All these "cheat-spotting" services don't replace a good teacher. A good teacher will spot a phoney a mile away, a lazy one won't. The problem is that too many teachers don't give a shit - they "teach to the book" or "teach to the test", rather than imparting real knowledge.
Also, you fail in your argument because you forget that the schools and universities are there to provide a service that they are being paid to provide. The students and/or the students parents, are the clients. If I'm paying tuition or otherwise funding "the system", I have a say in how it runs. And that includes the right to have copyrights respected.
If you want to better the education system, first fix the problem with the teachers, most of whom suck.
Smaller class sizes aren't the answer - they're part of the problem. By diluting the quality of teachers (a good teacher can handle 30 kids no problem - I've done it) we're just making things worse. A teacher who can't make the class interesting to the average student should be fired - they're doing more harm than no teacher at all.
Someone with a hotmail address (windowsnyder@hotmail.com) as a security expert on XP? No wonder Windows is broken. My own tests show that more than 1% of all hotmail addresses are down temporarily on any particular day.
So, maybe they do, maybe they don't... but you can't tell just from a video.
The JavaScript issue appears to be a real vulnerability, Window Snyder, Mozilla's security chief, said after watching a video of the presentation Saturday night.
Also, what sort of drugs do you have to be on to name your kid "Window"? Brings to mind Frank Zappa naming his kid "Moon Unit".
Sun's Solaris is based on BSD and they have already bought a get out of jail free card for any Unix V pollution,
Actually, no... if it turns out that SCO was in breech, then they didn't have the right to sell a unix license to Sun for $8m. So Sun has an invalid license... but they can always sue SCO (and SCO's directors) for damages.
In a year it'll probably be easier to list the big-name players who AREN'T suing SCO (or at least have filed a claim against their bankruptcy).
I wasn't what type of bank? The type of bank that handles large sums of other peoples' money?
I wrote:
which you would have known if you had read the article.
I read the article, and I just looked at it again. I still don't see what you mean.
No, it doesn't handle "other people's" money. You can't open an account there. Its the central bank for New Zealand http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/
The opening phrase of the article: " A man who accessed the Reserve Bank's telephone systems" should have been sufficient. Like the Federal Reserve in the US, it sets monetary policy, etc., but you can't apply there for a car loan or a mortgage.
People should be trying to break into these security systems every day, and they should be failing most of the time. I would be much more trusting of a bank that encourages anyone to test their information security than one that tries to hide their security flaws using the legal system.
When it comes to information systems, it's much like cryptography. Do you trust the algorithms that have been attacked countless times and found to be secure, or the algorithms that have never been attacked?
So by the same logic we should encourage the local mob to send a couple of boys around to break a few of your bones or smashing a few windows, testing your "personal security" and "need for protection". After all, its "okay" to attack unprotected systems, even if its illegal...
The guy should have been sent to jail, just like anyone else who tries to run any sort of "protection racket"... which is what this guy was doing, the implied threat being "I could leak this information."
He was war-dialing their phone lines, trying to get into peoples voice mail boxes by entering easy passwords, like 111 or 12345 or the person's birthday.
Would you like someone doing that to you? Would you consider that the same as an access point with NO password?
Its not the same as an open wap with no password - the voice mailboxes had passwords, and they weren't broadcasting their existence to the whole world.
Since he's tried to get money by conning the bank, he's STILL a con. Nosing around uninvited and then crying "wolf", and hoping to get paid for it? He's not just a con - he's a stupid con.
He wasn't owed anything for the "time he spent." Do you know what he was doing? He was calling their phone number, dialing an extension, then, if the person didn't answer, entering random number sequences to access their voice mail. And he wants to get PAID for this? Fuck off.
This guy's a ucktard who deserves to be banned from ever using either a computer or a phone for the next 5 years. We had one case here where a guy was doing that to the local police, and tried to claim he was "just testing their system."
He got fined for it, did it again, and got jail. This is not "security consulting." This is a public nuisance.
It sounds more like "have as many / few meetings as it takes to do the job."
At different points in a project, you need more meetings than at other points (and different types of meetings).
And yes, I'm jealous, darnit! I've been in places where there is a meeting every day, and nothing gets done (except preparing for meetings), and where there are NO meetings every week, and nothing (at least nothing on target) gets done. Both suck.
There *was* a demand for money. Backed up with the implied threat that "your system is vulnerable." It WAS an attempt at extorting money. The judge was an idiot.
On any phone system, there are going to be users with easy passwords and default passwords that didn't get changed, or got reset during maintenance.
This doesn't give him the right to go around playing detective unasked, then trying to bill them for it.
How about if someone shows up at your house unasked, and tells you they inspected it, and you need to do the following work, and by the way, their bill for the unwanted "inspection" is $300.00? I'd call the cops and nail the con artist for trespassing.
The judge was an idiot - what this guy did was just a new twist on the old "send them a bill and hope they pay at" scam.
A man who accessed the Reserve Bank's telephone systems to find security weak spots then billed the bank for his unsolicited services told the Wellington District Court he was surprised when police questioned him about his actions.
Gerasimos Macridis, 39, a researcher, represented himself in court before Judge Ian Mill.
Macridis pleaded guilty to one charge of intentionally accessing a computer system knowing he was not authorised to do so.
Police prosecutor Colin McGilivray told the court Macridis had telephoned the Reserve Bank on May 30, introducing himself as a security consultant.
He outlined problems with the bank's telephone system, then requested payment for providing the information. He also contacted Telecom and asked for payment, outlining testing he had conducted, vulnerabilities he had found and ways these could be fixed.
This is the same sort of scam that boiler-room ops do all the time - sending bills for unsolicited ad space in non-existent magazines, etc.
The guy is scum. The judge was out to lunch on this one.
Lets put it in terms slashdotters can understand... someone does a pen test of your web site, and sends you a description of what they found, plus a bill for their unsolicited:advice"... even though you didn't ask them to try to do any penetration testing and you never heard of them before...
Or someone tries to break into your house, then sends you a description of all the "security weaknesses" they found, plus a bill for their time.
Just because its a phone system doesn't make it any less an attempted con job.
If you don't register, you're only entitled to ACTUAL damages. If you spend the $45, you get to claim statutory damages (which you don't have to prove). That's where the RIAA gets off asking $150,000.00 per song.
This is what he said to the American public on TV on January 17th, 1998:
Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people."
Then he had to admit he had misled the public on August 7th, after Lewinsky produced the dress with the semen.
In his deposition. he had said that he didn't believe he had been alone with her at any time. So, was this some sort of public orgy?
Also, oral sex WAS covered in the definitions of sex:
"For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in sexual relations when the person knowingly engages in or causes:
Contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person;
Contact between any part of the person's body or an object and the genitals or anus of another person; or
Contact between the genitals or anus of the person and any part of another person's body.
Contact means intentional touching, either directly or through clothing."
Definition 1 would include any contact with Clinton's own genitals ("any person" includes Clinton) for the purpose of sexual gratification. Oral sex included. Genital contact + gratification of sexual desires == stain on dress. He lied. His lies lowered th bar for the presidency so that Bush can pull the crap he's pulling now.
As for whether anyone and everyone else would lie in a similar situation, a lot of people don't. They 'fess up to it, and either try to fix the problems that gave rise to their adultery, or give their partner a divorce.
This isn't a new phenomena... the Kennedys were known to have had a few bed-hopping incidents. It seems to be mostly a Democrat problem (teh Republicans are too busy screwing the whole country, perhaps).
The problems with the Razr are hardware problems, not software problems. People who bought the initial production run, before it became so cheap that it seems everyone has one, aren't complaining about it breking all the time, locking up, or anything else.
Windows will never be a quality product. There was a time when it could have happened (if the DoJ had split Microsoft into 3 or more business units), but that time is safely past.
They've reached the end of the road. The "roadmap" for beyond Vista is a joke - it actually makes the underlying OS irrelevant, which sort of boxes Microsoft into a corner... just like Vista doesn't bring anything new to the table over and above what XP already offers.
Microsoft is going to have to face the truth - operating systems are commodities. Most people don't care about the OS. They just want to surf the net, check their email, play some games, write some letters, do some spreadsheets, maybe write some code, and then turn the machine off until the next time.
The net wasn't even on Microsoft's radar when Win95 came out - and that was the last truly hyped OS. Those days are gone. They're never coming back. And this is a good thing for consumers.
I think its not so much "kernel-level drivers" but that Windows, unlike the *nixes, absolutely requires graphics mode.
If your X server craps out, you can just restart it, w/o having to reboot. Or try a different module. Or you can work from a console. The only option under Windows is to reboot (if it doesn't just halt by itself).
Would you want your car, your cell phone, your landline, your dvd player, your television, your monitor, your lcd display, your printer, your scanner, your microwave, your coffee maker, your watch, your calculator, and everything else running code that was as crappy as Microsofts "Gold Master", never mind RC?
Poster replied:
None of the software in any of those devices is even remotely as close to the level of complexity and functionality of Windows (or any other general purpose OS, for that matter).
The "quality" of Windows is on par with its contemporaries. That's all that matters in such a comparison.
The "quality" of Windows is far below that of its contemporaries.
And my cell phone can do more out of the box than Windows can. Windows can't record 8 hours of video without installing 3rd party software. Windows can't make phone calls without installing 3rd party software. Windows can't even run java apps without you dowloading and installing 3rd party software - but my cell phone does all this, and voice recognition, and web browsing, IMing, texting, email, etc., right out of the box. And it does it with only 12 megs of ram and a half-gig of chip storage.
... except they can't even say you violated some "honor code" without first admitting that they wilfully violated your copyright. And their "evidence, because its the fruits of an illegal act... I don't think it would buy them much sympathy from a civil trial looking to collect damages.
t looks like implied student consent attained from the teacher & institution is their argument, and in fact, they assume this consent has been attained in their contract with the institution. If not, they'll turn a legal argument against the teacher and school district. Be prepared to sue your college/school at the same time as Turnitin.
The "implied consent" doesn't hold water. There is no "implied consent." Either there is permission to make copies or their isn't. Its up to Turnitin.com to make sure they have the consent before they copy it... Absent any permisson to copy, the default is you have NO right to copy.
A PC has to run numerous types of independently-created software on numerous types of independently-created hardware, juggling between multiple actions running at the same time, with an infinitely-configurable I/O scheme (a screen/KB/mouse as opposed to, say, a button panel).
So how come everyone else manages to do it better and more profesionally than Microsoft?
Slashdot Mirror
Get over it - the schools are in the wrog here.
All these "cheat-spotting" services don't replace a good teacher. A good teacher will spot a phoney a mile away, a lazy one won't. The problem is that too many teachers don't give a shit - they "teach to the book" or "teach to the test", rather than imparting real knowledge.
Also, you fail in your argument because you forget that the schools and universities are there to provide a service that they are being paid to provide. The students and/or the students parents, are the clients. If I'm paying tuition or otherwise funding "the system", I have a say in how it runs. And that includes the right to have copyrights respected.
If you want to better the education system, first fix the problem with the teachers, most of whom suck.
Smaller class sizes aren't the answer - they're part of the problem. By diluting the quality of teachers (a good teacher can handle 30 kids no problem - I've done it) we're just making things worse. A teacher who can't make the class interesting to the average student should be fired - they're doing more harm than no teacher at all.
No, I commented on it too. Here's some food for thought:
http://www.matasano.com/log/window-snyder
http://www.blogger.com/profile/13043301
Someone with a hotmail address (windowsnyder@hotmail.com) as a security expert on XP? No wonder Windows is broken. My own tests show that more than 1% of all hotmail addresses are down temporarily on any particular day.
No, they didn't have a live exploit. The original article is here http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6121608.html, not the site linked to by slashdot.
All they had was a video ... no code to display.
So, maybe they do, maybe they don't ... but you can't tell just from a video.
Also, what sort of drugs do you have to be on to name your kid "Window"? Brings to mind Frank Zappa naming his kid "Moon Unit".
Actually, no ... if it turns out that SCO was in breech, then they didn't have the right to sell a unix license to Sun for $8m. So Sun has an invalid license ... but they can always sue SCO (and SCO's directors) for damages.
In a year it'll probably be easier to list the big-name players who AREN'T suing SCO (or at least have filed a claim against their bankruptcy).
I wrote:
Poster replied:
I wrote:
I read the article, and I just looked at it again. I still don't see what you mean.
No, it doesn't handle "other people's" money. You can't open an account there. Its the central bank for New Zealand http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/
The opening phrase of the article: " A man who accessed the Reserve Bank's telephone systems" should have been sufficient. Like the Federal Reserve in the US, it sets monetary policy, etc., but you can't apply there for a car loan or a mortgage.
So by the same logic we should encourage the local mob to send a couple of boys around to break a few of your bones or smashing a few windows, testing your "personal security" and "need for protection". After all, its "okay" to attack unprotected systems, even if its illegal ...
The guy should have been sent to jail, just like anyone else who tries to run any sort of "protection racket" ... which is what this guy was doing, the implied threat being "I could leak this information."
He was war-dialing their phone lines, trying to get into peoples voice mail boxes by entering easy passwords, like 111 or 12345 or the person's birthday.
Would you like someone doing that to you? Would you consider that the same as an access point with NO password?
Its not the same as an open wap with no password - the voice mailboxes had passwords, and they weren't broadcasting their existence to the whole world.
Since he's tried to get money by conning the bank, he's STILL a con. Nosing around uninvited and then crying "wolf", and hoping to get paid for it? He's not just a con - he's a stupid con.
He wasn't owed anything for the "time he spent." Do you know what he was doing? He was calling their phone number, dialing an extension, then, if the person didn't answer, entering random number sequences to access their voice mail. And he wants to get PAID for this? Fuck off.
This guy's a ucktard who deserves to be banned from ever using either a computer or a phone for the next 5 years. We had one case here where a guy was doing that to the local police, and tried to claim he was "just testing their system."
He got fined for it, did it again, and got jail. This is not "security consulting." This is a public nuisance.
Give it up. This wasn't that type of bank - which you would have known if you had read the article.
It was a phone system. How would you like someone else listening to your voice mail because your password was 1-2-3-4-5?
It sounds more like "have as many / few meetings as it takes to do the job."
At different points in a project, you need more meetings than at other points (and different types of meetings).
And yes, I'm jealous, darnit! I've been in places where there is a meeting every day, and nothing gets done (except preparing for meetings), and where there are NO meetings every week, and nothing (at least nothing on target) gets done. Both suck.
No, the real argument is "don't try to bullshit people into paying for something they didn't ask for in the first place."
He isn't a researcher ... If you had read the article, you'd have known he's an ex-con. Obviously his ethical compass is still bent.
There *was* a demand for money. Backed up with the implied threat that "your system is vulnerable." It WAS an attempt at extorting money. The judge was an idiot.
He didn't have a "sure way of making money."
On any phone system, there are going to be users with easy passwords and default passwords that didn't get changed, or got reset during maintenance.
This doesn't give him the right to go around playing detective unasked, then trying to bill them for it.
How about if someone shows up at your house unasked, and tells you they inspected it, and you need to do the following work, and by the way, their bill for the unwanted "inspection" is $300.00? I'd call the cops and nail the con artist for trespassing.
The judge was an idiot - what this guy did was just a new twist on the old "send them a bill and hope they pay at" scam.
This is the same sort of scam that boiler-room ops do all the time - sending bills for unsolicited ad space in non-existent magazines, etc.
The guy is scum. The judge was out to lunch on this one.
Lets put it in terms slashdotters can understand ... someone does a pen test of your web site, and sends you a description of what they found, plus a bill for their unsolicited :advice" ... even though you didn't ask them to try to do any penetration testing and you never heard of them before ...
Or someone tries to break into your house, then sends you a description of all the "security weaknesses" they found, plus a bill for their time.
Just because its a phone system doesn't make it any less an attempted con job.
Their "fixed" bill has come unfixed several times so far.
Twice they've had to throw another $5 million into the kitty for "expenses, experts, etc."
Its in their regulatory filings, along with "the future of the company is uncertain should we not prevail".
If you don't register, you're only entitled to ACTUAL damages. If you spend the $45, you get to claim statutory damages (which you don't have to prove). That's where the RIAA gets off asking $150,000.00 per song.
This is what he said to the American public on TV on January 17th, 1998:
Then he had to admit he had misled the public on August 7th, after Lewinsky produced the dress with the semen.
In his deposition. he had said that he didn't believe he had been alone with her at any time. So, was this some sort of public orgy?
Also, oral sex WAS covered in the definitions of sex:
Definition 1 would include any contact with Clinton's own genitals ("any person" includes Clinton) for the purpose of sexual gratification. Oral sex included. Genital contact + gratification of sexual desires == stain on dress. He lied. His lies lowered th bar for the presidency so that Bush can pull the crap he's pulling now.As for whether anyone and everyone else would lie in a similar situation, a lot of people don't. They 'fess up to it, and either try to fix the problems that gave rise to their adultery, or give their partner a divorce.
This isn't a new phenomena ... the Kennedys were known to have had a few bed-hopping incidents. It seems to be mostly a Democrat problem (teh Republicans are too busy screwing the whole country, perhaps).
The problems with the Razr are hardware problems, not software problems. People who bought the initial production run, before it became so cheap that it seems everyone has one, aren't complaining about it breking all the time, locking up, or anything else.
Windows will never be a quality product. There was a time when it could have happened (if the DoJ had split Microsoft into 3 or more business units), but that time is safely past.
They've reached the end of the road. The "roadmap" for beyond Vista is a joke - it actually makes the underlying OS irrelevant, which sort of boxes Microsoft into a corner ... just like Vista doesn't bring anything new to the table over and above what XP already offers.
Microsoft is going to have to face the truth - operating systems are commodities. Most people don't care about the OS. They just want to surf the net, check their email, play some games, write some letters, do some spreadsheets, maybe write some code, and then turn the machine off until the next time.
The net wasn't even on Microsoft's radar when Win95 came out - and that was the last truly hyped OS. Those days are gone. They're never coming back. And this is a good thing for consumers.
I think its not so much "kernel-level drivers" but that Windows, unlike the *nixes, absolutely requires graphics mode.
If your X server craps out, you can just restart it, w/o having to reboot. Or try a different module. Or you can work from a console. The only option under Windows is to reboot (if it doesn't just halt by itself).
I wrote:
Poster replied:The "quality" of Windows is far below that of its contemporaries.
And my cell phone can do more out of the box than Windows can. Windows can't record 8 hours of video without installing 3rd party software. Windows can't make phone calls without installing 3rd party software. Windows can't even run java apps without you dowloading and installing 3rd party software - but my cell phone does all this, and voice recognition, and web browsing, IMing, texting, email, etc., right out of the box. And it does it with only 12 megs of ram and a half-gig of chip storage.
... except they can't even say you violated some "honor code" without first admitting that they wilfully violated your copyright. And their "evidence, because its the fruits of an illegal act ... I don't think it would buy them much sympathy from a civil trial looking to collect damages.
t looks like implied student consent attained from the teacher & institution is their argument, and in fact, they assume this consent has been attained in their contract with the institution. If not, they'll turn a legal argument against the teacher and school district. Be prepared to sue your college/school at the same time as Turnitin.
The "implied consent" doesn't hold water. There is no "implied consent." Either there is permission to make copies or their isn't. Its up to Turnitin.com to make sure they have the consent before they copy it ... Absent any permisson to copy, the default is you have NO right to copy.
So the 4 months is only for you to receive the paperwork. Its effective immediately you hand over the $$$.
So how come everyone else manages to do it better and more profesionally than Microsoft?