You find this "movie codec thingy" at a shady pr0n website (alarm #1), and it asks you to specifically download a.dmg file (alarm #2), install it with admin/root permissions (alarm #3) just to play a non-standard codec (alarm #4).
Meanwhile, by comparison, there are a whole host of Windows nasties you can get just by, say, visiting a website with a rigged IFRAME in the page.
QED: It's not a question of fanboys pooh-poohing something because it's their pet OS - it's a question of simple fucking logic.
Come back and tell us about it when OSX (eventually) has an attack vector that doesn't require the user to be a complete and utter dumbass, please.
...go to the store, pop open a terminal on one of the demos, and start browsing a bit through/proc? I bet you could find out in very short order most of what you need to know.
Some estimates place it as high as 29 million as of 2005... and this is before Ubuntu took off. I believe it may be higher, it could be lower, far lower, and we'd still be just fine in saying "millions", no?
We're like the damned Fremen - we're practically everywhere, yet no authority really sees but few of us;)
I mean, with millions of people buying computers in the first world pre-loaded with Windows, then ripping that out and installing Linux...
Not like MSFT is going to catch up with that anytime soon... and at the rate Vista keeps flopping, it may get to the point where bribing every official in Africa won't be enough to catch up at all.
I must be a dynamo of a person because I don't own a cell phone, yet manage to keep in touch with my family and business partners.
Same story here - ditched my cell phone (T-Mobile) in February, and yet my landline (which curiously enough is done through Vonage) seems to suffice quite nicely. While (almost) as evil with the whole contract thing as the cell companies, I can honestly say that they actually do provide a decent service all around.
In spite of that, I can still work w/o a problem for a rather large technology company... if the pager goes off (the employer provides that, pays for it, etc), I can still deal with its reasons even if I'm not home.
I'm hoping that free public WiFi can get just a teensy bit more ubiquitous (I'm in Portland, OR), then I'll happily buy an overseas unlocked smartphone w/ WiFi that can run a Skype client, and mobile calling will no longer be any sort of a problem (or even a cost factor).
Are you suggesting that Napster and Kazaa could have avoided liability by simply making their software open-source?
I'm saying they could've stood a far better chance at avoiding being found liable - the plaintiffs' arguments were pretty damned tenuous as it was. The "it's open source - we don't even control what anyone out there does with the code, let alone the programs compiled from it!" argument could've very probably (but nowhere near certainly) snapped the *AA lawyers' arguments in half, and saved them from the verdicts they got. Given that most juries are about as tech-literate as an un-housebroken puppy, it would have been a very easy and persuasive argument to fashion.
It's been called piracy for as long as I've owned a computer, and that's goin' on 30 years...
Err, I believe that Sailors have a bit of a historical precedent on the term "piracy" and "pirate"... by something on the order of several centuries, if not millennia. For example, the word "pirate" meant something way different back when Lady Babbage was writing code, y'know?
Long story short: the Maritime industry calls "dibs" on the word "pirate".
PS: 30 years ago, the term "bootlegger" and "bootlegging" was far more common than "pirate" and "piracy"
(oh, great - now I've gone and done the one thing I detest most on/. - I've become a friggin' overly-semantics-picking pedant. Thanks a lot, pal! *grumble...*)
If his code allows something bad to happen, we can say with certainty that it's all his fault.
Manufacturers do not assume liability if their product is used to perform illegal activities.
I don't even have to point at an analogy, just at parallels - Napster. Kazaa. Both were very successfully litigated against for complicity in copyright infringement, no?
I can see it now... the typical gamer prez addressing congress:
"Ladies and Gentlemen of Congress, I come to you with a heavy heart. The {insert country here} have just attacked {tiny little country}, a small, peaceful nation with a great and long heritage whom we have sworn to protect by treaty. I come to you today to ask of you something that may cost us dearly in blood and treasure, but it must be done!"
"I ask you to authorize a Declaration of War. I ask you to allow our troops to pwnz0r the bitches, to be in their factories killin' their d00dz, and to unleash the righteous Zerg Rush of justice! It is our destiny to LOLZ at the n00bz, who have shown the audacity to utilize their aimbots and wallhacks of evil upon an innocent populace!"
"I will not lie to you. It will not be easy. But with the skillz, with the tenacity, and with a few tricks up our sleeves, our troops will come home in glorious victory, and our friends in {tiny little country} will be showerin' the eternal props at us. We shall be putting the deagle to the heads of those evil, heartless camping bastards in {insert country here}! We will never abandon our friends! We must do what is right. Thank you."
It's funny that your post gives the impression that the ability to hack a mac requires actual hacking skills.
It does, in a way. From making PC-flashed video cards to work on Macs (which requires more than simply booting off a floppy in many cases), to internals modifications that require doing a lot of things that the manufacturer never intended.
Almost makes you think that the majority of people who put together their own "PC" computers are just trying to save money, and don't actually know what the parts they're putting in there are doing, or if there are any compatibility/power/configuration issues...
For the most part, that's about it - to build a PC, you merely make the numbers and tech match, then you go shopping - starting with the mobo and using that as a guide for purchasing future bits and bobs to get your machine running.
When you're building your own cables and figuring pin-outs, soldering makeshift chassis ground bridges for displaced components, and using a slathering of electrical tape and thin fiberboard as insulation (which were only the small parts of what I did on the Cube modifications), then we can begin to compare. When you're crossing your fingers and hoping that the cobbled-together scripts you rigged up to flash a vidcard actually worked, and doing all of this knowing full well that any screw-ups will certainly not end in an RMA ticket, we can discuss how PC builders "hack" as a rule.
Don't get me wrong - there are a lot of folks out there who do hardware hacking on PC gear as well (e.g. the Japanese gent from 1998 or so, who jockeyed a soldering iron and a Dremel tool just to get a pair of PII Celerons operating on an SMB motherboard? He deserves the ultimate props for flirting with a warranty).
But... simply buying the bits and building a 'k3wl' gaming machine isn't really hacking at all. It's like (bad car analogy time!) comparing someone getting a new paint job, lower suspension kit, and a new sound system in their 2007 Honda Accord.... to someone who just got done converting a rusted-out 1968 Jeep into a rock-crawling off-road machine... and by the way the Jeep uses a Chevy engine, a Ford transmission, and sports a home-fabricated suspension, body, and roll-cage.
Heh - every OEM has to build their products as bits and pieces. With a smaller range, Apple can specify those bits and pieces, and have them assembled to form, shape, and spec. Apple has a habit of making sure the bits they do include are proven, tested, and simply do the job over insanely long periods of time.
On the flip side, yep - you can modify a Mac alright... right down to the CPU, where you could take a G3-300 box and hop it up literally to a G4 1.2GHz chip as a drop-in upgrade (caveat - not sure if the Intel models let you do that).
Hell, I remember shoe-horning an old ATI Radeon into a Mac Cube, and having to modify the unholy Hell out of the guts to accomplish that - simply because I figured I could. This included re-flashing the non-Mac Radeon (and praying that it took - it did), moving a major component (the DC/DC power dist board) out of the new video card's way (and actually finding room for it elsewhere in a cramped 7"x7" cubic space), and in general hacking the crap out of its internals while making sure the outside remained unscratched and normal in appearance.
So yes, you can hack a Mac. Even my workhorse dual G5 is starting to get the evil chop-town eyeball from me nowadays, and thoughts of "hmm... if I can do x and y to it, then z can be accomplished, and..." But, I want to get another Mac first before I go slashing away on this one.
Incidentally, there are folks who happily run OSX in a Non-Apple-built machine. Lots of people.
All that said, ~99.999% of Apple's customer base wouldn't even dream of doing anything fun like that to their machines. Same story with ~99.999% of Dell's customer base. Or HP's. or Gateway's. Or Lenovo's. Or... ?
Thing is, Apple sells computers. Microsoft sells a computer part (an OS). Thus you'd never really see the two compete that way. Apple is smart enough to avoid being trapped fully in the inexorable drive towards the OS being a mere commodity, by selling the whole package, and not just piece of one.
OTOH , if I am writing about some political or historical person for some paper, i must be VERy careful with Wiki, because of vandalism, bias, everchanging "facts" and so on. In this case some "official" encyclopedia uses to be (often) a lot more neutral (because official encyclopediae have neutrality as a global goal).... So bring the new one on.
Okay, but "official" according to whom?
I can very easily see clones of this being spawned along general ideological lines (e.g. one side espouses the views of 'crusading baby-seal-pup-killing eco-hating woman-hating corporate whores' while the other enshrines those of 'tech-hating tax-happy baby-killing terrorist-loving communists'). While neither would be so blatantly easy to spot, I'm willing to wager that each (and others like it?) would be full of subtle but ideologically left-leaning or right-leaning slants.
So which one would you trust?
May as well stick with the original Wikipedia, no? I mean, if you're writing a paper based on it, you verify and check all of your sources anyway, right?
There was a jury in Duluth whom we all thought wouldn't side with the RIAA, either. I would only trust juries about as far as I can throw the box they sit in... Juries are selected by both prosecutor and defending counsel(s), and they are instructed to only look at it as "did so-and-so do this beyond reasonable doubt, or not?" - not whether or not the law itself is valid (that would be for the appeals courts or USSC to decide, depending on how far up the chain it went).
Darl sure as hell is stupid, and most of the people at SCOX are too.
I wouldn't be so sure about being "stupid"... after all, SCO was about to die in 2003, and if they hadn't sued, they wouldn't likely to have made it past 2004.
Instead, SCOX launched a rather brash (yes, entirely wrong, but ballsy) lawsuit, got a shedload of cash infused into 'em (e.g. MSFT's $165m "license" payment), and McBride and his cohorts made some massive bank off of the stock kite - far more than they would have if they had simply died quietly. SCOX ran for about a buck a share before the lawsuit, but spiked at $24/share, and was still hovering at around $3.50 a share (think 350% profit here - a nice percentage, no?) until just before the carpet got pulled out from under the case.
In the eyes of McBride, who cared if SCOX lived on after the lawsuit? He's got money up to his eyeballs now.
I guess what I'm getting at is, you (and lots of folks, including me at first) looked at this from the wrong angle - SCOX wasn't looking to win, and even McBride didn't give a damn if SCOX won or lost, so long as they put up a good facade... he (and SCOX' management) was after the personal profits that were made off the hoopla - certainly enough to retire very comfortably off of.
Doesn't seem so stupid when put in that light, does it? Yet the results were still that he and SCOX lost the case.
To expand on what I said before - amoral, yes. Greedy, uh-huh. Malicious, yep. Stupid? Considering the personal wealth boost, I wouldn't be so quick to use the label on him or SCOX. This was calculated, and almost precisely so.
Now let's shift that to Colbert. Flirting with elections laws? Sure the guy will get ratings, so I wouldn't call him stupid either. OTOH, he's dancing along a very thin line. His lawyers are still getting paid and take no personal risk to speak of - it's Colbert's neck on the block if things go south, and aside from ratings, I don't see how Colbert would profit nearly as much in the end, esp. if the FEC makes him cough up a ginormous fine in the process that effectively removes the fruits of his efforts.
In any case he and his show lawyers aren't as stupid as they pretend to be and they will make sure they stay on the right side of the law in case this does get taken seriously.
To be fair, Darl McBride, SCO, and their lawyers aren't exactly stupid either (crazy, yes... greedy as Hell, certainly.... probably knowing up-front that they'd only be able to milk it for the stock kite and MSFT-funded PR, sure... but they're certainly not stupid people). We both know how successful they were no?
In this case however, Colbert's lawyers are gambling for slightly higher stakes. If they (and Colbert) lose the legality bet, it ain't just a failing company that goes under - it's Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-Prison time. (okay, lawn-chairs-at-Club-Fed time, but that isn't nearly as dramatic).
(I'm kidding, you bastards! Then again, all that key-dancing that emacs requires would become unnecessary w/ some sort of direct brain implant control thingy... )
Sure, you can keep in touch with lots of other people online, but when the (typical) user's entire social interaction is reduced to impassioned debates, downloading pr0n, FPS games, pissing off people on the other side of the planet with sophomoric trolling, and the whole time bullshitting about who you are and what you do in RL?
Gah - almost makes one fear for Humanity's future.
This is going to sound bad, but it's stories like this that make me feel not so bad when some tiny company (like, say, Eolas) comes along and hammers a big company.
IMHO, software patents in and of themselves suck, but there's a bit of me hoping like Hell that Verizon, AT&T, and all their kith and kin get slammed (soon) with a multi-billion-dollar patent lawsuit from some tiny company no one has ever heard of. Something big enough to hurt.
(or at least something big enough to get legislative attention and end this whole software patent silliness...)
Slashdot Mirror
Fix your website... it keeps giving me the default Apache test page for some reason.
(kidding!)
You find this "movie codec thingy" at a shady pr0n website (alarm #1), and it asks you to specifically download a .dmg file (alarm #2), install it with admin/root permissions (alarm #3) just to play a non-standard codec (alarm #4).
Meanwhile, by comparison, there are a whole host of Windows nasties you can get just by, say, visiting a website with a rigged IFRAME in the page.
QED: It's not a question of fanboys pooh-poohing something because it's their pet OS - it's a question of simple fucking logic.
Come back and tell us about it when OSX (eventually) has an attack vector that doesn't require the user to be a complete and utter dumbass, please.
Certainly.
Some estimates place it as high as 29 million as of 2005... and this is before Ubuntu took off. I believe it may be higher, it could be lower, far lower, and we'd still be just fine in saying "millions", no?
We're like the damned Fremen - we're practically everywhere, yet no authority really sees but few of us ;)
Not like MSFT is going to catch up with that anytime soon... and at the rate Vista keeps flopping, it may get to the point where bribing every official in Africa won't be enough to catch up at all.
Same story here - ditched my cell phone (T-Mobile) in February, and yet my landline (which curiously enough is done through Vonage) seems to suffice quite nicely. While (almost) as evil with the whole contract thing as the cell companies, I can honestly say that they actually do provide a decent service all around.
In spite of that, I can still work w/o a problem for a rather large technology company... if the pager goes off (the employer provides that, pays for it, etc), I can still deal with its reasons even if I'm not home.
I'm hoping that free public WiFi can get just a teensy bit more ubiquitous (I'm in Portland, OR), then I'll happily buy an overseas unlocked smartphone w/ WiFi that can run a Skype client, and mobile calling will no longer be any sort of a problem (or even a cost factor).
(I know, I know - but while I'm dreaming and all, I'd like a pony).
I'm saying they could've stood a far better chance at avoiding being found liable - the plaintiffs' arguments were pretty damned tenuous as it was. The "it's open source - we don't even control what anyone out there does with the code, let alone the programs compiled from it!" argument could've very probably (but nowhere near certainly) snapped the *AA lawyers' arguments in half, and saved them from the verdicts they got. Given that most juries are about as tech-literate as an un-housebroken puppy, it would have been a very easy and persuasive argument to fashion.
Err, I believe that Sailors have a bit of a historical precedent on the term "piracy" and "pirate"... by something on the order of several centuries, if not millennia. For example, the word "pirate" meant something way different back when Lady Babbage was writing code, y'know?
Long story short: the Maritime industry calls "dibs" on the word "pirate".
PS: 30 years ago, the term "bootlegger" and "bootlegging" was far more common than "pirate" and "piracy"
(oh, great - now I've gone and done the one thing I detest most on /. - I've become a friggin' overly-semantics-picking pedant. Thanks a lot, pal! *grumble...*)
Manufacturers do not assume liability if their product is used to perform illegal activities.
I don't even have to point at an analogy, just at parallels - Napster. Kazaa. Both were very successfully litigated against for complicity in copyright infringement, no?
"Ladies and Gentlemen of Congress, I come to you with a heavy heart. The {insert country here} have just attacked {tiny little country}, a small, peaceful nation with a great and long heritage whom we have sworn to protect by treaty. I come to you today to ask of you something that may cost us dearly in blood and treasure, but it must be done!"
"I ask you to authorize a Declaration of War. I ask you to allow our troops to pwnz0r the bitches, to be in their factories killin' their d00dz, and to unleash the righteous Zerg Rush of justice! It is our destiny to LOLZ at the n00bz, who have shown the audacity to utilize their aimbots and wallhacks of evil upon an innocent populace!"
"I will not lie to you. It will not be easy. But with the skillz, with the tenacity, and with a few tricks up our sleeves, our troops will come home in glorious victory, and our friends in {tiny little country} will be showerin' the eternal props at us. We shall be putting the deagle to the heads of those evil, heartless camping bastards in {insert country here}! We will never abandon our friends! We must do what is right. Thank you."
It does, in a way. From making PC-flashed video cards to work on Macs (which requires more than simply booting off a floppy in many cases), to internals modifications that require doing a lot of things that the manufacturer never intended.
Almost makes you think that the majority of people who put together their own "PC" computers are just trying to save money, and don't actually know what the parts they're putting in there are doing, or if there are any compatibility/power/configuration issues...For the most part, that's about it - to build a PC, you merely make the numbers and tech match, then you go shopping - starting with the mobo and using that as a guide for purchasing future bits and bobs to get your machine running.
When you're building your own cables and figuring pin-outs, soldering makeshift chassis ground bridges for displaced components, and using a slathering of electrical tape and thin fiberboard as insulation (which were only the small parts of what I did on the Cube modifications), then we can begin to compare. When you're crossing your fingers and hoping that the cobbled-together scripts you rigged up to flash a vidcard actually worked, and doing all of this knowing full well that any screw-ups will certainly not end in an RMA ticket, we can discuss how PC builders "hack" as a rule.
Don't get me wrong - there are a lot of folks out there who do hardware hacking on PC gear as well (e.g. the Japanese gent from 1998 or so, who jockeyed a soldering iron and a Dremel tool just to get a pair of PII Celerons operating on an SMB motherboard? He deserves the ultimate props for flirting with a warranty).
But... simply buying the bits and building a 'k3wl' gaming machine isn't really hacking at all. It's like (bad car analogy time!) comparing someone getting a new paint job, lower suspension kit, and a new sound system in their 2007 Honda Accord.... to someone who just got done converting a rusted-out 1968 Jeep into a rock-crawling off-road machine... and by the way the Jeep uses a Chevy engine, a Ford transmission, and sports a home-fabricated suspension, body, and roll-cage.
It's all a matter of degrees, no? ;)
On the flip side, yep - you can modify a Mac alright... right down to the CPU, where you could take a G3-300 box and hop it up literally to a G4 1.2GHz chip as a drop-in upgrade (caveat - not sure if the Intel models let you do that).
Hell, I remember shoe-horning an old ATI Radeon into a Mac Cube, and having to modify the unholy Hell out of the guts to accomplish that - simply because I figured I could. This included re-flashing the non-Mac Radeon (and praying that it took - it did), moving a major component (the DC/DC power dist board) out of the new video card's way (and actually finding room for it elsewhere in a cramped 7"x7" cubic space), and in general hacking the crap out of its internals while making sure the outside remained unscratched and normal in appearance.
So yes, you can hack a Mac. Even my workhorse dual G5 is starting to get the evil chop-town eyeball from me nowadays, and thoughts of "hmm... if I can do x and y to it, then z can be accomplished, and..." But, I want to get another Mac first before I go slashing away on this one.
Incidentally, there are folks who happily run OSX in a Non-Apple-built machine. Lots of people.
All that said, ~99.999% of Apple's customer base wouldn't even dream of doing anything fun like that to their machines. Same story with ~99.999% of Dell's customer base. Or HP's. or Gateway's. Or Lenovo's. Or... ?
Thing is, Apple sells computers. Microsoft sells a computer part (an OS). Thus you'd never really see the two compete that way. Apple is smart enough to avoid being trapped fully in the inexorable drive towards the OS being a mere commodity, by selling the whole package, and not just piece of one.
Okay, but "official" according to whom?
I can very easily see clones of this being spawned along general ideological lines (e.g. one side espouses the views of 'crusading baby-seal-pup-killing eco-hating woman-hating corporate whores' while the other enshrines those of 'tech-hating tax-happy baby-killing terrorist-loving communists'). While neither would be so blatantly easy to spot, I'm willing to wager that each (and others like it?) would be full of subtle but ideologically left-leaning or right-leaning slants.
So which one would you trust?
May as well stick with the original Wikipedia, no? I mean, if you're writing a paper based on it, you verify and check all of your sources anyway, right?
They'll get it eventually, and when they do (given that they are ID), I hope the headline reads "EXCELLENT!....IMPRESSIVE!"
So until then they got to hear "HOOOOLY SHIT!"?
(note to you non-CTF-playing weenies - it's the default sound in Quake 3 that plays when a flag carrier eats it within inches of capturing the thing).
I wouldn't be so sure about being "stupid"... after all, SCO was about to die in 2003, and if they hadn't sued, they wouldn't likely to have made it past 2004.
Instead, SCOX launched a rather brash (yes, entirely wrong, but ballsy) lawsuit, got a shedload of cash infused into 'em (e.g. MSFT's $165m "license" payment), and McBride and his cohorts made some massive bank off of the stock kite - far more than they would have if they had simply died quietly. SCOX ran for about a buck a share before the lawsuit, but spiked at $24/share, and was still hovering at around $3.50 a share (think 350% profit here - a nice percentage, no?) until just before the carpet got pulled out from under the case.
In the eyes of McBride, who cared if SCOX lived on after the lawsuit? He's got money up to his eyeballs now.
I guess what I'm getting at is, you (and lots of folks, including me at first) looked at this from the wrong angle - SCOX wasn't looking to win, and even McBride didn't give a damn if SCOX won or lost, so long as they put up a good facade... he (and SCOX' management) was after the personal profits that were made off the hoopla - certainly enough to retire very comfortably off of.
Doesn't seem so stupid when put in that light, does it? Yet the results were still that he and SCOX lost the case.
To expand on what I said before - amoral, yes. Greedy, uh-huh. Malicious, yep. Stupid? Considering the personal wealth boost, I wouldn't be so quick to use the label on him or SCOX. This was calculated, and almost precisely so.
Now let's shift that to Colbert. Flirting with elections laws? Sure the guy will get ratings, so I wouldn't call him stupid either. OTOH, he's dancing along a very thin line. His lawyers are still getting paid and take no personal risk to speak of - it's Colbert's neck on the block if things go south, and aside from ratings, I don't see how Colbert would profit nearly as much in the end, esp. if the FEC makes him cough up a ginormous fine in the process that effectively removes the fruits of his efforts.
To be fair, Darl McBride, SCO, and their lawyers aren't exactly stupid either (crazy, yes... greedy as Hell, certainly.... probably knowing up-front that they'd only be able to milk it for the stock kite and MSFT-funded PR, sure... but they're certainly not stupid people). We both know how successful they were no?
In this case however, Colbert's lawyers are gambling for slightly higher stakes. If they (and Colbert) lose the legality bet, it ain't just a failing company that goes under - it's Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-Prison time. (okay, lawn-chairs-at-Club-Fed time, but that isn't nearly as dramatic).
(I'm kidding, you bastards! Then again, all that key-dancing that emacs requires would become unnecessary w/ some sort of direct brain implant control thingy... )
Sure, you can keep in touch with lots of other people online, but when the (typical) user's entire social interaction is reduced to impassioned debates, downloading pr0n, FPS games, pissing off people on the other side of the planet with sophomoric trolling, and the whole time bullshitting about who you are and what you do in RL?
Gah - almost makes one fear for Humanity's future.
IMHO, software patents in and of themselves suck, but there's a bit of me hoping like Hell that Verizon, AT&T, and all their kith and kin get slammed (soon) with a multi-billion-dollar patent lawsuit from some tiny company no one has ever heard of. Something big enough to hurt.
(or at least something big enough to get legislative attention and end this whole software patent silliness...)
(which I wouldn't have known the answer to if it wasn't for those stupid Verizon commercials about some text messaging plan they have).
(and what on Earth would he say? Torvalds is one Hell of an act to follow, y'know?)