In college a roommate and I performed an exorcism on a new Compaq computer his parents sent up for him. After formatting it and cleanly installing Windows 98, we loaded Half-Life onto it since that was the all-the-rage FPS on the dorm network at the time. I'd run it dozens of times without incident and blasted away at the hallmates for hours. But this other buddy of ours, Rob, couldn't run it. If he clicked the icon, the computer would bluescreen. Reboot, he tries to run it again...bluescreen. Eventually we just either let him play from MY computer, or have me run HL (click the icon) before turning over the controls. I think he and that machine must have been enemies in a past life or something.
Bitch, bitch, bitch. Until a few months ago, my home setup was: 3 simultaneous users sharing a 56k modem via NAT. Actually, unless somebody was downloading serious porn/mp3s/movies (made convenient by VNC running on the NAT machine/leechbox), the impact of multiple users was pretty much negligible. (If you disbelieve, pay more careful attention to the blinkenlights of your modem, and see just how much of the time it spends sitting idle. Of course, the Proxomitron Effect could have something to do with this.) For the unattended 'heavy leeching', the modem connected at midnight and disconnected at 6am.
Incidentally, there is some claiming being done that you can't download full-length movies over dialup. You most certainly can, the only difference is you watch them "next week", not "tonight". (Assuming you don't want to tie up your phone line all day long.)
I also seem to notice that the friends without broadband seem to accomplish more and lead happier lives. Their lawns are not 8" tall all the time, the cars are always clean and they seem to keep a more tidy abode.
Strangely enough, I find these two sentences to be contradictory.
On today's modern machines, what miniscule percentage of CPU would it actually use to send this outgoing spam? I could easily see one "cpu hour" equating to one "spamming week"...
Makes me wonder, though...
1) Pull 386 from basement and install spamming software (1 CPU hour = 1 hour) 1.5) Optional: ever heard of Underclocking? 2) OUTBOUND HOST MODIFICATOR: tracker.virtualmda.com unchanged; all others routed to all.roads.lead.to.localhost:25 3) Spam spam spam spam spam 4) ??? 5) Profit.
10 years from now, the kiddies of tomorrow will be sick of Blue LEDs and they will be a fad long-dead. But what will replace them? I don't suppose that red/amber/green will make a triumphant comeback. I'm waiting for the kiddies to start modding their Blue LED gear with those fiery red-orange neon indicator lamps for that retro look. How they're going to generate 80VAC from a cordless mouse is anyone's guess, but for most plug-in-to-the-wall gear this should not be a problem. Personally, I'm waiting for the triumphant resurgence of the eerie "radioactive" glow of tuning-eye tubes in place of those *lovely* blue LED level meters.
Re:3 years ago, it was the opposite..
on
The Blues for LEDs
·
· Score: 1
It is a great idea in theory. Ideas like this have been discussed by spyware haters, activists, and makers of security software in a number of fora. Each time, they are ultimately rejected on the basis of creating legal liability/difficulties/saber-rattling for whoever is giving software the classifications. Some scenarios:
1) Researcher gives a piece of software from "Vendor A" e.g. a frowny-face icon because it does something semi-questionable, like transmit a GUID or auto-update without notice. Same researcher gives the same classification to another product from "Vendor B", but this product transmits the entire contents of the user's hard drive, harvests their email, and molests children. Vendor A's lawyers object to the classification on the basis that it associates their product with that of Vendor B, "creates confusion", etc.
2) Researcher evaluates a product on Tuesday, finds it spying, and gives it a SPYWARE label. Product's developer updates the program on Wednesday to remove the spyware features. Product's developer (or counsel, etc.) contacts the developer on Friday, demanding removal of the label because (on Friday) it is "false and damaging misinformation" causing damage to their business. Should the researcher label the product based on the sum of every version, only the latest version, the last n versions, or...? How would it play out in court, if the researcher and vendor disagree on which is appropriate? [Expensively, no matter who wins.])
3) Researcher labels a product $blahware, where $blahware is a relatively new term (e.g. Adware, Spyware, Malware, etc.) that does not appear in any official lexical record (OED, or whatever) and thus is not definitively defined. Product's author demands removal of this label on the basis that they can find definitions of $blahware (by other sites, their own affiliates(!), or whatever) that their product does not fit under. Whose definition shall be used? Which is correct? What if the researcher in question is in the minority? (This even can apply to terms the researcher has in fact invented on the spot. Think a hot-headed vendor will stand by while its product is labelled 'Crapware' a month before their big IPO?)
These are just a few scenarios. Unfortunately, most of this research is done by hobbyists and other everyday folks who don't want to, or can't afford to, be drawn into a lengthy battle, even if a judge would most likely find in their favor.
Personally, I can't wait until every road in the country IS retrofitted with magnetic spikes - preferably, ones that can be deployed on the asshole pushing his way to the head of a highway lane merge (racing along on the shoulder, one hand on the horn, one finger out the window) and slowing up traffic for everybody else.
downloadable program that purports to offer a gentler twist on "adware," providing users access to free music downloads and other content in exchange for the right to flash a limited number of ads onto their computer screens.
180solutions =~ GAIN
Vibrant Media, is making headway with a system that delivers ads through links attached to keywords in the text of news stories and other articles published on the Web.
Surprisingly, the most informative books I read on persuasion, perceived value, behavior modification, etc. were while I was doing an English paper on the internal environment (historically) of mental hospitals. Have a look into 'token economies', specifically the experiments that have been performed in this area in terms of psychological 'marketing' strategies tested against patients. The correlation of these experiments' findings to the assertions, images, situations, etc. commonly used in modern marketing pitches is somewhat spooky.
Hey, don't knock it. In my first 'tech job', I signed on to design a Web site for a power-transmission products company in Chicago. Turns out I ended up doing pretty much any computer-related project except Web design, since they were rather short on tech staff (that is, I WAS the tech staff). For example, designing a Web page also meant needing somewhere to put it, so there was my crash course in installing + configuring Linux/Apache/mailservers, fiddling with port forwarding, etc. Anyway, to make a long story slightly less rambly, boss decides that the unfinished Web page should have a product search for every type of product they distribute. (Incidentally, this is why I know Perl now:-) Things like, enter your application, desired RPMs, service factor, and available voltage, and the script grovells the database to select the ideal motor, gear reducer, ratio, etc. and present it in a neat little list with dimension data, drawings and so on.
So I says, "Boss-man," I says, "where's the product database? Show me the data structure and I'll have that stuff Web-searchable in a few days."
Boss-man says, "We don't have a product database."
"...All right, where do I get the product data? Is it on CD? Do I have to get it from the manufacturers?"
Boss-man walks off and returns in a few moments with a huge stack of manufacturers' paper catalogs, and the unwelcome news that we're "just" a distributor; we don't get product data in any usable form. Being short-staffed, I also end up being the guy charged with the task of typing in product data from the catalogs to a database. For obvious cost-saving reasons, this data is packed sardine-like into the catalogs in as small a font as they can reasonably get away with, so entering a page of the stuff would take f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
Now remember, I hired in to design a Web site for ten bucks an hour, expected to take a couple weeks at the very most...at this point I'm still the cheapest labor in the building, so this is not such a gross misapplication of a resource (me) as it seems. So I did this for, oh, a couple hours or so, 'til quitting time. Enter one line of data from the catalog tables, consult another set of tables at the back of the catalog to determine the remaining data (thermal, etc.), check for typos, enter the next line...
Boring, boring, boring. Not to mention horribly inefficient. Not being the type who likes to do more work than necessary (ahem, I mean, being the type who likes to maximize efficiency), I showed up the next day with my flatbed scanner and some OCR program. A few test scans of catalog pages to determine the format the OCR software spits out, a throwaway Perl script to convert this to comma-delimited and look up stuff from the thermal/etc. tables, and my job suddenly became a lot more fun, while also increasing my data rate roughly 2000%. It went something like this.
1) Prop feet on desk. 2) Rip page from catalog, stuff into scanner, press scan. 3) Nap and/or surf the net while waiting for scanner (remember, I already set up a Linux box for the web server, so I can surf the 'net from an official-looking server-admin-doing-important-server-admin-stuff telnet window. Lynx = awsome.) 4) Optional step. Sip coffee, eat donut... 5) Repeat steps 2-3 whenever I hear the scanner buzz its way back to home position. 6) Run perl script once there's a whole s***load of OCR data to crunch.
I never imagined a data-entry task could suck so little, but there I was. (Of course, now I'm a hardware/firmware hacker, which is way more cool:-)
I remember that, from my broke-college-student days. Everyone used to start up 'move the mouse' scripts and go to sleep, and usually got caught. I figured it probably checked for more involved activity, such as actual Web surfing (clicking on links, and such), so I wrote two different scripts: one to move the mouse in such a way as to sequentially click through a set of Netscape bookmarks at a randomish interval (between 3 ~ 5 minutes IIRC), and another to generate an insanely huge set of Netscape bookmarks (arranged as something like 25 folders with 25 links per folder) by turning it loose on any randomly-chosen list-o-million-links pages and letting it collect all the links. Did this for a few months...start the click script and rake in the $$$ while in class or sleeping. Unfortunately, this was toward the end of AllAdvantage when they began limiting how many hours per month they'd actually pay for, so by the end I was getting checks for...what was it...$12.50 per month I think. Eventually it just went out of business.
Just looking around, I still have the QBASIC script that generated bookmark files. (Yeah yeah, Qbasic and all, but it was semi-ingenious in those days. The script called C:\Windows\ping.exe to verify all the servers, to prevent e.g. "DNS Error" dialog boxes that would interfere with the link-clicking, as well as filter out anything that looked like an ad-link, etc.)
A few other useless-but-interesting facts I'm remembering about these services... AllAdvantage used the IE HTML renderer; it basically just displayed a Web page in its main window. The HTML for this was embedded in the.EXE, which did not checksum itself. Just find the <IMG SRC=... tag in the binary, and change the width and height attributes to all zeros. Viola, no more blinky blinky.
While you were at it (messing with the.exe, and all), you could change its internal name and window title so that the adbar programs (Cashsurf, EPIPO and whatever else existed at the time) wouldn't detect one another and close down.
And then of course, there was always WindowsSniper...
I thought the ghost of Mr. T had been laid to rest. But I was wrong.
Sadly, you have no idea how wrong. Mr. T has been recently spotted doing cheesy commercials for "Illinois Title Loans, Inc.", a company that lets one take out a loan by handing over their car title as collateral. At one point in the advert, he is actually heard to say, "I pity da foo' who doesn't call Illinois Title Loans!".
So THAT is what happens:-) See my earlier post about my brother doing pretty much exactly this (come to think of it, I think it even was a 2-partition setup trying to get around drive-size limitations on an older machine), and ending up with a disk full of MP3s whose names didn't match the contents, or contained pieces of 2-3 different songs...
Slashdot Mirror
In college a roommate and I performed an exorcism on a new Compaq computer his parents sent up for him. After formatting it and cleanly installing Windows 98, we loaded Half-Life onto it since that was the all-the-rage FPS on the dorm network at the time. I'd run it dozens of times without incident and blasted away at the hallmates for hours. But this other buddy of ours, Rob, couldn't run it. If he clicked the icon, the computer would bluescreen. Reboot, he tries to run it again...bluescreen. Eventually we just either let him play from MY computer, or have me run HL (click the icon) before turning over the controls. I think he and that machine must have been enemies in a past life or something.
...with their helmets off.
Bitch, bitch, bitch. Until a few months ago, my home setup was: 3 simultaneous users sharing a 56k modem via NAT. Actually, unless somebody was downloading serious porn/mp3s/movies (made convenient by VNC running on the NAT machine/leechbox), the impact of multiple users was pretty much negligible. (If you disbelieve, pay more careful attention to the blinkenlights of your modem, and see just how much of the time it spends sitting idle. Of course, the Proxomitron Effect could have something to do with this.) For the unattended 'heavy leeching', the modem connected at midnight and disconnected at 6am.
Incidentally, there is some claiming being done that you can't download full-length movies over dialup. You most certainly can, the only difference is you watch them "next week", not "tonight". (Assuming you don't want to tie up your phone line all day long.)
I also seem to notice that the friends without broadband seem to accomplish more and lead happier lives. Their lawns are not 8" tall all the time, the cars are always clean and they seem to keep a more tidy abode.
Strangely enough, I find these two sentences to be contradictory.
Most Slashdotters don't really give a shit. :-)
In some circles, it is considered not just functional, but an essential bit of modernity, like knowing ... that Diesel refers to jeans, not fuel.
/me crawls back under rock...
It does?
On today's modern machines, what miniscule percentage of CPU would it actually use to send this outgoing spam? I could easily see one "cpu hour" equating to one "spamming week"...
Makes me wonder, though...
1) Pull 386 from basement and install spamming software (1 CPU hour = 1 hour)
1.5) Optional: ever heard of Underclocking?
2) OUTBOUND HOST MODIFICATOR: tracker.virtualmda.com unchanged; all others routed to all.roads.lead.to.localhost:25
3) Spam spam spam spam spam
4) ???
5) Profit.
10 years from now, the kiddies of tomorrow will be sick of Blue LEDs and they will be a fad long-dead. But what will replace them? I don't suppose that red/amber/green will make a triumphant comeback. I'm waiting for the kiddies to start modding their Blue LED gear with those fiery red-orange neon indicator lamps for that retro look. How they're going to generate 80VAC from a cordless mouse is anyone's guess, but for most plug-in-to-the-wall gear this should not be a problem. Personally, I'm waiting for the triumphant resurgence of the eerie "radioactive" glow of tuning-eye tubes in place of those *lovely* blue LED level meters.
I think Dr. Seuss foretold this.
It is a great idea in theory. Ideas like this have been discussed by spyware haters, activists, and makers of security software in a number of fora. Each time, they are ultimately rejected on the basis of creating legal liability/difficulties/saber-rattling for whoever is giving software the classifications. Some scenarios:
1) Researcher gives a piece of software from "Vendor A" e.g. a frowny-face icon because it does something semi-questionable, like transmit a GUID or auto-update without notice. Same researcher gives the same classification to another product from "Vendor B", but this product transmits the entire contents of the user's hard drive, harvests their email, and molests children. Vendor A's lawyers object to the classification on the basis that it associates their product with that of Vendor B, "creates confusion", etc.
2) Researcher evaluates a product on Tuesday, finds it spying, and gives it a SPYWARE label. Product's developer updates the program on Wednesday to remove the spyware features. Product's developer (or counsel, etc.) contacts the developer on Friday, demanding removal of the label because (on Friday) it is "false and damaging misinformation" causing damage to their business. Should the researcher label the product based on the sum of every version, only the latest version, the last n versions, or...? How would it play out in court, if the researcher and vendor disagree on which is appropriate? [Expensively, no matter who wins.])
3) Researcher labels a product $blahware, where $blahware is a relatively new term (e.g. Adware, Spyware, Malware, etc.) that does not appear in any official lexical record (OED, or whatever) and thus is not definitively defined. Product's author demands removal of this label on the basis that they can find definitions of $blahware (by other sites, their own affiliates(!), or whatever) that their product does not fit under. Whose definition shall be used? Which is correct? What if the researcher in question is in the minority? (This even can apply to terms the researcher has in fact invented on the spot. Think a hot-headed vendor will stand by while its product is labelled 'Crapware' a month before their big IPO?)
These are just a few scenarios. Unfortunately, most of this research is done by hobbyists and other everyday folks who don't want to, or can't afford to, be drawn into a lengthy battle, even if a judge would most likely find in their favor.
Crap, I'll actually have to install the other 4 wires now?
Personally, I can't wait until every road in the country IS retrofitted with magnetic spikes - preferably, ones that can be deployed on the asshole pushing his way to the head of a highway lane merge (racing along on the shoulder, one hand on the horn, one finger out the window) and slowing up traffic for everybody else.
Wait, I thought AdSense was the polite little Google ads?...
Just imagine the pornography ads.
You need a signal beamed into your brain to want sex?
downloadable program that purports to offer a gentler twist on "adware," providing users access to free music downloads and other content in exchange for the right to flash a limited number of ads onto their computer screens.
180solutions =~ GAIN
Vibrant Media, is making headway with a system that delivers ads through links attached to keywords in the text of news stories and other articles published on the Web.
Vibrant Media =~ TOPText
Surprisingly, the most informative books I read on persuasion, perceived value, behavior modification, etc. were while I was doing an English paper on the internal environment (historically) of mental hospitals. Have a look into 'token economies', specifically the experiments that have been performed in this area in terms of psychological 'marketing' strategies tested against patients. The correlation of these experiments' findings to the assertions, images, situations, etc. commonly used in modern marketing pitches is somewhat spooky.
Hey, don't knock it. In my first 'tech job', I signed on to design a Web site for a power-transmission products company in Chicago. Turns out I ended up doing pretty much any computer-related project except Web design, since they were rather short on tech staff (that is, I WAS the tech staff). For example, designing a Web page also meant needing somewhere to put it, so there was my crash course in installing + configuring Linux/Apache/mailservers, fiddling with port forwarding, etc. Anyway, to make a long story slightly less rambly, boss decides that the unfinished Web page should have a product search for every type of product they distribute. (Incidentally, this is why I know Perl now :-) Things like, enter your application, desired RPMs, service factor, and available voltage, and the script grovells the database to select the ideal motor, gear reducer, ratio, etc. and present it in a neat little list with dimension data, drawings and so on.
:-)
So I says, "Boss-man," I says, "where's the product database? Show me the data structure and I'll have that stuff Web-searchable in a few days."
Boss-man says, "We don't have a product database."
"...All right, where do I get the product data? Is it on CD? Do I have to get it from the manufacturers?"
Boss-man walks off and returns in a few moments with a huge stack of manufacturers' paper catalogs, and the unwelcome news that we're "just" a distributor; we don't get product data in any usable form. Being short-staffed, I also end up being the guy charged with the task of typing in product data from the catalogs to a database. For obvious cost-saving reasons, this data is packed sardine-like into the catalogs in as small a font as they can reasonably get away with, so entering a page of the stuff would take f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
Now remember, I hired in to design a Web site for ten bucks an hour, expected to take a couple weeks at the very most...at this point I'm still the cheapest labor in the building, so this is not such a gross misapplication of a resource (me) as it seems. So I did this for, oh, a couple hours or so, 'til quitting time. Enter one line of data from the catalog tables, consult another set of tables at the back of the catalog to determine the remaining data (thermal, etc.), check for typos, enter the next line...
Boring, boring, boring. Not to mention horribly inefficient. Not being the type who likes to do more work than necessary (ahem, I mean, being the type who likes to maximize efficiency), I showed up the next day with my flatbed scanner and some OCR program. A few test scans of catalog pages to determine the format the OCR software spits out, a throwaway Perl script to convert this to comma-delimited and look up stuff from the thermal/etc. tables, and my job suddenly became a lot more fun, while also increasing my data rate roughly 2000%. It went something like this.
1) Prop feet on desk.
2) Rip page from catalog, stuff into scanner, press scan.
3) Nap and/or surf the net while waiting for scanner (remember, I already set up a Linux box for the web server, so I can surf the 'net from an official-looking server-admin-doing-important-server-admin-stuff telnet window. Lynx = awsome.)
4) Optional step. Sip coffee, eat donut...
5) Repeat steps 2-3 whenever I hear the scanner buzz its way back to home position.
6) Run perl script once there's a whole s***load of OCR data to crunch.
I never imagined a data-entry task could suck so little, but there I was. (Of course, now I'm a hardware/firmware hacker, which is way more cool
It just works on so many levels.
;-)
Or more precisely, two.
Post link to a wireless backpack Web server strapped to some dude's back on Slashdot:
/.ed backpack dude run around screaming and trying futilely to put himself out:
$FREE
Watch
$PRICELESS
Forget the wireless node...I can think of a few things you could do with a 6A continuous power source strapped to your back.
I remember that, from my broke-college-student days. Everyone used to start up 'move the mouse' scripts and go to sleep, and usually got caught. I figured it probably checked for more involved activity, such as actual Web surfing (clicking on links, and such), so I wrote two different scripts: one to move the mouse in such a way as to sequentially click through a set of Netscape bookmarks at a randomish interval (between 3 ~ 5 minutes IIRC), and another to generate an insanely huge set of Netscape bookmarks (arranged as something like 25 folders with 25 links per folder) by turning it loose on any randomly-chosen list-o-million-links pages and letting it collect all the links. Did this for a few months...start the click script and rake in the $$$ while in class or sleeping. Unfortunately, this was toward the end of AllAdvantage when they began limiting how many hours per month they'd actually pay for, so by the end I was getting checks for...what was it...$12.50 per month I think. Eventually it just went out of business.
.EXE, which did not checksum itself. Just find the <IMG SRC=... tag in the binary, and change the width and height attributes to all zeros. Viola, no more blinky blinky.
.exe, and all), you could change its internal name and window title so that the adbar programs (Cashsurf, EPIPO and whatever else existed at the time) wouldn't detect one another and close down.
Just looking around, I still have the QBASIC script that generated bookmark files. (Yeah yeah, Qbasic and all, but it was semi-ingenious in those days. The script called C:\Windows\ping.exe to verify all the servers, to prevent e.g. "DNS Error" dialog boxes that would interfere with the link-clicking, as well as filter out anything that looked like an ad-link, etc.)
A few other useless-but-interesting facts I'm remembering about these services... AllAdvantage used the IE HTML renderer; it basically just displayed a Web page in its main window. The HTML for this was embedded in the
While you were at it (messing with the
And then of course, there was always WindowsSniper...
Avalanche of pedantic comments on the difference between 'talking' and 'typing' in 3...2...
I thought the ghost of Mr. T had been laid to rest. But I was wrong.
Sadly, you have no idea how wrong. Mr. T has been recently spotted doing cheesy commercials for "Illinois Title Loans, Inc.", a company that lets one take out a loan by handing over their car title as collateral. At one point in the advert, he is actually heard to say, "I pity da foo' who doesn't call Illinois Title Loans!".
Or, you can find the security chip on the console [marked "CIC" in the old NES], and cut its clock pin :-)
So THAT is what happens :-) See my earlier post about my brother doing pretty much exactly this (come to think of it, I think it even was a 2-partition setup trying to get around drive-size limitations on an older machine), and ending up with a disk full of MP3s whose names didn't match the contents, or contained pieces of 2-3 different songs...