Don't allow a brand-new account to send out more than a few (20?) emails a day.
Ineffective at best. a.) You can create dozens of accounts if the CAPTCHA is cracked, easily, automatically. If that is not an option, you'd be surprised how long-term spammers can think -- just create dozens upon dozens of accounts. Let them sit, let them mature. Only then do you start spamming.
Make sure that most of the email varies.
It's easy to generate nonsensical emails that look like actual speech. Hell, it's easy to generate scientific papers that look like scientific papers, read like scientific papers, but are gibberish. You can do this all day and send it out to your closest friends on gmail (all those dozens of other accounts of varying ages you have created...)
Make sure the account gets and reads email as well as sends it,
What in there is something that cannot be, and indeed has not been, automated ?
and that the email is accessed.
So kinda like a bot with state.
The trick is, you keep rotating these measures and don't tell anyone just what they are.
Security by obscurity... bad, bad idea. You won't just shut out a lot of regular users that way, but you'll even think that you are secure ! (And yes, you will catch some regular users with this. How would you know, at the scale that gmail is at ?)
You don't automatically disable anyone who breaks the rules, you just hold on to any large number of similar messages until a human reviews them
So your approach does not, in fact, scale. At all.
--possibly through some mechanism similar to the "picture matching game" where multiple people identify a message as spam.
Oh, so now you want multiple people doing that ! And looking at potentially quite private emails too ! (wrongly tagged for review, for whatever reason). Does not scale, carries sizable privacy implications, and still has a nontrivial error rate.
If it's determined to be spam, never tell them you caught on, just stop email from that account from being sent, silently.
Ah, so the spammers have never, ever heard of, you know, having an email address of their own to check whether their setup works as expected. Hell, they could even set it up as a nagios plugin.
Log the ip addresses and use them to help you identify other accounts from the same computer if possible.
Great idea, until you've started working with anything with a userbase as diverse as, say, gmail. You'll block out plenty of proxy servers of ISPs, plenty of schools, universities, libraries, will eventually have blacklisted all dynamic IP ranges, and still not have done a lot of good -- you see, spammers have botnets. Botnets are huge. I mean really, really huge. A huge percentage of the bots on botnets change their IPs daily or more often (dynamic IPs); and you can easily just use some parts of the net one day, and other parts the next. Just proxy it all through there and every session will come from a different IP that also generates regular user sessions (the ones from oblivious-to-the-fact zombie-owners).
You could also use the ip addresses to notify people that they are a spambot next time that IP address is used to look up something on any google service.
GREAT idea. Especially with all those dynamically assigned IPs out there ! That won't cause any huge load on your support infrastructure at all, honest !
Wow, that's a broad action with a lot of chances for failure, but I bet it could be refined enough to work
There are lots of ideas, most of them quite useless i
Well come on, be fair. $0.01 is a proper price. Head over to mturk.com and get your captchas answered by humans for 1 cent a pop ! They'll eat em up. It'll take seconds for one to be solved. There is a webservice-interface, so all the hard work is already done. Oh, and Amazon apparently has no people checking for that kind of stuff, the amount of people asking you to sign up or do fraudulent things there is quite large.
Then again, why pay $0.01 when you can simply find an algorithm that gets it right most of the time for the cost of electricity...
I do think it is. Goods, and Services. Those are two well-defined words. Not sure what your trouble with deciding which is which is. You generally ship goods, you do not ship services.
It would not be hypocritical to restrict certain policies to certain countries. It would also not be unprecedented. Your example is flawed in many ways, in any case. First off, the plant is in the US. It's not in Japan. It produces cars that will be sold in the US. It employs US workers, predominantly. How is that comparable to offshoring work intended for the "home" market ? In any case, exceptions can be, and are, made when it benefits the country. Even the country is always out for #1.
Other countries can mirror all they like. I don't see all that many call centers in the US servicing non-US markets. There is, of course, Halliburton and such; though practically speaking, they have the power of the US armed forces behind them, so the point is moot.
You are correct in that it's a complex issue, and more likely than not a hack politician is going to make some rash judgement call to appease the people and ensure reelection that will, most likely, be useless or detrimental.
As for the supremist argument, you must be joking. Do you have any illusion, whatsoever, that, should the US economy fail, China will bail it out ?
There is a sizable difference between outsourcing and import/export of goods (notably not services). There is a sizable difference between Nielsen (a US company) outsourcing to Tata (an Indian company) and, say, "Indiacorp" (sorry, I do not have any Indian company names on hand) outsourcing to Tata in India.
Even if those are not accepted, there is also a sizable difference between "exchangable" resources and the quality of two companies' products. There are two sides to this coin, naturally; it stands to reason that it may be undesirable for the economy as a whole and citizens individually to have all sorts of crap imported without scrutiny; I'll let you decide on some examples for yourself.
It's not just (or probably even mostly) about the kiddie porn
Well, his initiative is.
- it's the software, video, and music that gets shared in the alt.* hierarchy, too. And the ISPs probably don't mind not providing a service that doesn't do much but cost them extra for bandwidth and storage.
Actually, ISPs should be flocking to Usenet, make it more accessible, and give it a lot of storage and bandwidth if what they want to do is reduce costs. Every bit that comes from the ISP-owned Usenet cluster is a bit that does not have to come from distant networks. If your customers leech the binary usenet servers dry all day, they can't be using the same bandwidth to leech the P2P services dry and clog up the network -- remember, since they are the ISP and they control the network, they could easily have caching Usenet-servers in the more densely populate locales. (As for making it accessible : something like what easynews.com is doing, i.e. searchable and fully pre-decoded files on HTTP servers)
Widespread use of this would probably cost a lot less than those silly filtering thingies they install on their network and do more for customer satisfaction. Of course, every content producer and their mothers would probably try to sue you, too -- but then again, there is plenty of precedent in this area; especially as how it relates to caching.
It's a lot more lucrative to sell your own content though, via your own triple-play packages and the like (why would you want to offer unfettered access to usenet that contains most of what TV has to offer when you are also selling cable TV at the same time, or worse, are in the business of selling music, movies, etc ?)
So long as enough people use Usenet in your ISP, it's a costsaver -- even if you have to deal with 1gbit/s of incoming data all the time.
And worst of all, it's not apparent that there is a direction this is going in, or a usage that would not be a complete timewaster or done better elsewhere. Right now, you have a basic "take these 3d objects, slap them in a room, tack some animations on, maybe display a picture here, a youtube video there, and pretend there is something oh-so-cool that everybody is missing.
Well, given how badly misreported this law has been, I'm not surprised that you misunderstood it.
I do believe the author understands it. It may be you who is having trouble.
All this law does
Looks like a law about jaywalking, eh ?
is provide legal protection for teachers to tech "alternate views" to the Theory of Evolution.
And why do they need such a law ? We are talking about biology and physics here. Two scientific classes. Teaching in those classes should be focused on the scientific method, scientific theory, and scientific fact. Any decent syllabus will include what "theory" means, as well as what constitutes a "law" in science. There is a reason it's not called the "Law of Evolution", but there is a whole lot of supporting scientific data to make it the best theory so far. If and when you can provide more and better scientific data to support a better/different theory, then you can start teaching it in the science classroom.
(What you do in your religion and philosophy classes is up to you, but stay the hell out of science classes with religious pseudo-science bullshit).
It is NOT exclusively restricted to ID teaching. This could, logically, also include FSM theory. So don't worry, be Happy! Teachers in LA can now ALSO tell children about the Noodly beginnings of humanity in addition to other creationist teachings.
Science teachers, in all honesty, shouldn't. Ever. Their religion has no bearing scientific discovery. I've had excellent science teachers in my years in school; their religion never played a part. Crackpot theories were not "taught" or "acknowledged" -- other than as exercises in critical thinking and verification. If students get out of school actually believing that "alternatives" to the theory of evolution are wide-spread in the scientific community, have any clout other than deluded religious propagandists, and should be accepted if you come across them in a scientific setting, the country has a problem. Namely that scientists will just leave and do their "scienc stuff" on a continent or in a country that actually values research and progression.
Seriously, this really is much ado about nothing. It's just an anti-stupid lawsuit law, to protect teachers who simply ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that not everyone believes ToE is correct. That's it, nothing more, no matter what the militant Atheist sites and D-Kos may say.
Militant atheists, eh ? Hadn't heard that one before, that's good. I wonder how many people those armed people killed in support of their religious beliefs.
As a science teacher, you should ideally teach, to the best of your ability, the current state of the science. You wouldn't consider letting English teachers "acknowledge" that spelling, grammar, and diction really don't matter that much if you know Chinese, would you ? They are there to teach their students the English language, not some crackpot theory of language, or even Esperanto.
When you vote for a bill you don't get to pick and choose what sections you are voting for. It's all or nothing.
Correct ! You got it ! Your comment is done ! Finito ! Err.. you had more to say ?
Obama voted for an amendment which would remove the telecom immunity provision of the bill, but it didn't pass. So instead of voting to take a way a tool in our war on terror, he voted for the bill as a whole.
That's like saying "Yes, I voted for it, but I didn't really mean to vote for all of it, and here is proof ! I voted for an ammendment ! Sadly, it did not pass", all the while thinking, "Yeah suckers, I knew it would not pass and I don't give a damn." It's just so he has an argument when being asked about it, one the oiliest moves in politics.
If you don't stand behind a bill, don't vote for it. If you do, it's pretty clear that the next time around, your opponents will put in even more crap -- after all, you apparently don't even give a damn. That's how we end up with stuff like the DMCA, COPPA, this abominable FISA bill, etc.
(and the weasel of potentially loosing "important" surveillance tools is astonishingly brazen; why are they important ? What do they accomplish ? And how much collateral damage do they cause ? Apparently, a lot already.)
I think you're a little too quick to judge a situation that you had no part in.
I do not. He offered his version of the story, I offered my take on it. I don't think that's uncalled for; I did not change the facts, I questioned the motives and exchanged them with, in my opinion, a more probable set thereof.
If the OP was telling the truth, he didn't find out the speakers were crap until AFTER he bid on them,
Assuming they/are/ crap, it is/entirely/ on him. He was the one who did the bidding. He was the one who/should/ have researched before bidding on them, not after. Even if you buy his argument that he "just" bid on them for fun, he is still the one responsible for that bid.
hence all the backpedaling.
He can backpedal if he wants. Painting it as anything other than that is just dishonest.
Yes, it was rather dumb to bid on an item before researching it, but everyone (and I do mean EVERYONE, even myself) has made at least one stupid purchase in their life. It's part of the process that we call "learning from your mistakes."
Indeed. Of course, this guy did not make the purchase, he assumed outright he was buying crap. Buyers are free to buy whatever they want, this guy was not forced into bidding. Hell, there is some stuff people buy I will never understand, but whatever floats their boat...
Also, I can't be the only one who's getting a little tired of seeing the word "douchebag" in every other blog/Digg/Slashdot comment lately.
I think it is the first time I used that word on Slashdot, though I may be mistaken. I do think it's accurate given my set of motivations:P
I really have to wonder why the heck people make lowball bids like that anyway. It's a total waste of everyone's time. ESPECIALLY if you're just going to try to back out if your lowball bid wins.
To go colloquial on your ass : to be a dick. Best case scenario, you just cost the next-highest bidder money. Some people enjoy spending other people's money like that, a lot. This does not only happen on lowball bids... Sometimes these people will bid very high as a form of a thrillride... If they win, they will try to back out.
Lowball bidders = morons.
Well, not really. The actual moron is the guy who lists an auction with the low price below what he would reasonably sell the item for. Of course eBay encourages you to do this with the fee structure, and psychologically speaking it's easier to hook a bidder that'll go sky-high early with a $1 bid. It is, however, quite dishonest. The seller better sell for lowball prices too if that happens.
Also, bidders who bid multiple times on the same item instead of using the autobid feature the way it was intended = morons. Unfortunately, there are a HELL of alot of these morons around.
Well... More than one school of thought on these; For one thing, you might change what you are willing to pay from one day to the next. This is legitimate. Also, you might want to avoid unscrupulous sellers who have sock puppet accounts driving up the price on their own auctions just to raise the autobid of bidders. This may even be worth eating the eBay fees if you get it wrong, if you do it often enough. And then, of course, it's the same tactic that sniping relies on; don't let other bidders know how high you are willing to go, but try to get the best price with a shot in the final seconds (or slowly increasing nonautobid bids).
Friendly hint : your comments could be a whole lot more readable if you learned to use paragraphs:)
Well with the Amiga it's obvious you weren't around for things like Kickstart 1.0,
I wonder why that would strike you as obvious. I was around when the Amiga was introduced, but I really did not care too much back then:)
mandatory means in my book means you need the update to run newer titles for the same system and with the Amiga if you didn't have the newest OS software would either not run or would be missing features.
Well, it was a personal computer after all, not so much a game console. AmigaOS had many versions as well.
Could they go with a fatter OS sure they could, but the point is not to be booting an OS and saving as much memory as possible by combining the OS and firmware, for example the PSP boots up just fine without having a memory stick in it to boot an OS, because all the functionality is in the firmware.
I used Memory Stick as a general term for "secondary storage".
As for copy protection and protection against non authorized corporate code that has been around for ages even before the CD generation, the Colecovision, NES, SNES, and Genesis all had it in some form or another in very simplistic forms and maybe even earlier as well, all to prevent any Joe Shmoe from creating their own unauthorized content for their cash cows (not that it stopped very many folks) or duplicating their software (also worked around).
There is a sizable difference between what you saw then and what you see now (excepting the Amiga and such:) on consoles. It was never a big hurdle to overcome, other than you needing actual hardware or hardware knowledge to pull it off. Unauthorized content wasn't really a problem, product piracy was (i.e. manufacturing clones, copied cartdridges, and selling those); that's not just unauthorized content.
The whole wobble thing wasn't just to protect Sony's discs but also from stopping basement coders from writing games for the precious system, just like the custom byte strings/circuits in cart based systems.
I'll contend that they didn't care much about the homebrew market one way or another (other than maybe the Net Yaroze thing); people interested in tinkering with their systems could rather easily get the tools required to do so (all you really needed was a third-party bootdisc and a parallel connector); manufacturing discs with their code on it that would work on regular consoles was not really a concern for those folks (it was for pirates selling their wares, and those were able to emulate the wobble at some point, anyway. It's funny how inventive and inquisitive folks get when there is cold, hard cash on the line:)
"Basement coders'" games and demos were not, as a whole, commercial-grade quality. They were/are a hobby.
Also of note you talked about being able to reverse updates well, while wiping the hard drive is completely inexcusable, the PS3 still would work if that was done effectively undoing the damage and not leaving one with an expensive shiny brick.
Which, in all likelihood, would only lead to a lot of cost for the customer service department having to replace all those bricks:)
The bottom line is even if they shifted where the load burden was it still wouldn't have mattered since then there would have been a bad OS and folks would have been whining about that.
Correct, if Sony had not been good engineers and built in back-up and restore into the unit. This is simple stuff. Of course, those development-hours are much-better spent on stuff that doesn't benefit the customer:)
I for one would like to know what went wrong, all the folks talking about testing and stuff is moot when the f
[ ] You understood the point the author was trying to make.
Here's are a few examples : "Everyone agrees that their editor is the best in the world." "Everyone agrees that Microsoft could do better." (of course, while some of us want that "do better" to mean "die", others think it means "make more money" and yet others think "innovate more"; but everyone agrees... right ?)
The OP is trying to make himself seem like the good guy in the story. Here is what happened :
Guy goes to eBay. Guy finds lots of speakers that he thinks are worth lots of moolah. Guy thinks to himself, hey, maybe I can bid low and rip somebody off (legally, $1 auctions have been known to net you high-priced goods whenever christmas and easter fall on the same day). Guy proceeds to bid on stuff with impunity without researching what he's bidding on.
Guy waits a day.
Guy actually wins an auction for an item. He didn't bother to read the description and model number the first time. He did not bother to research the item before he placed a bid. Guy thinks he's being scammed because, hey, he actually got an item for the price he bid. Guy is panicking. Guy wants out of this deal. Guy comes up with "They are SCAMMING ! This is not the item I bid on ! This is sub-standard quality gear ! I know, let's be a douchebag and offer to relist the item, I don't want to be held accountable to the bid I entered !"
Seller, meanwhile, gets annoyed. Since he does not want negative feedback (which is bad, bad stuff on eBay), he tries to work out a deal that is to everybody's satisfaction. Buyer offered to pay relisting, so seller takes the deal. Buyer does not believe the fee. Buyer is getting annoying and costing a lot of money in time spent. Seller offers buyer to pay whatever he deems fair as relisting fee. Buyer declines, frothing at the mouth. Seller initiates dead-beat buyer proceedings, as ANY reputable seller would, seeing as how they are the ones being scammed out of their listing fee. Seller ultimately decides to cut their losses and not deal with buyer anymore, not deal with eBay in this matter, not risk negative feedback, and just moves on, writing this off as the cost of doing business.
Meanwhile, douchebag buyer thinks he's won and really shown them. He hasn't been scammed. The speakers were listed on the eBay listing. He could have researched. Since he feels he is in the righteous right, he posts unanonymized eMails and tries to pass these guys off as scumbags... I have yet to see any evidence of that. If he had been delivered a box full of bricks, we might have a story. He hasn't.
I noticed in what I assume is your defense of systems that did not need firmware updates (correct me if I inferred incorrectly) you listed the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000, did you buy the later models that already had the Kickstart 1.3 firmware and didn't know that a large portion of them were sold with Kickstart 1.2?
My current ones actually have 1.3, you are correct. However, the "update" was not mandatory (both of these are second-hand, I stupidly sold my first Amiga way back).
I've had the PS3 since launch (as well as the 360, Wii,
I've taken a break with "next gen consoles" for a while (since the xbox, actually). I might catch up in a few years:)
and going back in time 2600, Bally Astrocade, Coleco-Vision, Genesis, NES, SNES, Atari 400, Atari 800, Amiga 1000/2000/3000 and the list goes on) and I for one am all for the updates that have come from both Sony and Microsoft because the vast majority added features to the systems I have.
Yes, you can do decent things with firmware updates. You can, quite probably, achieve the same effect with a leaner firmware/bios and a fatter OS. But that would require them to give up some control over the OS code, since code on the harddisk/on a memory stick is a lot easier to crack, generally.
Yes there is the fact that they do go in and root out security holes, but without updates there would be many crappy things that wouldn't be corrected that actually affected usability, background downloading for example wasn't in either system when they shipped, so if you downloaded a game from the store you had to wait until it was done or cancel it, that now is fixed on both units, numerous multimedia features added to both consoles which I like and use often, updates to the stores to make them easier to use, updates to network code to fix or prevent issues with multi-player games, a lot of stuff that we would miss out on.
Where there is a cane, sugar is never far away.
Sony's 2.4 update contained things that customers were asking for like the in game XMB access, I could see the wrath of folks if this was just a silly security patch with no payoff but in this case it's not.
Let's pretend they went with a lean BIOS method instead and put the majority of their OS and features on the harddrive. Let's further assume that they are decent system designers and know how to do system snapshots, backup strategies, modular design, etc. In that case you'd be updating a few files on an update, you'd be able to reverse updates via backup recovery (this could be one of those few functions the firmware has), and you'd have a more flexible system. You'd possibly lose some cracker security measures -- but let's face it, the machines all got cracked in short order anyway. (One of the reasons I stopped at the PSX with consoles was, quite frankly, that I could not play backups on the system without altering it substantially. I have no desire to pirate games, but I have no desire to losing access to a game due to scratches caused either by a slip or by friends; With cart-based games it was pretty damn hard to destroy the cartdridge, with disc-based games it's pretty damn easy. This is also the reason I'll be looking to get a modded version of whatever console I'll be getting next. I buy the games, but damn if I am going to break them).
The copy protection systems on consoles are quite something though. I am still in awe of the Playstation 1 one; The simple stuff you can see on any drive (libcrypt xored into subchannel data, some program checks), the "unique" color of the discs (black), and the not-so-simple stuff that takes a while to figure out properly (they encoded the symbols SCUS, SCEA, etc. encoded in slight changes in the frequency of the wobble of the disc, as read by track tracking coils in the playstation, for instance. It's a simple design, but VERY effective -- to this day you can't just "burn" a playstation CD that'll work in non-modded playstations (since the act of burning will, basically, destroy the wobble:)
Yes, did you ? (we can play this game all day, by the way)
I don't think so because if you did you should of saw how the first connotation of it as being bad was 1984 by the mass media but that it was used for year prior to that with an ethical connotation.
You go right past the argument straight to repeating your faulty logic:)
You obviously missed the lines before that which equate it with "prostitute" (definite negative connotations)
Two problems with this, one computers have nothing to do with prostitution.
That is not a problem. A flame has the negative connotation of burning something or somebody even if not applied in the realm of usenet. There is a negative connotation to the word per se, right there. My argument is not that "hack" means "computer prostitute", but rather that there is a negative connotation.
And two it's only negative to puritans and those like you, I have absolutely no problem with prostitution and believe it should be legal, require medical checks perhaps but legal still. As with many other things, I disagree with all laws that make something illegal even when there is no harm to anyone else.
Way to go off on a tangent. So you would not agree that, in the general sense, "prostitute" carries negative connotations at all, regardless of your own personal little worldview ?
But of course to you then "one who writes anything for hire" is also bad.
It suggests the absence of morals.
There's already a word to use when people use computers to do bad things, "criminal". If a new word is needed create one, compuminal perhaps. Years ago I kept a log, journal, of neologisms, some I found and some I created myself.
Good for you. How does his have/any/ relevance to how language is used, generally ?
Which is why I ask those who insist on using "hacker" with a bad connotation to at least use "blackhat hacker". You may find it strange I insist on doing stuff like this but I don't believe in letting something slide when I think it's wrong, well except grammar and spelling.
The only thing that accomplishes is being obnoxious. "Blackhat hacker" is a redundancy if you already know about the negative connotations carried by "hacker" in the general sense. "Blackhat" is an exceptionally bad modifier (it implies you know the distinction between black hats and white hats as they relate to morals, and of course it perpetuates the idea that black and blacks are evil... See, I can go off an unrelated tangent, as well). "Unethical hacker" might accomplish your goals a bit better, but even then, the definitions used by the general populace and, say, the jargon dictionary are sufficiently different for even that to be a bad replacement for the word "cracker" or "computer criminal" or "criminal" or "identity thief" or what have you.
You can opine on how much today's language and its idiosyncrasies and how it would be better if XX were true. It won't really help change language though. And people you tell not to use the word "hacker" in that sense with you may remember not to use that word in that sense with you, but usually they'll be intelligent enough to gauge whether the person they're talking to is going to know (or care) about the distinction; if not, it's possibly a lot easier to just use "hacker" in the way the "mass media" uses it, since the other party is going to know immediately what is meant. Note that only "ethical hackers" really care about the distinction, and even then only a subset of them. The rest of the populace, more often than not, just doesn't.
And if that causes problems for webmasters, Thompson says, so be it. "I don't want to sound flip about this, but if you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs."
From the linked article in the original submission. That is enough of a supporting statement for the statement given.
Fuck them, they deserve everything they're getting. If you don't want to be a good net citizen, you should not get the benefit of the doubt.
Actually, Sony does do small patches. Check the history for the frequency of these updates if you don't believe me. Or do you honestly believe that small changes to the system can't have disastrous effects?
First of all, do you/KNOW/ that Sony is/just/ changing the parts it says it is changing ? No, you do not.
Or say a protocol was change. Do you know exactly was changed? Because, I'm calling bullshit on what you're saying. That is unless you can show your insider knowledge and prove to me that this change is unnecessarily preventing on-line play.
Ah, but it works the other way around too. Show me why that particular protocol change was necessary and no backward compatibility was possible. Hint : DRM updates do not count, I don't give a rats ass about it on my legally bought, legally used console with legally owned games that suddenly refuses to boot without a harddrive wipe.
Yah, because fixing errors in the OS is a bad idea. Get a clue.
You both have a point. Your opponent is not clueless.
We're *far* beyond the 8-bit NES that didn't have an OS. We're in an age where consoles are basically specialised computers. Computers that have an OS which is software, which will have bugs that need to be fixed from time to time. Computers that will have features added.
This depends ENTIRELY on your development model. You can do software updates without flashing the firmware. You can design the firmware with a lot more stringent test procedures, and possibly less to do, moving the patchables onto the harddisk.
But, that's ok. We don't need an evolving set of features or improvements on features or increased stability or... We'll just go back to the old model of a static stagnant system reducing the systems lifespan increasing costs for everyone.
Uhm. My NES still works fine. You sometimes need to clean the contacts, but that's a mechanical necessity. My SNES also works fine, as do my GameGear, my Master System, my Genesis, my Jaguar, my 32X, my C64, my Amiga 500, my Amiga 2000, my Amiga CD32, my Sony Playstation, my Dreamcast, and countless others of my consoles. Your "lifespan" argument is complete and utter bullshit.
The primary reason for non-optional firmware upgrades required for online play is updates to the various DRM and copy protection schemes. Of course Sony knows this is a futile battle, and of course the ones being harmed by this policy are primarily paying customers who do not use pirated software -- see the case in point.
The meaning has been maligned because that's how the mass media uses it and no one corrects them on it.
Blaming the "mass media" is not going to help, they are not in a grand conspiracy to steal your word. They use the word the way it is known to their reader/viewership, and it's not their "fault" the word has that meaning.
Look at the etymology of "hack".
I have, have you?
Yes, have you ?
The Online Etymology Dictionary is pretty good, read the second (2) entry particularly.
Cute. You obviously missed the lines before that which equate it with "prostitute" (definite negative connotations), "hack writer" as in somebody who will write/anything/ for hire (indicating the utter lack of morals). Yes, it also lists the meaning you assign to the word as allegedly being coined at MIT in 1976 and later morphing into the meaning you do not like (1983, incidentally the year "War Games" got released); but to claim that "hack" did not have it coming given its meaning in other contexts is quite interesting.
As used with writers "hack" dates back to 1749, whereas with criminals using computers it first appears in 1984. It's ethical meaning was used years before then.
Like prostitute, hack writer, etc ? Yes, those are ethical terms. Right.
I first came across the ethical meaning in the mid to late 1970s in magazines like "Byte: The small and micro systems journal" magazine. My fav writers in "Byte" was Steve Ciarcia who wrote the column "Circuit Cellar" which became it's own magazine and Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor".
I still come across this meaning when talking to CS people and people in certain communities, and I have no problem with accepting it there as a form of slang in those circles. It is not, however, the generally accepted definition of the word being used there, and everybody using it that way, without fail, knows it. It's akin to using "tree" when talking to computer scientists or programmers. Quite often the first thing they'll think about is a data structure, not something barkish with real-life leaves. There are countless other words that carry a different meaning when used in smaller circles or professions, "hack" and "hacker" are no different. The only real distinction that word has it that it has an inordinately high likelihood of being misunderstood without context; a hacker describing their latest cool hack may elicit a member of the general public to stamp them as an unethical criminal, especially if they do not have enough knowledge of the field the hack is in to properly evaluate what the hack actually does ("He's doing something illegal with computers, I'm sure of it !").
Then again other words have had the same thing done to them, like "hack" and "hacker". Whereas a hack used to mean something creative and a hacker was someone who hacked, and writers were hacks too, today they are used for crimes and criminals. As used with computers a hacker follows the Hacker ethic.
Bad, bad example. No matter how often "ethical hackers" claim the word for themselves or try to give it a meaning contrary to what the general populace believes the word to mean, it still carries that meaning. A hack is a talentless idiot, a hacker is somebody who cracks computers. Look at the etymology of "hack". It's got NOTHING to do with what you claim it once did. Hell, use of it in the pejorative goes back to the 80s.
Sure, the definition of "hack" and "hacker" that some folks at MIT really like(d) is cutesy and quirky, but they didn't coin the words and they had negative connotations for, quite literally, hundreds of years.
So please pardon me if I say that yes, I think I do know an awful lot about this guy and am going to judge the hell out of him. No, I will not. The world is not about you. You still have no idea whatsoever who that guy is.
Nowhere did I advocate not punishing him or that there should be no consequences; however, consequences that ruin the rest of your life for a stupid mistake are not the answer. For all YOU know, this is the first run-in with this kind of stuff this guy had.
put him into community service (with the other 12 kids by the way.) So you are assuming that those 12 others were complicit in the crime ? What if he just wanted to be "nice" to them ? Not their fault he's stupid.
If he is guilty of those charges, he is a criminal. Well, duh. But is he a kid-stealing-a-candybar-criminal, or a I-just-raped-and-murdered-your-wife-criminal ? The former is a stupid youthful mistake that can usually be straightened out by a parent and maybe some community service. The latter really isn't.
Those actions undermine society's trust in the system that if someone graduates from an institution and that institution certifies that the student did what the records say they did, they may or may not be qualified for jobs, further education, etc. AND RIGHTFULLY SO.
I put that in caps because it is important.
Society's trust in those records is misplaced if they are trivial to alter electronically. In this case he got caught, good thing. Question is, how many such cases slip by ? If the number is nonzero, then the trust is misplaced.
While 38 years is certainly harsh, that is criminal behavior. There should be punishment, no doubt. Putting the guy into a jail for most of his adult life is cruel, unusual, and unwarranted.
Our education system is far from perfect but guys like this certainly do not help make it better. And guys like this are not SUPPOSED to help make it better. They are the ones that should get educated by the system. It's not their responsibility to make it better. Sure, it helps if the students are all nice and pretty and have no problems whatsoever in any area of their life, but they do. And the education system does its part to help those students get better. Or it should.
I would much rather that he applied himself to do well in school and set a good example of what good behavior, studying, and hard work can do when working with the grain, not against it. Good for you. So are you saying that any and all "problem kid" should be expelled from school at the earliest opportunity ? That's the ultimate resolution of this problem... You don't want to work with the grain ? Fine. There's the highway.
Up until the Windows System Administrator at the school (who got that title 'cause he knew how to install Windows on a computer, or got lucky enought to succeed anyway) called the FBI ('cause they obviously are the ones to call with this newfangled cyberterrorism stuff), who got a subpoena for the "anonymous" email service provider's logs (they all keep logs), got your IP (you were not smart enough to use TOR in 8th grade), traced it to your home, and called SWAT on your ass since you are obviously a cyberterrorist out to hurt the children at that school. After all, you threatened them by listing their weaknesses. That's like sending your teacher a detailed list of his or her whereabouts throughout the day and the angles he can be seen from unnoticed. At least to scared-of-terrorists-administrators-who-want-to-cover-their-asses it is.
Yeah, it's a whole lot better to keep quiet. Admittedly the above is just one of several outcomes, but it is quite easily a possible one given the proficiency-level of many of the involved parties. Other outcomes include getting computer access revoked for the remainder of your time in school, detention, disciplinary action, expulsion, "permanent record", black marks on your transcript, etc.... While one would like to believe that a well-meaning student trying to notify the powers-that-be of a serious (or not so much) security hole would be thanked and sent on his/her way, that's often not the case. Your chances are better if you have an adult advocate beyond reproach (say, a teacher), but that level of trust is not easy to build.
Slashdot Mirror
On gMail some simple rules should suffice.
Oh please, enlighten us ! :-)
Don't allow a brand-new account to send out more than a few (20?) emails a day.
Ineffective at best. a.) You can create dozens of accounts if the CAPTCHA is cracked, easily, automatically. If that is not an option, you'd be surprised how long-term spammers can think -- just create dozens upon dozens of accounts. Let them sit, let them mature. Only then do you start spamming.
Make sure that most of the email varies.
It's easy to generate nonsensical emails that look like actual speech. Hell, it's easy to generate scientific papers that look like scientific papers, read like scientific papers, but are gibberish. You can do this all day and send it out to your closest friends on gmail (all those dozens of other accounts of varying ages you have created ...)
Make sure the account gets and reads email as well as sends it,
What in there is something that cannot be, and indeed has not been, automated ?
and that the email is accessed.
So kinda like a bot with state.
The trick is, you keep rotating these measures and don't tell anyone just what they are.
Security by obscurity ... bad, bad idea. You won't just shut out a lot of regular users that way, but you'll even think that you are secure !
(And yes, you will catch some regular users with this. How would you know, at the scale that gmail is at ?)
You don't automatically disable anyone who breaks the rules, you just hold on to any large number of similar messages until a human reviews them
So your approach does not, in fact, scale. At all.
--possibly through some mechanism similar to the "picture matching game" where multiple people identify a message as spam.
Oh, so now you want multiple people doing that ! And looking at potentially quite private emails too ! (wrongly tagged for review, for whatever reason). Does not scale, carries sizable privacy implications, and still has a nontrivial error rate.
If it's determined to be spam, never tell them you caught on, just stop email from that account from being sent, silently.
Ah, so the spammers have never, ever heard of, you know, having an email address of their own to check whether their setup works as expected. Hell, they could even set it up as a nagios plugin.
Log the ip addresses and use them to help you identify other accounts from the same computer if possible.
Great idea, until you've started working with anything with a userbase as diverse as, say, gmail. You'll block out plenty of proxy servers of ISPs, plenty of schools, universities, libraries, will eventually have blacklisted all dynamic IP ranges, and still not have done a lot of good -- you see, spammers have botnets. Botnets are huge. I mean really, really huge. A huge percentage of the bots on botnets change their IPs daily or more often (dynamic IPs); and you can easily just use some parts of the net one day, and other parts the next. Just proxy it all through there and every session will come from a different IP that also generates regular user sessions (the ones from oblivious-to-the-fact zombie-owners).
You could also use the ip addresses to notify people that they are a spambot next time that IP address is used to look up something on any google service.
GREAT idea. Especially with all those dynamically assigned IPs out there ! That won't cause any huge load on your support infrastructure at all, honest !
Wow, that's a broad action with a lot of chances for failure, but I bet it could be refined enough to work
There are lots of ideas, most of them quite useless i
Well come on, be fair. $0.01 is a proper price. Head over to mturk.com and get your captchas answered by humans for 1 cent a pop ! They'll eat em up. It'll take seconds for one to be solved. There is a webservice-interface, so all the hard work is already done. Oh, and Amazon apparently has no people checking for that kind of stuff, the amount of people asking you to sign up or do fraudulent things there is quite large.
Then again, why pay $0.01 when you can simply find an algorithm that gets it right most of the time for the cost of electricity ...
I do think it is. Goods, and Services. Those are two well-defined words. Not sure what your trouble with deciding which is which is. You generally ship goods, you do not ship services.
It would not be hypocritical to restrict certain policies to certain countries. It would also not be unprecedented. Your example is flawed in many ways, in any case. First off, the plant is in the US. It's not in Japan. It produces cars that will be sold in the US. It employs US workers, predominantly. How is that comparable to offshoring work intended for the "home" market ? In any case, exceptions can be, and are, made when it benefits the country. Even the country is always out for #1.
Other countries can mirror all they like. I don't see all that many call centers in the US servicing non-US markets. There is, of course, Halliburton and such; though practically speaking, they have the power of the US armed forces behind them, so the point is moot.
You are correct in that it's a complex issue, and more likely than not a hack politician is going to make some rash judgement call to appease the people and ensure reelection that will, most likely, be useless or detrimental.
As for the supremist argument, you must be joking. Do you have any illusion, whatsoever, that, should the US economy fail, China will bail it out ?
Are you even trying ? :)
There is a sizable difference between outsourcing and import/export of goods (notably not services). There is a sizable difference between Nielsen (a US company) outsourcing to Tata (an Indian company) and, say, "Indiacorp" (sorry, I do not have any Indian company names on hand) outsourcing to Tata in India.
Even if those are not accepted, there is also a sizable difference between "exchangable" resources and the quality of two companies' products. There are two sides to this coin, naturally; it stands to reason that it may be undesirable for the economy as a whole and citizens individually to have all sorts of crap imported without scrutiny; I'll let you decide on some examples for yourself.
It's not just (or probably even mostly) about the kiddie porn
Well, his initiative is.
- it's the software, video, and music that gets shared in the alt.* hierarchy, too. And the ISPs probably don't mind not providing a service that doesn't do much but cost them extra for bandwidth and storage.
Actually, ISPs should be flocking to Usenet, make it more accessible, and give it a lot of storage and bandwidth if what they want to do is reduce costs. Every bit that comes from the ISP-owned Usenet cluster is a bit that does not have to come from distant networks. If your customers leech the binary usenet servers dry all day, they can't be using the same bandwidth to leech the P2P services dry and clog up the network -- remember, since they are the ISP and they control the network, they could easily have caching Usenet-servers in the more densely populate locales.
(As for making it accessible : something like what easynews.com is doing, i.e. searchable and fully pre-decoded files on HTTP servers)
Widespread use of this would probably cost a lot less than those silly filtering thingies they install on their network and do more for customer satisfaction. Of course, every content producer and their mothers would probably try to sue you, too -- but then again, there is plenty of precedent in this area; especially as how it relates to caching.
It's a lot more lucrative to sell your own content though, via your own triple-play packages and the like (why would you want to offer unfettered access to usenet that contains most of what TV has to offer when you are also selling cable TV at the same time, or worse, are in the business of selling music, movies, etc ?)
So long as enough people use Usenet in your ISP, it's a costsaver -- even if you have to deal with 1gbit/s of incoming data all the time.
Have you heard of the embed-tag ? Make a webpage, embed the rickroll and iframe the goatse. :P
And worst of all, it's not apparent that there is a direction this is going in, or a usage that would not be a complete timewaster or done better elsewhere. Right now, you have a basic "take these 3d objects, slap them in a room, tack some animations on, maybe display a picture here, a youtube video there, and pretend there is something oh-so-cool that everybody is missing.
It reminds me a lot of VRML, 'ca 1997.
Well, given how badly misreported this law has been, I'm not surprised that you misunderstood it.
I do believe the author understands it. It may be you who is having trouble.
All this law does
Looks like a law about jaywalking, eh ?
is provide legal protection for teachers to tech "alternate views" to the Theory of Evolution.
And why do they need such a law ? We are talking about biology and physics here. Two scientific classes. Teaching in those classes should be focused on the scientific method, scientific theory, and scientific fact. Any decent syllabus will include what "theory" means, as well as what constitutes a "law" in science. There is a reason it's not called the "Law of Evolution", but there is a whole lot of supporting scientific data to make it the best theory so far. If and when you can provide more and better scientific data to support a better/different theory, then you can start teaching it in the science classroom.
(What you do in your religion and philosophy classes is up to you, but stay the hell out of science classes with religious pseudo-science bullshit).
It is NOT exclusively restricted to ID teaching. This could, logically, also include FSM theory. So don't worry, be Happy! Teachers in LA can now ALSO tell children about the Noodly beginnings of humanity in addition to other creationist teachings.
Science teachers, in all honesty, shouldn't. Ever. Their religion has no bearing scientific discovery. I've had excellent science teachers in my years in school; their religion never played a part. Crackpot theories were not "taught" or "acknowledged" -- other than as exercises in critical thinking and verification. If students get out of school actually believing that "alternatives" to the theory of evolution are wide-spread in the scientific community, have any clout other than deluded religious propagandists, and should be accepted if you come across them in a scientific setting, the country has a problem. Namely that scientists will just leave and do their "scienc stuff" on a continent or in a country that actually values research and progression.
Seriously, this really is much ado about nothing. It's just an anti-stupid lawsuit law, to protect teachers who simply ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that not everyone believes ToE is correct. That's it, nothing more, no matter what the militant Atheist sites and D-Kos may say.
Militant atheists, eh ? Hadn't heard that one before, that's good. I wonder how many people those armed people killed in support of their religious beliefs.
As a science teacher, you should ideally teach, to the best of your ability, the current state of the science. You wouldn't consider letting English teachers "acknowledge" that spelling, grammar, and diction really don't matter that much if you know Chinese, would you ? They are there to teach their students the English language, not some crackpot theory of language, or even Esperanto.
When you vote for a bill you don't get to pick and choose what sections you are voting for. It's all or nothing.
Correct ! You got it ! Your comment is done ! Finito ! Err .. you had more to say ?
Obama voted for an amendment which would remove the telecom immunity provision of the bill, but it didn't pass. So instead of voting to take a way a tool in our war on terror, he voted for the bill as a whole.
That's like saying "Yes, I voted for it, but I didn't really mean to vote for all of it, and here is proof ! I voted for an ammendment ! Sadly, it did not pass", all the while thinking, "Yeah suckers, I knew it would not pass and I don't give a damn." It's just so he has an argument when being asked about it, one the oiliest moves in politics.
If you don't stand behind a bill, don't vote for it. If you do, it's pretty clear that the next time around, your opponents will put in even more crap -- after all, you apparently don't even give a damn. That's how we end up with stuff like the DMCA, COPPA, this abominable FISA bill, etc.
(and the weasel of potentially loosing "important" surveillance tools is astonishingly brazen; why are they important ? What do they accomplish ? And how much collateral damage do they cause ? Apparently, a lot already.)
I think you're a little too quick to judge a situation that you had no part in.
I do not. He offered his version of the story, I offered my take on it. I don't think that's uncalled for; I did not change the facts, I questioned the motives and exchanged them with, in my opinion, a more probable set thereof.
If the OP was telling the truth, he didn't find out the speakers were crap until AFTER he bid on them,
Assuming they /are/ crap, it is /entirely/ on him. He was the one who did the bidding. He was the one who /should/ have researched before bidding on them, not after. Even if you buy his argument that he "just" bid on them for fun, he is still the one responsible for that bid.
hence all the backpedaling.
He can backpedal if he wants. Painting it as anything other than that is just dishonest.
Yes, it was rather dumb to bid on an item before researching it, but everyone (and I do mean EVERYONE, even myself) has made at least one stupid purchase in their life. It's part of the process that we call "learning from your mistakes."
Indeed. Of course, this guy did not make the purchase, he assumed outright he was buying crap. Buyers are free to buy whatever they want, this guy was not forced into bidding. Hell, there is some stuff people buy I will never understand, but whatever floats their boat ...
Also, I can't be the only one who's getting a little tired of seeing the word "douchebag" in every other blog/Digg/Slashdot comment lately.
I think it is the first time I used that word on Slashdot, though I may be mistaken. I do think it's accurate given my set of motivations :P
Your version sounds more accurate.
And all just from reading his own post :>
I really have to wonder why the heck people make lowball bids like that anyway. It's a total waste of everyone's time. ESPECIALLY if you're just going to try to back out if your lowball bid wins.
To go colloquial on your ass : to be a dick. Best case scenario, you just cost the next-highest bidder money. Some people enjoy spending other people's money like that, a lot. This does not only happen on lowball bids ... Sometimes these people will bid very high as a form of a thrillride ... If they win, they will try to back out.
Lowball bidders = morons.
Well, not really. The actual moron is the guy who lists an auction with the low price below what he would reasonably sell the item for. Of course eBay encourages you to do this with the fee structure, and psychologically speaking it's easier to hook a bidder that'll go sky-high early with a $1 bid. It is, however, quite dishonest. The seller better sell for lowball prices too if that happens.
Also, bidders who bid multiple times on the same item instead of using the autobid feature the way it was intended = morons. Unfortunately, there are a HELL of alot of these morons around.
Well ... More than one school of thought on these; For one thing, you might change what you are willing to pay from one day to the next. This is legitimate. Also, you might want to avoid unscrupulous sellers who have sock puppet accounts driving up the price on their own auctions just to raise the autobid of bidders. This may even be worth eating the eBay fees if you get it wrong, if you do it often enough. And then, of course, it's the same tactic that sniping relies on; don't let other bidders know how high you are willing to go, but try to get the best price with a shot in the final seconds (or slowly increasing nonautobid bids).
Friendly hint : your comments could be a whole lot more readable if you learned to use paragraphs :)
Well with the Amiga it's obvious you weren't around for things like Kickstart 1.0,
I wonder why that would strike you as obvious. I was around when the Amiga was introduced, but I really did not care too much back then :)
mandatory means in my book means you need the update to run newer titles for the same system and with the Amiga if you didn't have the newest OS software would either not run or would be missing features.
Well, it was a personal computer after all, not so much a game console. AmigaOS had many versions as well.
Could they go with a fatter OS sure they could, but the point is not to be booting an OS and saving as much memory as possible by combining the OS and firmware, for example the PSP boots up just fine without having a memory stick in it to boot an OS, because all the functionality is in the firmware.
I used Memory Stick as a general term for "secondary storage".
As for copy protection and protection against non authorized corporate code that has been around for ages even before the CD generation, the Colecovision, NES, SNES, and Genesis all had it in some form or another in very simplistic forms and maybe even earlier as well, all to prevent any Joe Shmoe from creating their own unauthorized content for their cash cows (not that it stopped very many folks) or duplicating their software (also worked around).
There is a sizable difference between what you saw then and what you see now (excepting the Amiga and such :) on consoles. It was never a big hurdle to overcome, other than you needing actual hardware or hardware knowledge to pull it off. Unauthorized content wasn't really a problem, product piracy was (i.e. manufacturing clones, copied cartdridges, and selling those); that's not just unauthorized content.
The whole wobble thing wasn't just to protect Sony's discs but also from stopping basement coders from writing games for the precious system, just like the custom byte strings/circuits in cart based systems.
I'll contend that they didn't care much about the homebrew market one way or another (other than maybe the Net Yaroze thing); people interested in tinkering with their systems could rather easily get the tools required to do so (all you really needed was a third-party bootdisc and a parallel connector); manufacturing discs with their code on it that would work on regular consoles was not really a concern for those folks (it was for pirates selling their wares, and those were able to emulate the wobble at some point, anyway. It's funny how inventive and inquisitive folks get when there is cold, hard cash on the line :)
"Basement coders'" games and demos were not, as a whole, commercial-grade quality. They were/are a hobby.
Also of note you talked about being able to reverse updates well, while wiping the hard drive is completely inexcusable, the PS3 still would work if that was done effectively undoing the damage and not leaving one with an expensive shiny brick.
Which, in all likelihood, would only lead to a lot of cost for the customer service department having to replace all those bricks :)
The bottom line is even if they shifted where the load burden was it still wouldn't have mattered since then there would have been a bad OS and folks would have been whining about that.
Correct, if Sony had not been good engineers and built in back-up and restore into the unit. This is simple stuff. Of course, those development-hours are much-better spent on stuff that doesn't benefit the customer :)
I for one would like to know what went wrong, all the folks talking about testing and stuff is moot when the f
[ ] You understood the point the author was trying to make.
Here's are a few examples : "Everyone agrees that their editor is the best in the world." ... right ?)
"Everyone agrees that Microsoft could do better."
(of course, while some of us want that "do better" to mean "die", others think it means "make more money" and yet others think "innovate more"; but everyone agrees
The OP is trying to make himself seem like the good guy in the story. Here is what happened :
Guy goes to eBay. Guy finds lots of speakers that he thinks are worth lots of moolah. Guy thinks to himself, hey, maybe I can bid low and rip somebody off (legally, $1 auctions have been known to net you high-priced goods whenever christmas and easter fall on the same day). Guy proceeds to bid on stuff with impunity without researching what he's bidding on.
Guy waits a day.
Guy actually wins an auction for an item. He didn't bother to read the description and model number the first time. He did not bother to research the item before he placed a bid. Guy thinks he's being scammed because, hey, he actually got an item for the price he bid. Guy is panicking. Guy wants out of this deal. Guy comes up with "They are SCAMMING ! This is not the item I bid on ! This is sub-standard quality gear ! I know, let's be a douchebag and offer to relist the item, I don't want to be held accountable to the bid I entered !"
Seller, meanwhile, gets annoyed. Since he does not want negative feedback (which is bad, bad stuff on eBay), he tries to work out a deal that is to everybody's satisfaction. Buyer offered to pay relisting, so seller takes the deal. Buyer does not believe the fee. Buyer is getting annoying and costing a lot of money in time spent. Seller offers buyer to pay whatever he deems fair as relisting fee. Buyer declines, frothing at the mouth. Seller initiates dead-beat buyer proceedings, as ANY reputable seller would, seeing as how they are the ones being scammed out of their listing fee.
Seller ultimately decides to cut their losses and not deal with buyer anymore, not deal with eBay in this matter, not risk negative feedback, and just moves on, writing this off as the cost of doing business.
Meanwhile, douchebag buyer thinks he's won and really shown them. He hasn't been scammed. The speakers were listed on the eBay listing. He could have researched. Since he feels he is in the righteous right, he posts unanonymized eMails and tries to pass these guys off as scumbags ... I have yet to see any evidence of that. If he had been delivered a box full of bricks, we might have a story. He hasn't.
I noticed in what I assume is your defense of systems that did not need firmware updates (correct me if I inferred incorrectly) you listed the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000, did you buy the later models that already had the Kickstart 1.3 firmware and didn't know that a large portion of them were sold with Kickstart 1.2?
My current ones actually have 1.3, you are correct. However, the "update" was not mandatory (both of these are second-hand, I stupidly sold my first Amiga way back).
I've had the PS3 since launch (as well as the 360, Wii,
I've taken a break with "next gen consoles" for a while (since the xbox, actually). I might catch up in a few years :)
and going back in time 2600, Bally Astrocade, Coleco-Vision, Genesis, NES, SNES, Atari 400, Atari 800, Amiga 1000/2000/3000 and the list goes on) and I for one am all for the updates that have come from both Sony and Microsoft because the vast majority added features to the systems I have.
Yes, you can do decent things with firmware updates. You can, quite probably, achieve the same effect with a leaner firmware/bios and a fatter OS. But that would require them to give up some control over the OS code, since code on the harddisk/on a memory stick is a lot easier to crack, generally.
Yes there is the fact that they do go in and root out security holes, but without updates there would be many crappy things that wouldn't be corrected that actually affected usability, background downloading for example wasn't in either system when they shipped, so if you downloaded a game from the store you had to wait until it was done or cancel it, that now is fixed on both units, numerous multimedia features added to both consoles which I like and use often, updates to the stores to make them easier to use, updates to network code to fix or prevent issues with multi-player games, a lot of stuff that we would miss out on.
Where there is a cane, sugar is never far away.
Sony's 2.4 update contained things that customers were asking for like the in game XMB access, I could see the wrath of folks if this was just a silly security patch with no payoff but in this case it's not.
Let's pretend they went with a lean BIOS method instead and put the majority of their OS and features on the harddrive. Let's further assume that they are decent system designers and know how to do system snapshots, backup strategies, modular design, etc. In that case you'd be updating a few files on an update, you'd be able to reverse updates via backup recovery (this could be one of those few functions the firmware has), and you'd have a more flexible system. You'd possibly lose some cracker security measures -- but let's face it, the machines all got cracked in short order anyway.
(One of the reasons I stopped at the PSX with consoles was, quite frankly, that I could not play backups on the system without altering it substantially. I have no desire to pirate games, but I have no desire to losing access to a game due to scratches caused either by a slip or by friends; With cart-based games it was pretty damn hard to destroy the cartdridge, with disc-based games it's pretty damn easy. This is also the reason I'll be looking to get a modded version of whatever console I'll be getting next. I buy the games, but damn if I am going to break them).
The copy protection systems on consoles are quite something though. I am still in awe of the Playstation 1 one; The simple stuff you can see on any drive (libcrypt xored into subchannel data, some program checks), the "unique" color of the discs (black), and the not-so-simple stuff that takes a while to figure out properly (they encoded the symbols SCUS, SCEA, etc. encoded in slight changes in the frequency of the wobble of the disc, as read by track tracking coils in the playstation, for instance. It's a simple design, but VERY effective -- to this day you can't just "burn" a playstation CD that'll work in non-modded playstations (since the act of burning will, basically, destroy the wobble :)
Did you read the etymology of "hack"?
Yes, did you ? (we can play this game all day, by the way)
I don't think so because if you did you should of saw how the first connotation of it as being bad was 1984 by the mass media but that it was used for year prior to that with an ethical connotation.
You go right past the argument straight to repeating your faulty logic :)
You obviously missed the lines before that which equate it with "prostitute" (definite negative connotations)
Two problems with this, one computers have nothing to do with prostitution.
That is not a problem. A flame has the negative connotation of burning something or somebody even if not applied in the realm of usenet. There is a negative connotation to the word per se, right there. My argument is not that "hack" means "computer prostitute", but rather that there is a negative connotation.
And two it's only negative to puritans and those like you, I have absolutely no problem with prostitution and believe it should be legal, require medical checks perhaps but legal still. As with many other things, I disagree with all laws that make something illegal even when there is no harm to anyone else.
Way to go off on a tangent. So you would not agree that, in the general sense, "prostitute" carries negative connotations at all, regardless of your own personal little worldview ?
But of course to you then "one who writes anything for hire" is also bad.
It suggests the absence of morals.
There's already a word to use when people use computers to do bad things, "criminal". If a new word is needed create one, compuminal perhaps. Years ago I kept a log, journal, of neologisms, some I found and some I created myself.
Good for you. How does his have /any/ relevance to how language is used, generally ?
Which is why I ask those who insist on using "hacker" with a bad connotation to at least use "blackhat hacker". You may find it strange I insist on doing stuff like this but I don't believe in letting something slide when I think it's wrong, well except grammar and spelling.
The only thing that accomplishes is being obnoxious. "Blackhat hacker" is a redundancy if you already know about the negative connotations carried by "hacker" in the general sense. "Blackhat" is an exceptionally bad modifier (it implies you know the distinction between black hats and white hats as they relate to morals, and of course it perpetuates the idea that black and blacks are evil ... See, I can go off an unrelated tangent, as well). "Unethical hacker" might accomplish your goals a bit better, but even then, the definitions used by the general populace and, say, the jargon dictionary are sufficiently different for even that to be a bad replacement for the word "cracker" or "computer criminal" or "criminal" or "identity thief" or what have you.
You can opine on how much today's language and its idiosyncrasies and how it would be better if XX were true. It won't really help change language though. And people you tell not to use the word "hacker" in that sense with you may remember not to use that word in that sense with you, but usually they'll be intelligent enough to gauge whether the person they're talking to is going to know (or care) about the distinction; if not, it's possibly a lot easier to just use "hacker" in the way the "mass media" uses it, since the other party is going to know immediately what is meant. Note that only "ethical hackers" really care about the distinction, and even then only a subset of them. The rest of the populace, more often than not, just doesn't.
And if that causes problems for webmasters, Thompson says, so be it. "I don't want to sound flip about this, but if you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs."
From the linked article in the original submission. That is enough of a supporting statement for the statement given.
Fuck them, they deserve everything they're getting. If you don't want to be a good net citizen, you should not get the benefit of the doubt.
Actually, Sony does do small patches. Check the history for the frequency of these updates if you don't believe me. Or do you honestly believe that small changes to the system can't have disastrous effects?
First of all, do you /KNOW/ that Sony is /just/ changing the parts it says it is changing ? No, you do not.
Or say a protocol was change. Do you know exactly was changed? Because, I'm calling bullshit on what you're saying. That is unless you can show your insider knowledge and prove to me that this change is unnecessarily preventing on-line play.
Ah, but it works the other way around too. Show me why that particular protocol change was necessary and no backward compatibility was possible. Hint : DRM updates do not count, I don't give a rats ass about it on my legally bought, legally used console with legally owned games that suddenly refuses to boot without a harddrive wipe.
Yah, because fixing errors in the OS is a bad idea. Get a clue.
You both have a point. Your opponent is not clueless.
We're *far* beyond the 8-bit NES that didn't have an OS. We're in an age where consoles are basically specialised computers. Computers that have an OS which is software, which will have bugs that need to be fixed from time to time. Computers that will have features added.
This depends ENTIRELY on your development model. You can do software updates without flashing the firmware. You can design the firmware with a lot more stringent test procedures, and possibly less to do, moving the patchables onto the harddisk.
But, that's ok. We don't need an evolving set of features or improvements on features or increased stability or... We'll just go back to the old model of a static stagnant system reducing the systems lifespan increasing costs for everyone.
Uhm. My NES still works fine. You sometimes need to clean the contacts, but that's a mechanical necessity. My SNES also works fine, as do my GameGear, my Master System, my Genesis, my Jaguar, my 32X, my C64, my Amiga 500, my Amiga 2000, my Amiga CD32, my Sony Playstation, my Dreamcast, and countless others of my consoles. Your "lifespan" argument is complete and utter bullshit.
The primary reason for non-optional firmware upgrades required for online play is updates to the various DRM and copy protection schemes. Of course Sony knows this is a futile battle, and of course the ones being harmed by this policy are primarily paying customers who do not use pirated software -- see the case in point.
The meaning has been maligned because that's how the mass media uses it and no one corrects them on it.
Blaming the "mass media" is not going to help, they are not in a grand conspiracy to steal your word. They use the word the way it is known to their reader/viewership, and it's not their "fault" the word has that meaning.
Look at the etymology of "hack".
I have, have you?
Yes, have you ?
The Online Etymology Dictionary is pretty good, read the second (2) entry particularly.
Cute. You obviously missed the lines before that which equate it with "prostitute" (definite negative connotations), "hack writer" as in somebody who will write /anything/ for hire (indicating the utter lack of morals). Yes, it also lists the meaning you assign to the word as allegedly being coined at MIT in 1976 and later morphing into the meaning you do not like (1983, incidentally the year "War Games" got released); but to claim that "hack" did not have it coming given its meaning in other contexts is quite interesting.
As used with writers "hack" dates back to 1749, whereas with criminals using computers it first appears in 1984. It's ethical meaning was used years before then.
Like prostitute, hack writer, etc ? Yes, those are ethical terms. Right.
I first came across the ethical meaning in the mid to late 1970s in magazines like "Byte: The small and micro systems journal" magazine. My fav writers in "Byte" was Steve Ciarcia who wrote the column "Circuit Cellar" which became it's own magazine and Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor".
I still come across this meaning when talking to CS people and people in certain communities, and I have no problem with accepting it there as a form of slang in those circles. It is not, however, the generally accepted definition of the word being used there, and everybody using it that way, without fail, knows it. It's akin to using "tree" when talking to computer scientists or programmers. Quite often the first thing they'll think about is a data structure, not something barkish with real-life leaves. There are countless other words that carry a different meaning when used in smaller circles or professions, "hack" and "hacker" are no different. The only real distinction that word has it that it has an inordinately high likelihood of being misunderstood without context; a hacker describing their latest cool hack may elicit a member of the general public to stamp them as an unethical criminal, especially if they do not have enough knowledge of the field the hack is in to properly evaluate what the hack actually does ("He's doing something illegal with computers, I'm sure of it !").
Then again other words have had the same thing done to them, like "hack" and "hacker". Whereas a hack used to mean something creative and a hacker was someone who hacked, and writers were hacks too, today they are used for crimes and criminals. As used with computers a hacker follows the Hacker ethic.
Bad, bad example. No matter how often "ethical hackers" claim the word for themselves or try to give it a meaning contrary to what the general populace believes the word to mean, it still carries that meaning. A hack is a talentless idiot, a hacker is somebody who cracks computers. Look at the etymology of "hack". It's got NOTHING to do with what you claim it once did. Hell, use of it in the pejorative goes back to the 80s.
Sure, the definition of "hack" and "hacker" that some folks at MIT really like(d) is cutesy and quirky, but they didn't coin the words and they had negative connotations for, quite literally, hundreds of years.
Nowhere did I advocate not punishing him or that there should be no consequences; however, consequences that ruin the rest of your life for a stupid mistake are not the answer. For all YOU know, this is the first run-in with this kind of stuff this guy had.
I put that in caps because it is important.
Society's trust in those records is misplaced if they are trivial to alter electronically. In this case he got caught, good thing. Question is, how many such cases slip by ? If the number is nonzero, then the trust is misplaced.
While 38 years is certainly harsh, that is criminal behavior. There should be punishment, no doubt. Putting the guy into a jail for most of his adult life is cruel, unusual, and unwarranted. Our education system is far from perfect but guys like this certainly do not help make it better. And guys like this are not SUPPOSED to help make it better. They are the ones that should get educated by the system. It's not their responsibility to make it better. Sure, it helps if the students are all nice and pretty and have no problems whatsoever in any area of their life, but they do. And the education system does its part to help those students get better. Or it should. I would much rather that he applied himself to do well in school and set a good example of what good behavior, studying, and hard work can do when working with the grain, not against it. Good for you. So are you saying that any and all "problem kid" should be expelled from school at the earliest opportunity ? That's the ultimate resolution of this problemUp until the Windows System Administrator at the school (who got that title 'cause he knew how to install Windows on a computer, or got lucky enought to succeed anyway) called the FBI ('cause they obviously are the ones to call with this newfangled cyberterrorism stuff), who got a subpoena for the "anonymous" email service provider's logs (they all keep logs), got your IP (you were not smart enough to use TOR in 8th grade), traced it to your home, and called SWAT on your ass since you are obviously a cyberterrorist out to hurt the children at that school. After all, you threatened them by listing their weaknesses. That's like sending your teacher a detailed list of his or her whereabouts throughout the day and the angles he can be seen from unnoticed. At least to scared-of-terrorists-administrators-who-want-to-cover-their-asses it is.
Yeah, it's a whole lot better to keep quiet. Admittedly the above is just one of several outcomes, but it is quite easily a possible one given the proficiency-level of many of the involved parties. Other outcomes include getting computer access revoked for the remainder of your time in school, detention, disciplinary action, expulsion, "permanent record", black marks on your transcript, etc. ... While one would like to believe that a well-meaning student trying to notify the powers-that-be of a serious (or not so much) security hole would be thanked and sent on his/her way, that's often not the case. Your chances are better if you have an adult advocate beyond reproach (say, a teacher), but that level of trust is not easy to build.