to a degree i am sure you are right, traditional robotics have put some people out of work in factories. Increased automation for assembly & production lead to a more service based economy which has generally been bad for blue collar labor... lower pay, worse benefits, low job security. Of course nafta has probably done far more to the manufacturing job base than robotics have.
You have to remember that nanotech is hardly what sci-fi books tell you about though. It won't be like you will be buying a big can of nano workers and kick back at the pool while you watch them swarm and build your house. They will be situational just like a lot of regular automation has been... And open up a number of markets where humans cant do the work, creating jobs in the process.
Is it even possible for software to be subject to "dumping" laws? Doesnt the product need to be sold for less than it's manufacturing cost? Sorry if i am misinformed.
You've wholly missed the point of my posting, however. I never derided science fiction for not predicting the future, i simply stated that it generally does not.
My point was, why are we looking towards science fiction authors to predict the future in non fiction terms, when we know from our history that what they predict rarely comes to pass?
Of course these predictions seem plausible at the time to us, that is the whole point. These authors are not predicting things that no one would agree with, it is the very nature of these predictions that they seem wholly likely, especially when set with a background of popular fiction. But the specific fact that history has shown us that these predictions are unreliable should give us clues to base our understanding of current predictions on.
1984 is a great example of social commentary and satire, not really science fiction. You say that if i do not take science fiction as a predictor of the future i should turn to an attorney general? You are making my point here for me, neither of these people are suited for the job.
Just because someone spins a good yarn to sell books gives him no more access to a future yet to come, than say... a lawyer working for the government. But then again, no one is looking to ashcroft to do that either.
Last month there was a/. article about William Gibson addressing the Directors Guild of America. His remarks closed essentially telling his audience that in n years people would be consuming their classic films with software designed to super-impose the heads of dogs over the actors and then pause the action to participate in a kung-fu knock down using Meryl Streep with dog head on top as the protagonist.
Now Sterling is telling us that deep databases of personal info will destabalize our government causing shifts in power so fast that it essentially doom our country. Even though in the begining of the interview he says he doesnt think the system has much traction, later on he seems to imply that the result is inevitable (ala google) and the answer is to leave the country (presumably to one that doesnt have google)
What is with science fiction authors being relied on to predict the future? Haven't we shown time after time that science fiction is in fact a horrible way to try to get a handle on the next fifty years? If we actually followed sci-fi these days we'd commute back and forth from the moon, have life like robots that do our every whim, attack people with energy weapons and almost never user computers.
I like both of the authors i mentioned but i'll continue to buy their works of fiction and not be planning on hiring either any time soon for a think tank.
This exploit appears to allow you to obscure your ip address as well. I didn't see any mention of this in the linked article so i figured it was worth mentioning. About a month ago i recieved a spam complaint from our ISP about mail sent from a machine in our IP block:
Received: from 64.84.xxx.xxx by bay3-dav112.bay3.hotmail.com with DAV;
After investigation it didnt seem like the spam had come from there, there was no evidence of a break in or that anyone had used it to send spam. While we were investigating we changed it's IP adress and never bothered to change it back, but we've still been given 3 more copies of current spam showing this IP address thats not even in use anymore.
By the way, I thought the article was pretty retarded standing on it's soap box about horrible microsoft security blah blah blah. The entire industry has problems with security, singling one company out is just petty. I've certainly had a lot of linux security updates I've needed to install over the past year, its nothing exclusive to one camp.
Also i think he was exagerating the effect of this bug.
I checked my spam that i've gotten since 5/1/03: 3467 pieces of spam 5 pieces of DAV spam
when you buy a company with stock, part of what you buy is a term of service with key contributors. This is so important folks like CEO's don't bail the day after the deal leaving you holding the bag with a company you cant run or a product that still needs work.
thats what applies in this situation. I'm not talking about options that employees are awarded at market value as part of a typical compensation package (though i'm sure he had these too).
We're talking about a financial transaction to buy a company. You cant buy a company with 1 million of your own options priced at your current market value... That would be close to trying to buy a company with no money at all. Instead they use real stock, one that has an actual cash value (something that an option at current market price doesnt have). But that doesnt mean they can't put provisions on its release, which is where the vesting comes in.
Everyone all upset about aol (aka the man) keeping justin down should consider this:
june 1, 1999: aol buys nullsoft for $86m
june 2, 2003: justin announces resignation due to creative differences
For those who can't connect the dots, he had a 4 year stock vesting schedule. Justin didn't have enough trouble with his free expression while his stock was still vesting, but now that it's done he suddenly feels the pangs of regret for working for the corporate machine.
There's nothing wrong with leaving after your contracts are up, but why not be a man about it? Releasing a ton of code you don't own under the GPL (and indeed, has code in it that can't be released this way due to RSA copyright) and yamering on in public about your former employer is at best pretty immature.
Justin obviously made out quite well selling a media player for nearly $100m. Anyone that's followed the ups and extreme downs of the industry knows that its unlikely nullsoft was ever worth that big of a price tag. Why not exit out of the situation gracefully and be thankful for the luck he had in getting the deal instead of granstanding for your hacker friends.
Well, I will be the first to admit that i probably painted with too broad a brush when i included the entire dod community in that statement.
But, what did you say to the contrary? Nothing, really. I have had personal contact with folks who have had to line by line qualify and build from source everything from modern windows/solaris releases, compilers & languages, email programs, CAD systems & databases and I'm sure a ton more.
While i will admit probably everything doesnt get this inspection, especially if it's just something a temp uses in a dod accounting office, your reaction which implies that these practices simply don't exist is way off base. Just because your low end job didnt include the ability to check out the source for MS word doesnt mean someone doesnt have access to it.
yeah, this is the point. There is the same amount of risk or greater with closed source projects. Do you think the DOD has never used a piece of software the creator discontinued? Or went out of business? To protect against that I am sure they always manage to get the source code up front (to say nothing of the security issues that require them to get closed source)... In either case if something bad happens the dod can maintain their own systems, open source would just take a step out of the contract negotiations that allow that.
you guys have to realize that the record companies dont have to sue or win anything to scrfew over apple. They painstakingly negotiated licenses for each label they sell music from, if the record industry gets pissed all they have to do is cancel the contract or raise the price over what apple can afford to pay.
The lawsuits are for companies the industry doesnt do business with at all, as it stands its so unbelievably hard to get a reasonable deal on a downloadable music contract even with drm involvecd that ANYONE that has one will do whatever they have to do to make sure it wont be taken away. Most of the online music efforts have died specifically because of major label contract issues.
wow i envy you. I get between 60-100 spam mails a day, no exageration at all. I'll get 3-5 pieces of non-spam mail each day.
Some of these systems look promising but to be honest bayesian filtering like is present in popfile and spamassasin was my savior. Spamassassin was OK before bayesian filtering but now that it has it too it catches every piece of spam i get, possibly missing 1 per day though many days it doesnt miss a piece.
I strongly reccomend anyone wanting to filter spam to look into one of the many bayesian filter programs, it may take a few hours to set up and occasionally need a minute or two to keep it trained but it's performance is so good it feels like magic.
I am thinking the problem of wind moving these things around is grossly understated by the article. Minimum distance for one of these things would be 1.5km but if they say they only need 18 total that means they must expect distances of 20-30km+ which is quite a distance. Customer sites would need tight beam directional antennas to go that far that would lose signal as soon as the balloon moved much at all. They say in the article that they will have an "antenna stabilisation system" that keeps the balloon in place even if its getting blow around, but could it really keep it in place within a few feet considering it's on a 1.5km tether? Honestly that seems like the sticky point to me, unless i am way off in how much tolerance for movement the customer antennas would have.
I guess. Of course everything can be cracked somehow.
If you look at current MS drm tech though, it's not maybe as sinmpleton as you would think. A service run by microsoft would likely have a lot of tools at it's disposal. While nothing will stop you from attacking a single file and being successful, even current public ms drm tech has the ability to use a seperate key for every asset, or indeed have a bunch of keys for the same asset so that every consumer doesnt even get the same encrypted version of the same song. And of course these files will be tethered or close to tethered, compromised keys can be expired, compromised players can be expired, and since it's a monthly type service they can enforce needing the newest software to continue to participate.
Keep in mind that ms has been planning extensions of the drm system into the rendering chain including the OS and drivers for some time now. I would be surprised if their efforts weren't ultimately related.
Once you put all of these hurdles in the way, the practical approaches to wide scale piracy of the system dwindle. The most likely compromise of a system like this is in the rendering path, either near the driver or actually plugged into the sound out of a computer. Once you've made it so that piracy can only happen at 1x as the song is playing, needs to be re-encoded, possible quality loss, etc. You make piracy really not that appealing.
I worked on a system that was similar in some ways in that it offered a large variety of music on a subscription basis. The trouble with this approach so far has ultimately been liscensing, it is difficult to acquire liscenses to music in this way that allow for everyone to be paid as they believe they should and still provide something affordable to the consumer.
BUT, if you do manage it, the niceness of a service like this is something you truly have to experience to appreciate. Having access to a wide catalog of music was a transformatice experience for me. I have a much broader musical background now and I believe i appreciate music much more as well. If i had simply logged on and pirated my favorite 5,000 songs for $10 and logged off i never would have gotten the best experience out of the system. Indeed much of what i listened to with it i wouldnt have even wanted to pirate. But it was great to be able to play a song you remembered once or twice or explore new music that you might enjoy listening to once (if not again).
Case in point: Out of the experience I ended up with man thousands of albums, all professionally encoded, that i keep on a home server. While storage obviously keeps going down, needing to have a 600gb raid array at home just for piracy is out of the league of most folks. Even then this amount of music only represents about 5% of the US in-print catalog (to say nothing of the international and out of print works). With all of this music at my disposal, i'd still gladly shell out several times the usual expected fee for this kind of service (normally priced at like $5-$15/mo, i would easily pay $50/mo but then i am probably not the typical user) if i could get access to the other 95% of the US music catalog.
Said another way, if the service is designed well and compelling piracy may be a non-factor as you could get much more out of the system using it as it was intended.
I hate replying to myself and continuing to rant but i had one more thing i wanted to get off my chest.
Talk to any number of "in the know" types in the public or private sectors and one of their number one suggestions for personal security is to run some type zone alarm style personal firewall that allows you to manage and block outgoing communications from processes running on your computer. The reason? To combat key loggers and the like that once run and communicating virtually anonymously over the internet the entire rest of your security is blown. They have all your passwords, everything you might decide to type. The implication of this advice has always seemed clear to me, that US organizations are at least in part, using these without warrants.
Where are the trojan fingerprints for these US government developed keyloggers? Certainly you wont be finding them in Symantec's product lines.
No not making the worm, but going to address the UN about these three classes of attacks. Who came up with these classes and the names? I would be surprised to find out it was anyone other than Symantec, I've never heard of them before.
In particular this supposed "Class I flash attack" which sounds right out of your favorite cold war B-Movie, Clyde is warning of well funded squads of uber hackers funded by national agencies. He is just pandering towards current international paranoia regarding terrorism.
It's even better than creating the attacks themselves (since you run the risk of gettin caught), creating attackers that don't even exist! (yet?)
Speculation and cyber fantasy aside, everyone who lets loose worms or viruses to my knowledge generally turns out to be people with no backing and no real agenda. Has there ever been evidence of international players being caught with their hand in the cookie jar funding any kind of worm or virus or ddos attack?
And really, if you were to effectively prevent this kind of attack by deploying systems widely, wouldn't these super hackers simply launch an attack when they had found an effective way around these measures?
I think it's more likely that frequent update systems would keep out the lowest common denominator attacks, script kiddies and common worms.
Don't get me wrong i think there are big issues with how software comes configured and how security holes are dealt with, and i think it is for the good of the internet as a whole organism that these be addressed, and one of them may very well be very quick automated updating of network facing software.
But it pisses me off to see someone from what i would consider a shady industry (virus protection) addressing people at the UN about these future terrorist hacker squads or whatever, essentially fear mongering to sell software. All on the backs of a great tragedy that had nothing to do with any of this.
"It will not be long before well-funded teams of hackers sponsored by countries or other organizations begin to create Flash attacks that can be launched in seconds,"
wow, proof of what i always suspected. Those hardcore stay up 3 days straight at a LAN party gamers are on more meth than a gang of trailer park tweakers.
I dont get your response, where does it say anyweher that the point of this system is to foil dvd copiers? It isn't and it doesn't. As for people paying good money and dont "get" the movie, isnt the same thing true for a rental today? This is designed to be similar to a video shop transaction.
Down the street from me is a big vending machine/kiosk type thing that purports to rent DVDs. I havent been able to try it because it seems to require a discover card and the signup cards never seem to be there. But from looking at it it seems to have 20 movies or so available 24 hours a day for a 3 day rental.
I am guessing that is the type of thing they want to do with expiring DVD's. If they sold 48 hour dvd rentals at airports or hotels i'm sure i would use the service from time to time. And the company and the buyer dont need to worry about where they will be in 48 hours to return it. Takes all the difficulty out of running a vending machine based rental service.
Of course it doesnt seem like a good replacement for blockbuster, i agree with many posters that said the last thing we need is the entire world throwing out every movie they rent. But then again there are disposable cell phones for sale that serve a niche but we arent all throwing away our telephones after every call.
Haha get over yourself and your freshman poli sci course! You think you are making some kind of noble point? "I shall not tolerate discrimination against what others might steal, so that I myself will be free to steal what I wish with impunity". Haha, go get 'em martin luther.
kind of a serious slide there, and i was feeling sorry for myself for my own career prospects. If he stays on track he'll probably be a clerk at a dirty magazine shop next.
You think a cool use for a very thin black and white display that updates very slowly would be to put it on your wall, mount a camera outside, and replace your windows?
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to a degree i am sure you are right, traditional robotics have put some people out of work in factories. Increased automation for assembly & production lead to a more service based economy which has generally been bad for blue collar labor... lower pay, worse benefits, low job security. Of course nafta has probably done far more to the manufacturing job base than robotics have.
You have to remember that nanotech is hardly what sci-fi books tell you about though. It won't be like you will be buying a big can of nano workers and kick back at the pool while you watch them swarm and build your house. They will be situational just like a lot of regular automation has been... And open up a number of markets where humans cant do the work, creating jobs in the process.
Is it even possible for software to be subject to "dumping" laws? Doesnt the product need to be sold for less than it's manufacturing cost? Sorry if i am misinformed.
You've wholly missed the point of my posting, however. I never derided science fiction for not predicting the future, i simply stated that it generally does not.
My point was, why are we looking towards science fiction authors to predict the future in non fiction terms, when we know from our history that what they predict rarely comes to pass?
Of course these predictions seem plausible at the time to us, that is the whole point. These authors are not predicting things that no one would agree with, it is the very nature of these predictions that they seem wholly likely, especially when set with a background of popular fiction. But the specific fact that history has shown us that these predictions are unreliable should give us clues to base our understanding of current predictions on.
1984 is a great example of social commentary and satire, not really science fiction. You say that if i do not take science fiction as a predictor of the future i should turn to an attorney general? You are making my point here for me, neither of these people are suited for the job.
Just because someone spins a good yarn to sell books gives him no more access to a future yet to come, than say... a lawyer working for the government. But then again, no one is looking to ashcroft to do that either.
Last month there was a /. article about William Gibson addressing the Directors Guild of America. His remarks closed essentially telling his audience that in n years people would be consuming their classic films with software designed to super-impose the heads of dogs over the actors and then pause the action to participate in a kung-fu knock down using Meryl Streep with dog head on top as the protagonist.
Now Sterling is telling us that deep databases of personal info will destabalize our government causing shifts in power so fast that it essentially doom our country. Even though in the begining of the interview he says he doesnt think the system has much traction, later on he seems to imply that the result is inevitable (ala google) and the answer is to leave the country (presumably to one that doesnt have google)
What is with science fiction authors being relied on to predict the future? Haven't we shown time after time that science fiction is in fact a horrible way to try to get a handle on the next fifty years? If we actually followed sci-fi these days we'd commute back and forth from the moon, have life like robots that do our every whim, attack people with energy weapons and almost never user computers.
I like both of the authors i mentioned but i'll continue to buy their works of fiction and not be planning on hiring either any time soon for a think tank.
don't be an idiot, after i posted on slashdot i posted the same thing in his comments.
Over react much?
This exploit appears to allow you to obscure your ip address as well. I didn't see any mention of this in the linked article so i figured it was worth mentioning. About a month ago i recieved a spam complaint from our ISP about mail sent from a machine in our IP block:
Received: from 64.84.xxx.xxx by bay3-dav112.bay3.hotmail.com with DAV;
After investigation it didnt seem like the spam had come from there, there was no evidence of a break in or that anyone had used it to send spam. While we were investigating we changed it's IP adress and never bothered to change it back, but we've still been given 3 more copies of current spam showing this IP address thats not even in use anymore.
By the way, I thought the article was pretty retarded standing on it's soap box about horrible microsoft security blah blah blah. The entire industry has problems with security, singling one company out is just petty. I've certainly had a lot of linux security updates I've needed to install over the past year, its nothing exclusive to one camp.
Also i think he was exagerating the effect of this bug.
I checked my spam that i've gotten since 5/1/03:
3467 pieces of spam
5 pieces of DAV spam
hardly a substantial amount.
when you buy a company with stock, part of what you buy is a term of service with key contributors. This is so important folks like CEO's don't bail the day after the deal leaving you holding the bag with a company you cant run or a product that still needs work.
thats what applies in this situation. I'm not talking about options that employees are awarded at market value as part of a typical compensation package (though i'm sure he had these too).
We're talking about a financial transaction to buy a company. You cant buy a company with 1 million of your own options priced at your current market value... That would be close to trying to buy a company with no money at all. Instead they use real stock, one that has an actual cash value (something that an option at current market price doesnt have). But that doesnt mean they can't put provisions on its release, which is where the vesting comes in.
Everyone all upset about aol (aka the man) keeping justin down should consider this:
june 1, 1999: aol buys nullsoft for $86m
june 2, 2003: justin announces resignation due to creative differences
For those who can't connect the dots, he had a 4 year stock vesting schedule. Justin didn't have enough trouble with his free expression while his stock was still vesting, but now that it's done he suddenly feels the pangs of regret for working for the corporate machine.
There's nothing wrong with leaving after your contracts are up, but why not be a man about it? Releasing a ton of code you don't own under the GPL (and indeed, has code in it that can't be released this way due to RSA copyright) and yamering on in public about your former employer is at best pretty immature.
Justin obviously made out quite well selling a media player for nearly $100m. Anyone that's followed the ups and extreme downs of the industry knows that its unlikely nullsoft was ever worth that big of a price tag. Why not exit out of the situation gracefully and be thankful for the luck he had in getting the deal instead of granstanding for your hacker friends.
Well, I will be the first to admit that i probably painted with too broad a brush when i included the entire dod community in that statement.
But, what did you say to the contrary? Nothing, really. I have had personal contact with folks who have had to line by line qualify and build from source everything from modern windows/solaris releases, compilers & languages, email programs, CAD systems & databases and I'm sure a ton more.
While i will admit probably everything doesnt get this inspection, especially if it's just something a temp uses in a dod accounting office, your reaction which implies that these practices simply don't exist is way off base. Just because your low end job didnt include the ability to check out the source for MS word doesnt mean someone doesnt have access to it.
yeah, this is the point. There is the same amount of risk or greater with closed source projects. Do you think the DOD has never used a piece of software the creator discontinued? Or went out of business? To protect against that I am sure they always manage to get the source code up front (to say nothing of the security issues that require them to get closed source)... In either case if something bad happens the dod can maintain their own systems, open source would just take a step out of the contract negotiations that allow that.
come on, it says one of the lunch choices is two pieces of white bread and a cricket.
you guys have to realize that the record companies dont have to sue or win anything to scrfew over apple. They painstakingly negotiated licenses for each label they sell music from, if the record industry gets pissed all they have to do is cancel the contract or raise the price over what apple can afford to pay.
The lawsuits are for companies the industry doesnt do business with at all, as it stands its so unbelievably hard to get a reasonable deal on a downloadable music contract even with drm involvecd that ANYONE that has one will do whatever they have to do to make sure it wont be taken away. Most of the online music efforts have died specifically because of major label contract issues.
wow i envy you. I get between 60-100 spam mails a day, no exageration at all. I'll get 3-5 pieces of non-spam mail each day.
Some of these systems look promising but to be honest bayesian filtering like is present in popfile and spamassasin was my savior. Spamassassin was OK before bayesian filtering but now that it has it too it catches every piece of spam i get, possibly missing 1 per day though many days it doesnt miss a piece.
I strongly reccomend anyone wanting to filter spam to look into one of the many bayesian filter programs, it may take a few hours to set up and occasionally need a minute or two to keep it trained but it's performance is so good it feels like magic.
I am thinking the problem of wind moving these things around is grossly understated by the article. Minimum distance for one of these things would be 1.5km but if they say they only need 18 total that means they must expect distances of 20-30km+ which is quite a distance. Customer sites would need tight beam directional antennas to go that far that would lose signal as soon as the balloon moved much at all. They say in the article that they will have an "antenna stabilisation system" that keeps the balloon in place even if its getting blow around, but could it really keep it in place within a few feet considering it's on a 1.5km tether? Honestly that seems like the sticky point to me, unless i am way off in how much tolerance for movement the customer antennas would have.
my friend used to say "the only people who wear sunglasses at night are speed freaks and assholes"
I guess. Of course everything can be cracked somehow.
If you look at current MS drm tech though, it's not maybe as sinmpleton as you would think. A service run by microsoft would likely have a lot of tools at it's disposal. While nothing will stop you from attacking a single file and being successful, even current public ms drm tech has the ability to use a seperate key for every asset, or indeed have a bunch of keys for the same asset so that every consumer doesnt even get the same encrypted version of the same song. And of course these files will be tethered or close to tethered, compromised keys can be expired, compromised players can be expired, and since it's a monthly type service they can enforce needing the newest software to continue to participate.
Keep in mind that ms has been planning extensions of the drm system into the rendering chain including the OS and drivers for some time now. I would be surprised if their efforts weren't ultimately related.
Once you put all of these hurdles in the way, the practical approaches to wide scale piracy of the system dwindle. The most likely compromise of a system like this is in the rendering path, either near the driver or actually plugged into the sound out of a computer. Once you've made it so that piracy can only happen at 1x as the song is playing, needs to be re-encoded, possible quality loss, etc. You make piracy really not that appealing.
I worked on a system that was similar in some ways in that it offered a large variety of music on a subscription basis. The trouble with this approach so far has ultimately been liscensing, it is difficult to acquire liscenses to music in this way that allow for everyone to be paid as they believe they should and still provide something affordable to the consumer.
BUT, if you do manage it, the niceness of a service like this is something you truly have to experience to appreciate. Having access to a wide catalog of music was a transformatice experience for me. I have a much broader musical background now and I believe i appreciate music much more as well. If i had simply logged on and pirated my favorite 5,000 songs for $10 and logged off i never would have gotten the best experience out of the system. Indeed much of what i listened to with it i wouldnt have even wanted to pirate. But it was great to be able to play a song you remembered once or twice or explore new music that you might enjoy listening to once (if not again).
Case in point: Out of the experience I ended up with man thousands of albums, all professionally encoded, that i keep on a home server. While storage obviously keeps going down, needing to have a 600gb raid array at home just for piracy is out of the league of most folks. Even then this amount of music only represents about 5% of the US in-print catalog (to say nothing of the international and out of print works). With all of this music at my disposal, i'd still gladly shell out several times the usual expected fee for this kind of service (normally priced at like $5-$15/mo, i would easily pay $50/mo but then i am probably not the typical user) if i could get access to the other 95% of the US music catalog.
Said another way, if the service is designed well and compelling piracy may be a non-factor as you could get much more out of the system using it as it was intended.
I hate replying to myself and continuing to rant but i had one more thing i wanted to get off my chest.
Talk to any number of "in the know" types in the public or private sectors and one of their number one suggestions for personal security is to run some type zone alarm style personal firewall that allows you to manage and block outgoing communications from processes running on your computer. The reason? To combat key loggers and the like that once run and communicating virtually anonymously over the internet the entire rest of your security is blown. They have all your passwords, everything you might decide to type. The implication of this advice has always seemed clear to me, that US organizations are at least in part, using these without warrants.
Where are the trojan fingerprints for these US government developed keyloggers? Certainly you wont be finding them in Symantec's product lines.
sorry for coming off like a conspiracy theorist.
It seems to me that's exactly what they're doing.
No not making the worm, but going to address the UN about these three classes of attacks. Who came up with these classes and the names? I would be surprised to find out it was anyone other than Symantec, I've never heard of them before.
In particular this supposed "Class I flash attack" which sounds right out of your favorite cold war B-Movie, Clyde is warning of well funded squads of uber hackers funded by national agencies. He is just pandering towards current international paranoia regarding terrorism.
It's even better than creating the attacks themselves (since you run the risk of gettin caught), creating attackers that don't even exist! (yet?)
Speculation and cyber fantasy aside, everyone who lets loose worms or viruses to my knowledge generally turns out to be people with no backing and no real agenda. Has there ever been evidence of international players being caught with their hand in the cookie jar funding any kind of worm or virus or ddos attack?
And really, if you were to effectively prevent this kind of attack by deploying systems widely, wouldn't these super hackers simply launch an attack when they had found an effective way around these measures?
I think it's more likely that frequent update systems would keep out the lowest common denominator attacks, script kiddies and common worms.
Don't get me wrong i think there are big issues with how software comes configured and how security holes are dealt with, and i think it is for the good of the internet as a whole organism that these be addressed, and one of them may very well be very quick automated updating of network facing software.
But it pisses me off to see someone from what i would consider a shady industry (virus protection) addressing people at the UN about these future terrorist hacker squads or whatever, essentially fear mongering to sell software. All on the backs of a great tragedy that had nothing to do with any of this.
"It will not be long before well-funded teams of hackers sponsored by countries or other organizations begin to create Flash attacks that can be launched in seconds,"
wow, proof of what i always suspected. Those hardcore stay up 3 days straight at a LAN party gamers are on more meth than a gang of trailer park tweakers.
I dont get your response, where does it say anyweher that the point of this system is to foil dvd copiers? It isn't and it doesn't. As for people paying good money and dont "get" the movie, isnt the same thing true for a rental today? This is designed to be similar to a video shop transaction.
Down the street from me is a big vending machine/kiosk type thing that purports to rent DVDs. I havent been able to try it because it seems to require a discover card and the signup cards never seem to be there. But from looking at it it seems to have 20 movies or so available 24 hours a day for a 3 day rental.
I am guessing that is the type of thing they want to do with expiring DVD's. If they sold 48 hour dvd rentals at airports or hotels i'm sure i would use the service from time to time. And the company and the buyer dont need to worry about where they will be in 48 hours to return it. Takes all the difficulty out of running a vending machine based rental service.
Of course it doesnt seem like a good replacement for blockbuster, i agree with many posters that said the last thing we need is the entire world throwing out every movie they rent. But then again there are disposable cell phones for sale that serve a niche but we arent all throwing away our telephones after every call.
I guess your reaction to someone who said that they didn't believe MENSA was relevant would be to say that they are likely stupid (have a low iq)?
Haha get over yourself and your freshman poli sci course! You think you are making some kind of noble point? "I shall not tolerate discrimination against what others might steal, so that I myself will be free to steal what I wish with impunity". Haha, go get 'em martin luther.
honestly i kind of feel bad for him, lets analyze his career moves so far
1. cop
2. web designer
3. spammer
4. online defibulator salesman
kind of a serious slide there, and i was feeling sorry for myself for my own career prospects. If he stays on track he'll probably be a clerk at a dirty magazine shop next.
if you read the article it was funded as performance art O.o
let me get this straight...
You think a cool use for a very thin black and white display that updates very slowly would be to put it on your wall, mount a camera outside, and replace your windows?