I'm not exactly sure what ISPs hope to gain from this policy. There are very few people who really want to pay for multiple Dynamic addresses (my Cable modem provider charges $5 a pop.) I can't imagine that there's a ton of money to be made here.
The ISPs aren't losing anything; if users are sucking up too much bandwidth, limit them. A lot of NAT users aren't major bandwidth hogs, anyway. They're just people with a simple gateway (for instance, an Apple Airport) who happen to have a couple of computers in the house. Oftentimes, they're using the thing primarily as a firewall. I suppose there may be a handful of business customers abusing the privilege, but those people aren't likely to turn around and buy "business" versions of your Cable modem service. They're just as likely to get DSL (and maybe their employees will too.)
It strikes me that this is just an extension of the "rent a cable box for every room in the house" Cable strategy, only one that's less likely to bring in revenue.
You're right, of course. The author should talk to an IP lawyer. Who'll probably tell him/her the same thing. That these licenses (which were put together by IP lawyers) have never been tested, are fairly experimental, etc. Then the author will just have to take a chance. Really, any situation that involves going to court could be considered something of a loss, anyway, given the cost.
Imagine that you truly post the source to the book (LaTeX or something), and someone latexs it and prints off a thousand copies at Kinko's, has it bound, and sells them for $10 on eBay.
I don't really understand the problem. As you point out, somebody could do the same with a Linux distro, or any other piece of OSS. Generally, customers won't be stupid enough to shell out much dough for a product that they could obtain for no cost, unless they feel that they're getting something for what they're spending (like the printing and binding.)
The danger would come from somebody attempting to claim a new copyright on your work (fairly easy to deal with, if you register your work), or somebody modifying and redistributing it as their own work. In either situation, you've got a decent court case. I don't know how strong OSS licenses may be in the print arena, but if you did have to go to court, I think you'd have at least an even shot. Hopefully, nobody would be stupid enough to test you.
The author could always keep an eye out for somebody trying to do this, and potentially undercut him/her by selling copies for a lower price.
That means MS would pay about 1/2 of its cash reserves to a settle a lawsuit that originally sought to break up MS.
Not bad. Plus, MS can be done with it forever.
Not bad? Are you crazy! It's bad, bad, bad!
Half their cash reserves? Billions of dollars? All in one case? You're certainly right that it's not a bullet in the brain for Microsoft, but it's one in each of their kidneys. And it would leave them open to god knows how many hungry lawyers.
Now, it's very unlikely that anything approaching this will come to pass. But if it did, it would not be good for MS. In any analysis.
Similarly, even if average people experience a lot of Windows crashes (which they do), they're not going to get mad at Microsoft, but rather with Dell or Compaq or something...
However, they might associate some of that unreliability with the whole world of computers. Now imagine a computer company attempting to horn in on a market that's considered (by your average Joe) to be reliable and crash-free unlike the average PC (though this is often false, it's the perception.)
Imagine the consumer's lack of enthusiasm for such advancements. It's nothing to do with Microsoft, specifically. But their name carries a stigma. I suppose if Dell or Gateway started building set-top boxes, they'd get about the same response.
How in the world could you have DRM built into an open-source OS? Users could just modify the source code to disable it.
Not all components of Red Hat need to be Open Source, I suppose. If AOL chose to implement a closed-source, encrypted DRM file system as a separate component (TiVo does this, couldn't AOL?), they could include it with their "brand name" Linux-based OS. They'd even have DMCA protection if somebody tried to distribute an Open Source version.
It certainly wouldn't be foolproof-- any DRM system is going to get broken by someone. But it might do the job, preventing the average AOL customer from duplicating protected content.
The above is wild speculation, and should not be taken too seriously. I mean, AOL getting their average user to use Linux? Puh-leeze:)
in which AOL is mearly picking up another weapon with which to threaten Microsoft. Like Winamp, Redhat woudl probably be let alone to continue development
Until, of course, the content side of AOL/TW becomes more interested in DRM and content protection than in beating MS over the head. Then ownership of Red Hat will be more of a liability than anything else.
If you've got a PhD, life looks fantastic. If you don't know what PhD stands for, life looks pretty bleak.
I wouldn't count on it. I know plenty of 40 and 50 yr old CS/EE/Chem PhDs who are now being forced to job-hunt, as the big old east coast research labs disintegrate. They'll probably get jobs, but nothing like what they're used to. That makes them significantly luckier than the poor ex-NASA folks who were displaced at the end of the space program.
Depending on how many consumers have decent jobs in this brave new world, of course. I'm less concerned with people drooling in front of their TV-- that's their choice-- than with people not being able to afford a TV (or a couch or a home) in the first place.
At some point, the needs of society are going to kick in as a counterweight to the corporate drive for fewer and smarter employees. If enough people lose their jobs (particularly older employees who are less able to switch careers every few years), then the substrate upon which corporations rest will start to erode.
In the current climate, Corps don't much care about the health of the society in which they do business, at least until it becomes so bad they begin to suffer. Sooner or later everything will balance out, but I think it could be a grim time to be alive.
If microsoft can, by some complex reorganization of their development and review process, make their code have the same, or less, incidence of critical issue as, say, Linux... What would we do?
The typical assumption (as I've heard it) has always been that Microsoft's poor security was a necessary side effect of their quick-to-market and add-lots-of-new-feature strategies. Though I don't think most people on this forum view those two strategies as a "good" thing, it appears that they've worked rather well for MS up until now.
So the $50,000 question is, can Microsoft focus on security without falling behind on those other fronts? And if they have to slow down on their speedy rollout of new products and features, will they suffer in the marketplace?
If MS can do security and still be as quick-to-market as they were before, they're probably going to be in a very good position. If, on the other hand, they are forced to make a tradeoff-- of speed and quantity for security, for instance-- then it might be a whole different ballgame. Worse yet, they might wind up compromising on both fronts.
Re:You're kidding about that Terrorism thing...
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 1
Um, hello? Have you ever heard of Israel? There people haven't been cowed by forty years of bombings, wars, etc...
It depends what you mean by cowed. Not too long ago, I seem to remember Israel being willing to settle things, grant statehood and even give up significant natural gas resources to the Palestinians. All this despite the fact that Palestinians and Israelis had been doing little but killing each other for years.
That plan could very well have worked out. What made it fail was the fact that significant factions of the Palestinian people wanted more than that simple settlement (there were plenty of Israelis who were similarly uncompromising, but they were generally less likely to take matters into their own hands and attack Palestine.)
Had the situation been less complicated, and more like the one you describe, the Palestinians' tactics could well have accomplished the goal.
do you have an inkling yet what the controversy is about?
I was always told that it had to do with the right to play DVDs on Linux boxes. I'm shocked and dismayed to learn that it really is all about copying:)
On a more serious note, I don't have a DVD-R, and wasn't aware that they had such limitations until just now. Thanks for letting me know.
BUT, unfortunately, it has opened the door to DVD copyright infringement ("piracy"), like it or not.
Although those products may incorporate DeCSS, I see no reason why a DVD copy program couldn't just do a bit-copy from one disk to another without breaking the crypto. As has been said a million times, DeCSS is not an anti-copying system. It's an anti-playing tool.
Certain applications, like re-encoding a DVD onto a CD-R would definitely require DeCSS or something of the sort. But with the attendant quality loss, you might as while be making VHS copies (which as far as I know is legal and accepted-- not at all considered piracy.)
In actuality the book paints a picture of Heisenberg not wanting to develop the bomb at all - and turning the german research team away from a number of key discoveries.
Despite the after-the-fact romancing (of a guy who would very probably have delivered the Nazis an atomic weapon if he could have) there's good reason to believe that the only thing preventing Heisenberg from developing the bomb were his own miscalculations. Not the least of which was his determination that the amount of fissionable material required to create a critical mass was much greater than was actually required (there's a fascinating theory vs. engineering story behind that, but you can probably look it up.) This calculation led him to believe that any atomic weapon would be enormous and hard to deliver.
After the war Heisenberg was taken to a detention center in the UK where he was surveilled with listening devices. When the he learned that the US had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, he was stunned, and (IIRC) initially remarked to his co-detainees that we must have found a way to deliver a colossally huge bomb or something of the sort.
Some have theorized that Heisenberg was both extremely clever and extremely loyal to the German people-- so much so that he deliberately foiled the Nazi research effort, then faked disbelief in order to mislead the Allied eavesdroppers. Personally, I think he just blew it.
Yes, for heavy web surfers getting broadband is almost like getting a second phone line. Of course, not many Americans have a second phone line either.
And my point was that regardless of how much the average American adult surfs, any family with kids and a computer often becomes a family with kids, a computer, and constant busy signals. I would submit that even though this (obviously) doesn't apply to everyone, it represents a large enough demographic to seriously aid in the adoption of broadband.
For the average Joe (i.e. someone who isn't apt-get'ing tonnes of MB a night) $40 a month just for the broadband service is a lot of cash.
Which isn't such a huge deal if same average Joe is already spending $10-20 on dialup. Not to mention that if you have kids who use the net frequently, getting Broadband is almost like getting a second phoneline.
The point is that none had to do with the preview pane itself, and instead used malformed data to attack code that was already on your computer and therefore you had to trust. Maybe HTML mail is just a bad idea, but it's customer demanded feature that exists on non-Windows platforms too (recall the Netscape JVM 'feature' that turned your browser/mailer into a webserver).
A JVM that by design provided security features preventing an applet from having access to the file system, but by implementation carried a bug. Bad implementation.
A native Object system (ActiveX) that contains no such design guarantees, and simply relies on the user to make decisions about whether or not to "trust" the object to behave well on your machine. (Or, in the case of objects pre-installed on your system, gives you no such choice.) Silly design, perhaps inevitable. I certainly don't know any reason why two of these controls needed to be installed and ready to be activated in the average user's Preview pane.
And if you feel that applying this sort of protection to ActiveX is silly, then why not apply it to Windows Scripting? There are reasons Windows Scripts might need access to the filesystem and your mail address book. However, such access need not be provided by default. Had Microsoft placed strong limitations on Windows scripts, only allowing them full access in specific situations defined by the user (or perhaps making "only allow limited script actions" a default option in the Security dialog), people wouldn't have been forced to completely disable Active Scripting (remember when that was the only protection for a while?)
It strikes me that this solution alone would have negated pretty much every major email virus out there. Sure, it would have been a little bit more inconvenient for the user who actually needed to run a powerful script, but a little inconvenience always beats having your file system emailed to your whole address book, doesn't it?
The patch in question is for outlook NOT the OS itself. And there was never a time that you couldn't turn off the preview pane, it's the way Outlook parses MIME email, not a basic flaw in the security design.
There are two kinds of security flaws. Those that result from a poorly thought-out design, and those that result from a poor implementation. Java applets, for example, have great limitations imposed upon them to prevent their maliciously attacking local resources. Occasionally some bug in a particular JVM implementation negates this, and things go wrong.
ActiveX controls, on the other hand, have few security protections beyond "would you like to install this control?" If the user blindly answers Yes to that question, or if that question isn't posed because a silly mailreader forgets to ask it, the system is easily compromised.
This is a big deal. You can send all sorts of malicious packages via email and HTTP. Only a few types will actually execute in a display pane (with or without user approval.) In building support for these types into the OS, Microsoft didn't provide for explicit security measures, and this is the design flaw I'm talking about. One that required only an omission of confirmation by a mail reader to exploit. Remember that the code designed to handle ActiveX objects is part of the OS.
In case you wonder why I'm talking about ActiveX, the Preview pane problems I'm speaking of were the result of "trusted" ActiveX controls launching and running Windows Script code. For a while, the only solution to the problem was to deactivate Active Scripting across the whole computer.
You haven't been able to do this since early 1999. All you need to do is visit windows update, and the problem is fixed.
Seems you've missed the point. This was a bug that should never have been possible. A preview window that treats all embedded objects with their default behavior, fine. Stupid bug. When that default behavior includes allowing untrusted code to run free all over your computer-- particularly on OSes like 95/98 which don't have a concept of Administrator protections-- not fine.
It's evidence of a backwards approach to security. If you're building a bank, you don't riddle your building with doors just because it's convenient, then slap locks on them criminals alert you to them. You start from the ground up and make sure your system has adequate protections against the execution of untrusted code.
You'd think that Microsoft would have learned this lesson after Word first became infested with Macro viruses. Unfortunately, they went ahead and repeated the same mistakes on a much grander scale, and release unreliable patches everytime something slips through. Patches that are, I should remind you, easily un-patched when you install another update to fix a different problem.
I can see two reasons why someone might target MS. First is the quanity of users--more targets to hit.
And of course, the fact that Microsoft systems have a fundamentally screwed up security design. What sort of security architecture requires a patch to prevent the unannounced execution of a script by a mail preview pane!
And again, alot of programs that would run otherwise correctly as administrator won't work with this method. In which case you have to save all your work, log out, log in as admin, run that program, log out, log back in, restart all the program you were using. Blah! Easily a ten minutes process.
And as a result, many Windows users just stay logged into the Administrator account all the time, completely eliminating any security advantages.
I would imagine a lot of people do this, at least those whose machines weren't carefully configured by their IT dept, or those who aren't given their Administrator password. Also, once you've logged in, there's nothing particular to remind you of your Administrator status.
"Check out this cool theme! Just run install.sh." Then the installer then says "you must be root to install this theme, please enter password:"
If only those two steps were required to run malicious code on a Microsoft machine. Instead of thousands of morons infecting themselves and their friends, you'd have thousands of morons calling tech support to ask what the hell "root" is.
Ok, I've got well over three hundred channels, a friend of mine has over eight hundred, all of these are constantly putting out new content simultaneously. I cannot begin to imagine the resources that it would take to record this all and then storing it, say digitally
Unimaginable? Not necessarily. Permanently storing all TV produced would be difficult right now, but it wouldn't be impossible to store the last year's programming using today's technology. Assume that you capture the video at 5Mbps MPEG-II:
Some quick calculations, that's 54 GB of data per day per channel. Sounds like a lot, but you have to realize that such an application can be massively distributed. A single machine with 10 (70-100GB) drives could hold a couple of weeks worth of a single channel.
Multiply that by the actual number of broadcast channels out there generating "new" content (channels that simply rebroadcast movies and older recordings need not be archived in full, and your PPV and Music channels hardly count), a year's worth of programming could be distributed across a thousand machines scattered across the net.
That's using today's storage technology, which is increasing dramatically in capacity. The advent of HDTV will set things back, but that's a one-time hit. I would imagine that within the next decade and a half we'll be seeing systems designed to do exactly what we're talking about here. The major obstacle is not the technology, it's reticence from the broadcasters who own the content.
Like it or not, every form of guitar music excepting the most specialist garage thrash that gets recorded on two track cassette recorders as a matter of principle (as you can see, my own credentials are perfectly in order as well... I remember the Donnas back when they didn't suck... do you?) needs some form of label support to pay the atrocious bills of a studio that knows what it's doing.
Well, I don't know about that. Studios and people who "know what they're doing" have proliferated. After fifty years of experience, there are a whole lot of people in this country who can do respectable-- in uninspired-- guitar recording. You can hire these people for a reasonable chunk of cash. And equipment costs are at an all-time low.
Even if the budget doesn't exist to hire those people, there's nothing to stop bands from embracing a rawer aesthetic. After all, there's no shortage of tortured, overproduced guitar music on the radio today-- perhaps the time is right for something slightly less "professional".
Slashdot Mirror
The ISPs aren't losing anything; if users are sucking up too much bandwidth, limit them. A lot of NAT users aren't major bandwidth hogs, anyway. They're just people with a simple gateway (for instance, an Apple Airport) who happen to have a couple of computers in the house. Oftentimes, they're using the thing primarily as a firewall. I suppose there may be a handful of business customers abusing the privilege, but those people aren't likely to turn around and buy "business" versions of your Cable modem service. They're just as likely to get DSL (and maybe their employees will too.)
It strikes me that this is just an extension of the "rent a cable box for every room in the house" Cable strategy, only one that's less likely to bring in revenue.
Why in god's name would I take offense at that?
You're right, of course. The author should talk to an IP lawyer. Who'll probably tell him/her the same thing. That these licenses (which were put together by IP lawyers) have never been tested, are fairly experimental, etc. Then the author will just have to take a chance. Really, any situation that involves going to court could be considered something of a loss, anyway, given the cost.
I don't really understand the problem. As you point out, somebody could do the same with a Linux distro, or any other piece of OSS. Generally, customers won't be stupid enough to shell out much dough for a product that they could obtain for no cost, unless they feel that they're getting something for what they're spending (like the printing and binding.)
The danger would come from somebody attempting to claim a new copyright on your work (fairly easy to deal with, if you register your work), or somebody modifying and redistributing it as their own work. In either situation, you've got a decent court case. I don't know how strong OSS licenses may be in the print arena, but if you did have to go to court, I think you'd have at least an even shot. Hopefully, nobody would be stupid enough to test you.
The author could always keep an eye out for somebody trying to do this, and potentially undercut him/her by selling copies for a lower price.
Not bad. Plus, MS can be done with it forever.
Not bad? Are you crazy! It's bad, bad, bad!
Half their cash reserves? Billions of dollars? All in one case? You're certainly right that it's not a bullet in the brain for Microsoft, but it's one in each of their kidneys. And it would leave them open to god knows how many hungry lawyers.
Now, it's very unlikely that anything approaching this will come to pass. But if it did, it would not be good for MS. In any analysis.
However, they might associate some of that unreliability with the whole world of computers. Now imagine a computer company attempting to horn in on a market that's considered (by your average Joe) to be reliable and crash-free unlike the average PC (though this is often false, it's the perception.)
Imagine the consumer's lack of enthusiasm for such advancements. It's nothing to do with Microsoft, specifically. But their name carries a stigma. I suppose if Dell or Gateway started building set-top boxes, they'd get about the same response.
Not all components of Red Hat need to be Open Source, I suppose. If AOL chose to implement a closed-source, encrypted DRM file system as a separate component (TiVo does this, couldn't AOL?), they could include it with their "brand name" Linux-based OS. They'd even have DMCA protection if somebody tried to distribute an Open Source version.
It certainly wouldn't be foolproof-- any DRM system is going to get broken by someone. But it might do the job, preventing the average AOL customer from duplicating protected content.
The above is wild speculation, and should not be taken too seriously. I mean, AOL getting their average user to use Linux? Puh-leeze :)
Until, of course, the content side of AOL/TW becomes more interested in DRM and content protection than in beating MS over the head. Then ownership of Red Hat will be more of a liability than anything else.
Fortunately, there'll be other distros out there.
I wouldn't count on it. I know plenty of 40 and 50 yr old CS/EE/Chem PhDs who are now being forced to job-hunt, as the big old east coast research labs disintegrate. They'll probably get jobs, but nothing like what they're used to. That makes them significantly luckier than the poor ex-NASA folks who were displaced at the end of the space program.
Depending on how many consumers have decent jobs in this brave new world, of course. I'm less concerned with people drooling in front of their TV-- that's their choice-- than with people not being able to afford a TV (or a couch or a home) in the first place.
At some point, the needs of society are going to kick in as a counterweight to the corporate drive for fewer and smarter employees. If enough people lose their jobs (particularly older employees who are less able to switch careers every few years), then the substrate upon which corporations rest will start to erode.
In the current climate, Corps don't much care about the health of the society in which they do business, at least until it becomes so bad they begin to suffer. Sooner or later everything will balance out, but I think it could be a grim time to be alive.
The typical assumption (as I've heard it) has always been that Microsoft's poor security was a necessary side effect of their quick-to-market and add-lots-of-new-feature strategies. Though I don't think most people on this forum view those two strategies as a "good" thing, it appears that they've worked rather well for MS up until now.
So the $50,000 question is, can Microsoft focus on security without falling behind on those other fronts? And if they have to slow down on their speedy rollout of new products and features, will they suffer in the marketplace?
If MS can do security and still be as quick-to-market as they were before, they're probably going to be in a very good position. If, on the other hand, they are forced to make a tradeoff-- of speed and quantity for security, for instance-- then it might be a whole different ballgame. Worse yet, they might wind up compromising on both fronts.
It depends what you mean by cowed. Not too long ago, I seem to remember Israel being willing to settle things, grant statehood and even give up significant natural gas resources to the Palestinians. All this despite the fact that Palestinians and Israelis had been doing little but killing each other for years.
That plan could very well have worked out. What made it fail was the fact that significant factions of the Palestinian people wanted more than that simple settlement (there were plenty of Israelis who were similarly uncompromising, but they were generally less likely to take matters into their own hands and attack Palestine.)
Had the situation been less complicated, and more like the one you describe, the Palestinians' tactics could well have accomplished the goal.
I was always told that it had to do with the right to play DVDs on Linux boxes. I'm shocked and dismayed to learn that it really is all about copying :)
On a more serious note, I don't have a DVD-R, and wasn't aware that they had such limitations until just now. Thanks for letting me know.
Sorry, I meant to say CSS, not DeCSS.
Although those products may incorporate DeCSS, I see no reason why a DVD copy program couldn't just do a bit-copy from one disk to another without breaking the crypto. As has been said a million times, DeCSS is not an anti-copying system. It's an anti-playing tool.
Certain applications, like re-encoding a DVD onto a CD-R would definitely require DeCSS or something of the sort. But with the attendant quality loss, you might as while be making VHS copies (which as far as I know is legal and accepted-- not at all considered piracy.)
Despite the after-the-fact romancing (of a guy who would very probably have delivered the Nazis an atomic weapon if he could have) there's good reason to believe that the only thing preventing Heisenberg from developing the bomb were his own miscalculations. Not the least of which was his determination that the amount of fissionable material required to create a critical mass was much greater than was actually required (there's a fascinating theory vs. engineering story behind that, but you can probably look it up.) This calculation led him to believe that any atomic weapon would be enormous and hard to deliver.
After the war Heisenberg was taken to a detention center in the UK where he was surveilled with listening devices. When the he learned that the US had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, he was stunned, and (IIRC) initially remarked to his co-detainees that we must have found a way to deliver a colossally huge bomb or something of the sort.
Some have theorized that Heisenberg was both extremely clever and extremely loyal to the German people-- so much so that he deliberately foiled the Nazi research effort, then faked disbelief in order to mislead the Allied eavesdroppers. Personally, I think he just blew it.
But you're right. Judge for yourself.
And my point was that regardless of how much the average American adult surfs, any family with kids and a computer often becomes a family with kids, a computer, and constant busy signals. I would submit that even though this (obviously) doesn't apply to everyone, it represents a large enough demographic to seriously aid in the adoption of broadband.
Which isn't such a huge deal if same average Joe is already spending $10-20 on dialup. Not to mention that if you have kids who use the net frequently, getting Broadband is almost like getting a second phoneline.
A JVM that by design provided security features preventing an applet from having access to the file system, but by implementation carried a bug. Bad implementation.
A native Object system (ActiveX) that contains no such design guarantees, and simply relies on the user to make decisions about whether or not to "trust" the object to behave well on your machine. (Or, in the case of objects pre-installed on your system, gives you no such choice.) Silly design, perhaps inevitable. I certainly don't know any reason why two of these controls needed to be installed and ready to be activated in the average user's Preview pane.
And if you feel that applying this sort of protection to ActiveX is silly, then why not apply it to Windows Scripting? There are reasons Windows Scripts might need access to the filesystem and your mail address book. However, such access need not be provided by default. Had Microsoft placed strong limitations on Windows scripts, only allowing them full access in specific situations defined by the user (or perhaps making "only allow limited script actions" a default option in the Security dialog), people wouldn't have been forced to completely disable Active Scripting (remember when that was the only protection for a while?)
It strikes me that this solution alone would have negated pretty much every major email virus out there. Sure, it would have been a little bit more inconvenient for the user who actually needed to run a powerful script, but a little inconvenience always beats having your file system emailed to your whole address book, doesn't it?
There are two kinds of security flaws. Those that result from a poorly thought-out design, and those that result from a poor implementation. Java applets, for example, have great limitations imposed upon them to prevent their maliciously attacking local resources. Occasionally some bug in a particular JVM implementation negates this, and things go wrong.
ActiveX controls, on the other hand, have few security protections beyond "would you like to install this control?" If the user blindly answers Yes to that question, or if that question isn't posed because a silly mailreader forgets to ask it, the system is easily compromised.
This is a big deal. You can send all sorts of malicious packages via email and HTTP. Only a few types will actually execute in a display pane (with or without user approval.) In building support for these types into the OS, Microsoft didn't provide for explicit security measures, and this is the design flaw I'm talking about. One that required only an omission of confirmation by a mail reader to exploit. Remember that the code designed to handle ActiveX objects is part of the OS.
In case you wonder why I'm talking about ActiveX, the Preview pane problems I'm speaking of were the result of "trusted" ActiveX controls launching and running Windows Script code. For a while, the only solution to the problem was to deactivate Active Scripting across the whole computer.
Seems you've missed the point. This was a bug that should never have been possible. A preview window that treats all embedded objects with their default behavior, fine. Stupid bug. When that default behavior includes allowing untrusted code to run free all over your computer-- particularly on OSes like 95/98 which don't have a concept of Administrator protections-- not fine.
It's evidence of a backwards approach to security. If you're building a bank, you don't riddle your building with doors just because it's convenient, then slap locks on them criminals alert you to them. You start from the ground up and make sure your system has adequate protections against the execution of untrusted code.
You'd think that Microsoft would have learned this lesson after Word first became infested with Macro viruses. Unfortunately, they went ahead and repeated the same mistakes on a much grander scale, and release unreliable patches everytime something slips through. Patches that are, I should remind you, easily un-patched when you install another update to fix a different problem.
And of course, the fact that Microsoft systems have a fundamentally screwed up security design. What sort of security architecture requires a patch to prevent the unannounced execution of a script by a mail preview pane!
And as a result, many Windows users just stay logged into the Administrator account all the time, completely eliminating any security advantages.
I would imagine a lot of people do this, at least those whose machines weren't carefully configured by their IT dept, or those who aren't given their Administrator password. Also, once you've logged in, there's nothing particular to remind you of your Administrator status.
If only those two steps were required to run malicious code on a Microsoft machine. Instead of thousands of morons infecting themselves and their friends, you'd have thousands of morons calling tech support to ask what the hell "root" is.
Unimaginable? Not necessarily. Permanently storing all TV produced would be difficult right now, but it wouldn't be impossible to store the last year's programming using today's technology. Assume that you capture the video at 5Mbps MPEG-II:
Some quick calculations, that's 54 GB of data per day per channel. Sounds like a lot, but you have to realize that such an application can be massively distributed. A single machine with 10 (70-100GB) drives could hold a couple of weeks worth of a single channel.
Multiply that by the actual number of broadcast channels out there generating "new" content (channels that simply rebroadcast movies and older recordings need not be archived in full, and your PPV and Music channels hardly count), a year's worth of programming could be distributed across a thousand machines scattered across the net.
That's using today's storage technology, which is increasing dramatically in capacity. The advent of HDTV will set things back, but that's a one-time hit. I would imagine that within the next decade and a half we'll be seeing systems designed to do exactly what we're talking about here. The major obstacle is not the technology, it's reticence from the broadcasters who own the content.
Well, I don't know about that. Studios and people who "know what they're doing" have proliferated. After fifty years of experience, there are a whole lot of people in this country who can do respectable-- in uninspired-- guitar recording. You can hire these people for a reasonable chunk of cash. And equipment costs are at an all-time low.
Even if the budget doesn't exist to hire those people, there's nothing to stop bands from embracing a rawer aesthetic. After all, there's no shortage of tortured, overproduced guitar music on the radio today-- perhaps the time is right for something slightly less "professional".