So if Jon and Dimitry had included an "if it sucks, too bad" clause in their licences, they'd have been OK? But wait, I'm fairly sure they both DID!
Perhaps if they'd developed the software somewhere where reverse-engineering copy-control systems was legal, like Norway or Russia. Oh.. never mind.
I think the GP was suggesting that we should haul the spyware and virus writers into court, not the company responsible for SwissCheeseXP that makes such malware so easy to write and spread. Start with Sony.
I can name plenty of URL's that install drive-by spyware on MSIE (astalavista.box.sk, serials.ws). Go ahead and give me even one solitary URL that installs drive-by spyware through firefox. Just one! I promise I will visit it with firefox, and let you know the results.
I won't jump through hoops for _any_ website. It's just too easy to go find another website that has the same information or service, and does work.
And when it comes to banking it's my opinion that any bank which requires MSIE (or claims to require it, even if it can be bypassed) is putting up a big flashing neon sign that says "WE HAVE NO FSCKING CLUE" -- I'd switch anyway, and advise my friends to do the same.
I've been living a 'one browser' life for years; Firefox and nothing else (before that it was just Mozilla).
I've only encountered one site in recent memory that insisted on MSIE, and that was only for the signup which I used a friend's machine for. I'm aware of other sites deliberately searching for them, but only ever ran into one during ordinary web use..
My bank is fine with Firefox, and if they ever change that I will not hesitate to switch banks.
You will not make backup copies of your files. You will not have your files on more than one computer. You may not share the files under any circumstance.
Standard DRM stuff. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
You may not playback the movie to more than 5 people.
The usual wording is more like "For home viewing only. This film may not be rented or shown in public, clubs, schools, churches, prisons, etc".. You have four friends over for poker, that's a club. Don't even think about letting them watch a movie with you! They make it pretty clear that they'd really like to fine you for letting anyone who isn't immediate family watch it with you, if only they could catch you at it. And somewhere an MPAA lawyer is working on a version that forbids viewing by families with more than four children too.
I have a friend who's completely blind and uses the web a lot. Some sites are a major pain and some are completely inaccessable, but most are reasonably accessable to him using yasr and links. Very few sites now require msie and he's pretty-much given up on Windows. 98 is unstable, upgrading to XP would require a faster computer and a later version of JAWS which is mega-expensive.. We're still waiting for a useable version of gnopernicus but one of the great things about Linux is that almost everything can still be done from the command line.
1 kg bag of chicken nibbles. 1 kg bag shoestring fries 1 cup flour 1 tbsp salt 1 tbsp pepper.
Mix flour, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Dump all your chicken in, cover bowl, and shake the crap out of it so all the chicken is well-coated. Leave it to sit for a while.
Cook fries in hot fat, not panzy vegetable oil or oven fried. Add a little salt and put them in the oven at about 90 deg. C to stay hot.
Cook chicken in hot fat (my fryer can fit about 8 or ten at a time) for about 10 or 15 minutes per batch till it's golden brown.
Dump chicken into oven dish with chips, and serve.
Google recognises 'gateway' pages that link to many other pages of good content, and I think it ranks links from 'gateway' pages higher than other links.
So;
Set up a web index that links to many good pages on a subject. Google will rank it highly.
Include a few links to your own pages. Google will rank them higher since they appear on a high-ranking gateway page.
been there, done that. 75 baud data from one side of a room to the other through purely acoustic media. You could probably go a _little_ faster, but ultrasound suffers from echoes and multipath interference so the bandwidth is seriously limited.
The actual figure from BigChampagne, as reported by Cory Doctrow, is "less than three minutes"
"In the DRM world, security is breached so long as there is any person with the wherewithal to make a cleartext copy of an asset and put it on the Internet. In practice, this happens with amazing swiftness. Big Champagne, a company that monitors P2P networks, says that iTunes-only tracks (e.g. assets that are only released within DRM wrappers) typically appear on P2P networks less than three minutes after they are released to the iTunes Music Store."
I didn't entirely pull it from my ass. I pulled it from memory, and I'm not absloutely sure it was six minutes. It was about the same length of time it takes to rip a whole CD on a reasonably fast computer.
However, I am fairly confident in my memory that BigChampagne (the company who monitors p2p filesharing and releases statistics to media companies like the RIAA) did publish an approximate average time between tracks becoming available through legitimate channels, and their appearance on p2p networks. And that there was no statistically significant difference between 'protected' and 'unprotected' content.
I can also quote this. "There is no evidence that DRM has prevented a single act of piracy" - Eric Garland, CEO of media tracking firm BigChampagne.
'Rampant piracy' doesn't significantly impact sales. Over 1,000,000 sales on iTunes agrees with this (the same tunes are _all_ readily available from p2p at the same or better quality)
However, DRM also does NOT make the slightest difference to piracy, rampant or otherwise.
The average time for an ordinary CD to appear on p2p networks is about 6 minutes after it appears on store shelves.
For a DRM-protected CD the average time is about 6 minutes.
For an iTunes-only track, the average time is _still_ only 6 minutes.
The only people even the slightest bit bothered by CD copy-protection and DRM on digital music files are the legitimate music purchasers. Seeders know how to bypass it. P2P downloaders never even see it.
It's outragous that a gentle and social company like Google should be subject to the same law that Jane LOL Webcunt has to obey.
And vice-versa.
When's the last time J. L Webcunt had to had over a bunch (only a few mere terrabytes) of their personal or business data to the Feds for no better reason than because the Feds thought it might be useful to have?
An actual court case I can understand, if it's relevent, and if the same information can't be obtained by some less obtrusive means. But the Government hardly needs to ask googke to figure out that there's a crapload of pr0n on the web and an approximately equal number of people looking for it.
It's not a non-issue. Both the motherboard and soundcard had drivers available for 95, 98 and 2k.. so it's a case of 'too old' not 'too new'
The hardware obviously existed when XP was first released, and the S3 card must be fairly common; I've been given about five so far (mostly from users who found they couldn't get drivers for it after they upgraded to Windows XP.:-) Microsoft couldn't be bothered including more than generic support for the mobo, or any support for the soundcard, and the manufacturers couldn't be bothered releasing new drivers for hardware they no longer manufactured or supported. Thus in order to upgrade to Windows XP, John has had to accept reduced functionality on his motherboard and discard an otherwise perfectly good soundcard.
I've seen MANY reviews of Linux that are harshly critical about 'users having to buy new hardware' because there are no drivers for their existing hardware. So why shouldn't I be just as critical of Windows?
Don't even bother flashing the system bios at all. Many people have their system set to boot from CDROM first. Flash the CDROM bios so that it loads the rootkit as if from bootable CD, and them boots 'normally' from an actual CD or the harddive under VM control.
The whole time I was dealing with this windows box, my kids (age 9 and 11) were playing games on my machine, running Dapper Flight 4 with the XGL desktop. Dapper found _ALL_ my hardware on install, I had no trouble getting nvidia drivers, xgl and compiz sorted, and it (an alpha release) was completely stable for the five hours that the kids used it. I also burned off a couple of CDs and recovered some files from a corrupted media card that Windows couldn't access.
This Saturday I helped a guy install Windows XP on a white box using an ABIT motherboard.
Out of the box onboard video was using the generic drivers, and onboard sound didn't work. The S3 SonicVibes card he had also wouldn't work. The ABIT website in Taiwan (after trying to download foreign language support at every page) only had chipset drivers for 95, 98 and 2k. Drivers for the S3 soundcard were the same.
I'm not sure how much else didn't work but he eventually went out and bought another cheap soundcard and decided he could live with the generic unaccelerated video. He's not a gamer..
I don't know why we had so many problems.. the mobo wasn't all that much older that Windows XP itself which is about 5 years old now. It was a fairly ordinary Taiwanese board, and a very common S3 soundcard. I took the old soundcard home because I have used a few of these in the past and know from experience it will work flawlessly in any Linux distro.
If this were about Linux, many people would suggest at this point that it will never be ready for mainstream use until this kind of issue is sorted out. My experience is that I usually have much bigger problems sorting out drivers for Windows unless it's a fairly new machine with all the OEM CD's still at hand.
I've got it running (under Dapper Flight4) with my crappy first-generation nvidia.. still a few bugs though, it won't run any of the glx stuff or play videos, although the desktop itself is pretty smooth.
Sorry, perhaps I should go read those links again. I missed the part where Microsoft said they were going to do anything more than create an illusion of improved security. I missed the part where Microsoft haven't had a single easter egg since the flight simulator one. I missed the part where Microsoft didn't have an unpatched, widely exploited flaw for two weeks that let anyone embed runnable code in image files. And I missed the part where Vista codebase was rewritten from scratch and so well audited that it didn't share the same flaw.
Slashdot Mirror
So if Jon and Dimitry had included an "if it sucks, too bad" clause in their licences, they'd have been OK? But wait, I'm fairly sure they both DID!
Perhaps if they'd developed the software somewhere where reverse-engineering copy-control systems was legal, like Norway or Russia. Oh.. never mind.
I think the GP was suggesting that we should haul the spyware and virus writers into court, not the company responsible for SwissCheeseXP that makes such malware so easy to write and spread. Start with Sony.
What's the URL?
I can name plenty of URL's that install drive-by spyware on MSIE (astalavista.box.sk, serials.ws). Go ahead and give me even one solitary URL that installs drive-by spyware through firefox. Just one! I promise I will visit it with firefox, and let you know the results.
I won't jump through hoops for _any_ website. It's just too easy to go find another website that has the same information or service, and does work.
And when it comes to banking it's my opinion that any bank which requires MSIE (or claims to require it, even if it can be bypassed) is putting up a big flashing neon sign that says "WE HAVE NO FSCKING CLUE" -- I'd switch anyway, and advise my friends to do the same.
I've been living a 'one browser' life for years; Firefox and nothing else (before that it was just Mozilla).
I've only encountered one site in recent memory that insisted on MSIE, and that was only for the signup which I used a friend's machine for. I'm aware of other sites deliberately searching for them, but only ever ran into one during ordinary web use..
My bank is fine with Firefox, and if they ever change that I will not hesitate to switch banks.
But it didn't happen because Ford started supplying their own flag-carrier-for-life free with every new car, did it?
"It IS faster, over Five Million.." -South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
My favorite part of the whole movie. And why the hell didn't the navy actually do that when NT4 left their high-tech destroyer dead in the water?
Err no..
It's a 700M file. You don't need any DRM to stop people from emailing it, there are SFA mail servers that will accept a file this big!
You will not make backup copies of your files.
.. You have four friends over for poker, that's a club. Don't even think about letting them watch a movie with you! They make it pretty clear that they'd really like to fine you for letting anyone who isn't immediate family watch it with you, if only they could catch you at it. And somewhere an MPAA lawyer is working on a version that forbids viewing by families with more than four children too.
You will not have your files on more than one computer.
You may not share the files under any circumstance.
Standard DRM stuff. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
You may not playback the movie to more than 5 people.
The usual wording is more like "For home viewing only. This film may not be rented or shown in public, clubs, schools, churches, prisons, etc"
wtf? Misfortune?
I have a friend who's completely blind and uses the web a lot. Some sites are a major pain and some are completely inaccessable, but most are reasonably accessable to him using yasr and links. Very few sites now require msie and he's pretty-much given up on Windows. 98 is unstable, upgrading to XP would require a faster computer and a later version of JAWS which is mega-expensive.. We're still waiting for a useable version of gnopernicus but one of the great things about Linux is that almost everything can still be done from the command line.
Fried chicken, Yeah! I love fried chicken!
1 kg bag of chicken nibbles.
1 kg bag shoestring fries
1 cup flour
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp pepper.
Mix flour, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Dump all your chicken in, cover bowl, and shake the crap out of it so all the chicken is well-coated. Leave it to sit for a while.
Cook fries in hot fat, not panzy vegetable oil or oven fried. Add a little salt and put them in the oven at about 90 deg. C to stay hot.
Cook chicken in hot fat (my fryer can fit about 8 or ten at a time) for about 10 or 15 minutes per batch till it's golden brown.
Dump chicken into oven dish with chips, and serve.
There's a movie based on that idea. It's quite a good movie too!
"The Man Who Sued God"
Google recognises 'gateway' pages that link to many other pages of good content, and I think it ranks links from 'gateway' pages higher than other links.
So;
Set up a web index that links to many good pages on a subject. Google will rank it highly.
Include a few links to your own pages. Google will rank them higher since they appear on a high-ranking gateway page.
That's the theory.
been there, done that. 75 baud data from one side of a room to the other through purely acoustic media. You could probably go a _little_ faster, but ultrasound suffers from echoes and multipath interference so the bandwidth is seriously limited.
The actual figure from BigChampagne, as reported by Cory Doctrow, is "less than three minutes"
"In the DRM world, security is breached so long as there is any person with the wherewithal to make a cleartext copy of an asset and put it on the Internet. In practice, this happens with amazing swiftness. Big Champagne, a company that monitors P2P networks, says that iTunes-only tracks (e.g. assets that are only released within DRM wrappers) typically appear on P2P networks less than three minutes after they are released to the iTunes Music Store."
http://www.xs4all.nl/~collin/test/hpdrm.html
I didn't entirely pull it from my ass. I pulled it from memory, and I'm not absloutely sure it was six minutes. It was about the same length of time it takes to rip a whole CD on a reasonably fast computer.
However, I am fairly confident in my memory that BigChampagne (the company who monitors p2p filesharing and releases statistics to media companies like the RIAA) did publish an approximate average time between tracks becoming available through legitimate channels, and their appearance on p2p networks. And that there was no statistically significant difference between 'protected' and 'unprotected' content.
I can also quote this. "There is no evidence that DRM has prevented a single act of piracy" - Eric Garland, CEO of media tracking firm BigChampagne.
'Rampant piracy' doesn't significantly impact sales. Over 1,000,000 sales on iTunes agrees with this (the same tunes are _all_ readily available from p2p at the same or better quality)
However, DRM also does NOT make the slightest difference to piracy, rampant or otherwise.
The average time for an ordinary CD to appear on p2p networks is about 6 minutes after it appears on store shelves.
For a DRM-protected CD the average time is about 6 minutes.
For an iTunes-only track, the average time is _still_ only 6 minutes.
The only people even the slightest bit bothered by CD copy-protection and DRM on digital music files are the legitimate music purchasers. Seeders know how to bypass it. P2P downloaders never even see it.
It's outragous that a gentle and social company like Google should be subject to the same law that Jane LOL Webcunt has to obey.
And vice-versa.
When's the last time J. L Webcunt had to had over a bunch (only a few mere terrabytes) of their personal or business data to the Feds for no better reason than because the Feds thought it might be useful to have?
An actual court case I can understand, if it's relevent, and if the same information can't be obtained by some less obtrusive means. But the Government hardly needs to ask googke to figure out that there's a crapload of pr0n on the web and an approximately equal number of people looking for it.
OK, but;
The root password is hard-coded in plaintext in this bash script
The root password is visible to all users via 'w' the entire time the script runs.
This is _much_ worse than the original issue.
echo "Why would anyone leave their root password hardcoded in a bash script" ; exit 1
It's not a non-issue. Both the motherboard and soundcard had drivers available for 95, 98 and 2k.. so it's a case of 'too old' not 'too new'
:-) Microsoft couldn't be bothered including more than generic support for the mobo, or any support for the soundcard, and the manufacturers couldn't be bothered releasing new drivers for hardware they no longer manufactured or supported. Thus in order to upgrade to Windows XP, John has had to accept reduced functionality on his motherboard and discard an otherwise perfectly good soundcard.
The hardware obviously existed when XP was first released, and the S3 card must be fairly common; I've been given about five so far (mostly from users who found they couldn't get drivers for it after they upgraded to Windows XP.
I've seen MANY reviews of Linux that are harshly critical about 'users having to buy new hardware' because there are no drivers for their existing hardware. So why shouldn't I be just as critical of Windows?
Don't even bother flashing the system bios at all. Many people have their system set to boot from CDROM first. Flash the CDROM bios so that it loads the rootkit as if from bootable CD, and them boots 'normally' from an actual CD or the harddive under VM control.
Forgot to mention..
The whole time I was dealing with this windows box, my kids (age 9 and 11) were playing games on my machine, running Dapper Flight 4 with the XGL desktop. Dapper found _ALL_ my hardware on install, I had no trouble getting nvidia drivers, xgl and compiz sorted, and it (an alpha release) was completely stable for the five hours that the kids used it. I also burned off a couple of CDs and recovered some files from a corrupted media card that Windows couldn't access.
This Saturday I helped a guy install Windows XP on a white box using an ABIT motherboard.
Out of the box onboard video was using the generic drivers, and onboard sound didn't work. The S3 SonicVibes card he had also wouldn't work. The ABIT website in Taiwan (after trying to download foreign language support at every page) only had chipset drivers for 95, 98 and 2k. Drivers for the S3 soundcard were the same.
I'm not sure how much else didn't work but he eventually went out and bought another cheap soundcard and decided he could live with the generic unaccelerated video. He's not a gamer..
I don't know why we had so many problems.. the mobo wasn't all that much older that Windows XP itself which is about 5 years old now. It was a fairly ordinary Taiwanese board, and a very common S3 soundcard. I took the old soundcard home because I have used a few of these in the past and know from experience it will work flawlessly in any Linux distro.
If this were about Linux, many people would suggest at this point that it will never be ready for mainstream use until this kind of issue is sorted out. My experience is that I usually have much bigger problems sorting out drivers for Windows unless it's a fairly new machine with all the OEM CD's still at hand.
I've got it running (under Dapper Flight4) with my crappy first-generation nvidia.. still a few bugs though, it won't run any of the glx stuff or play videos, although the desktop itself is pretty smooth.
Sorry, perhaps I should go read those links again. I missed the part where Microsoft said they were going to do anything more than create an illusion of improved security. I missed the part where Microsoft haven't had a single easter egg since the flight simulator one. I missed the part where Microsoft didn't have an unpatched, widely exploited flaw for two weeks that let anyone embed runnable code in image files. And I missed the part where Vista codebase was rewritten from scratch and so well audited that it didn't share the same flaw.
Sorry, I guess I should pay more attention.