IANAL myself, but I can imagine a lawyer smelling a Sherman Act case here. I don't know if that would fly nowadays, since Microsoft got out of their case with a slap on the wrist with a Nerf bat.
It'd be unfortunate for it to have to come to that, but it would be an ultimately good thing if such advocates for ever stringent copyright laws got a taste of their own medicine.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I'm certain that they would have pressured legislators to build exemptions for themselves into such laws.
At least, they'll try to pressure and lobby to amend immunity for themselves into existing law. Once big corporations learned that money talks in politics, the sky has been the limit for them.
Fellow reply says that the kid reached for what she thought was a Wii gun controller, but I think there's more to this than that. I think that although his disgraceful behavior and ethical lacking got him disbarred, Jack Thompson's crackpot "video games make kids violent" theory has had an indelible effect on the national media.
And, IMO, using that in the submission to increase page views on Slashdot is just as disgraceful on the part of the editors.
If you're a small shop and can't afford the "arm, leg, and firstborn" prices of volume licensing, set up a system where a manager or an experienced IT admin pre-approves software installation, and makes a (hopefully organized) record* of what software got installed on what computer/server.
If you're not starting up, have all the users go through their PCs and write up a list of software on their computers. It's disruptive, it's time-consuming, but only when you do it the first time, and it ferrets out the odd user who installed Google Desktop and a crapton of add-ons, distracting him more than making him more productive.
* If there's discomfort over management approval of software installs, you could be fairly liberal about it and say "well, you can install anything within company policy (i.e. no porn), just let us know so we don't freak out when WeIRDsofTWAREName shows up."
I had a similar "rude awakening" of sorts when my boss and I tried to get some licenses for Symantec Client Security. We compared the features and costs, and concluded that CS was the best bang for the buck and would get us out of trying to justify using a free product that may perform just as well (/me shakes fist at ISO 27001 committee).
So we tried to actually purchase it, since Symantec suggests through their licensing info and online shop that you could purchase licenses one at a time. Turns out there's a minimum purchase of 5. They did that to recycle shop code, and in a sense, bait-and-switch a small business into buying a big chunk of licenses "just in case".
Finally we bought NAV at Target for 20% off, and got to blow some raspberries at Symantec. At least, for a year.
Our parent company's Terminal Services server faces similar cost issues. "Ah, we'll need your firstborn for the server, client CALs and application CALs... then your second-born for the client CALs for the applications..."
They're thinking of brewing their own Windows server "garden" in their main or aux office. Personally I'd just rip the whole mess out and use a Linux/BSD farm, but we still handle Office documents and other Windows-dependent apps.
I think in a mass-production environment (or even a repair/refurbish shop), an electronic device that can only format microSD cards would be great at combating this vulnerability. Maybe a PROM and a flash drive interface. This way, you never hook up the flash card to a possibly-infected PC, and the device itself has no operating system to speak of, it's just a device that electronically formats the bits on the card.
I'm probably being hopelessly naive, but that sounds like a great project. If you could miniaturize it so it fits inside a mobile phone, you could integrate it as a remote-wipe or remote-kill (rewrite everything in flash with zeros) for those corporate smartphones that need the security.
It was as recent as two years ago that I re-bought StarCraft Battle Chest because I misplaced the CD key and/or damaged the discs (yeah, yeah, backup, pfft). This service has been a godsend, and has allowed me to stop worrying about losing or damaging physical media.
Of course, I never had to worry about Steam games dying via damaging the CDs, but kudos to Blizzard for picking up a few neat tricks from Valve.
Last I checked, LEDs were roughly as power-efficient as fluorescent. The shift from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent and now LED bulbs is more than offset by the increase in draw from computers and other electronics.
I haven't been impressed with the current batch of LED light bulbs. They're pitching an MBTF of 15,000 and 25,000 hours when LEDs have classically exhibited lifetimes closer to 60,000 hours. That means they're doing something wrong.
LEDs are notoriously heat-sensitive-- the most powerful LED devices are like today's modern GPUs in that they require fat heatsinks because the combined heat of the solid-state electronics and the phosphors are enough to threaten both the lifespan and efficiency of the light source. This heat sensitivity is made worse when designs use multiple LED devices in a compact enclosure. There's a reason why EarthLED's top-of-the-line bulb includes a small fan to cool the LED inside, and yet provides the same energy efficiency as a CFL at several times the cost.
As Treebeard says, "Don't be hasty." It's not that they're doing something wrong, it's that they haven't found the right design yet. I remember the early CFLs were either huge and bulky, or too dim. Give them a few more years and they might discover a design that provides the light output of an arc lamp (i.e. HIDs) at a fraction of the power and with the near-indestructible nature of solid state electronics.
By "environmentalists" it's usually "Greenpeace", who don't benefit directly from building nuke plants, thus they protest.
You could tell them that you'll be using a design that will give them eons of organic produce until you're blue in the face, and it still won't convince them to stop thinking that nuclear power isn't a means of increasing proliferation and radioactive waste.
Of course, the greatest bang for the buck right now isn't building new nuke plants, but by reducing our consumption via efficiency improvements.
This reminded me of a recent legal movement to allow a corporation to not necessarily put shareholders first. The linked story refers to Ben & Jerry's, who were forced by threat of shareholder litigation to literally sell out.
I suppose that, since servers are still the primary target market for virtualization, one could just get the least expensive Xeon and build a system off of that.
This and XP Mode in Windows 7 are some of the strongest reasons to buy a current AMD chip (the last one being cost). You can't tell in some cases whether an Intel chip has virtualization even by model number alone-- for some model numbers, they initially didn't support it and later added it to compete with AMD here.
I honestly can't see how this is any worse than a Social Security card, passport, credit card, or drivers license.
This argument assumes that there are no consequences to yet another form of government-issued ID, or one that would supersede/replace the aforementioned as a requirement for employment. If these forms of ID are already in place and work just fine, why bother devising another ID scheme and thus another vector for identity theft?
I am also oppose to illegals destroy our economy (and yes, they are costing America HUGE, along with the outsourcing).
Just to play devil's advocate (a bit sincerely, at that), who is responsible for the growth of illegal immigration and outsourcing? The Mexicans/Central Americans, Chinese, and Indians? They just want a job that pays better than a couple of USD per day, and would be among the last people who want the US economy to collapse. Can we not level some responsibility at the US corporations who fanatically seek dirt-cheap labor costs and zero labor protections/environmental regulations? Can we not see some responsibility in American laborers who demand ever-increasing wages and benefits while turning down the plentiful manual labor that the illegal immigrants consider generous? And, if the labor is being utilized by these undocumented workers, exactly how are these taxpaying people costing America*? For that matter, where are you getting this idea that handing out more documentation will suddenly cause illegals to stop working illicitly, or that this would prevent boneheaded racist ideas from becoming policy?
Boiling the discussion down to "illegals destroy our economy" makes for a catchy talking point (which is why GOP politicians use it liberally), but it is, in the end, a Big Lie designed to foster discrimination and create a class of scapegoats. If it worked for every immigrant struggle in the history of this fine nation, why not, right?
An ID card is little more than security theater. You'll have the same things that happen today with SSNs and identity theft, where illegals buy paperwork from dishonest people to become (sarcasm quotes) "documented"-- the only difference will be the time it takes to crack whatever encryption is on the ID card (remember, a straight cipher like the one you suggest is very straightforward to crack with brute force), or, more likely, the time it takes to move the electronics to a fake ID.
Let's not require such cards for citizens and permanent resident visas; don't even encourage employers to try to "document" their citizen/green-card workers this way, as the constitutional implications of this are serious. Let's not force those who seek temporary visas to get these IDs, as if we're Narita Airport's immigration gates fingerprinting every foreigner (remembering that by and large we Americans are descendants of immigrants). But if we want to somehow try to offer a way for undocumented workers to get legit documentation that's easy for employers to verify, offer this to them. Put them on "probation", if you would, and monitor their progress towards a legit visa.
Maybe that's too progressive for some folks, so naturally Congress would probably strengthen CIS officials' power to kick undocumented workers out for any reason. There is never a straightforward answer to a problem like this, and every solution will hurt a huge number of people. Hanging onto this ID card idea as if it were a silver bullet strongly suggests that you want a quick and dirty fix without thinking about the consequences.
* Yes, yes, you want to say "they're taking jobs away from hard-working patriotic freedom-loving Americans". I've got news for you-- those jobs were either priced out of their market by the employers, or the same hard-working Americans rejected the lower wages. You cannot pin the responsibility on the illegals alone for wage depression.
Worse (for the Beltway, anyway), if there is greater transparency in governance, it risks exposing further all the quid pro quo-style deals that lobbyists, interests, and politicians have set up to make themselves wealthy at the expense of the people.
It boils down to having a media, business, and political environment that is too interdependent. Big corporations with huge amounts of resources (don't even think about comparing them to labor unions, who command a tiny fraction of a percent of what corps can spend) pay huge sums to lobbyists who convince legislators and regulators to bend policy towards said corporations, who in turn offer lucrative jobs to said regulators/legislators when they retire or are voted out of office. And, since the majority of the media is own by corporations who share directors, you will never hear about these deals, when in a truly independent media, they would be a major scoop.
Even "public" broadcasting is influenced-- if they over-expose this corruption, there goes the lucrative underwriting grants. If the aim of the modern American corporation is to assume full control of government operations and information distribution, either they've succeeded or they're very close to succeeding. Citizens United is just the beginning.
No, I think the EU is doing this as an act of self-preservation.
I've done my fair share of BS'ing/armchair-punditry, but I have to say that this is either grossly naive or overgeneralized. France under Sarkozy has been pushing 3-strikes legislation aggressively, even though it keeps getting killed in court.
And if the US backs out of its FTAs, that'd be akin to committing economic policy seppuku. Another commenter mentioned China, but do you realize how much we're interdependent with East Asia in general? 90%+ of the components you used to comment were either made there (China) or designed by a firm in that region (Samsung, LG, Sony, Asus, etc. etc. etc.). Now imagine what would happen if the US even thinks about going protectionist on these guys-- you'll see a collapse of the US consumer economy as we know it, because we've abandoned the idea of making goods domestically due to higher costs.
There are always alternatives. Like this nifty thing that runs on 2 AA batteries and has no memory or software. Sure, you'll need to get an additional $40 or so of equipment (soldering iron, clamp), but like OSS and food you make from scratch, you know exactly what's going into it.
And, for bonus points, you can expand this USB power supply with neat things like lithium-polymer batteries, USB charging, and even solar cells.
Another commenter notes that the language code of the trojan is Chinese.
I think that American businesses should strongly reconsider the merits of having their goods produced in a highly authoritarian state who is known to employ hackers.
I'm not sure if you were being ironic, but I'm inclined to agree solely based on cost. After this media drubbing, Toyota dealers will be desperate for sales when they resume sales of affected model lines.
Also, if you're going to attempt to stop him, can I have your watch when you are dead?
Stopping him by confronting him head-on would be a risky maneuver at best, but there are other ways of stopping his behavior and/or not letting him get away with it. Taking cell phone footage of the guy hauling the ATM and plastering it on Youtube, for example. I'm told this same technique brought a lot of unwanted notoriety to the BART police when one of their officers shot a restrained guy dead.
This sort of thing, sumo wrestler or not (and since that's the suspect's claim, I doubt he is one unless Roho or some of the other Russian wrestlers went nuts), is best left to the authorities anyway. But take the pictures discreetly, just in case it's a mayor's son or something.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that's bad??? Try getting reeled in by spice traders.
I'm still having withdrawal symptoms from my last cumin and star anise addiction...
IANAL myself, but I can imagine a lawyer smelling a Sherman Act case here. I don't know if that would fly nowadays, since Microsoft got out of their case with a slap on the wrist with a Nerf bat.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I'm certain that they would have pressured legislators to build exemptions for themselves into such laws.
At least, they'll try to pressure and lobby to amend immunity for themselves into existing law. Once big corporations learned that money talks in politics, the sky has been the limit for them.
Fellow reply says that the kid reached for what she thought was a Wii gun controller, but I think there's more to this than that. I think that although his disgraceful behavior and ethical lacking got him disbarred, Jack Thompson's crackpot "video games make kids violent" theory has had an indelible effect on the national media.
And, IMO, using that in the submission to increase page views on Slashdot is just as disgraceful on the part of the editors.
If you're a small shop and can't afford the "arm, leg, and firstborn" prices of volume licensing, set up a system where a manager or an experienced IT admin pre-approves software installation, and makes a (hopefully organized) record* of what software got installed on what computer/server.
If you're not starting up, have all the users go through their PCs and write up a list of software on their computers. It's disruptive, it's time-consuming, but only when you do it the first time, and it ferrets out the odd user who installed Google Desktop and a crapton of add-ons, distracting him more than making him more productive.
* If there's discomfort over management approval of software installs, you could be fairly liberal about it and say "well, you can install anything within company policy (i.e. no porn), just let us know so we don't freak out when WeIRDsofTWAREName shows up."
I had a similar "rude awakening" of sorts when my boss and I tried to get some licenses for Symantec Client Security. We compared the features and costs, and concluded that CS was the best bang for the buck and would get us out of trying to justify using a free product that may perform just as well (/me shakes fist at ISO 27001 committee).
So we tried to actually purchase it, since Symantec suggests through their licensing info and online shop that you could purchase licenses one at a time. Turns out there's a minimum purchase of 5. They did that to recycle shop code, and in a sense, bait-and-switch a small business into buying a big chunk of licenses "just in case".
Finally we bought NAV at Target for 20% off, and got to blow some raspberries at Symantec. At least, for a year.
Our parent company's Terminal Services server faces similar cost issues. "Ah, we'll need your firstborn for the server, client CALs and application CALs... then your second-born for the client CALs for the applications..."
They're thinking of brewing their own Windows server "garden" in their main or aux office. Personally I'd just rip the whole mess out and use a Linux/BSD farm, but we still handle Office documents and other Windows-dependent apps.
I think in a mass-production environment (or even a repair/refurbish shop), an electronic device that can only format microSD cards would be great at combating this vulnerability. Maybe a PROM and a flash drive interface. This way, you never hook up the flash card to a possibly-infected PC, and the device itself has no operating system to speak of, it's just a device that electronically formats the bits on the card.
I'm probably being hopelessly naive, but that sounds like a great project. If you could miniaturize it so it fits inside a mobile phone, you could integrate it as a remote-wipe or remote-kill (rewrite everything in flash with zeros) for those corporate smartphones that need the security.
It was as recent as two years ago that I re-bought StarCraft Battle Chest because I misplaced the CD key and/or damaged the discs (yeah, yeah, backup, pfft). This service has been a godsend, and has allowed me to stop worrying about losing or damaging physical media.
Of course, I never had to worry about Steam games dying via damaging the CDs, but kudos to Blizzard for picking up a few neat tricks from Valve.
LEDs are notoriously heat-sensitive-- the most powerful LED devices are like today's modern GPUs in that they require fat heatsinks because the combined heat of the solid-state electronics and the phosphors are enough to threaten both the lifespan and efficiency of the light source. This heat sensitivity is made worse when designs use multiple LED devices in a compact enclosure. There's a reason why EarthLED's top-of-the-line bulb includes a small fan to cool the LED inside, and yet provides the same energy efficiency as a CFL at several times the cost.
As Treebeard says, "Don't be hasty." It's not that they're doing something wrong, it's that they haven't found the right design yet. I remember the early CFLs were either huge and bulky, or too dim. Give them a few more years and they might discover a design that provides the light output of an arc lamp (i.e. HIDs) at a fraction of the power and with the near-indestructible nature of solid state electronics.
By "environmentalists" it's usually "Greenpeace", who don't benefit directly from building nuke plants, thus they protest.
You could tell them that you'll be using a design that will give them eons of organic produce until you're blue in the face, and it still won't convince them to stop thinking that nuclear power isn't a means of increasing proliferation and radioactive waste.
Of course, the greatest bang for the buck right now isn't building new nuke plants, but by reducing our consumption via efficiency improvements.
This reminded me of a recent legal movement to allow a corporation to not necessarily put shareholders first. The linked story refers to Ben & Jerry's, who were forced by threat of shareholder litigation to literally sell out.
I suppose that, since servers are still the primary target market for virtualization, one could just get the least expensive Xeon and build a system off of that.
Yeah, if I had a couple thousand bucks to burn...
This and XP Mode in Windows 7 are some of the strongest reasons to buy a current AMD chip (the last one being cost). You can't tell in some cases whether an Intel chip has virtualization even by model number alone-- for some model numbers, they initially didn't support it and later added it to compete with AMD here.
This argument assumes that there are no consequences to yet another form of government-issued ID, or one that would supersede/replace the aforementioned as a requirement for employment. If these forms of ID are already in place and work just fine, why bother devising another ID scheme and thus another vector for identity theft?
Just to play devil's advocate (a bit sincerely, at that), who is responsible for the growth of illegal immigration and outsourcing? The Mexicans/Central Americans, Chinese, and Indians? They just want a job that pays better than a couple of USD per day, and would be among the last people who want the US economy to collapse. Can we not level some responsibility at the US corporations who fanatically seek dirt-cheap labor costs and zero labor protections/environmental regulations? Can we not see some responsibility in American laborers who demand ever-increasing wages and benefits while turning down the plentiful manual labor that the illegal immigrants consider generous? And, if the labor is being utilized by these undocumented workers, exactly how are these taxpaying people costing America*? For that matter, where are you getting this idea that handing out more documentation will suddenly cause illegals to stop working illicitly, or that this would prevent boneheaded racist ideas from becoming policy?
Boiling the discussion down to "illegals destroy our economy" makes for a catchy talking point (which is why GOP politicians use it liberally), but it is, in the end, a Big Lie designed to foster discrimination and create a class of scapegoats. If it worked for every immigrant struggle in the history of this fine nation, why not, right?
An ID card is little more than security theater. You'll have the same things that happen today with SSNs and identity theft, where illegals buy paperwork from dishonest people to become (sarcasm quotes) "documented"-- the only difference will be the time it takes to crack whatever encryption is on the ID card (remember, a straight cipher like the one you suggest is very straightforward to crack with brute force), or, more likely, the time it takes to move the electronics to a fake ID.
Let's not require such cards for citizens and permanent resident visas; don't even encourage employers to try to "document" their citizen/green-card workers this way, as the constitutional implications of this are serious. Let's not force those who seek temporary visas to get these IDs, as if we're Narita Airport's immigration gates fingerprinting every foreigner (remembering that by and large we Americans are descendants of immigrants). But if we want to somehow try to offer a way for undocumented workers to get legit documentation that's easy for employers to verify, offer this to them. Put them on "probation", if you would, and monitor their progress towards a legit visa.
Maybe that's too progressive for some folks, so naturally Congress would probably strengthen CIS officials' power to kick undocumented workers out for any reason. There is never a straightforward answer to a problem like this, and every solution will hurt a huge number of people. Hanging onto this ID card idea as if it were a silver bullet strongly suggests that you want a quick and dirty fix without thinking about the consequences.
* Yes, yes, you want to say "they're taking jobs away from hard-working patriotic freedom-loving Americans". I've got news for you-- those jobs were either priced out of their market by the employers, or the same hard-working Americans rejected the lower wages. You cannot pin the responsibility on the illegals alone for wage depression.
Worse (for the Beltway, anyway), if there is greater transparency in governance, it risks exposing further all the quid pro quo-style deals that lobbyists, interests, and politicians have set up to make themselves wealthy at the expense of the people.
It boils down to having a media, business, and political environment that is too interdependent. Big corporations with huge amounts of resources (don't even think about comparing them to labor unions, who command a tiny fraction of a percent of what corps can spend) pay huge sums to lobbyists who convince legislators and regulators to bend policy towards said corporations, who in turn offer lucrative jobs to said regulators/legislators when they retire or are voted out of office. And, since the majority of the media is own by corporations who share directors, you will never hear about these deals, when in a truly independent media, they would be a major scoop.
Even "public" broadcasting is influenced-- if they over-expose this corruption, there goes the lucrative underwriting grants. If the aim of the modern American corporation is to assume full control of government operations and information distribution, either they've succeeded or they're very close to succeeding. Citizens United is just the beginning.
I've done my fair share of BS'ing/armchair-punditry, but I have to say that this is either grossly naive or overgeneralized. France under Sarkozy has been pushing 3-strikes legislation aggressively, even though it keeps getting killed in court.
And if the US backs out of its FTAs, that'd be akin to committing economic policy seppuku. Another commenter mentioned China, but do you realize how much we're interdependent with East Asia in general? 90%+ of the components you used to comment were either made there (China) or designed by a firm in that region (Samsung, LG, Sony, Asus, etc. etc. etc.). Now imagine what would happen if the US even thinks about going protectionist on these guys-- you'll see a collapse of the US consumer economy as we know it, because we've abandoned the idea of making goods domestically due to higher costs.
There are always alternatives. Like this nifty thing that runs on 2 AA batteries and has no memory or software. Sure, you'll need to get an additional $40 or so of equipment (soldering iron, clamp), but like OSS and food you make from scratch, you know exactly what's going into it.
And, for bonus points, you can expand this USB power supply with neat things like lithium-polymer batteries, USB charging, and even solar cells.
It's even perfect for online gaming sessions:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010317
I was hoping to find a clip of Quagmire handcuffed to a bed and needing a phone call, but for understandable reasons I can't. ;)
Corollary: Do not rocket jump from a tall platform-- you'll end up like the last Soldier in the TF2 trailer.
Another commenter notes that the language code of the trojan is Chinese.
I think that American businesses should strongly reconsider the merits of having their goods produced in a highly authoritarian state who is known to employ hackers.
I'm not sure if you were being ironic, but I'm inclined to agree solely based on cost. After this media drubbing, Toyota dealers will be desperate for sales when they resume sales of affected model lines.
Here's the video. Fascinating stuff-- the first sample is a copper plate with copper oxide crystals coated in a material very similar to Teflon.
Stopping him by confronting him head-on would be a risky maneuver at best, but there are other ways of stopping his behavior and/or not letting him get away with it. Taking cell phone footage of the guy hauling the ATM and plastering it on Youtube, for example. I'm told this same technique brought a lot of unwanted notoriety to the BART police when one of their officers shot a restrained guy dead.
This sort of thing, sumo wrestler or not (and since that's the suspect's claim, I doubt he is one unless Roho or some of the other Russian wrestlers went nuts), is best left to the authorities anyway. But take the pictures discreetly, just in case it's a mayor's son or something.