This is going to be a bit disappointing for all those people who organized Windows 7 launch parties to celebrate the moment. All four of them.
I think you meant, there were only four real parties. But there are more than four "parties". After all, it was a cheap way to get Windows 7 Ultimate. And all you have to do is get a few adults together for a photo or something. Heck, you can probably use your kid's birthday as the reason for the get-together!
All it is is a promise not to sue. He owns the text of the book, but not the additional stuff Apress did - say, the covers, front matter (including the Table of Contents) and the back matter (indices, etc), which would mean that you're pirating his work, and none of Apress'.
Those full version torrents/downloads do include stuff the Apress owns the copyright for, and whom Apress might sue.
The major news corporations report the news that they think will get them viewers, readers or listeners. The only possible conclusion from this is that not enough people in the US are interested in that kind of news.
It hit the newspapers here a long time ago - they called it "Is your iPod illegal?"
That is what's needed to get the public interested - tell them how ACTA will hurt them.
Since there's been nothing but bad news coming out of the way, how about full page ads saying stuff like:
"Jailed for copying their CD to their iPod" "Jailed for recording last's night TV" "Jailed for singing in the shower" "Jailed for using Windows XP" (... because it lacks the Copyright Protections in Vista/7) "Jailed for quoting a book" (... magazine article, newspaper article, movie, TV show, etc. Extend with "writing a bad review of" too). "Flying with electronics? Please arrive 6 hours prior to departure for electronics (including iPods, cameras, laptops) screening" "Purchased a new TV? Guess what? You can't use it anymore!" "Own a TV bigger than 42 inches? It's too big - you'll need a performance permit to use it" "Friends over for the Superbowl? Hope they're not staying to watch - it's illegal"
A bit of hyperbole, yes, but given it's ACTA we're talking about, there's a good chance it's true. People are calling for no format shifting and no timeshifting without payment. And while the border patrols say they won't scrutinize iPods and the like, it's an ever-present threat.
A simple marketing campaign directed at stuff people do every day without a second thought. Don't bother with crap like downloading music or anything, just stick with stuff that's perfectly legal today and not contentious. Hell, if you want to add some fun FUD, add stuff like "Copyright taxes for iPods, blank media, hard drives, computers, internet service".
And yes, I mention iPods specifically, because the general public knows iPods. They don't know MP3 player.
Dogfooding because Microsoft loves to replace infrastructure with Windows equivalents, and maybe it failed (E.g., Hotmail).
Sabotage because apparently the old Danger team is somewhat disgruntled, which may explain why it's so difficult to recover the data because the backups were destroyed as well...
Actually, I think this is more of a way to certify ad-hoc mode. Infrastructure mode is what the WiFi Alliance tends to test the most, but ad-hoc can be quite iffy - it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. That and security settings make it somewhat interesting. (Note that ad-hoc mode has been well-defined by the 802.11 spec).
I think this is a way to standardize security and setup of ad-hoc mode devices.
Not really. A CPU running at half speed uses something like 70% of the power that it does at full speed. So it's better to run at full speed for a short time, then go into power saving mode than to run at slow speed for a long time. This has been called "race to idle", and reminds me of the de facto motto of my old military school, "hurry up so we can wait".
Actually, that's probably only true if you keep the voltage constant. If you can reduce the voltage to the CPU as you reduce the frequency ("DVFS" - Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), the power consumption at lower speeds is far lower than running the CPU twice as long. Power consumption varies by the square of the voltage.
This is not a new technique - and is the core of many technologies like SpeedStep and the like. A frequency agile CPU is handy. But a frequency and voltage agile CPU is very handy. However, this complicates the power management software considerably - do you crank the speed up (and power consumption) to wait, or can you run it at a reduced rate and save power? An idling CPU consumes less power (especially if you can "slow-idle" it - reduce clock dramatically AND voltage - I remember an old embedded PowerPC that was so frequency agile, you could go from 200MHz operational to 33MHz when you entered the idle loop, and back to 200MHz when you left). But it's tricky since it takes time to do a speed/voltage switch and power.
Activities where the CPU being as slow as possible would be media playback (where you want the frame to be ready just before it's needed, so you can stay in the busy-low-voltage-low-frequency range and not switch, which will save more power than cranking the CPU up, decode the frame, then crank it down and idle). But if you're doing something interactive, say, rendering a web page, it's more optimal to crank the CPU up, render the page, then crank the CPU back down and idle. A user is waiting for the output, and finishing their work fast may result in being able to stay in a low power state longer, or finish their work faster so the whole laptop can be put to sleep. The problem is, at the scheduler level, it's hard to tell what workload it is.
Google has a malware hosting problem of their own.
Google Spreadsheets can be abused to create phony login pages. Here's one for "Free Habbo credits", designed to collect Habbo logins. It's been reported via the usual "Google abuse" mechanism, repeatedly, and it's still up. It's been up since October 28, 2008.
We track major domains being exploited by active phishing scams. ("Major" here means only that it's in Open Directory, with about 1.5 million domains.) There are 39 exploited domains today. Only 7 have been on that list since 2008. The most abused site is Piczo.com, which is a hosting service/social network/shopping site for teenagers.
Just about everybody else has cleaned up their act. 18 months ago, that list had 174 entries, including Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft Live, and TinyURL. All those companies have become more aggressive about checking for phishing scams that were injected into their domain. Google's cluelessness in this area ought to be embarrassing to someone.
Let me guess - you want Google to remove people's documents arbitrarily? That's what you're saying.
Right now, Google's right to not do anything - how would you feel if someone just took down one of your documents arbitrarily? Not even a DMCA notice, just a vague "this is a hacker tool" thing? And how do you differentiate between "fake login page" and "log in page mockup"? After all, when designing a UI, you can do it in any medium you feel comfortable in.
So yeah, Google is clueless. They're so clueless, they'd rather not remove someone's document because there can be many legitimate reasons for it to be there. And I suppose, as much as Google would like to remove it, doing so sets a bad precedent. Your Google Doc annoys someone? Click "report abuse" and Google will take it down. Better than DMCA notice.
At best, Google can remove it from the index. But allowing Google to arbitrarily remove any document by an anonymous person invites a whole new can of worms. Might as well ban bullets, they've been used to harm people.
The way it works here with some banks in Australia is they send you a code via SMS when you try to issue a transfer from Internet banking. You need to enter the code into the website to continue the transaction. So the extra factor here of having the phone offers a pretty useful extra layer.
My bank doesn't offer it; I wish it did.
Great idea, but then you'll just get a nice bunch of hackers doing a DDoS of the SMS servers used, so you can try to log in, but the servers are so busy, you'll get the SMS sent out a half hour after you try to login. Or they'll monitor your account's phone number, then when you log in, send you hundreds of spam SMS. Nothing's more fun than being spammed all of a sudden, and having to read them all because the one you need is in there somewhere. Especially if they all look very similar.
It's this kind of thing that makes a netbook running Linux very useful. It's why I use my Acer Aspire One (Linux) for. Boots up in 30 seconds flat. That way you don't have to reboot your PC - you whip out your little netbook and do your banking there. Offer a financial package on there to help people manage their money, and you've got a handy device there.
1) Pay per app name is not a solution. People will complain about this continually. They already complain about the $100 yearly fee.
2) Yes, squatters can set up websites so they can sell names, but unless Apple allows name transfer, there will always be a race condition between the squatter releasing the name and the developer claiming it. This can lead to squatters stealing names from each other, making it risky for everyone involved. Plus, they then have to market the website to devs so they'd go and buy names (again, with the risk of it being claimed). Of course, Apple can always impose a quarantine period to increase the risk of name transfers so no one can claim a name. Imagine how worthwhile it would be for a dev to pay $1000 for "twitch" only to risk not getting it and having someone else take it.
3) Allowing duplicate app names is not a solution. Imagine doing a search for "GPS" and pulling up 1,000 apps named "GPS". Popular apps will have many phonies, and you can't have Apple ensuring "name quality" - "Your app was rejected because the name matched another app in the store." That's just stupid, and adds more headache to the already troublesome Apple approval process (really, you want to give Apple haters anothe reason?).
Periodic flushing? Well, what if your app takes a long time to develop? Maybe you weren't thinking of a simple 99-cent app, but something that's more than a novelty? If you flush too often, you discourage people from these kinds of apps because now they have to keep reserving it, and someone else can snatch it. This applies to anything - big devs or small. And you can't say "let's make it once a year" - people being squatted don't want to wait a whole year. But "let's make it monthly" means apps undergoing slow development have to bear the burden.
Flush apps with no binaries? Same issue - dev will just submit a skeleton app to hold it off.
Limit of X apps/year? Well, that's just silly. Microsoft can pull it off, but the next/. headline you'll see is "Apple Limits Devs to 5 Apps". Sure it may help to avoid doing the next 10,000 flashlight and fart apps, but geez, that seems low and arbitrary. Good devs may find themselves caught in this as well - that's over 2 months of development per app, and some useful apps just don't command that sort of development time. Even a reasonable limit has to be rather high - probably around 100?
First app with name submitted gets it? Well, then you have the patent deal - you deny the guy who submitted a few minutes later an app with the same name. There are probably going to be a ton of unintended consequences, too.
Still, the Apple solution of non-negotiation (by not revealing the squatter's identity) is probably a good one - DNS squatters are in it for money, and they'll sell. Here, the name is reserved, but since you can't negotiate, all the squatter is doing is being an ass. There's no financial incentive to squat on a name because anyone wanting to use it can't find your details and contact you to pay $1000 for the name. So it's costing them $100/year with zero gain. At least domain squatters can get several thousand per name to help pay for the domain registrations. The Apple method leaves them $100 poorer each year - it's not listed on iTunes, there are no ads, and no one can contact you to buy the name.
Maybe a solution is no developer can hold more than say, 5 names at any one time. Approval of an app removes that name from the list (so they're holding 4 names and can add one). Those extra names can be returned to the pool at any time - for example, a developer creates an app which can go under 5 possible names, then at the last minute they pick one and submits under that name. Since they have no use for the other 4, they can release them so freeing up more reserved name slots for their next app. Big dev houses probably already have multiple dev accounts, so they can reserve multiple names for multiple apps. 5 or 10 names reserved for apps in development ought to be enough. Implement it right (e.g., a dev can test to see if a name is taken before having to give up one of their existing ones) and it may reduce this problem.
Still - why squat on the names? People can't buy it off of you, so there's no financial incentive (which is why there are so many domain squatters), other than being an ass.
Most cheats for Xbox live games are fairly low tech. Purposefully inducing lag spikes, crap like that.
This is the stuff that would make an interesting article, can they do any other kind of cheating? They can play copied discs but can they modify the discs to contain aimbots/wall hax/etc (AFAIK they can't)?
No, they can't. The only thing the copied discs hacks do is tell the Xbox360 when the disc is queried, instead of returning stuff like "DVD-R", it'll return "Xbox360", and the like. The actual code signing mechanism hasn't been broken, so adding an aimbot is pretty much impossible right now. (The signatures are checked always).
Even the Halo cheats don't work anymore - at least for Halo 3 I believe...
its a hassle. i don't even bother with modding mine being it wasn't until a few weeks ago any homebrew was released for it and its very first modchip all still very early. 360 linux lacks alot good sound 3d support etc. being none really cared abought it until just recently.
The problem with this is just like PS3 Linux. Microsoft and Sony offer a legitimate way to get homebrew on the device - Microsoft with their XNA environment (and a $99/year fee to put your homebrew on your Xbox360 and sell it (yes, Microsoft encourages you to sell your homebrew games - the "Indie Marketplace")). Sony lets people go nuts with the Linux port (until recently - the Slim can't run Linux). Both these measures kept most homebrewers busy actually making homebrew, and leaving any mods to be used for piracy (until recently, the only reason to mod your xbox was for piracy, or "playing backup games").
But if you have an Xbox360 you don't want, give to to charity or sell it. Hack it only for fun - if it doesn't do what you want, and you don't want to invest in hacking it, then you might as well give/sell it to someone who wants it more.
Beagleboard uses the TI OMAP3530 processor using an ARM 8 core (and a bunch of other stuff).
No, it doesn't.
There are basically 4 cores that ARM Ltd. sells - the ARM9, ARM11, Cortex A8, and Cortex A9. (I'm leaving out the various little features of each, and going with general family). It's an easy mistake to make, but an ARM9 doesn't hold a candle to the Cortex A9.
The Cortex series of cores are the latest and shiniest, being that the core difference between the A8 and A9 is that the A9 supports symmetric multiprocessing. Note that many chips on the market today already have multiple ARM cores, but they are not setup for SMP - the secondary ARM core is often a coprocessor to do certain tasks. Common examples are multi-core SoCs used in cellphones - you have a powerful ARM core powering the general OS, and a lighter-weight one for the baseband side. Or an iPod, where you have one core powering the UI, and another doing the AAC/MP3 decode.
Still, I hope devices with embedded flash use something like FlashBlock. Nothing sucks worse than surfing freely then hitting some crappy flash ad that causes the whole system to virtually hang as the CPU is spent doing the ad and no CPU is left for the UI...
That's pretty handy, actually. Still I'd rather not update mine until the update itself has a zero chance of bricking my unit. Even if it IS free, that's time where the wii itself is left unusable. (And I'm far from the only person who wants to use this one in particular.)
Good idea. 3.0 has an ad ticker that you cannot disable - it's constantly scrolling stuff for you to buy, new games, etc. (This is different from the startup ad, which you CAN disable). 2.x had the "info bar" ticker as well, but that was also something you can disable. In 3.0, the only way to disable it is to delete the internet connection. Serves me right for updating it when I really only use it as a blu-ray player.
They also seemed to have broken auto-startup of disc if you turn your PS3 off with the disc inside, and have auto-disc-startup enabled. If it's a blu-ray movie you're watching, it means you either eject/insert, or have to click over to movie, then start it manually.
Hopefully 3.1 fixes these two issues.
The only good part is there are less ads on the PS3 than the Xbox360 (though excepting the annoying sound one, I find the Xbox360 NXE ads useful...)
Well, consider the male-female bias in protagonists. When minority (or underrepresented, women are actually a slight majority of the US population) groups are never reflected in gaming worlds (or in novels, or movies, etc.), they are being sent a message that this genre of entertainment is completely unconcerned with them, and as a result, they tune out. This narrows the focus of game development, as marketers perceive that they're only selling to the main (overrepresented) group, and that puts a big squeeze on the types of games that get developed, as the industry becomes increasingly devoted to whatever interests white fourteen-year-old boys.
And that opens up a whole field of people to market to. Look at Nintendo's strategy - they're on top not because those 14-year-old boys love their systems, but because they decided to appeal to the under-represented generation. You'd think something like the pink DS would sit on shelves, but it turns out young girls love that and they're actually one of the faster movers (besides the black and white). Or take the Wii, whose constant sellout wasn't to the traditional gaming market, but to newcomers who may have been marginalized before.
Ditto with co-op - people want it, developers see the money so they add it. People see a potential opportunity and they'll try to exploit it. You can see the movement away from the old gamer stereotypes the past 5+ years or so - the "hardcore gamers" aren't attracting the development houses as much as they used to. Instead, an explosion of casual gaming, and "simplified" games that appeal to a broader base. It may explain the decline of PC gaming, since the hardcore ones would be the kind to shun a console and purcase the latest and greatest hardware to eke out a few extra frames per second, while the majority sit around with their one generation or older video cards that play WoW just fine. And the rise of the "I want to play a f**king game" crowd who purchase consoles rather than mess with drivers, Windows, firewalls, etc.
Of course, I still wish Halo 3 had a bot/coop mode - I still hanker to kill, but not wish to do multiplayer (I suck at multiplayer - getting killed 10 times in 5 seconds is, unfortunately, not an achievement).
So it's malware on the iPhone, when it's a supported API on a number of other platforms, except Symbian.
OTOH, this is good for Palm - we'll soon be inundated with Norton Antivirus for WebOS, McAfee Antivirus for WebOS, etc. Just like Symbian and I believe WinMo have. After all, we can't have another Liberty virus that afflicted PalmOS devices. (This was named after the Liberty Game Boy Emulator for PalmOS).
And I suppose, good for developers of fart apps, flashlight apps, and other spam apps. Last one was particularly interesting. Helps the Pre's app numbers, though.
True. Flash on mobile browsers might be too much (hardware wise) for the current generation of smartphones. But we're getting there fast.
Actually, if you want to try surfing the flash based web, you really should try turning off adblock and noscript. If one flash ad doesn't bring your phone to its knees, a few of them will.
I've tried flash on mobile devices. It's horrible. You're surfing around, and all of a sudden, your device hangs as it loads and runs some flash app. Worse yet, it won't budge since the flash plugins are taking 100% of your multi-core multi-GHz ARM processors. Now say you want to look up some data off the web on your phone, and boom, the page you want to access has a flash ad and now you can't scroll, exit, or do anything because the CPU is bogged down processing flash more than handling the UI or other issue.
(BTW, this was on multiple devices that support it - a Nokia N810, Archos 605). You won't notice on a number of pages because the flash ads don't hog the CPU, but then you'll hit one that does. Not fun at all. Oh yeah, while your device is "hung" trying to update the latest punch-the-monkey, it's CPUs have ramped up to max speed, and your battery life will be depleting before your eyes - you can see the gauge go down. (ARMs are power efficient, yes, but you're still talking a wide range of power consumption - from multiple watts with everything full on, to fractions of a milliwatt when in powersaving mode).
And since most flash is done to watch video these days, it's probably better to have it shell out and run a video player than try to run an emulated codec - my Archos could play all sorts of Flash video (that's why it supported it) pretty flawlessly, but the Nokia dropped frames on practically every YouTube.
if the reason that the big boys don't want to go to IPv6 is that they stand to lose an additional money maker. They can charge for publicly available IP addresses with IPv4. In IPv6, every address would be public. This might explain carrier reluctance to make the change. It gives them one less way to nickle and dime the consumer.
No, because they will just ensure that everything except x:x:...:x:0001 is firewalled out. If you want, you can buy additional IP addresses, and they'll just give you another x:x:...:y:0001 IP address. There's so many IP addresses, they can waste the other 65534 of them. And still bill you $5/month extra as per IPv4 addresses.
They're not giving up that money maker anytime soon. And we'll have NATv6 soon enough so we don't have to waste another $60/year extra for each new computer.
Hopefully when the EU does that we'll not get a torrent of ZOMG THE EU HATES US COMPANIES!!
Not to mention the flood of "COMPANIES SCREW EU CUSTOMERS!" when the price of their products are 2x the US price from all the consumer-protection laws that have to be supported. E.g., the warranties that can be 5+ years on TVs and consoles - it's like being forced to buy extended warranties with every product because that's what it is.
Anyhow, I'm surprised the ATI-nVidia thing even works - given the amount of deep plumbing hacks these drivers do, it seems unlikely that they'll play nice together.
As for onboard ATI graphics - if you want a full nVidia system - just uninstall the ATI drivers. Even if you can't disable it in the BIOS, if Windows can't drive it, Windows doesn't see it. Then disable the hardware so Windows won't try to PnP install it.
Acorn, along with most computer companies that were building non-PC compatible computers at the time, failed. Long before they failed, they had spun off the processor division into a separate company which flourished.
The processor architecture has enjoyed quite a bit of success and is now found in a lot of embedded systems.
Actually, Apple needed a low-power RISC chip for their new tablet platform - I believe it was called the Einstein, no, sorry, the Newton. They saw potential in the Acorn processor and invested a bit of money in the whole thing, enough to be spun off, renamed (Acorn -> Advanced RISC Machines, then ARM Inc.) and produce a useful processor that has caused it to become one of the best-selling architectures. There's probably more ARM chips sold than x86 these days (especially since most x86 PCs come with several ARM processors...).
Yes, I was surprised that Apple had a hand in it. It's probably why Apple has the other architecture license (DEC owned it, produced the StrongARM used in the Newton, which was sold to Compaq when Compaq bought Digital, and through various licensing/patenting things, ended up at Intel, who I think sold it to Marvell). All other licensees must license the core as designed by ARM, which is why they have ARM9, ARM11, Cortex A8/A9 cores, but (formerly Intel) Marvell has XScale (and StrongARM). Apple has yet to produce their own ARM core chip, though.
This may be closer to the truth then you think. Verizion has a long history of not allowing certain functions on phones. This is why nobody wants a used Verizon phone because so much is disabled. This would allow Apple to still make one iPhone with one OS and one firmware but allow Verizion to place its own mandated limits on the ones used on its networks. Thus allowing Verizon to be known as the evil network and AT&T the freedom loving patriot ( quite a switch)
Actually, EVERY carrier has certain restrictions on features on their phones. Some are more anal than others (e.g., the "send" key must be a certain shade of green). Now, GSM carriers aren't as powerful in demanding that certain features be dropped - they can only demand it of phones sold through them. That's because a GSM carrier pretty much has to accept any phone that's compatible and takes their SIM. CDMA carriers, most of them anyhow (there's a few that accept RUIMs), can simply not activate phones that weren't bought through them. The one exception would be country-wide requirements (e.g., China and WiFi must support China's encryption standard).
You can get fully-unlocked GSM phones with all features the carrier wanted to ban.
The other thing is... why'd it take so long? Surely some engineer out there already saw the need to do one build per carrier (yes, I've seen this) and would want to do it so they only need one build.
Jailbreak it. OpenSSH is a package available via Cydia, including the server.
localhost:~ mobile$ uname -a Darwin localhost 9.4.1 Darwin Kernel Version 9.4.1: Sat Nov 1 19:09:48 PDT 2008 ; root:xnu-1228.7.36~2/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8900X iPhone1,1 arm M68AP Darwin localhost:~ mobile$ ps auxwww | grep sshd mobile 565 6.0 0.5 273304 644 s001 R+ 9:01PM 0:00.04 grep sshd
I've pirated (and bought) a large variety of software in the last 15 years. And the one time i have ever been infected. it came from a piece of commercial software right on the cd.
The 'pirates' and cracked software are WAY more trustworthy than any company out there. It only takes one or two bad comments to make people avoid using that cracked piece of software. With commercial software it takes thousands of bad installs before it makes the news and people avoid a bad piece of commercial software.
Actually, the past 2 or 3 years, the number of infested cracks is probably close to 99% or so. Cracks these days are an excellent infection vector. I find it hard to believe that you're not currently infected, unless you have direct access to the cracker releases yourself.
Once the cracker releases it to the wild, tons of malware authors grab it, wrap their little downloader trojan around it, then release it and use SEO to ensure that every google search will turn up their infected version. Or, some people make a trojan that does zip (other than display an error message), but then installs an infection vector. They then copy the file 10,000+ times and rename them to various names suggesting they are official cracks.
The infected crack ones tend to propagate via webpages, but also torrents - they do work, but they also install a little something extra. Finding "clean" stuff gets more and more difficult, especially since these minor downloaders tend to be extremely quiet. Considering how easy it is to write a downloader, wrapped cracks almost never trigger any antivirus warning. It's only when they start installing old stuff that's detected will the user even know. Sometimes it can be months because the distribution of the malware is so slow, no one notices.
Heck, even OS X gets infected this way - I believe various popular applications often include in the installation hidden install bundles that install the trojan alongside it. The latest release known to have it would be torrents of Snow Leopard, especially those that appeared before the official release date.
Malware generally moves the same way any other software moves. The user downloads and installs it.
Not only that, the user often willingly downloads it! It often doesn't come like the spyware of old, buried deep inside the ToS. Instead, the user willingly downloads the trojan and runs it.
People complain that anti-virus programs continually complain that cracks are infected, but from what I've seen, the AV program is right. People release clean cracks, then more nefarious ones take that crack, and wrap it with all sorts of trojan downloaders. The crack works, but it also installs a vector for more malware to come in. Or they bypass the whole "get a crack" thing and release fake cracks. A little SEO and the top 20 hits on google will be infected, and if it works, that infected crack will also make its way onto torrents.
I've seen listings of literally 10,000 cracks suddenly released that were just renames of the same trojan - the binary was byte-for-byte identical. Interstingly, half were for programs, the other half were for movies and stuff. Even the once-trustworthy sites get afflicted.
It's well known that apps can detect when they've been pirated on the iPod Touch and iPhone (it's completely detectable, and works 100% since DRM'ed versions should not have the extra entries). In fact, these apps have been known to report back to the host practically everything about the device - UUID and other things (it was posted in one of the forums how to do this, and what you should do if you detect it).
Funny enough, the crackers have also discovered the apps doing this and work around it...
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I think you meant, there were only four real parties. But there are more than four "parties". After all, it was a cheap way to get Windows 7 Ultimate. And all you have to do is get a few adults together for a photo or something. Heck, you can probably use your kid's birthday as the reason for the get-together!
All it is is a promise not to sue. He owns the text of the book, but not the additional stuff Apress did - say, the covers, front matter (including the Table of Contents) and the back matter (indices, etc), which would mean that you're pirating his work, and none of Apress'.
Those full version torrents/downloads do include stuff the Apress owns the copyright for, and whom Apress might sue.
It hit the newspapers here a long time ago - they called it "Is your iPod illegal?"
That is what's needed to get the public interested - tell them how ACTA will hurt them.
Since there's been nothing but bad news coming out of the way, how about full page ads saying stuff like:
"Jailed for copying their CD to their iPod"
"Jailed for recording last's night TV"
"Jailed for singing in the shower"
"Jailed for using Windows XP" (... because it lacks the Copyright Protections in Vista/7)
"Jailed for quoting a book" (... magazine article, newspaper article, movie, TV show, etc. Extend with "writing a bad review of" too).
"Flying with electronics? Please arrive 6 hours prior to departure for electronics (including iPods, cameras, laptops) screening"
"Purchased a new TV? Guess what? You can't use it anymore!"
"Own a TV bigger than 42 inches? It's too big - you'll need a performance permit to use it"
"Friends over for the Superbowl? Hope they're not staying to watch - it's illegal"
A bit of hyperbole, yes, but given it's ACTA we're talking about, there's a good chance it's true. People are calling for no format shifting and no timeshifting without payment. And while the border patrols say they won't scrutinize iPods and the like, it's an ever-present threat.
A simple marketing campaign directed at stuff people do every day without a second thought. Don't bother with crap like downloading music or anything, just stick with stuff that's perfectly legal today and not contentious. Hell, if you want to add some fun FUD, add stuff like "Copyright taxes for iPods, blank media, hard drives, computers, internet service".
And yes, I mention iPods specifically, because the general public knows iPods. They don't know MP3 player.
Interesingly, rumors have it that it may be caused by dogfooding or sabotage.
Dogfooding because Microsoft loves to replace infrastructure with Windows equivalents, and maybe it failed (E.g., Hotmail).
Sabotage because apparently the old Danger team is somewhat disgruntled, which may explain why it's so difficult to recover the data because the backups were destroyed as well...
Actually, I think this is more of a way to certify ad-hoc mode. Infrastructure mode is what the WiFi Alliance tends to test the most, but ad-hoc can be quite iffy - it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. That and security settings make it somewhat interesting. (Note that ad-hoc mode has been well-defined by the 802.11 spec).
I think this is a way to standardize security and setup of ad-hoc mode devices.
Actually, that's probably only true if you keep the voltage constant. If you can reduce the voltage to the CPU as you reduce the frequency ("DVFS" - Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), the power consumption at lower speeds is far lower than running the CPU twice as long. Power consumption varies by the square of the voltage.
This is not a new technique - and is the core of many technologies like SpeedStep and the like. A frequency agile CPU is handy. But a frequency and voltage agile CPU is very handy. However, this complicates the power management software considerably - do you crank the speed up (and power consumption) to wait, or can you run it at a reduced rate and save power? An idling CPU consumes less power (especially if you can "slow-idle" it - reduce clock dramatically AND voltage - I remember an old embedded PowerPC that was so frequency agile, you could go from 200MHz operational to 33MHz when you entered the idle loop, and back to 200MHz when you left). But it's tricky since it takes time to do a speed/voltage switch and power.
Activities where the CPU being as slow as possible would be media playback (where you want the frame to be ready just before it's needed, so you can stay in the busy-low-voltage-low-frequency range and not switch, which will save more power than cranking the CPU up, decode the frame, then crank it down and idle). But if you're doing something interactive, say, rendering a web page, it's more optimal to crank the CPU up, render the page, then crank the CPU back down and idle. A user is waiting for the output, and finishing their work fast may result in being able to stay in a low power state longer, or finish their work faster so the whole laptop can be put to sleep. The problem is, at the scheduler level, it's hard to tell what workload it is.
Let me guess - you want Google to remove people's documents arbitrarily? That's what you're saying.
Right now, Google's right to not do anything - how would you feel if someone just took down one of your documents arbitrarily? Not even a DMCA notice, just a vague "this is a hacker tool" thing? And how do you differentiate between "fake login page" and "log in page mockup"? After all, when designing a UI, you can do it in any medium you feel comfortable in.
So yeah, Google is clueless. They're so clueless, they'd rather not remove someone's document because there can be many legitimate reasons for it to be there. And I suppose, as much as Google would like to remove it, doing so sets a bad precedent. Your Google Doc annoys someone? Click "report abuse" and Google will take it down. Better than DMCA notice.
At best, Google can remove it from the index. But allowing Google to arbitrarily remove any document by an anonymous person invites a whole new can of worms. Might as well ban bullets, they've been used to harm people.
Great idea, but then you'll just get a nice bunch of hackers doing a DDoS of the SMS servers used, so you can try to log in, but the servers are so busy, you'll get the SMS sent out a half hour after you try to login. Or they'll monitor your account's phone number, then when you log in, send you hundreds of spam SMS. Nothing's more fun than being spammed all of a sudden, and having to read them all because the one you need is in there somewhere. Especially if they all look very similar.
It's this kind of thing that makes a netbook running Linux very useful. It's why I use my Acer Aspire One (Linux) for. Boots up in 30 seconds flat. That way you don't have to reboot your PC - you whip out your little netbook and do your banking there. Offer a financial package on there to help people manage their money, and you've got a handy device there.
As an adjunct:
1) Pay per app name is not a solution. People will complain about this continually. They already complain about the $100 yearly fee.
2) Yes, squatters can set up websites so they can sell names, but unless Apple allows name transfer, there will always be a race condition between the squatter releasing the name and the developer claiming it. This can lead to squatters stealing names from each other, making it risky for everyone involved. Plus, they then have to market the website to devs so they'd go and buy names (again, with the risk of it being claimed). Of course, Apple can always impose a quarantine period to increase the risk of name transfers so no one can claim a name. Imagine how worthwhile it would be for a dev to pay $1000 for "twitch" only to risk not getting it and having someone else take it.
3) Allowing duplicate app names is not a solution. Imagine doing a search for "GPS" and pulling up 1,000 apps named "GPS". Popular apps will have many phonies, and you can't have Apple ensuring "name quality" - "Your app was rejected because the name matched another app in the store." That's just stupid, and adds more headache to the already troublesome Apple approval process (really, you want to give Apple haters anothe reason?).
There is no simple solution, really.
Periodic flushing? Well, what if your app takes a long time to develop? Maybe you weren't thinking of a simple 99-cent app, but something that's more than a novelty? If you flush too often, you discourage people from these kinds of apps because now they have to keep reserving it, and someone else can snatch it. This applies to anything - big devs or small. And you can't say "let's make it once a year" - people being squatted don't want to wait a whole year. But "let's make it monthly" means apps undergoing slow development have to bear the burden.
Flush apps with no binaries? Same issue - dev will just submit a skeleton app to hold it off.
Limit of X apps/year? Well, that's just silly. Microsoft can pull it off, but the next /. headline you'll see is "Apple Limits Devs to 5 Apps". Sure it may help to avoid doing the next 10,000 flashlight and fart apps, but geez, that seems low and arbitrary. Good devs may find themselves caught in this as well - that's over 2 months of development per app, and some useful apps just don't command that sort of development time. Even a reasonable limit has to be rather high - probably around 100?
First app with name submitted gets it? Well, then you have the patent deal - you deny the guy who submitted a few minutes later an app with the same name. There are probably going to be a ton of unintended consequences, too.
Still, the Apple solution of non-negotiation (by not revealing the squatter's identity) is probably a good one - DNS squatters are in it for money, and they'll sell. Here, the name is reserved, but since you can't negotiate, all the squatter is doing is being an ass. There's no financial incentive to squat on a name because anyone wanting to use it can't find your details and contact you to pay $1000 for the name. So it's costing them $100/year with zero gain. At least domain squatters can get several thousand per name to help pay for the domain registrations. The Apple method leaves them $100 poorer each year - it's not listed on iTunes, there are no ads, and no one can contact you to buy the name.
Maybe a solution is no developer can hold more than say, 5 names at any one time. Approval of an app removes that name from the list (so they're holding 4 names and can add one). Those extra names can be returned to the pool at any time - for example, a developer creates an app which can go under 5 possible names, then at the last minute they pick one and submits under that name. Since they have no use for the other 4, they can release them so freeing up more reserved name slots for their next app. Big dev houses probably already have multiple dev accounts, so they can reserve multiple names for multiple apps. 5 or 10 names reserved for apps in development ought to be enough. Implement it right (e.g., a dev can test to see if a name is taken before having to give up one of their existing ones) and it may reduce this problem.
Still - why squat on the names? People can't buy it off of you, so there's no financial incentive (which is why there are so many domain squatters), other than being an ass.
No, they can't. The only thing the copied discs hacks do is tell the Xbox360 when the disc is queried, instead of returning stuff like "DVD-R", it'll return "Xbox360", and the like. The actual code signing mechanism hasn't been broken, so adding an aimbot is pretty much impossible right now. (The signatures are checked always).
Even the Halo cheats don't work anymore - at least for Halo 3 I believe...
The problem with this is just like PS3 Linux. Microsoft and Sony offer a legitimate way to get homebrew on the device - Microsoft with their XNA environment (and a $99/year fee to put your homebrew on your Xbox360 and sell it (yes, Microsoft encourages you to sell your homebrew games - the "Indie Marketplace")). Sony lets people go nuts with the Linux port (until recently - the Slim can't run Linux). Both these measures kept most homebrewers busy actually making homebrew, and leaving any mods to be used for piracy (until recently, the only reason to mod your xbox was for piracy, or "playing backup games").
But if you have an Xbox360 you don't want, give to to charity or sell it. Hack it only for fun - if it doesn't do what you want, and you don't want to invest in hacking it, then you might as well give/sell it to someone who wants it more.
No, it doesn't.
There are basically 4 cores that ARM Ltd. sells - the ARM9, ARM11, Cortex A8, and Cortex A9. (I'm leaving out the various little features of each, and going with general family). It's an easy mistake to make, but an ARM9 doesn't hold a candle to the Cortex A9.
The Cortex series of cores are the latest and shiniest, being that the core difference between the A8 and A9 is that the A9 supports symmetric multiprocessing. Note that many chips on the market today already have multiple ARM cores, but they are not setup for SMP - the secondary ARM core is often a coprocessor to do certain tasks. Common examples are multi-core SoCs used in cellphones - you have a powerful ARM core powering the general OS, and a lighter-weight one for the baseband side. Or an iPod, where you have one core powering the UI, and another doing the AAC/MP3 decode.
Still, I hope devices with embedded flash use something like FlashBlock. Nothing sucks worse than surfing freely then hitting some crappy flash ad that causes the whole system to virtually hang as the CPU is spent doing the ad and no CPU is left for the UI...
Good idea. 3.0 has an ad ticker that you cannot disable - it's constantly scrolling stuff for you to buy, new games, etc. (This is different from the startup ad, which you CAN disable). 2.x had the "info bar" ticker as well, but that was also something you can disable. In 3.0, the only way to disable it is to delete the internet connection. Serves me right for updating it when I really only use it as a blu-ray player.
They also seemed to have broken auto-startup of disc if you turn your PS3 off with the disc inside, and have auto-disc-startup enabled. If it's a blu-ray movie you're watching, it means you either eject/insert, or have to click over to movie, then start it manually.
Hopefully 3.1 fixes these two issues.
The only good part is there are less ads on the PS3 than the Xbox360 (though excepting the annoying sound one, I find the Xbox360 NXE ads useful...)
And that opens up a whole field of people to market to. Look at Nintendo's strategy - they're on top not because those 14-year-old boys love their systems, but because they decided to appeal to the under-represented generation. You'd think something like the pink DS would sit on shelves, but it turns out young girls love that and they're actually one of the faster movers (besides the black and white). Or take the Wii, whose constant sellout wasn't to the traditional gaming market, but to newcomers who may have been marginalized before.
Ditto with co-op - people want it, developers see the money so they add it. People see a potential opportunity and they'll try to exploit it. You can see the movement away from the old gamer stereotypes the past 5+ years or so - the "hardcore gamers" aren't attracting the development houses as much as they used to. Instead, an explosion of casual gaming, and "simplified" games that appeal to a broader base. It may explain the decline of PC gaming, since the hardcore ones would be the kind to shun a console and purcase the latest and greatest hardware to eke out a few extra frames per second, while the majority sit around with their one generation or older video cards that play WoW just fine. And the rise of the "I want to play a f**king game" crowd who purchase consoles rather than mess with drivers, Windows, firewalls, etc.
Of course, I still wish Halo 3 had a bot/coop mode - I still hanker to kill, but not wish to do multiplayer (I suck at multiplayer - getting killed 10 times in 5 seconds is, unfortunately, not an achievement).
Is that functionality malware? From post #29585841,
So it's malware on the iPhone, when it's a supported API on a number of other platforms, except Symbian.
OTOH, this is good for Palm - we'll soon be inundated with Norton Antivirus for WebOS, McAfee Antivirus for WebOS, etc. Just like Symbian and I believe WinMo have. After all, we can't have another Liberty virus that afflicted PalmOS devices. (This was named after the Liberty Game Boy Emulator for PalmOS).
And I suppose, good for developers of fart apps, flashlight apps, and other spam apps. Last one was particularly interesting. Helps the Pre's app numbers, though.
Actually, if you want to try surfing the flash based web, you really should try turning off adblock and noscript. If one flash ad doesn't bring your phone to its knees, a few of them will.
I've tried flash on mobile devices. It's horrible. You're surfing around, and all of a sudden, your device hangs as it loads and runs some flash app. Worse yet, it won't budge since the flash plugins are taking 100% of your multi-core multi-GHz ARM processors. Now say you want to look up some data off the web on your phone, and boom, the page you want to access has a flash ad and now you can't scroll, exit, or do anything because the CPU is bogged down processing flash more than handling the UI or other issue.
(BTW, this was on multiple devices that support it - a Nokia N810, Archos 605). You won't notice on a number of pages because the flash ads don't hog the CPU, but then you'll hit one that does. Not fun at all. Oh yeah, while your device is "hung" trying to update the latest punch-the-monkey, it's CPUs have ramped up to max speed, and your battery life will be depleting before your eyes - you can see the gauge go down. (ARMs are power efficient, yes, but you're still talking a wide range of power consumption - from multiple watts with everything full on, to fractions of a milliwatt when in powersaving mode).
And since most flash is done to watch video these days, it's probably better to have it shell out and run a video player than try to run an emulated codec - my Archos could play all sorts of Flash video (that's why it supported it) pretty flawlessly, but the Nokia dropped frames on practically every YouTube.
No, because they will just ensure that everything except x:x:...:x:0001 is firewalled out. If you want, you can buy additional IP addresses, and they'll just give you another x:x:...:y:0001 IP address. There's so many IP addresses, they can waste the other 65534 of them. And still bill you $5/month extra as per IPv4 addresses.
They're not giving up that money maker anytime soon. And we'll have NATv6 soon enough so we don't have to waste another $60/year extra for each new computer.
Actually, Apple needed a low-power RISC chip for their new tablet platform - I believe it was called the Einstein, no, sorry, the Newton. They saw potential in the Acorn processor and invested a bit of money in the whole thing, enough to be spun off, renamed (Acorn -> Advanced RISC Machines, then ARM Inc.) and produce a useful processor that has caused it to become one of the best-selling architectures. There's probably more ARM chips sold than x86 these days (especially since most x86 PCs come with several ARM processors...).
Yes, I was surprised that Apple had a hand in it. It's probably why Apple has the other architecture license (DEC owned it, produced the StrongARM used in the Newton, which was sold to Compaq when Compaq bought Digital, and through various licensing/patenting things, ended up at Intel, who I think sold it to Marvell). All other licensees must license the core as designed by ARM, which is why they have ARM9, ARM11, Cortex A8/A9 cores, but (formerly Intel) Marvell has XScale (and StrongARM). Apple has yet to produce their own ARM core chip, though.
Actually, EVERY carrier has certain restrictions on features on their phones. Some are more anal than others (e.g., the "send" key must be a certain shade of green). Now, GSM carriers aren't as powerful in demanding that certain features be dropped - they can only demand it of phones sold through them. That's because a GSM carrier pretty much has to accept any phone that's compatible and takes their SIM. CDMA carriers, most of them anyhow (there's a few that accept RUIMs), can simply not activate phones that weren't bought through them. The one exception would be country-wide requirements (e.g., China and WiFi must support China's encryption standard).
You can get fully-unlocked GSM phones with all features the carrier wanted to ban.
The other thing is... why'd it take so long? Surely some engineer out there already saw the need to do one build per carrier (yes, I've seen this) and would want to do it so they only need one build.
Jailbreak it. OpenSSH is a package available via Cydia, including the server.
Just remember to install bsd-utils and change the password for root and mobile.
Actually, the past 2 or 3 years, the number of infested cracks is probably close to 99% or so. Cracks these days are an excellent infection vector. I find it hard to believe that you're not currently infected, unless you have direct access to the cracker releases yourself.
Once the cracker releases it to the wild, tons of malware authors grab it, wrap their little downloader trojan around it, then release it and use SEO to ensure that every google search will turn up their infected version. Or, some people make a trojan that does zip (other than display an error message), but then installs an infection vector. They then copy the file 10,000+ times and rename them to various names suggesting they are official cracks.
The infected crack ones tend to propagate via webpages, but also torrents - they do work, but they also install a little something extra. Finding "clean" stuff gets more and more difficult, especially since these minor downloaders tend to be extremely quiet. Considering how easy it is to write a downloader, wrapped cracks almost never trigger any antivirus warning. It's only when they start installing old stuff that's detected will the user even know. Sometimes it can be months because the distribution of the malware is so slow, no one notices.
Heck, even OS X gets infected this way - I believe various popular applications often include in the installation hidden install bundles that install the trojan alongside it. The latest release known to have it would be torrents of Snow Leopard, especially those that appeared before the official release date.
Not only that, the user often willingly downloads it! It often doesn't come like the spyware of old, buried deep inside the ToS. Instead, the user willingly downloads the trojan and runs it.
People complain that anti-virus programs continually complain that cracks are infected, but from what I've seen, the AV program is right. People release clean cracks, then more nefarious ones take that crack, and wrap it with all sorts of trojan downloaders. The crack works, but it also installs a vector for more malware to come in. Or they bypass the whole "get a crack" thing and release fake cracks. A little SEO and the top 20 hits on google will be infected, and if it works, that infected crack will also make its way onto torrents.
I've seen listings of literally 10,000 cracks suddenly released that were just renames of the same trojan - the binary was byte-for-byte identical. Interstingly, half were for programs, the other half were for movies and stuff. Even the once-trustworthy sites get afflicted.
It's well known that apps can detect when they've been pirated on the iPod Touch and iPhone (it's completely detectable, and works 100% since DRM'ed versions should not have the extra entries). In fact, these apps have been known to report back to the host practically everything about the device - UUID and other things (it was posted in one of the forums how to do this, and what you should do if you detect it).
Funny enough, the crackers have also discovered the apps doing this and work around it...