The so-called freedom argument is about the lamest thing I heard.
Do you have the freedom to slice the tires of random cars in the parking lot of your favorite mall? Is the gouvernment oppressing you by taking away from you that most basic freedom?
Every freedom in society basically needs to be balanced against the freedom of other people, because many interests are fundamentally opposing. (This concept is very hard to grasp for many americans, who never get past the 'I WANT' part). The role of the society is to provide with its laws and customs a stable framework to balance those interest.
For instance, you have the right to express your dislike of your neighbour, but you don't have the right to do it with your 5000 Watt amplifier set on maximum at 3 o'clock in the morning.
The same applies to spam and direct marketing. Under the proposed law, you can send your mail to anybody you want, as long as you don't have been told by him that he wants it. If he didn't give you that permission, you just have to assume that he doesn't want your fabulous offer.
> Most spammers couldn't care less if it's legal or not.
Yes, most spammers couldn't care less, but most spammers are sitting in the USA anyway. It seems, spam and bad elevator music is the only thing the USA is exporting these days..
Where this law will help most is to shoot down hare-brained schemes by soulless middle managers and marketroids. With this directive,I can tell them, to please check with the legal department if their last stupid idea conforms to the law. This usually stops them fast.
As a side note, such laws sometimes work. I'm living in Europe, and I've never been called by direct markeing organisations I've never heard of who try to sell useless junk. Not during the day, not in the evening. I guess, the laws against unsolicited call and calls by machines don't really hurt.
> First, we have the ability to monitor all ground movements of bin Laden's fighter [...]
America isn't facing an army in bright red uniforms that can easily be tagged from above. America will be facing civilians, in civilian clothes mixed with civilians, living with their family. Most of those civilians will be harmless, but a very few are the one the USA wants to get rid of. You will end up monitoring the whole Afghan population.
I seriously doubt, that even the american military is able to monitor every afghan hovel. Even if it should be able to monitor every discussion, the next problem is extracting intelligence data from it. How many people do you know, who have even a basic understanding of the afghan flavor of persian or Pashtu, or any of the other local dialects. You didn't expect Mr. bin Laden's fighter to speak english during their conspirative meetings, just so that the american army can understand them?
Better scratch that one.
Then MtViewGuy went on:
> Second, we can use highly-mobile special forces [...] that can
> operate in very small teams and deliver a very deadly punch.
That always assumes, you know where to punch. Deliviring deadly punches into empty huts or children won't help the matter. And yes, the russians used Spetznaz troops (as far as I know from the beggining on), but those didn't have the expected success. And the russians had the advantage of having at least some local support.
> Finally, even caves may not be the best place to hide.
That has been tried by the russians, with only moderate success.
All in all, the USA has a very slim chance of success, and most likely you'll only get a bloody nose in the form of a few thousand dead troops (if your military is crazy enough to send any troops there) without achieving anything except creating further bad will towards the USA.
> Back in the '30s, the big threat wasn't Palistinians...
> It was Jews. Hitler instituted all sorts of restraints on human
> rights to combat that threat.
Please check some history books or talk to people who were living in europe then. Whatever gave you that impression was completely wrong.
Saying that back in the '30s, the jews were are threat is like saying that WASP are a threat to the USA today: completely wrong.
They were, a minority of the population, with a good part being members of the middle class. Combine that with a long history of antisemitism in europe (just like americans are very fond of racism), they made a prime scape goat.
The laws passed by Hitler were never about civil liberties (a concept that gained popularity only later), they were just designed to focus the mobs on the jews and to disown them in the most efficient manner.
The jews only became a threat later, during the '50s and early '60s, when israeli terrorists were using plane highjacking and bomb attacks to gain international acceptance for israel. They more or less invented plane highjacking and started a real fad with it.
No, I didn't try Lyx, for the simple reason, that at that time, Lyx wasn't. This dates back quite some time, and we tried to replace MSWord for Windows 2.0 .
As a previous poster said, it can be done. Unfortunately, the biggest challenges aren't of technical nature. Getting conversion filters from all those formats to a new one isn't a problem, it's just a matter of money in the worst case.
What becomes the real stumbling block in such initiatives is the user. As longs a the user begged, tempted and forced to produce all new documents in the new format, all work you do will be in vain.
To get acceptance by all those civil servants, you'll have to
- either accept MS-Word documents with excel objects and power point presentations added in them,
- or transparently convert those kind documents into a format you like, all while trying to figure what relevant data is in there,
- or force the user to use a system that produces properly formatted documents.
The first solution will have you deal with atrocious documents, sometimes with every line terminated by paragraph break and tables formatted with spaces. To add insult to injury, you'll find in them power point objects, which include excel graphs, just because the user likes to add a little arrow pointing to a column. But at least user will not complain about the new guidelines, because they can happily go on producing their horrors.
With second solution, converting the documents to a storage format, you'll end up with something like PDF, which just try to render the document to their foremat just to get rid of all the crap. PDF is well documented and it's quite easy to produce a document reader. This solution is usually acceptable, although you lose the document structure (for the few documents that had one in the first place).
Forcing the user to produce well formed documents is the most challenging solution. You will basically alienate most of your customers and, if you don't have decades of experience in interdepartment infighting and enough power to enforce the new guidelines, you'll lose. On the other hand, if you had that experience and power, you wouldn't think about such a project.
What works best is to provide a reasonable framework for the documents and everything else will get stripped. That way you take most creative potential from the clients and lock them in a most rigid frame. If you have the luck to get that framework sanctioned from very high authority (which means tons of unproductive meetings with uninterested and clueless people who have their own axes to grind), the users will bitch and moan, but they won't be able to escape. If that official approval misses, the framework will be ignored.
You have a very stony road ahead, and depending on your capacity for frustration, you will give up sooner or later. And, when you give up, taking PDF as standard format isn't such a terrible choice. Been there, got burned. Now I'm older.
Confused (failed crusader for structured documents)
PS: I love LATeX and TeX, but trying to introduce it in a Microsoft oriented place is asking for disaster. You will just exchange unusable word document with unusable LATeX documents. At least the Word Documents don't have syntax errors.
What I find most interesting is whow BAD a spy this guy was. Going back to the same account nine times ? Especially regularly using, and repeatedly ging back to local public libraries, where all activity is recorded and logged for just such abuses ? Where the library's access to the network is often via some other local government agency or educational institution ?
I think, what got this guy was mostly that he was low on funds. Setting up a communication system safe from backtracking or spying for regular use isn't that easy, if you're just a lone guy and can't afford to jet around the world just to check your mail or open untraceable remailing or anonymizer servers in strange locations.
Now if the american counter-espinage got hold of the documents from the Lybians (I guess they have some inside contacts there too), he's in real deep trouble. As soon as he's on the suspect list, because he accessed the documents, he's toast. A perfect safe communication system would only have delayed the time until they catch him.
All in all I agree, that guy was stupid, but not because he used Hotmail and the Library, his stupidity was the way he procured himself the documents he sold. As long as they can be linked to his Intelnet account or workstation, it would just have been a matter of time.
Even a quick search on the names and locations cited indicate, that those examples are pure fiction. While doing a quick check on Google, there seem just to be one lone reference for all of them.
You're just trolling. At least you could have had the decency to add a reference to Natalie Portman and hot grits.
A helicopter will carry more than a blimp [...]
"The helicopter is capable of lifting 16 tons (14.5 metric tons) at sea level, transporting the load 50 nautical miles (57.5 miles) and returning. [...]"
Going by what Cargolifter plans, they'll be able to transport 160 (metric) tons filling up a volume up to 8 x 8 x 50 meter over distances up to 10000 km. (cf. Datasheet for CL 160). This is about 10 times what helicopters can carry for about 100 times the distance.
As they plan to cover those distances at 90 km/h - which is about what lorries can easily reach on highways - I assume that it will be usable in moderate to bad weather too.
> The site does not mention top speed of this airship,
>but I doubt it would be much faster than highway speed.
As far as I remeber, that is good enough. The main purpose of these thngs would be to provide cheap heavy lifting capability in areas where there are no usable highways or waterways. Think of them as lorries that don't need roads.
For short distance transport in well developped areas, trains make more sense, for long distances regular planes are faster.
By this argument students should not be allowed to use computers or even calculators...they should have only a writing tablet and do all the calculations by hand. [...] And hell, let's forget about students learning Java or Perl or C++, [...]
IMO, Students go to school so that they can learn how to get around in their world - and right or wrong, this is a world with jobs requiring Microsoft expertise.
The knowledge how to write or do arithmetic by hand helps you far than where to klick in Microsoft products or to program in Java. Those skills can easily be acquired later on.
For once, Microsoft is completely right, and the the schools are on the wrong side. Before you tag this message as troll or flamebait, let me explain.
Microsoft sells their product under certain conditions, one of them being, that you may not install them more than once. These conditions are silly, used to harass the user etc., nevertheless they are what one must accept to use the programs.
If a school or teacher wants to use MS-Office, they need to get a legal copy. The facts that schools have no money to buy the licenses, are in a poor neighborhood, don't want to spend the money or perform very important service for the community gives them no right to override those conditions.
Basically, the school has only three ways of resolving the problem:
- Asking Microsoft to donate some licenses or give at least huge rebates and hope they'll get it. This may work where Microsoft sees a benefit, but it also may not work.
- Getting the money to buy full licenses. This shouldn't be a problem in any civilised country that value the education of its youth. Something is really wrong in a country, where schools don't get enough money to do their job.
- Using cheaper or free products. There are great freely usable programs out there for most tasks a teacher will ever need. I really loved the line about there being no replacement for outlook available. As if Microsoft inventend email.
All three ways are reasonable courses to take for the schools and the involved teachers. There is no reason for breaking silly licenses. If they choose to do it anyway and have the bad luck of being caught at it, they get what they deserve and I don't have any sympathy for them.
If you call Microsoft, turn off the caller ID on your phone -> no reverse lookup.
Of the MAC and the processor serial number, just a few bits of their MD5 is transmitted. Further on, the MAC is transmitted only on the current LAN segment. After the first router, there is no link between the MAC and the IP-address.
Probably by starting to trace through the activation key function. Though this can be time consuming, it can be done. I personally have it dome with many games in my youth.
They incidently don't include the magic key to get their source code working.
They didn't include the key just to cover their behind. Without the key, the paper can be passed off as research and as useless for unlawful purposes. The compiled program can be passed of as a proof of concept. Anybody who can use a disassembler, can get the key out of the executabl eeasily. That way, they have published the key without exposing themselves. (Someone already posted the key, by the way).
They conclude this MS thing is not a problem, for us not to worry about it.
As surprising as it seems to you, this is a fair assessment. For each piece of hardware, only a part of the MD-5 derived from the equipment ID is transmitted. So Microsoft will be able to get only a very few things from the string. They will know if you have a laptop, what processor you have (not that many possible hash strings) and how much ram you have and if you have an IDE or SCSI controller. There may also be able to identify some very popular components. What they won't be able to get, is your processor ID and your MAC.
All in all, the data gathered is comparable to the information in the log file of a web-site you visited.
Am I the only person that smells a rat here?
If you bothered to read the article, you'd understand how they come to this conclusion. No need for obscure conspiracy theories.
Just for the fun of it, search in a german or austrian phonebook for strings containing those 4 letter words, americans are so obsessed about.
Example taken from www.etb.at, the austrian phonebook:
String to search for: fuck*
Samples from the resulting list:
Fuckar Bruno,....
Fuckenrieder Annika,...
Fucker Friedrich,...
Fuckerieder Johann,...
Fuckerrieder Adolf,...
Fuckner Frieda,...
Those names are not common, but not unheard of either. Wank* and Dick* will get you even more names. For Shit* I suggest taking a japanese phonebook, for Cunt* spanish or frensh will yield better results.
This would suck all the car owners with a leaky oil reserve!
No, not really. The shop must take back the oil, but the customer is only give an easy option to dispose of it without harming the environment. And it seems that most people are ready to make a little effort to keep their surroundings clean, as long as it isn't too inconvenient.
The problem with the leaky oil reserved should be handled by the mandatory yearly car inspection. If you want to drive a car, you have to prove every year it's still safe and not polluting too much.
It's supposed to be illegal to dispose of the old oil out of your car just anywhere too, but it seems to me that if I got caught dumping it DOWN BY THE RIVER -- it wouldn't be the Pennzoil corporation that would be held responsible!
Actually, in Austria, for every liter of motor oil you buy, the shop has to take back a liter of old oil. This oil then needs to be disposed of by the shop in a legal fashion. It makes the disposal of the old oil very hassle-free for the customer.
You see, not everything that seems unusual to your vision of the world is automatically moronic. Just different, sometimes even better. And no, I won't start another thread about the curious perception, that in order to live in peace one needs to arm himself with medium size artillery.
Too many people are convinced that they can create a kick-ass web site all on their own and then go on to make fetid piles of stinking net-garbage.
Yes, and the worst offenders are graphic studios. One of the great joys at work is to ask those so called designers to demonstrate their oeuvres on my machine. I use some archic version IE and Netscape with most things turned of.
They really hate it, when I ask them, why the never tested their brilliant pages and send them back into those fancy studio where they came from.
Often they can't even understand that not everybody is using IE 6.8 (or Netscape of similar version) with gazillions of plug-ins installed and everything turned on, but some are getting better with every workover. If they continue at this rate, they will produce userfriendly pages by the end of the next decade, I guess.
All those people thinking about fines for refused trademarks and patents are missing a point. Even if the system is abused badly a the moment, raising the cost of entering a patent would leave the field to big corporations.
This is the problem, the patent process was supposed to solve and give smaller inventor a fair chance.
Small companies with something really worth patenting (in the classical sense, not those stupid software patents) probably couldn't risk getting an application rejected by the patent office and wouldn't patent its stuff.
Big corporations wouldn't care and use those patents they get to bludgeon smaller competitiors even worse than today. Not having a department full of patent lawyers is big enough of a handicap today, this needn't be increased with big fines.
And even if a small company entered a valid patent, the big ones would probably contest it just on a matter of principle. Maybe they'll get a favorable licensing conditions.
Haven't people ever thought to work within the system... (use your most whiny voice)
I have reverse-engineered a few systems, and in every case, it was a measure of last resort, when working within the system didn't help. Reverse-engineering is a lot of work, and getting a working solution is usually cheaper.
But if the vendor just tells you, that you are out of luck then it's time to get out the debuggers, the logic anaylizers and teh hex dumpers. The same happens if you need to import legacy data into the new system and the vendor provides no support.
When buying a system, I expect the vendor to provide the minimum means to do with it what I need (or like). This usually means at least access to the documentation of all file formats and transmission protocols. If he doesn't, he witholds from his customers part of what they paid for:
The possibility to get the maximum use out of the product.
Slashdot Mirror
The so-called freedom argument is about the lamest thing I heard.
Do you have the freedom to slice the tires of random cars in the parking lot of your favorite mall? Is the gouvernment oppressing you by taking away from you that most basic freedom?
Every freedom in society basically needs to be balanced against the freedom of other people, because many interests are fundamentally opposing. (This concept is very hard to grasp for many americans, who never get past the 'I WANT' part). The role of the society is to provide with its laws and customs a stable framework to balance those interest.
For instance, you have the right to express your dislike of your neighbour, but you don't have the right to do it with your 5000 Watt amplifier set on maximum at 3 o'clock in the morning.
The same applies to spam and direct marketing. Under the proposed law, you can send your mail to anybody you want, as long as you don't have been told by him that he wants it. If he didn't give you that permission, you just have to assume that he doesn't want your fabulous offer.
There's nothing more to it.
> Most spammers couldn't care less if it's legal or not.
Yes, most spammers couldn't care less, but most spammers are sitting in the USA anyway. It seems, spam and bad elevator music is the only thing the USA is exporting these days..
Where this law will help most is to shoot down hare-brained schemes by soulless middle managers and marketroids. With this directive,I can tell them, to please check with the legal department if their last stupid idea conforms to the law. This usually stops them fast.
As a side note, such laws sometimes work. I'm living in Europe, and I've never been called by direct markeing organisations I've never heard of who try to sell useless junk. Not during the day, not in the evening. I guess, the laws against unsolicited call and calls by machines don't really hurt.
MtViewGuy wrote:
> First, we have the ability to monitor all ground movements of bin Laden's fighter [...]
America isn't facing an army in bright red uniforms that can easily be tagged from above. America will be facing civilians, in civilian clothes mixed with civilians, living with their family. Most of those civilians will be harmless, but a very few are the one the USA wants to get rid of. You will end up monitoring the whole Afghan population.
I seriously doubt, that even the american military is able to monitor every afghan hovel. Even if it should be able to monitor every discussion, the next problem is extracting intelligence data from it. How many people do you know, who have even a basic understanding of the afghan flavor of persian or Pashtu, or any of the other local dialects. You didn't expect Mr. bin Laden's fighter to speak english during their conspirative meetings, just so that the american army can understand them?
Better scratch that one.
Then MtViewGuy went on:
> Second, we can use highly-mobile special forces [...] that can
> operate in very small teams and deliver a very deadly punch.
That always assumes, you know where to punch. Deliviring deadly punches into empty huts or children won't help the matter. And yes, the russians used Spetznaz troops (as far as I know from the beggining on), but those didn't have the expected success. And the russians had the advantage of having at least some local support.
> Finally, even caves may not be the best place to hide.
That has been tried by the russians, with only moderate success.
All in all, the USA has a very slim chance of success, and most likely you'll only get a bloody nose in the form of a few thousand dead troops (if your military is crazy enough to send any troops there) without achieving anything except creating further bad will towards the USA.
Good luck at taking the 'high ground'.
Stephen Samuel wrote:
> Back in the '30s, the big threat wasn't Palistinians...
> It was Jews. Hitler instituted all sorts of restraints on human
> rights to combat that threat.
Please check some history books or talk to people who were living in europe then. Whatever gave you that impression was completely wrong.
Saying that back in the '30s, the jews were are threat is like saying that WASP are a threat to the USA today: completely wrong.
They were, a minority of the population, with a good part being members of the middle class. Combine that with a long history of antisemitism in europe (just like americans are very fond of racism), they made a prime scape goat.
The laws passed by Hitler were never about civil liberties (a concept that gained popularity only later), they were just designed to focus the mobs on the jews and to disown them in the most efficient manner.
The jews only became a threat later, during the '50s and early '60s, when israeli terrorists were using plane highjacking and bomb attacks to gain international acceptance for israel. They more or less invented plane highjacking and started a real fad with it.
No, I didn't try Lyx, for the simple reason, that at that time, Lyx wasn't. This dates back quite some time, and we tried to replace MSWord for Windows 2.0 .
Confused
As a previous poster said, it can be done. Unfortunately, the biggest challenges aren't of technical nature. Getting conversion filters from all those formats to a new one isn't a problem, it's just a matter of money in the worst case.
What becomes the real stumbling block in such initiatives is the user. As longs a the user begged, tempted and forced to produce all new documents in the new format, all work you do will be in vain.
To get acceptance by all those civil servants, you'll have to
- either accept MS-Word documents with excel objects and power point presentations added in them,
- or transparently convert those kind documents into a format you like, all while trying to figure what relevant data is in there,
- or force the user to use a system that produces properly formatted documents.
The first solution will have you deal with atrocious documents, sometimes with every line terminated by paragraph break and tables formatted with spaces. To add insult to injury, you'll find in them power point objects, which include excel graphs, just because the user likes to add a little arrow pointing to a column. But at least user will not complain about the new guidelines, because they can happily go on producing their horrors.
With second solution, converting the documents to a storage format, you'll end up with something like PDF, which just try to render the document to their foremat just to get rid of all the crap. PDF is well documented and it's quite easy to produce a document reader. This solution is usually acceptable, although you lose the document structure (for the few documents that had one in the first place).
Forcing the user to produce well formed documents is the most challenging solution. You will basically alienate most of your customers and, if you don't have decades of experience in interdepartment infighting and enough power to enforce the new guidelines, you'll lose. On the other hand, if you had that experience and power, you wouldn't think about such a project.
What works best is to provide a reasonable framework for the documents and everything else will get stripped. That way you take most creative potential from the clients and lock them in a most rigid frame. If you have the luck to get that framework sanctioned from very high authority (which means tons of unproductive meetings with uninterested and clueless people who have their own axes to grind), the users will bitch and moan, but they won't be able to escape. If that official approval misses, the framework will be ignored.
You have a very stony road ahead, and depending on your capacity for frustration, you will give up sooner or later. And, when you give up, taking PDF as standard format isn't such a terrible choice. Been there, got burned. Now I'm older.
Confused (failed crusader for structured documents)
PS: I love LATeX and TeX, but trying to introduce it in a Microsoft oriented place is asking for disaster. You will just exchange unusable word document with unusable LATeX documents. At least the Word Documents don't have syntax errors.
Beanerspace wrote:
What I find most interesting is whow BAD a spy this guy was. Going back to the same account nine times ? Especially regularly using, and repeatedly ging back to local public libraries, where all activity is recorded and logged for just such abuses ? Where the library's access to the network is often via some other local government agency or educational institution ?
I think, what got this guy was mostly that he was low on funds. Setting up a communication system safe from backtracking or spying for regular use isn't that easy, if you're just a lone guy and can't afford to jet around the world just to check your mail or open untraceable remailing or anonymizer servers in strange locations.
Now if the american counter-espinage got hold of the documents from the Lybians (I guess they have some inside contacts there too), he's in real deep trouble. As soon as he's on the suspect list, because he accessed the documents, he's toast. A perfect safe communication system would only have delayed the time until they catch him.
All in all I agree, that guy was stupid, but not because he used Hotmail and the Library, his stupidity was the way he procured himself the documents he sold. As long as they can be linked to his Intelnet account or workstation, it would just have been a matter of time.
Even a quick search on the names and locations cited indicate, that those examples are pure fiction. While doing a quick check on Google, there seem just to be one lone reference for all of them.
You're just trolling. At least you could have had the decency to add a reference to Natalie Portman and hot grits.
WyattEarp wrote:
A helicopter will carry more than a blimp [...]
"The helicopter is capable of lifting 16 tons (14.5 metric tons) at sea level, transporting the load 50 nautical miles (57.5 miles) and returning. [...]"
Going by what Cargolifter plans, they'll be able to transport 160 (metric) tons filling up a volume up to 8 x 8 x 50 meter over distances up to 10000 km. (cf. Datasheet for CL 160). This is about 10 times what helicopters can carry for about 100 times the distance.
As they plan to cover those distances at 90 km/h - which is about what lorries can easily reach on highways - I assume that it will be usable in moderate to bad weather too.
> The site does not mention top speed of this airship,
>but I doubt it would be much faster than highway speed.
As far as I remeber, that is good enough. The main purpose of these thngs would be to provide cheap heavy lifting capability in areas where there are no usable highways or waterways. Think of them as lorries that don't need roads.
For short distance transport in well developped areas, trains make more sense, for long distances regular planes are faster.
Seems this is another difference between Europe and the USA. Here is Austria, disabled caller IDs will not be transmitted to toll-free numbers.
Only emergency numbers (Police, etc) have an override.
By this argument students should not be allowed to use computers or even calculators...they should have only a writing tablet and do all the calculations by hand. [...] And hell, let's forget about students learning Java or Perl or C++, [...]
IMO, Students go to school so that they can learn how to get around in their world - and right or wrong, this is a world with jobs requiring Microsoft expertise.
The knowledge how to write or do arithmetic by hand helps you far than where to klick in Microsoft products or to program in Java. Those skills can easily be acquired later on.
For once, Microsoft is completely right, and the the schools are on the wrong side. Before you tag this message as troll or flamebait, let me explain.
Microsoft sells their product under certain conditions, one of them being, that you may not install them more than once. These conditions are silly, used to harass the user etc., nevertheless they are what one must accept to use the programs.
If a school or teacher wants to use MS-Office, they need to get a legal copy. The facts that schools have no money to buy the licenses, are in a poor neighborhood, don't want to spend the money or perform very important service for the community gives them no right to override those conditions.
Basically, the school has only three ways of resolving the problem:
- Asking Microsoft to donate some licenses or give at least huge rebates and hope they'll get it. This may work where Microsoft sees a benefit, but it also may not work.
- Getting the money to buy full licenses. This shouldn't be a problem in any civilised country that value the education of its youth. Something is really wrong in a country, where schools don't get enough money to do their job.
- Using cheaper or free products. There are great freely usable programs out there for most tasks a teacher will ever need. I really loved the line about there being no replacement for outlook available. As if Microsoft inventend email.
All three ways are reasonable courses to take for the schools and the involved teachers. There is no reason for breaking silly licenses. If they choose to do it anyway and have the bad luck of being caught at it, they get what they deserve and I don't have any sympathy for them.
If you call Microsoft, turn off the caller ID on your phone -> no reverse lookup.
Of the MAC and the processor serial number, just a few bits of their MD5 is transmitted. Further on, the MAC is transmitted only on the current LAN segment. After the first router, there is no link between the MAC and the IP-address.
They happen to work out the process.
Probably by starting to trace through the activation key function. Though this can be time consuming, it can be done. I personally have it dome with many games in my youth.
They incidently don't include the magic key to get their source code working.
They didn't include the key just to cover their behind. Without the key, the paper can be passed off as research and as useless for unlawful purposes. The compiled program can be passed of as a proof of concept. Anybody who can use a disassembler, can get the key out of the executabl eeasily. That way, they have published the key without exposing themselves. (Someone already posted the key, by the way).
They conclude this MS thing is not a problem, for us not to worry about it.
As surprising as it seems to you, this is a fair assessment. For each piece of hardware, only a part of the MD-5 derived from the equipment ID is transmitted. So Microsoft will be able to get only a very few things from the string. They will know if you have a laptop, what processor you have (not that many possible hash strings) and how much ram you have and if you have an IDE or SCSI controller. There may also be able to identify some very popular components. What they won't be able to get, is your processor ID and your MAC.
All in all, the data gathered is comparable to the information in the log file of a web-site you visited.
Am I the only person that smells a rat here?
If you bothered to read the article, you'd understand how they come to this conclusion. No need for obscure conspiracy theories.
If you consider that AOL, Hotmail (MS) and Yahoo all offer very popular web-mailers, it becomes obvious why Google isn't included in the list.
The checkbox exists only in the english version. The foreign language versions don't have it.
Interesting, what that says about the maturity of english speaking people.
Confused
Just for the fun of it, search in a german or austrian phonebook for strings containing those 4 letter words, americans are so obsessed about.
....
...
...
...
...
...
Example taken from www.etb.at, the austrian phonebook:
String to search for: fuck*
Samples from the resulting list:
Fuckar Bruno,
Fuckenrieder Annika,
Fucker Friedrich,
Fuckerieder Johann,
Fuckerrieder Adolf,
Fuckner Frieda,
Those names are not common, but not unheard of either. Wank* and Dick* will get you even more names. For Shit* I suggest taking a japanese phonebook, for Cunt* spanish or frensh will yield better results.
Damn those silly americans!
This would suck all the car owners with a leaky oil reserve!
No, not really. The shop must take back the oil, but the customer is only give an easy option to dispose of it without harming the environment. And it seems that most people are ready to make a little effort to keep their surroundings clean, as long as it isn't too inconvenient.
The problem with the leaky oil reserved should be handled by the mandatory yearly car inspection. If you want to drive a car, you have to prove every year it's still safe and not polluting too much.
Servus,
johi
It's supposed to be illegal to dispose of the old oil out of your car just anywhere too, but it seems to me that if I got caught dumping it DOWN BY THE RIVER -- it wouldn't be the Pennzoil corporation that would be held responsible!
Actually, in Austria, for every liter of motor oil you buy, the shop has to take back a liter of old oil. This oil then needs to be disposed of by the shop in a legal fashion. It makes the disposal of the old oil very hassle-free for the customer.
You see, not everything that seems unusual to your vision of the world is automatically moronic. Just different, sometimes even better. And no, I won't start another thread about the curious perception, that in order to live in peace one needs to arm himself with medium size artillery.
Cheers,
johi
[Microsoft] might make crappy products, but give credit where credit is due.
OK. {Shuffles through old software boxes} Thanks Peter Norton!
... who, by the way, had not a lot to do with developping the Norton Commander. He just bought a mostly finished product by John Socha named VDOS.
Scratch another 'great' innovator from the list.
Too many people are convinced that they can create a kick-ass web site all on their own and then go on to make fetid piles of stinking net-garbage.
Yes, and the worst offenders are graphic studios. One of the great joys at work is to ask those so called designers to demonstrate their oeuvres on my machine. I use some archic version IE and Netscape with most things turned of.
They really hate it, when I ask them, why the never tested their brilliant pages and send them back into those fancy studio where they came from.
Often they can't even understand that not everybody is using IE 6.8 (or Netscape of similar version) with gazillions of plug-ins installed and everything turned on, but some are getting better with every workover. If they continue at this rate, they will produce userfriendly pages by the end of the next decade, I guess.
All those people thinking about fines for refused trademarks and patents are missing a point. Even if the system is abused badly a the moment, raising the cost of entering a patent would leave the field to big corporations.
This is the problem, the patent process was supposed to solve and give smaller inventor a fair chance.
Small companies with something really worth patenting (in the classical sense, not those stupid software patents) probably couldn't risk getting an application rejected by the patent office and wouldn't patent its stuff.
Big corporations wouldn't care and use those patents they get to bludgeon smaller competitiors even worse than today. Not having a department full of patent lawyers is big enough of a handicap today, this needn't be increased with big fines.
And even if a small company entered a valid patent, the big ones would probably contest it just on a matter of principle. Maybe they'll get a favorable licensing conditions.
Don't worry, after hiring them, they'll stop being your friends. Rather sooner than later.
Haven't people ever thought to work within the system... (use your most whiny voice)
I have reverse-engineered a few systems, and in every case, it was a measure of last resort, when working within the system didn't help. Reverse-engineering is a lot of work, and getting a working solution is usually cheaper.
But if the vendor just tells you, that you are out of luck then it's time to get out the debuggers, the logic anaylizers and teh hex dumpers. The same happens if you need to import legacy data into the new system and the vendor provides no support.
When buying a system, I expect the vendor to provide the minimum means to do with it what I need (or like). This usually means at least access to the documentation of all file formats and transmission protocols. If he doesn't, he witholds from his customers part of what they paid for:
The possibility to get the maximum use out of the product.