the Chinese appear to understand that restricting Internet content is an internal matter and are making an effort to deal with it themselves instead of trying to ram their legislation down the throats of other nations. Now if only they would let their people have a larger say in what was and was not permitted...
I think it's far more likely that the purpose of these new employees is to help Microsoft invalidate patents that may be used against it such as the bogus Eolas patent a few months back. That of course begs the question, why do they think that this is going to be an issue since they also think that software patents are such a good idea? Unless, perhaps, they *know* they are invalidating patents, are afraid they will get sued and feel that the best defense is a good offense...
Maybe you should take a look at the article then since K-Meleon v0.8.2 is included in the comparison in the "Windows Browsers" section. It came out as slightly slower than IE6 in most tests except for the cold start, somewhat surprising given that IE6 is preloaded by the OS - I was expecting IE to ace the startup times on Windows.
Well several of the sites are claiming it was a "settlement" between the MPAA and Lowkee/Ed Webber. The general consensus seems to be that this entails handing over of the site, any logs and an unspecified amount of money to the MPAA and a promise not to do it again, or face further more severe sanctions. A jail sentence, or even a criminal prosecution, does not appear to be in the offing, although there *is* a court gagging order in effect. However, for a different take on what "settlement" might have been, check out this article, which should be especially of interest to the suck^H^H^H^H people who donated money.
I first saw this as an email when Windows '95 shipped, and it appears it was rehashed for the Windows '98 lauch too. Thanks to the lameness filter I can't post it directly so here is a link.
Well that's a little out of context, but there is a short page about "odd" comments in UNIX which includes an explaination of the abovehere.
A better idea would be to build two orbiting radio telescopes in Earth's orbital path, on opposite sides of the sun and with the same orbital velocity as that of Earth. This essentially fixes the Earth and the two telescopes in place relative to each other and keeps line of sight communications between Earth and each of the satellites at all times. Massage the resultant data together via the wonders of very long baseline interferometry and you effectively have an single radio telescope the diameter of Earth's orbit.
The question then becomes one of how well the existing motherboards would cope of course. The ideal would be for it to be entirely transparent and the dual cores are handled by the CPU in a similar manner to hyperthreading. If that's not possible then we'd be looking at a BIOS update at least, and even then it might not be possible to maximise the benefit of dual cores with out a motherboard designed for the purpose.
In any case, with AMD in a similar situation with its own upcoming dual core CPUs, it's going to interesting to see how the two companies approach it. There's going to be some unhappy customers if one company manages to enable upgrades to dual cores on current motherboards and the other doesn't, that's for sure...
No, it's part of what NASA does. NASA has been coming up with detailed "what-if" proposals on all sorts of things since their inception. Almost every single one of them is written in the style of documenting an approach to solving a challenge that has already been set, in this case - how might we terraform Mars? The fact that we have no current technical means at our disposal to achieve that is immaterial. As time passes and our knowledge grows such plans get refined until they can either be achieved with a reasonable of success, or get archived and largely forgotten about.
There are numerous other examples of these documents in the public domain, including ones for building multigenerational starships to visit nearby stars using propulation systems that are still largely theoretical. If you read one the amount of detail and consideration of potential scenarios is *amazing*, you have to keep reminding yourself that this tech is still SciFi and not something you see every day. This is merely a timely release of such a proposal to coincide with the climate debate that the UK is hosting at the moment and the press has run with it.
Either way, it's still broken of course. :(
A significant number of phishing attacks using this would kind of destroy the already dubious "most prevalent platform" argument in my book. However, what if there are no attempts to exploit it? 10% is a still pretty sizable userbase; there must be some fools in there waiting to help prove the adage about being parted from their money, and spam runs are cheap...
Well, changing the actual setting via about:config works OK for me with Firefox 1.0 on both MS Windows XP and Fedora Core 3 (both fully patched). However, even with IDN supposedly disabled in Firefox clicking on the links still takes me to the spoofed version of Paypal on both links, and I'm not seeing any of the URL bar glitches either. More worryingly, on the HTTPS site, the domain is also given as "www.paypal.com" by the padlock icon; you have to double click on the padlock and then view the certificate before you finally see that the site is actually "www.xn--pypal-4ve.com".
There's a small snag with that idea. Their boss, satellite TV equipment retailer Saad "Jay" Echouafni, did a runner despite being out on $750,000 bail and is currently on the FBI's most wanted list. Someone is going to have to find him and his assets before that approach will bear fruit.
Indeed. I suspect the FBI are actually after bigger game since according to the article "the author of the Agobot internet worm had provided a customized version of the program to Walker, who released it to create a botnet of approximately 10,000 computers." If there is a deal on the cards, then I suspect any reducation in sentence will depend on the arrest of the Agobot author.