It appears that most of the victims weren't running security protection.
Often these guys use directed fraud mails written in reasonably good Swedish, so I wouldn't really doubt they have custom made keyloggers too to attempt to escape antivirus tools. Sure, they could use detection by heuristics like some support, but then the accuracy falls rapidly, as well as the fact that not nearly all popular tools even supporting that.
What's needed here is that users don't become so naive when they sit down in front of a computer. To many, it seems like they then enter a world of safety where they don't have to think much and just click through mails that "look right" even if they ask for logon details that the banks has earlier been very careful to inform they'll never request. (because they already have that info, or can reset it at their whim anyway, duh!) The problem is that on the Internet, the exact opposite mostly holds true.
Sometimes I wish they should at least be forced to come up with advice on what "meaningful security" is when they sue like this to at least get something better than relatives to a victim of a sexual offense seeking money from a social community. I understand they don't have to, but why do I get the feeling these parents would think "meaningful security" would be something economically/organizationally crazy like snail mailing the parents for a written approval before allowing a user under 18 to register an account on MySpace, or something on that order?:-p
Also, don't now go upgrade someone's computer to Vista for someone who needs to run Windows for one reason or another just because of his idea of "it wasn't so different from XP anyway". The Explorer has been reworked quite a bit, the Control Panel navigation is very different (again!), and there's the whole concept with file tagging and virtual folders for novices to wrap their heads around... and when failing with that, which gets me to my point -- call closest tech support!;-)
Now, I can only hope that Microsoft got this security "issue" fixed, so that you PC users will stop spamming me with sexually explicit crap and drug sales
Sorry, the "issue" you're looking at is likely called "users", which gives me little hope in that it will be resolved anytime soon, unless you or others are to present them with a much more locked down OS.
Hmm, but to be fair, there are lots of features new to Vista besides licensing and DRM.:-p
Among things I find interesting is the new memory manager and process scheduler, shadow copies, the new driver model to run more in user mode that should help against driver bugs, the new low latency audio stack, as well as things like their full IPv4 overhaul. The latter will be interesting to see if it has any negative side effects though from being a bit unproven code in the real world. The new TCP stack will for example be much better at adjusting e.g. the receive window depending on current network conditions for better throughputs, as well as improved recoveries from packet losses. Vista will now also distribute e.g. network transfer processing across more than one processor on e.g. dual cores.
Anyway, there are tons of things like these, and Vista should (at least we are to be fair) be taken as the major version upgrade it is, with updates littered throughout the OS, and not something where Microsoft added Windows Media Player 11 with HDMI support.:-p
Anyone else noticed quite a big jump in news stories just about the recent year or so about Second Life, despite still having a quite small highly active user base compared to World of Warcraft and the likes? Either it's somehow popular to report on this "unusual" game (personally I find it quite boring, although the stories are fun for laughs), journalists find the game "futuristic" in the sense of what it's doing ("Oooh, look, we found out news about this cool game where you can protest for/against the UN or whatever!"), or there's the tin foil theory with many Second Life gamers submitting story material to news sites, posting it in blogs, etc to generate coverage.
Personally, I don't really see the big deal. Some huge geeks started using a game as a platform for politics debates? What's new, really. People stand out in towns in WoW, Guild Wars, and other games and sometimes get into hot "religion and politics" debates. It's just more of the same, only that due to how Second Life works, they can take a more "practical" stance on it with crappy designed graphics looking like something out of the early nineties to help their cause.
I actually calculated this for a similar Digg story. Using my avg BT bandwidth on a basic 10 Mbps line (yes, these days that's pretty basic, and even 100 Mbps is not that rare), I got about 16 hours download time. On average speeds, taking into account I'm not maxing out all the time.
And now, 16 hours is 8 hours sleep and 8 hour work day. Whoop-de-doo for many pirates.
As for storage, by the time people would have dozens and dozens of *quality* HD-DVD's worth saving (and thus, storing), I bet we're about 2 years or so ahead in the future with burners and discs having fallen a lot in costs.
These things are indeed most likely non-issues for enough people to make it commonly pirated material.
I bet by the time movie studios have stopped fighting their standard war and actually *released* hundreds of download-worthy movies, HD-DVD disc and burner costs have fallen enough for you to not have more problems storing them than storing 100 DVD discs.
Yes, that, and customer lock-in to proprietary DRM are some pieces of the DRM puzzle.
When you see Microsoft switching from their PlaysForSure DRM to Zune's own for its marketplace as that player is released without quoting security problems with the PlaysForSure tech, you know there are other things under the hood. Similarly, Apple is reluctant to opening up their FairPlay (why do they keep picking oxymorons for these techs?) standard to others because it could impair Apple's market dominance.
It's really sad that outside organizations to keep market competition, business practices, as well as user rights in check aren't more involved in this.
Nah, particle physics aren't going to die due to a lack of a breakthrough in two years. The field is not dominated by some sort of "nutcases" thinking up crazy theories either, that's just a fraction of them, and their presence should be valued, as their abscene would do much worse for possibilities of scientific breakthroughs.
Basically we've reached the point where everything we can test right now is tested and understood
No, this sounds really wrong -- we can test theories of gravity and get results from observation working well with our models, but we don't quite understand why there is gravity, our models don't show how galaxies can be held together without a sort of dark matter that we'll attempt to start studying better soon at the LHC, and so on. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it seems there is a whole lot currently known to be some way or another, but not necessarily understood. We have found signs of gravitational waves (Nobel prize 1993) predicted by the general theory of relativity, and gravitational waves are yet another example where a lot is pointing towards them being very real things we're just starting to see signs of, and where we still need further information to understand them, which is why e.g. LIGO and VIRGO was built.
I think one should be careful to not fall into the trap that makes it seem like the modern day is always the day when science is progressing slowly. People are doing this mistake constantly, and I recall these articles have even been posted in the past on Slashdot, when in reality, it seems that the more we learn about our Universe, the more questions are raised. So far, we can perform very real studies on phenomenons and lots of money is put into this very alive and active field, and the real nutcases to me are those that don't see what there is still out there to discover.
I'm not sure, but this just sounds like a grumpy journalist to me...
Google is obviously in talks with the involved parties here.
"We have opened channels with the military in Iraq but we are not prepared to discuss what we have discussed with them," a spokesperson told the newspaper. "But we do listen and we are sensitive to requests."
It's just that they don't want to go public with all the details.
That honestly sounds good enough to me. The important part is that they're aware of the problem, not that they inform grumpy Google journalists of every little thing they're discussing internally. I think they don't deserve the negative spin on this in that article.
The positive sides of the story would in this case be twofold:
1. That a Java site not having as bad spam problems has likely gained notability to Google at the cost of this one.
2. That his site should be back in case he fixes his problems at the next Google spidering, at least if Google is consistent here, and I don't see why they shouldn't for the best of their search index.
Sure, but search engine accuracy should be besides the point here.
What the guy story in the story claims is that his site ceased to exist, and dropped off Google's indexes.
I'm not going to waste time looking up various search terms and see where they place his site, but obviously it's in their index, so his main argument falls right there.
Has the same thing been done for Blu-Ray yet? I would like to see DRM on both systems being shown as being useless.
I agree, although it would be more amusing to me if Blu-ray DRM was broken with various key extraction algorithms in about 6 months or so, for it to reach the market better and give them less hope to just change details in the standard as a worst case scenario.:-) Makes me wonder if it's possible they'll do this with HD-DVD, or if it has reached critical mass alraedy, so to speak.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I smiled when I saw this :-)
"Personally, I wouldn't jump at something like DX10 right now"
This could be reworded as
"Personally, I wouldn't jump at something like DirectX right now"
It appears that most of the victims weren't running security protection.
Often these guys use directed fraud mails written in reasonably good Swedish, so I wouldn't really doubt they have custom made keyloggers too to attempt to escape antivirus tools.
Sure, they could use detection by heuristics like some support, but then the accuracy falls rapidly, as well as the fact that not nearly all popular tools even supporting that.
What's needed here is that users don't become so naive when they sit down in front of a computer. To many, it seems like they then enter a world of safety where they don't have to think much and just click through mails that "look right" even if they ask for logon details that the banks has earlier been very careful to inform they'll never request. (because they already have that info, or can reset it at their whim anyway, duh!) The problem is that on the Internet, the exact opposite mostly holds true.
Since people aren't mature enough to take care of themselves below 21* in the US, I recommend that age. :-p
So... underage = 20 years or less.
* = highest drinking age in the world
Huh? Why not just go on with their human skull collecting and polishing as usual? :-)
Sometimes I wish they should at least be forced to come up with advice on what "meaningful security" is when they sue like this to at least get something better than relatives to a victim of a sexual offense seeking money from a social community. I understand they don't have to, but why do I get the feeling these parents would think "meaningful security" would be something economically/organizationally crazy like snail mailing the parents for a written approval before allowing a user under 18 to register an account on MySpace, or something on that order? :-p
Also, don't now go upgrade someone's computer to Vista for someone who needs to run Windows for one reason or another just because of his idea of "it wasn't so different from XP anyway". The Explorer has been reworked quite a bit, the Control Panel navigation is very different (again!), and there's the whole concept with file tagging and virtual folders for novices to wrap their heads around... and when failing with that, which gets me to my point -- call closest tech support! ;-)
Now, I can only hope that Microsoft got this security "issue" fixed, so that you PC users will stop spamming me with sexually explicit crap and drug sales
Sorry, the "issue" you're looking at is likely called "users", which gives me little hope in that it will be resolved anytime soon, unless you or others are to present them with a much more locked down OS.
Hmm, but to be fair, there are lots of features new to Vista besides licensing and DRM. :-p
:-p
Among things I find interesting is the new memory manager and process scheduler, shadow copies, the new driver model to run more in user mode that should help against driver bugs, the new low latency audio stack, as well as things like their full IPv4 overhaul. The latter will be interesting to see if it has any negative side effects though from being a bit unproven code in the real world. The new TCP stack will for example be much better at adjusting e.g. the receive window depending on current network conditions for better throughputs, as well as improved recoveries from packet losses. Vista will now also distribute e.g. network transfer processing across more than one processor on e.g. dual cores.
Anyway, there are tons of things like these, and Vista should (at least we are to be fair) be taken as the major version upgrade it is, with updates littered throughout the OS, and not something where Microsoft added Windows Media Player 11 with HDMI support.
Yes, you need a herring to cut down a tree. :-)
Anyone else noticed quite a big jump in news stories just about the recent year or so about Second Life, despite still having a quite small highly active user base compared to World of Warcraft and the likes? Either it's somehow popular to report on this "unusual" game (personally I find it quite boring, although the stories are fun for laughs), journalists find the game "futuristic" in the sense of what it's doing ("Oooh, look, we found out news about this cool game where you can protest for/against the UN or whatever!"), or there's the tin foil theory with many Second Life gamers submitting story material to news sites, posting it in blogs, etc to generate coverage.
Personally, I don't really see the big deal. Some huge geeks started using a game as a platform for politics debates? What's new, really. People stand out in towns in WoW, Guild Wars, and other games and sometimes get into hot "religion and politics" debates. It's just more of the same, only that due to how Second Life works, they can take a more "practical" stance on it with crappy designed graphics looking like something out of the early nineties to help their cause.
Why would Germany care for what other countries allow? :-p
Are they losing out revenue on not wanting violent games in their own country, and thus don't want anyone else to profit from sales or what?
If they only minded their own business and limited their own crazy laws to themselves.
I actually calculated this for a similar Digg story. Using my avg BT bandwidth on a basic 10 Mbps line (yes, these days that's pretty basic, and even 100 Mbps is not that rare), I got about 16 hours download time. On average speeds, taking into account I'm not maxing out all the time.
And now, 16 hours is 8 hours sleep and 8 hour work day. Whoop-de-doo for many pirates.
As for storage, by the time people would have dozens and dozens of *quality* HD-DVD's worth saving (and thus, storing), I bet we're about 2 years or so ahead in the future with burners and discs having fallen a lot in costs.
These things are indeed most likely non-issues for enough people to make it commonly pirated material.
I bet by the time movie studios have stopped fighting their standard war and actually *released* hundreds of download-worthy movies, HD-DVD disc and burner costs have fallen enough for you to not have more problems storing them than storing 100 DVD discs.
Unlike Europe, where you can go to prison for debating how many Jews were killed in WWII.
Which European country?
There's no such law here, in mine.
There are few things that ruin one's argument more than sheer ignorance.
Yes, that, and customer lock-in to proprietary DRM are some pieces of the DRM puzzle.
When you see Microsoft switching from their PlaysForSure DRM to Zune's own for its marketplace as that player is released without quoting security problems with the PlaysForSure tech, you know there are other things under the hood. Similarly, Apple is reluctant to opening up their FairPlay (why do they keep picking oxymorons for these techs?) standard to others because it could impair Apple's market dominance.
It's really sad that outside organizations to keep market competition, business practices, as well as user rights in check aren't more involved in this.
That likely depends on when you start trying to learn. The later, the longer and harder.
Nah, particle physics aren't going to die due to a lack of a breakthrough in two years. The field is not dominated by some sort of "nutcases" thinking up crazy theories either, that's just a fraction of them, and their presence should be valued, as their abscene would do much worse for possibilities of scientific breakthroughs.
Basically we've reached the point where everything we can test right now is tested and understood
No, this sounds really wrong -- we can test theories of gravity and get results from observation working well with our models, but we don't quite understand why there is gravity, our models don't show how galaxies can be held together without a sort of dark matter that we'll attempt to start studying better soon at the LHC, and so on. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it seems there is a whole lot currently known to be some way or another, but not necessarily understood. We have found signs of gravitational waves (Nobel prize 1993) predicted by the general theory of relativity, and gravitational waves are yet another example where a lot is pointing towards them being very real things we're just starting to see signs of, and where we still need further information to understand them, which is why e.g. LIGO and VIRGO was built.
I think one should be careful to not fall into the trap that makes it seem like the modern day is always the day when science is progressing slowly. People are doing this mistake constantly, and I recall these articles have even been posted in the past on Slashdot, when in reality, it seems that the more we learn about our Universe, the more questions are raised. So far, we can perform very real studies on phenomenons and lots of money is put into this very alive and active field, and the real nutcases to me are those that don't see what there is still out there to discover.
What? But you seem to be complaining mostly about the uncertainty principle?
It seems you think quantum theories are stupid, not the string theory?
Is this supposed to be exciting? I've had my endoskeleton since birth. Bah!
It supports saving/loading backwards compatible formats too...
It also had a surprisingly low learning curve for me, despite the vastly more accessible UI it seems to have than 2003 with its menu jungles.
Google is obviously in talks with the involved parties here.
It's just that they don't want to go public with all the details.
That honestly sounds good enough to me. The important part is that they're aware of the problem, not that they inform grumpy Google journalists of every little thing they're discussing internally. I think they don't deserve the negative spin on this in that article.
Events like these are among the most tragic in the business world as all they're doing is being destructive to their own areas of business. :-(
The positive sides of the story would in this case be twofold:
1. That a Java site not having as bad spam problems has likely gained notability to Google at the cost of this one.
2. That his site should be back in case he fixes his problems at the next Google spidering, at least if Google is consistent here, and I don't see why they shouldn't for the best of their search index.
Sure, but search engine accuracy should be besides the point here.
What the guy story in the story claims is that his site ceased to exist, and dropped off Google's indexes.
I'm not going to waste time looking up various search terms and see where they place his site, but obviously it's in their index, so his main argument falls right there.
Has the same thing been done for Blu-Ray yet? I would like to see DRM on both systems being shown as being useless.
:-) Makes me wonder if it's possible they'll do this with HD-DVD, or if it has reached critical mass alraedy, so to speak.
I agree, although it would be more amusing to me if Blu-ray DRM was broken with various key extraction algorithms in about 6 months or so, for it to reach the market better and give them less hope to just change details in the standard as a worst case scenario.