They start to morally judge what you can and cant sell, who you can/cant take money from with paypal.
It's a combination of them covering their asses (for all sorts of reasons, e.g. liability), protecting their consumers, and making sure they aren't being abused to do black market transactions.
Too bad everyone is cornering themselves into 1 company for most products... you end up with a company that can do what it wants, and you have no options to go else where.
Here you're making the leap from auctions to products, as if you can't buy things at other sites, and you end with the imagined possibility that if ebay/paypal get bad enough, no one will come up with a competing service.
I just can't imagine this. There's always amazon, and craigslist, or even making your own website for auctioning, and I think the credit card companies, if they got their act together, could make a killing providing paypal-like services.
I really have to disagree with everything you've said here.
I've said this in a topic about switching friends to firefox, and another about switching family to Linux.. if you LIE to the people you're switching, you're not helping them.
The users we're talking about don't know -- and more importantly -- don't care what they're running as long as they can get their work done.
They won't realize that what they are using isn't "Word" or "Excel" but a free open program that they could use at home. If they knew that, they would use it it at home and also tell their friends about this amazing new free software on the intarwebs that's just as good or even better than the expensive Microsoft version.
The people we're talking about aren't the ones that go installing software (at least, not on purpose, e.g. adware and spyware). They don't know what they're running at home either, and the probably wouldn't know where to start to get OOo installed and keep it maintained.
If a little white lie is all it takes to transition them to a office suite that's less expensive, or a web browser that won't compromise their computer, then I say go for it. Sure, you can try teaching them what's really happening, but I serious doubt anyone cares. It's the sysadmins at work and the techies helping their families -- the ones that get to deal with and fix the software being replaced -- that care.
If I remember this correctly, Raskin believes no interface is really intuitive, and what we think of as "intuitive" really means "easy to learn". Once learned, it should apply across the whole desktop.
This is different than user customization. In fact, user customization is probably one of the more interesting (and thus difficult) aspects when designing a user interface. For example, "if the user can drag this to a toolbar, it should make sense that the user can drag anything here and that it makes sense when the user selects it". Contrast this with "only Documents can be dragged to this toolbar", which leads to user confusion if they try to drag something else and it doesn't work, or it converts the thing into a Document, or does something the user didn't want.
Reportedly he was against the mouse driven interface and other things we've grown quite used to.
If you take a look at The Humane Interface book, you'll see that this is wrong. He spends one section talking about how the Mac's application pulldowns at the very top of the screen are superior to pulldowns at the tops of each window.
It seems to me that Jef is very much an interface purest, promoting the most highly efficient and cleanest interface possible. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily translate to the most user friendly experience.
He is more concered about consistency and having the interface be easy to learn. He doesn't believe in "intuitive" interfaces, but instead interfaces that once learned should be applied everywere the user thinks would be appropriate.
The Technology Review had an article about this (or a similar system) a few months ago. They described the system a bit more -- I believe it's being used to monitor NYC's water. That article also mentions that the fish are only in the monitor for six weeks at a time, which may or may not make you feel better about animal cruelty concerns.
Swimming Sentinels - February 29, 2004 David Talbot Fish enlisted in protecting water supplies from toxins
Also check out mismunch from xscreensaver. This is an intentionally buggy implementation of munch, a classic square-filling screensaver you've probably seen before.
When I first saw it, I though it was printing out pictures of processor cores or something...
For the external attack described in the document you mentioned, it assumes that the SecureID token's value is sent in the clear. I don't know about you, but this seems like a pretty big assumption. If one enters the value over SSL or SSH, observing the value over the network is harder, and makes the first attack not feasible.
That leaves the rest of the document describing attacks between the machines that verify the value, which hopefully are internal and not snoopable from the outside.
I'd really like someone to write up what their experience was in buying a track from Real and trying it on their iPod/iTunes/whatever. (If someone wants to reply with one or a link to one, that'd be great.)
What did the file look like?.m4p? AAC protected under some other extention? Some sort of mp3 that you had to unlock with some real software?
Did it play all right using iTunes and iPod? Anything act weird? Did you "authenticate" the track to the computer using some Real software, or your iTunes account? What prevents you from copying the file to a friend or a friend's iPod?
Personally, I'm not going to buy a thing from Real until I know some of the above answers. Depending on how Real did it, it might be simple for Apple to change something in their next update that breaks Harmony, making any Real purchases useless.
I can't reach the website, but presumably this only works if you have access to the wireless network, so you'd have to break WPA/WEP as well (or find a sucker with an open network).
It's possible to password protect the audio aspect of the airport express separate from WPA/WEP. You can even leave the access point entirely open and still password protect access to the audio. The article's still unavailable, so it's unclear what exactly Jon cracked.
Gee, I wonder who might want to provide me with... oh, I don't know... some sort of authentication for VoIP... or perhaps internet services in general...
"The fear with VoIP spam is you will have an Internet address for your phone number, which means you can use the same tools you use for e-mail to generate traffic, said Tom Kershaw, a vice president at security specialist
VeriSign.
Dan is literally *using* DNS to hide his traffic, not just using udp:53.
Even so, this still isn't that interesting. So you mime encode it (or whatever), tack on a domain, and talk to a rogue dns server. Anyone dealing with secure networks should know that having any opening to the internet is a security risk and take that into account when designing one's network.
This is, in fact, what I do.:)
However, it's not with my primary mail, it's with my everything else mail.
It's nice that gmail provides the Reply-To header to make this work as well as it does.
Actually, the web interface is so much better than any email client I've ever used (elm, mutt, Evolution, Thunderbird)... The conversation feature is just wonderful.
I had my incoming mail split between gmail and my normal mail, which I read with mutt. I stuck to gmail for a week, but came to these conclusions:
I really want my editor when composing longer emails.
The fact that they have shortcut keys is great, but there need to be more of them. (no file to trash? no visit trash? I realize that one is supposed to Archive rather than Trash, but there's definitely a lot of one-shot email that has lost all purpose after reading it once.)
The limits on filters and how they are matched are annoying.
Mutt's sort by threads is as good as conversations. Mutt with thread-editing is possibly better.
Mutt's limit function and searching are good enough for the searching I do. The only way gmail is better is that, since there are no folders, you can search all "folders" at once. I'm pretty good about saving things to the right folder (since you can set the default save folder via a set of match operations), so this rarely comes up.
With longer gmail use, I would probably find more use for search. This all being said, if gmail offered imap I'd be extremely interested, in that I could both use the web interface when using a friend's machine, and switch over to mutt when I want to do more serious mail usage.
They're source-only updates on purpose -- the only binaries that are available are through releases and (recently) snapshots.
Once you update your src tree, you can recompile the kernel and system binaries if you need to -- whatever the patch requires. As a bonus, since everything is backed by cvs, you could make local changes and merge in updates rather seamlessly.
The snapshot builds, I think, are taken from -current rather than -stable.
Of course, a smarter setup would be to set up an S/KEY-like sequence for the port knocking -- that is, the sequence changes in known way from connection to connection, but the sequence is hard to predict without knowing the predetermined, shared key.
Tried it, it's not that clean. It wanted to install DLcompat, ESP Ghostscript, and fondu as well, all locally. This got messy, since I wanted to provide fondu from fink (that worked) but wanted to install DLcompat and ESP on the new disk image I made for OO. DLcompat was happy with it, and the OO installer was happy too once I made symlinks from/usr/local to/Volume/OpenOffice.../usr/local. ESP GS didn't want to install on the image, so that ended up being under/usr/local.
I'm curious to see how much of it the uninstaller will catch when I finally want to uninstall. Really, all of this is so that I can view rtf files with tables...
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I just can't imagine this. There's always amazon, and craigslist, or even making your own website for auctioning, and I think the credit card companies, if they got their act together, could make a killing providing paypal-like services.
Not that many sites use kerberos, but mit has had single sign-on with kerberos for quite some time.
If a little white lie is all it takes to transition them to a office suite that's less expensive, or a web browser that won't compromise their computer, then I say go for it. Sure, you can try teaching them what's really happening, but I serious doubt anyone cares. It's the sysadmins at work and the techies helping their families -- the ones that get to deal with and fix the software being replaced -- that care.
This is different than user customization. In fact, user customization is probably one of the more interesting (and thus difficult) aspects when designing a user interface. For example, "if the user can drag this to a toolbar, it should make sense that the user can drag anything here and that it makes sense when the user selects it". Contrast this with "only Documents can be dragged to this toolbar", which leads to user confusion if they try to drag something else and it doesn't work, or it converts the thing into a Document, or does something the user didn't want.
Eh, "in the monitor tank", but whatever.
auteur n: a filmmaker who has a personal style and keeps creative control over his or her works
When I first saw it, I though it was printing out pictures of processor cores or something...
That leaves the rest of the document describing attacks between the machines that verify the value, which hopefully are internal and not snoopable from the outside.
What did the file look like? .m4p? AAC protected under some other extention? Some sort of mp3 that you had to unlock with some real software?
Did it play all right using iTunes and iPod? Anything act weird? Did you "authenticate" the track to the computer using some Real software, or your iTunes account? What prevents you from copying the file to a friend or a friend's iPod?
Personally, I'm not going to buy a thing from Real until I know some of the above answers. Depending on how Real did it, it might be simple for Apple to change something in their next update that breaks Harmony, making any Real purchases useless.
Even so, this still isn't that interesting. So you mime encode it (or whatever), tack on a domain, and talk to a rogue dns server. Anyone dealing with secure networks should know that having any opening to the internet is a security risk and take that into account when designing one's network.
This is, in fact, what I do. :)
However, it's not with my primary mail, it's with my everything else mail.
It's nice that gmail provides the Reply-To header to make this work as well as it does.
- I really want my editor when composing longer emails.
- The fact that they have shortcut keys is great, but there need to be more of them. (no file to trash? no visit trash? I realize that one is supposed to Archive rather than Trash, but there's definitely a lot of one-shot email that has lost all purpose after reading it once.)
- The limits on filters and how they are matched are annoying.
- Mutt's sort by threads is as good as conversations. Mutt with thread-editing is possibly better.
- Mutt's limit function and searching are good enough for the searching I do. The only way gmail is better is that, since there are no folders, you can search all "folders" at once. I'm pretty good about saving things to the right folder (since you can set the default save folder via a set of match operations), so this rarely comes up.
With longer gmail use, I would probably find more use for search. This all being said, if gmail offered imap I'd be extremely interested, in that I could both use the web interface when using a friend's machine, and switch over to mutt when I want to do more serious mail usage.Being able to manipulate conversations exactly like emacs buffers is extremely powerful.
Once you update your src tree, you can recompile the kernel and system binaries if you need to -- whatever the patch requires. As a bonus, since everything is backed by cvs, you could make local changes and merge in updates rather seamlessly.
The snapshot builds, I think, are taken from -current rather than -stable.
I've been less of a fan since he screwed over Ripley. ;)
Of course, a smarter setup would be to set up an S/KEY-like sequence for the port knocking -- that is, the sequence changes in known way from connection to connection, but the sequence is hard to predict without knowing the predetermined, shared key.
Tried it, it's not that clean. It wanted to install DLcompat, ESP Ghostscript, and fondu as well, all locally. This got messy, since I wanted to provide fondu from fink (that worked) but wanted to install DLcompat and ESP on the new disk image I made for OO. DLcompat was happy with it, and the OO installer was happy too once I made symlinks from /usr/local to /Volume/OpenOffice.../usr/local. ESP GS didn't want to install on the image, so that ended up being under /usr/local.
I'm curious to see how much of it the uninstaller will catch when I finally want to uninstall. Really, all of this is so that I can view rtf files with tables...