They didn't fix any flaws. They just deactivated old keys and issued new ones. Supposedly InterVideo will be patched to be more secure (aka try to hide the new key). Maybe that is what they are talking about but it still does not fix any flaws by a long shot. Just look at all the cracked versions of software out there that have all kinds of fancy safety and protection mechanisms and are still cracked daily. As long as its in memory in unencrypted form for any amount of time, it can be obtained.
What they have done is analogous to re-keying a lock that is susceptible to being picked -- it's only a matter of time before it is picked again. Lather, rinse, repeat. And how long before a hardware player is cracked? If I had one I'd bust into it to see what kind of flash it has. It probably has an on-board JTAG or other programming port to dump the memory like most consumer devices which are mass produced and then flashed assembly style, making obtaining the key quite easy. When the players come down in price I fully expect them to be cracked on a daily basis.
I don't know about you, but many corporate companies don't like people like that...people that research what they should but paid. Many HR managers think that the job market in IT (and many other fields) is so good they would rather replace you and hire someone in that will feel like they are lucky to do the job at or under your current rate. It's largely because the attitude in many companies these days is a sense of "you should be lucky you're here" or "you should be lucky we only make you work 40 hours a week". At my job, I was told when they changed our benefits structure that "you should feel lucky the company deems you important enough to give ANY benefits at all".
I have found companies would rather hire someone who is utterly incompetent but willing to do the job for pennies and doesn't complain when they get bait switched to shitty health insurance. The types of people who have these lay down and take it attitudes are naturally people who are just morons and really don't know what they are doing. My theory is they are quiet and don't stir the pot too often because they are in constant fear of getting found out. The company doesn't care that half the work is getting done because that is harder for HR to measure than a raw starting price and capability is highly subjective. If I complain about a recent HR drone hire, the finger will often get pointed at me, with such remarks as "Don't be so hard on him..." "Have you ever considered it might be you or your department??" "What are you doing to correct the situation?". I'm sorry, I am not here to teach someone 4 years of CS that they should already know. To make it worse, the HR people saying this have no idea about anything technical, they don't understand anything that we do so going to them with a valid logical argument of why the guy they just hired is a dumbass falls on deaf ears. Try to bring any of this up to higher level management and all they can see are the good numbers from HR and how much money they are saving. Meanwhile, my shit is suffering, more work is put on me, and no one understands or let alone cares.
If you think many companies are not run this way, think again. You can usually tell a company like this from job postings. Our HR department shops for people like you would shop for a vacuum cleaner at Walmart -- they try to get the most for less. They look for whizbang things on resumes for stuff we would never need experience in or stuff that isn't relevant to what we are doing. I don't really care if someone has a masters if all they have been doing with it is designing VB forms. I really don't understand who came up with the concept for an HR department anyway, because it sucks. I would rather all hiring decisions go through the person that actually manages a team and produces a product, not some "HR Technical Specialist", which is really some moron with an HR degree who has worked for a tech company before.
So before you go up to your boss with salary figures in hand you should understand that a lot of times we don't have the capability to change anything. In the large corporations I've worked for, the manager never controls the salary and HR would always rather you quit or be miserable than risk having everyone pull those same figures and come to them, taking their precious monthly how-much-can-you-save bonus away. Many HR departments are running on the principal of separation of markets, where you don't know how much the market pays. If I was an HR manager I'd be scared shirtless of someone who quotes salary figures and can suddenly make my only bargaining point go away, I'd rather hire the no nothing guy that passes all the rudimentary hoops that will sit down and shut up and make me look good.
This article is stupid. It's certainly not Apple's fault you can't purchase the music in the US or on the US version of itunes. The label, while at fault, is usually doing this for a good reason. They generally negotiate per country with different artists for a reason. Before a label decides to "launch" an artist in a new country (especially one where there is a language barrier), significant PR and advertising needs to be done to ensure a successful launch and good rankings for that artist. Imagine if Celine Dion (pardon my example) just started selling albums in the US without any PR machine. Her initial album sales likely would not be too good and it would take awhile for her to get noticed, even if her quality is high. This especially holds true for latin american artists doing a "cross over" etc.
The same thing goes for DVD region codes, etc. People sometimes I think don't bother to stop and try to figure out the whys of something they just automatically assume everything is done for some nefarious reason.
What is to prevent people from storing electricity (in batteries) during off peak hours and then selling it back during peak hours and generating a profit?
At least for cable modems, it's possible to "clone" a modem and create an identical modem that is usually used to gain service. However, anything that this person now does with the cloned modem will fall back on the person who actually has the MAC address of the modem associated with their account.
Simply, how can you prove the modem was not cloned and they actually did share these files?
Don't these managers realize it's expensive as hell to fire someone? Typically a company has a significant amount of money invested in someone in the HR process, training and up-training, job acclamation, etc. It takes years and thousands to get teams of people working at such a state where they are productive and profitable. Not to mention the negative effects on morale a large lay off causes and the associated losses in skilled workers (either by will or forcefully) and productivity.
If the current structure of the organization is inefficient or not working, it is the CEO and senior management's responsibility to reorganize that structure, avoiding loss of workforce whenever possible. Just because someone's "job" is inefficient doesn't mean that person isn't and can't be taught a new job or an organizational system changed. Thats like saying we're getting rid of all this scrap steel because we'd rather pay more to bring in new stuff. That fact is, the same people you have in place can form the core of your "new" company.
You can tell this CEO clearly does not know what he is talking about and is clearly behind the curve with his peanut butter sandwich analogy, which is just nonsense. Its a real shame people like this get to these positions without having anything real to offer to those they manage in terms of wisdom or innovation.
Calling for change is good, but knowing how to institute it effictivly to do good for the company is what defines a good manager. That said, the first change Yahoo! should make should be this VP.
While it may be true that all this is one elaborate prank. However that does not change the fact that real damage is done by these jokes. As far as I'm concerned, they're no better than the people who author e-mail virus hoaxes.
Like I said, at the very least, Mozilla needs to consider civil action against these guys.
The two are obviously related, and LiveJournal should consider immediate termination of their employee Mischa, as he is in league with Wbeelsoi, who attacked LiveJournal members themselves.
Here as some nice quotes from the article:
"We do have exploits for all the stuff we're going to show you," the 21-year-old calling himself Wbeelsoi said. "We'll give them away to anyone who proves their actions are going to be politically motivated. We don't care what side you're on as long as you commit yourself to destruction."
"We were just trying to have some fun up there," Spiegelmock said.
Mozilla should really consider civil, if not criminal actions. Damage to the Firefox brand has already been done, regardless if the exploit is real or not.
I recently had an employee, an MIS employee at that, fired. He was using Anonymizer at work. We have a tracking system (Web Inspector) and I kept noticing that he was leaving no tracks.
I consulted with my supervisor and he decided that I should analyze the employee's system. I found footprints, hacking, and a batch file he used to delete all Internet traces. So I sent the system off to forensics and they found all the bits, each and every one. We're now in legal limbo. The employee is being fired, not for the hacking or the batch file, but for using the Anonymizer.
Thought maybe you'd be interested in hearing about the dangers of using the Anonymizer in the workplace. They claim the Anonymizer hides your tracks at work--but I guess not all of them. --Name Withheld, Network and Computer Systems Administrator
Anyone who reads that from this so called "Network and Computer Systems Administrator" will be seriously scratching their head. First, they used a tool from the same people that make Webwasher pseudo-ware. This software basically looks for HTTP GET requests and prepares a report. Then he mentioned they found evidence of a leet batch file, "footprints", whatever those are, and of course this employee of theirs was some leet uber hacker going to deploy the latest and greatest worm on their network of poorly secured network running some sort of automated intrusion detection ware.
Then he ships the system off to Forensics (what company has a Forensics department I don't want to work at) and they were able to find all the bits, maybe even some bytes. When it came down to it, the company supposedly terminated the employee for using an online anonomyizer service, assuming they couldn't prove he was using it to break company policy.
If this story is true, which I highly doubt based upon the anecdotal evidence of this so called "Network and Computer Systems Administrator" they should have fired none other than this dumbass. Bullshit article.
I kind of feel sorry for Vonage on this one. I've had their service, and while I'm about to switch (to free true VoIP services), I've had no problems with their service at all. That said, I also know how to manage a stable Internet connection.
The fact of the matter is Vonage is too hard for most people. All the things that can go wrong with a regular cable/DSL Internet connection now suddenly affect their phone service.
I work for a VoIP phone company. We get people calling in because after they unplug their modems to move them downstairs, they have no phone service. They're angry and mad and just don't understand how that would cause them not to have a dial tone. This is only one example, I'm sure you can think of others. Their old Bell South phone service 'just worked', and now they are having to reset routers and make sure the MTA is plugged into a phone jack/NIU. It's really complicated for the average person.
To make it worse, some Cable/DSL ISPs throttle their own VoIP traffic above all other traffic, and it's my beleif they have a way of changing the priority of other carrier's VoIP traffic to boost the quality of their own service (in comparison). Even if they don't admit to it or not, I wouldn't put it past them.
Add all this to Vonage's off-shore support who are at times hard to understand for the average 60 year old customer and you have some very miffed people. They feel the phone service is at fault, when they actually need to reboot their modem.
I'm sure Vonage has even more problems than I do, because we happen to be both the ISP and VoIP provider. I can only imagine what unknown variables they have to deal with, which are 100% required to deliver a quality, stable service.
This is just silly. No wonder they're litigating over in the U.K., as this "idea infringement" wouldn't make it over here in the US, even with our own nonsense copyright laws (DMCA anyone?). The copyright office clearly states you can't own copyright to an idea or method of doing something. That would be just a little too much -- even for people in the US.
My friend works for the marketing department at Rogers cable in Toronto and usually does most of the graphics design for their unsolicited mass mailings when not working on their new customer and business brochures/paper materials.
I was talking to him a few weeks ago and he was ranting about working on a new promo for content filtering, he described it as a bandaid solution for parents who don't have enough time for their children and promised his view of the matter would be expressed in the marketing material. I was thinking more along the lines of making sure consumers knew this was an opt-in thing and was no substitute for good parenting and actually knowing what your kids are doing.
It's funny his work would end up on Slashdot, and I'll bet this is his idea of irony expressed in the mailing. Quite clever I would say as I'm sure his point has been well delivered.
Unforunatly, some processors don't work well toegther. It usually ends up as one processor is doing all the work, while the other one sits in the background doing not a damn thing. Day in and out, this processor sits on it's ass complaining about all the heat the other one is generating, when all he is trying to do is process these stupid little single thread applications, which are usually the result of the other processor (compiling is often a multi-processing task).
Eventually if things continue as they are, the two processors split in an ever growing trend in electronics of single processor systems and live in their own cases on their own motherboards. Sure, applications at times suffer, but it's for the best and they can still have visitation with both processors via a shared wireless network.
Won't the flies, eventully, through the process of elimination, learn not to fall for these robots using whatever specific characteristic in how they operate? I know these processes take a long time, but how long is the generation of a fly? You can have thousands of generations, in what, a month's time? Plenty of time for biological trial and error if you ask me.
Monitoring toxic gases is not a complicated task, a small microcontroller could do the job well in most cases. Attach a reliable, large capacity battery and you can have a unit in operation for years, and not have to worry about fly populations or the complications associated with attracting and converting the pesky creatures into energy.
This fly business is nothing but a gimmick like the web server powered by potatoe.
Real is evil, period. While Apple is wrong for their stance on the DMCA and hacking rhetoric, Real is an evil company like a horde expanding its reach onto soverign soil. Real's player and format is a bloated, spyware filled and commercialized junk heap and I think Apple's reaction would be different if this were about another file format (like ogg, etc.). It's all because Real is looking to cash in on Apple's player and innovative music concept by riding on the coat-tails of the Ipod without having to spend a penny on R&D or consumer marketing.
This isn't about offering "free choice", it's about making money without having to spend as much. More power to them, we need competition, but the entire concept to me is just brute force like.
Please mod the parent up. This is what college and being out on your own are all about, and this way only serves to better prepare you for life ahead. There is a lot more to life than having a good education, and doing it this way (I am doing it now) teaches you things your scholarship/daddy money peers probably won't learn about until out of school.
Don't always take the easy way; the other path may be more interesting and rewarding -- true success isn't without its struggle.
Because MPEG is expensive, both in bandwidth and server CPU. It can't be easily compressed further during transport (like Flash) and is terribly inefficient at simple animation like this series (at least not without a lot of optimization and tweaking). It's also resolution dependant meaning if they did offer it in MPG, it would be painful to watch, in a tiny 320x240 size.
Flash is vector based graphics with some code to make it all move and some sound. It has the added benefit of being both animation studio and viewer of the final product, which makes it a perfect choice for animation like this, so much that there is a whole genre of (entertaining) flash mini-series out there on the 'net.
Get off your righteous high arse, download Flash, disable it if you must, and enable it when you want to view things like this. Personally, Flash ads are offensive and annoying, but I find I can quickly ignore them -- filter them out, or turn them off within an instant when the need arises. Flash itself isn't bad, just like HTML itself isn't bad. That doesn't mean I am going to uninstall my web browser because I can't stand the latest X10 (HTML) ad.
This is nonsense. If someone steals your car, and then commits a drive-by shooting with it, should you be held responsible because you hadn't installed an anti-theft system in it? If someone steals an axe out of your garage and kills someone with it, should you be responsible for their actions? If someone steals your gun and uses it to commit a crime, should you serve that person's time?
The answer to all of these situations is no. It would be different if you were allowing the person to use these things and knew they were going to be used in a crime, however, you still wouldn't be the one ultimatly responsible for the actual crime, whatever it is. The key is the person commiting the crime is commiting a secondary, enabling crime by stealing someone from you to commit the real crime in question.
I think all the stuck up trolls here on Slashdot who drone on about updating this and that, firewall this and that are missing the big picture. How much software do you have that needs security updates, how often, and what type of knowledge does it take to do this? Keep in mind that every user doesn't read bugtraq. The answer to this question: probably a lot, and new updates are required almost weekly.
Oddly enough, there are some people (read: a lot, the majority) that use a computer like a tool, similar to a calculator or copier. An office device to get their work done. Most people are too busy with their lives and their work that doesn't involve computers but involves using one to constantly update and manage the increasingly tangeled mess that is internet security.
It's true that as a member of the Internet community you should try to be responsible, especially if you are a corporate member or someone providing a large service. But to try to hold joe sixpack with his job in Marketing, two kids and busy schedule responsible for not keeping up on his updates or using a firewall on his hacked computer that his kids use primarily to play games on is just plain silly.
People need to wake up and realize that the fault ultimatly lies with the person that commited the crime, this is the integral wrong and always will be. This computer owner is guilty non-sense is dumb and non-sensical.
The problem with their "model" is that something as complex as the current Internet as it exists today can't really be modeled, at least not very well. It's a huge chaotic system thats constantly changing and growing, so when you try to model it your model is going to be out of date before you can do anything useful with it. I really don't think $5 million can buy even a small representation of what the Internet is today. Think of the OSI layers and all the different software, hardware, protocols, methods, systems and manufactures in place at each layer. Each of those has its own set of vulnerabilities, holes, etc. and keep in mind there are many different versions of each of those running at the same time across different networks.
This complexity is precisely what makes tracking and solving problems with today's Internet so hard.
I am curious as to what they expect to study and find from this model. Today's problems with the Internet and networking in general are largely social, economic, or political. Figuring out some neat new protocol isn't going to make backbone provider X update their entire network. Worms and the such are also the bain of a social problem. As long as we have smart programmers with free time, there will be worms and exploits of the system no matter what procedures are in place or how smart the network is; The fix for said worms are timely patches and updates, however most users won't and don't do this, hence the epidemics.
This might make some great academic research and a neat new toy for the University but I fail to see how it can find applications in the real world where the problems are much harder than the technical ones this project (presumably) hopes to solve.
>I don't know if you mean to come off sounding >like a spoiled brat, but...
I didn't mean to come off as a spoiled brat, I meant to show that they should come after someone who can take them on. I have worked for everything in my life, never given hand-outs, etc. My family is successful because we worked hard for it and know the value of saving and we would be willing to stand up for our rights legally.
>you are willing to be sued for something you >are doing that's illegal
Just because it's illegal per the DMCA, doesn't mean that its wrong. What is wrong is obtaining information without regard for The United State's most fundamental foundation -- The Constitution. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to issue subponeas to gain information illegally.
How would you feel if a corporation issued a subponea to your telephone company to gain your phone records just because it thinks you are using your phone to arrange for the illegal sale of copyrighted works? I know that's a strange and far-fetched example, but it's not far away. How far away is the local police issuing their own subponeas without court order or due process? Look how the castle crumbles. This is more than about music here folks. Our freedoms are gradually being ripped up from under us by the bad mistakes of today's politics.
I didn't used to allow uploads from the shared drives several weeks ago, but now I've turned them all on. I'm fed up with turning on the TV and hearing about an overfluffed politican talking about blowing up people's personal property for copyright violations. That was when I started this with my college roomates (not on campus connection btw). I'm fed up with the fact that the RIAA now has a new well connected political head. This is just absurd what is going on today.
I think it's time we stand up and face the flames while we still can. I challenge everyone on Slashdot to run their P2P applications and share their files.
I have over 100 GB of commercial works by many of the companies you represent on my network. Two computers my roomates use run Kazaa and Winmx non-stop sharing from the network drive. LimeWire runs on the server itself. We share over a cable connection, and I recently had DSL installed. Typically during the day there are thousands of uploads, so many sometimes LimeWire crashes.
And guess what? I have the money to fight you. The fact is folks, that if the information on illegal acts was obtained illegally and unconstitutionally, the evidence cannot be admitted into court and without evidence there is no case. It is unconstitional for private companies to issue subponeas because due process is not observed and there is no legal forward.
Sorry, but I am just begging they come after me. I have the cash ready and I come from a family (yes, it's sad I know) of very sucessful lawyers.
First, If you don't have enough bandwidth for even the most minimialistic google page with stripped graphics etc., you don't have enough bandwidth to view the sites attached to the results of your query. What good is a list of results by e-mail when you can't view the links to establish how accurate they are?
Also, the search process for the Internet is not only related to the quality of the search engine you use. It's an interactive process of finding what works best, refining your query based on results until you eventually find what you're looking for -- using this system would eliminate this aspect, at minimum making it painfully slow.
Can anyone give a useful application that many people could use and benefit from?
First of all, most cell phones store ringtones in a compressed PCM-like format, ADPCM, for instance. PCM sampling rates for most phones top out at around 22 KHz.
The speakers in such phones also can't reproduce high quality sound in even the ranges they are rated in, and the quality, response and dbm it takes to drive the speakers drops off considerably as the frequency goes significantly below or beyond its rated frequency response. Piezo elements could do it but those are rated for a single frequency or set of frequencies and all but the oldest phones still have them (those don't support ring tones anyway).
Perhaps they observed a different effect -- waving the phone in the air with the ring tone emmited will naturally rouse the insects.
I'll stick to bug spray and avoid the swamp lands, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_pZV3tDiw
At the end of the video you can see a demonstration of the machine.
They didn't fix any flaws. They just deactivated old keys and issued new ones. Supposedly InterVideo will be patched to be more secure (aka try to hide the new key). Maybe that is what they are talking about but it still does not fix any flaws by a long shot. Just look at all the cracked versions of software out there that have all kinds of fancy safety and protection mechanisms and are still cracked daily. As long as its in memory in unencrypted form for any amount of time, it can be obtained.
What they have done is analogous to re-keying a lock that is susceptible to being picked -- it's only a matter of time before it is picked again. Lather, rinse, repeat. And how long before a hardware player is cracked? If I had one I'd bust into it to see what kind of flash it has. It probably has an on-board JTAG or other programming port to dump the memory like most consumer devices which are mass produced and then flashed assembly style, making obtaining the key quite easy. When the players come down in price I fully expect them to be cracked on a daily basis.
I don't know about you, but many corporate companies don't like people like that...people that research what they should but paid. Many HR managers think that the job market in IT (and many other fields) is so good they would rather replace you and hire someone in that will feel like they are lucky to do the job at or under your current rate. It's largely because the attitude in many companies these days is a sense of "you should be lucky you're here" or "you should be lucky we only make you work 40 hours a week". At my job, I was told when they changed our benefits structure that "you should feel lucky the company deems you important enough to give ANY benefits at all".
I have found companies would rather hire someone who is utterly incompetent but willing to do the job for pennies and doesn't complain when they get bait switched to shitty health insurance. The types of people who have these lay down and take it attitudes are naturally people who are just morons and really don't know what they are doing. My theory is they are quiet and don't stir the pot too often because they are in constant fear of getting found out. The company doesn't care that half the work is getting done because that is harder for HR to measure than a raw starting price and capability is highly subjective. If I complain about a recent HR drone hire, the finger will often get pointed at me, with such remarks as "Don't be so hard on him..." "Have you ever considered it might be you or your department??" "What are you doing to correct the situation?". I'm sorry, I am not here to teach someone 4 years of CS that they should already know. To make it worse, the HR people saying this have no idea about anything technical, they don't understand anything that we do so going to them with a valid logical argument of why the guy they just hired is a dumbass falls on deaf ears. Try to bring any of this up to higher level management and all they can see are the good numbers from HR and how much money they are saving. Meanwhile, my shit is suffering, more work is put on me, and no one understands or let alone cares.
If you think many companies are not run this way, think again. You can usually tell a company like this from job postings. Our HR department shops for people like you would shop for a vacuum cleaner at Walmart -- they try to get the most for less. They look for whizbang things on resumes for stuff we would never need experience in or stuff that isn't relevant to what we are doing. I don't really care if someone has a masters if all they have been doing with it is designing VB forms. I really don't understand who came up with the concept for an HR department anyway, because it sucks. I would rather all hiring decisions go through the person that actually manages a team and produces a product, not some "HR Technical Specialist", which is really some moron with an HR degree who has worked for a tech company before.
So before you go up to your boss with salary figures in hand you should understand that a lot of times we don't have the capability to change anything. In the large corporations I've worked for, the manager never controls the salary and HR would always rather you quit or be miserable than risk having everyone pull those same figures and come to them, taking their precious monthly how-much-can-you-save bonus away. Many HR departments are running on the principal of separation of markets, where you don't know how much the market pays. If I was an HR manager I'd be scared shirtless of someone who quotes salary figures and can suddenly make my only bargaining point go away, I'd rather hire the no nothing guy that passes all the rudimentary hoops that will sit down and shut up and make me look good.
This article is stupid. It's certainly not Apple's fault you can't purchase the music in the US or on the US version of itunes. The label, while at fault, is usually doing this for a good reason. They generally negotiate per country with different artists for a reason. Before a label decides to "launch" an artist in a new country (especially one where there is a language barrier), significant PR and advertising needs to be done to ensure a successful launch and good rankings for that artist. Imagine if Celine Dion (pardon my example) just started selling albums in the US without any PR machine. Her initial album sales likely would not be too good and it would take awhile for her to get noticed, even if her quality is high. This especially holds true for latin american artists doing a "cross over" etc.
The same thing goes for DVD region codes, etc. People sometimes I think don't bother to stop and try to figure out the whys of something they just automatically assume everything is done for some nefarious reason.
What is to prevent people from storing electricity (in batteries) during off peak hours and then selling it back during peak hours and generating a profit?
At least for cable modems, it's possible to "clone" a modem and create an identical modem that is usually used to gain service. However, anything that this person now does with the cloned modem will fall back on the person who actually has the MAC address of the modem associated with their account.
Simply, how can you prove the modem was not cloned and they actually did share these files?
Don't these managers realize it's expensive as hell to fire someone? Typically a company has a significant amount of money invested in someone in the HR process, training and up-training, job acclamation, etc. It takes years and thousands to get teams of people working at such a state where they are productive and profitable. Not to mention the negative effects on morale a large lay off causes and the associated losses in skilled workers (either by will or forcefully) and productivity.
If the current structure of the organization is inefficient or not working, it is the CEO and senior management's responsibility to reorganize that structure, avoiding loss of workforce whenever possible. Just because someone's "job" is inefficient doesn't mean that person isn't and can't be taught a new job or an organizational system changed. Thats like saying we're getting rid of all this scrap steel because we'd rather pay more to bring in new stuff. That fact is, the same people you have in place can form the core of your "new" company.
You can tell this CEO clearly does not know what he is talking about and is clearly behind the curve with his peanut butter sandwich analogy, which is just nonsense. Its a real shame people like this get to these positions without having anything real to offer to those they manage in terms of wisdom or innovation.
Calling for change is good, but knowing how to institute it effictivly to do good for the company is what defines a good manager. That said, the first change Yahoo! should make should be this VP.
While it may be true that all this is one elaborate prank. However that does not change the fact that real damage is done by these jokes. As far as I'm concerned, they're no better than the people who author e-mail virus hoaxes.
Like I said, at the very least, Mozilla needs to consider civil action against these guys.
Everyone here should read this article:0 /zeroday_firefox_exploit_claime.html
1 /account_hijackings_force_livej.html).
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/1
It actually turns out that Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi are closely related. As we all now know, Misa works for LiveJournal. Andrew Wbeelsoi is part of Bantown, who claimed responsibility for a Javascript attack on LiveJournal (see http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/0
The two are obviously related, and LiveJournal should consider immediate termination of their employee Mischa, as he is in league with Wbeelsoi, who attacked LiveJournal members themselves.
Here as some nice quotes from the article:
"We do have exploits for all the stuff we're going to show you," the 21-year-old calling himself Wbeelsoi said. "We'll give them away to anyone who proves their actions are going to be politically motivated. We don't care what side you're on as long as you commit yourself to destruction."
"We were just trying to have some fun up there," Spiegelmock said.
Mozilla should really consider civil, if not criminal actions. Damage to the Firefox brand has already been done, regardless if the exploit is real or not.
Anyone who reads that from this so called "Network and Computer Systems Administrator" will be seriously scratching their head. First, they used a tool from the same people that make Webwasher pseudo-ware. This software basically looks for HTTP GET requests and prepares a report. Then he mentioned they found evidence of a leet batch file, "footprints", whatever those are, and of course this employee of theirs was some leet uber hacker going to deploy the latest and greatest worm on their network of poorly secured network running some sort of automated intrusion detection ware.
Then he ships the system off to Forensics (what company has a Forensics department I don't want to work at) and they were able to find all the bits, maybe even some bytes. When it came down to it, the company supposedly terminated the employee for using an online anonomyizer service, assuming they couldn't prove he was using it to break company policy.
If this story is true, which I highly doubt based upon the anecdotal evidence of this so called "Network and Computer Systems Administrator" they should have fired none other than this dumbass. Bullshit article.
I kind of feel sorry for Vonage on this one. I've had their service, and while I'm about to switch (to free true VoIP services), I've had no problems with their service at all. That said, I also know how to manage a stable Internet connection.
The fact of the matter is Vonage is too hard for most people. All the things that can go wrong with a regular cable/DSL Internet connection now suddenly affect their phone service.
I work for a VoIP phone company. We get people calling in because after they unplug their modems to move them downstairs, they have no phone service. They're angry and mad and just don't understand how that would cause them not to have a dial tone. This is only one example, I'm sure you can think of others. Their old Bell South phone service 'just worked', and now they are having to reset routers and make sure the MTA is plugged into a phone jack/NIU. It's really complicated for the average person.
To make it worse, some Cable/DSL ISPs throttle their own VoIP traffic above all other traffic, and it's my beleif they have a way of changing the priority of other carrier's VoIP traffic to boost the quality of their own service (in comparison). Even if they don't admit to it or not, I wouldn't put it past them.
Add all this to Vonage's off-shore support who are at times hard to understand for the average 60 year old customer and you have some very miffed people. They feel the phone service is at fault, when they actually need to reboot their modem.
I'm sure Vonage has even more problems than I do, because we happen to be both the ISP and VoIP provider. I can only imagine what unknown variables they have to deal with, which are 100% required to deliver a quality, stable service.
This is just silly. No wonder they're litigating over in the U.K., as this "idea infringement" wouldn't make it over here in the US, even with our own nonsense copyright laws (DMCA anyone?). The copyright office clearly states you can't own copyright to an idea or method of doing something. That would be just a little too much -- even for people in the US.
l #idea
See:
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.htm
People need to stop wasting their time in the courts.
Didn't Bill steal most of his ideas from other people?
I don't know, this whole thing is just bizzare.
My friend works for the marketing department at Rogers cable in Toronto and usually does most of the graphics design for their unsolicited mass mailings when not working on their new customer and business brochures/paper materials.
I was talking to him a few weeks ago and he was ranting about working on a new promo for content filtering, he described it as a bandaid solution for parents who don't have enough time for their children and promised his view of the matter would be expressed in the marketing material. I was thinking more along the lines of making sure consumers knew this was an opt-in thing and was no substitute for good parenting and actually knowing what your kids are doing.
It's funny his work would end up on Slashdot, and I'll bet this is his idea of irony expressed in the mailing. Quite clever I would say as I'm sure his point has been well delivered.
Unforunatly, some processors don't work well toegther. It usually ends up as one processor is doing all the work, while the other one sits in the background doing not a damn thing. Day in and out, this processor sits on it's ass complaining about all the heat the other one is generating, when all he is trying to do is process these stupid little single thread applications, which are usually the result of the other processor (compiling is often a multi-processing task).
Eventually if things continue as they are, the two processors split in an ever growing trend in electronics of single processor systems and live in their own cases on their own motherboards. Sure, applications at times suffer, but it's for the best and they can still have visitation with both processors via a shared wireless network.
Won't the flies, eventully, through the process of elimination, learn not to fall for these robots using whatever specific characteristic in how they operate? I know these processes take a long time, but how long is the generation of a fly? You can have thousands of generations, in what, a month's time? Plenty of time for biological trial and error if you ask me.
Monitoring toxic gases is not a complicated task, a small microcontroller could do the job well in most cases. Attach a reliable, large capacity battery and you can have a unit in operation for years, and not have to worry about fly populations or the complications associated with attracting and converting the pesky creatures into energy.
This fly business is nothing but a gimmick like the web server powered by potatoe.
Real is evil, period. While Apple is wrong for their stance on the DMCA and hacking rhetoric, Real is an evil company like a horde expanding its reach onto soverign soil. Real's player and format is a bloated, spyware filled and commercialized junk heap and I think Apple's reaction would be different if this were about another file format (like ogg, etc.). It's all because Real is looking to cash in on Apple's player and innovative music concept by riding on the coat-tails of the Ipod without having to spend a penny on R&D or consumer marketing.
This isn't about offering "free choice", it's about making money without having to spend as much. More power to them, we need competition, but the entire concept to me is just brute force like.
Please mod the parent up. This is what college and being out on your own are all about, and this way only serves to better prepare you for life ahead. There is a lot more to life than having a good education, and doing it this way (I am doing it now) teaches you things your scholarship/daddy money peers probably won't learn about until out of school.
Don't always take the easy way; the other path may be more interesting and rewarding -- true success isn't without its struggle.
Because MPEG is expensive, both in bandwidth and server CPU. It can't be easily compressed further during transport (like Flash) and is terribly inefficient at simple animation like this series (at least not without a lot of optimization and tweaking). It's also resolution dependant meaning if they did offer it in MPG, it would be painful to watch, in a tiny 320x240 size.
Flash is vector based graphics with some code to make it all move and some sound. It has the added benefit of being both animation studio and viewer of the final product, which makes it a perfect choice for animation like this, so much that there is a whole genre of (entertaining) flash mini-series out there on the 'net.
Get off your righteous high arse, download Flash, disable it if you must, and enable it when you want to view things like this. Personally, Flash ads are offensive and annoying, but I find I can quickly ignore them -- filter them out, or turn them off within an instant when the need arises. Flash itself isn't bad, just like HTML itself isn't bad. That doesn't mean I am going to uninstall my web browser because I can't stand the latest X10 (HTML) ad.
This is nonsense. If someone steals your car, and then commits a drive-by shooting with it, should you be held responsible because you hadn't installed an anti-theft system in it? If someone steals an axe out of your garage and kills someone with it, should you be responsible for their actions? If someone steals your gun and uses it to commit a crime, should you serve that person's time?
The answer to all of these situations is no. It would be different if you were allowing the person to use these things and knew they were going to be used in a crime, however, you still wouldn't be the one ultimatly responsible for the actual crime, whatever it is. The key is the person commiting the crime is commiting a secondary, enabling crime by stealing someone from you to commit the real crime in question.
I think all the stuck up trolls here on Slashdot who drone on about updating this and that, firewall this and that are missing the big picture. How much software do you have that needs security updates, how often, and what type of knowledge does it take to do this? Keep in mind that every user doesn't read bugtraq. The answer to this question: probably a lot, and new updates are required almost weekly.
Oddly enough, there are some people (read: a lot, the majority) that use a computer like a tool, similar to a calculator or copier. An office device to get their work done. Most people are too busy with their lives and their work that doesn't involve computers but involves using one to constantly update and manage the increasingly tangeled mess that is internet security.
It's true that as a member of the Internet community you should try to be responsible, especially if you are a corporate member or someone providing a large service. But to try to hold joe sixpack with his job in Marketing, two kids and busy schedule responsible for not keeping up on his updates or using a firewall on his hacked computer that his kids use primarily to play games on is just plain silly.
People need to wake up and realize that the fault ultimatly lies with the person that commited the crime, this is the integral wrong and always will be. This computer owner is guilty non-sense is dumb and non-sensical.
EOD
The problem with their "model" is that something as complex as the current Internet as it exists today can't really be modeled, at least not very well. It's a huge chaotic system thats constantly changing and growing, so when you try to model it your model is going to be out of date before you can do anything useful with it. I really don't think $5 million can buy even a small representation of what the Internet is today. Think of the OSI layers and all the different software, hardware, protocols, methods, systems and manufactures in place at each layer. Each of those has its own set of vulnerabilities, holes, etc. and keep in mind there are many different versions of each of those running at the same time across different networks.
This complexity is precisely what makes tracking and solving problems with today's Internet so hard.
I am curious as to what they expect to study and find from this model. Today's problems with the Internet and networking in general are largely social, economic, or political. Figuring out some neat new protocol isn't going to make backbone provider X update their entire network. Worms and the such are also the bain of a social problem. As long as we have smart programmers with free time, there will be worms and exploits of the system no matter what procedures are in place or how smart the network is; The fix for said worms are timely patches and updates, however most users won't and don't do this, hence the epidemics.
This might make some great academic research and a neat new toy for the University but I fail to see how it can find applications in the real world where the problems are much harder than the technical ones this project (presumably) hopes to solve.
>I don't know if you mean to come off sounding >like a spoiled brat, but...
I didn't mean to come off as a spoiled brat, I meant to show that they should come after someone who can take them on. I have worked for everything in my life, never given hand-outs, etc. My family is successful because we worked hard for it and know the value of saving and we would be willing to stand up for our rights legally.
>you are willing to be sued for something you >are doing that's illegal
Just because it's illegal per the DMCA, doesn't mean that its wrong. What is wrong is obtaining information without regard for The United State's most fundamental foundation -- The Constitution. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to issue subponeas to gain information illegally.
How would you feel if a corporation issued a subponea to your telephone company to gain your phone records just because it thinks you are using your phone to arrange for the illegal sale of copyrighted works? I know that's a strange and far-fetched example, but it's not far away. How far away is the local police issuing their own subponeas without court order or due process? Look how the castle crumbles. This is more than about music here folks. Our freedoms are gradually being ripped up from under us by the bad mistakes of today's politics.
I didn't used to allow uploads from the shared drives several weeks ago, but now I've turned them all on. I'm fed up with turning on the TV and hearing about an overfluffed politican talking about blowing up people's personal property for copyright violations. That was when I started this with my college roomates (not on campus connection btw). I'm fed up with the fact that the RIAA now has a new well connected political head. This is just absurd what is going on today.
I think it's time we stand up and face the flames while we still can. I challenge everyone on Slashdot to run their P2P applications and share their files.
Hey RIAA!
I have over 100 GB of commercial works by many of the companies you represent on my network. Two computers my roomates use run Kazaa and Winmx non-stop sharing from the network drive. LimeWire runs on the server itself. We share over a cable connection, and I recently had DSL installed. Typically during the day there are thousands of uploads, so many sometimes LimeWire crashes.
And guess what? I have the money to fight you. The fact is folks, that if the information on illegal acts was obtained illegally and unconstitutionally, the evidence cannot be admitted into court and without evidence there is no case. It is unconstitional for private companies to issue subponeas because due process is not observed and there is no legal forward.
Sorry, but I am just begging they come after me. I have the cash ready and I come from a family (yes, it's sad I know) of very sucessful lawyers.
First, If you don't have enough bandwidth for even the most minimialistic google page with stripped graphics etc., you don't have enough bandwidth to view the sites attached to the results of your query. What good is a list of results by e-mail when you can't view the links to establish how accurate they are?
Also, the search process for the Internet is not only related to the quality of the search engine you use. It's an interactive process of finding what works best, refining your query based on results until you eventually find what you're looking for -- using this system would eliminate this aspect, at minimum making it painfully slow.
Can anyone give a useful application that many people could use and benefit from?
First of all, most cell phones store ringtones in a compressed PCM-like format, ADPCM, for instance. PCM sampling rates for most phones top out at around 22 KHz.
The speakers in such phones also can't reproduce high quality sound in even the ranges they are rated in, and the quality, response and dbm it takes to drive the speakers drops off considerably as the frequency goes significantly below or beyond its rated frequency response. Piezo elements could do it but those are rated for a single frequency or set of frequencies and all but the oldest phones still have them (those don't support ring tones anyway).
Perhaps they observed a different effect -- waving the phone in the air with the ring tone emmited will naturally rouse the insects.
I'll stick to bug spray and avoid the swamp lands, thank you.