> There is no legitimate reason a PVR shouldn't be able to do everything > my 10-year old VCR can do. Hardware that I purchase and own should not > conspire against me.
That's exactly my argument. My TiVo is like having a VCR programmed to record my shows, but I have a limited stack of VHS tapes to use. If I was using a VCR, or DVD recorder (now commonly available), I could not only have the recording space of my TiVo, I could have VHS or DVD copies of every episode.
If they don't want people recording on TiVo's, they need to continue on and outlaw VCR's, DVD recorders, video capture cards, etc, etc.. They could just push us back to no broadcast television, and video works are only presented in theaters. But, I want my nickle bucket of popcorn.
Ahhh, the good ol' days, when talkies had just started coming into the mainstream, and newsreels.
Damn technology, making things better, faster, and easier. Forget comfort, or making customers happy.
Well, TiVo has other great stuff to it. Being able to pause a live show, or rewind to hear what someone babbled is great. But still, sometimes the actors don't do well, and we (me and my GF) keep asking each other "what did he say". After rewinding 3 times, if we don't get it we give up.
I think one of the best parts (argued a lot online) is the TiVo picks. Based on what you've watched in the past, and the score that you've given shows, it picks other shows to record. It only uses empty space on the drive (which I have a lot of), and will never override your other recordings. I've actually seen some great movies that I've never heard of because of it. It's kind of like having a really great guy working at the video store, who can hand you movies based on what you watched before and said you liked, but since it's pulling it from the channels that you're already paying for, you aren't paying the extra rental fees.
Well, more like for years I watched crap, now I can watch a better quality of crap on my own schedule.:)
Speaking of the crap I watch, one of my shows comes on in two hours. I'm still at work, and won't be home for 4 hours. I'll watch it sometime after midnight.
Not that the story is wrong, but the idea is bullshit.
I have a TiVo and I upgraded it with a 140Gb drive, so I get over 100hrs of storage. I use it in exactly the way they should want someone to. I'm not a couch potato, I work for a living. There are shows I like to watch, but I usually don't have time to just sit down at watch when they're on. I usually start watching television around 2am. For years, this meant I watched crap. Now that I have a TiVo, I can watch good shows.
We'll use their example of '6 feet under'. I may not get a chance to watch it til a week later. Should I miss the episode because they decided to set an arbitrary limit to how long I can keep it stored? What if I'm out of town for work for a week? Can't I come home, and catch up on the episodes that I missed. Yes, this has happened more than once, and it's *REALLY* nice that I can do it.
I haven't seen any black market shops selling '6 feet under' episodes recorded with TiVo.
How about PPV movies? My girlfriend has watched movies, and recorded them (on the TiVo). I may sit down a week or two later, and watch that movie. Fair use. The household paid for it. Or more like, *I* paid for it. If we had been home at the same time, we would have watched together. So if this goes through, now she'll see the movie or show, and I'll be out of luck?
They're not afraid of piracy, they're looking at possible revenue that they're missing. They could possibly get an extra PPV viewing fee because I would possibly buy it twice. Well, that's wrong, I wouldn't. I won't pay twice, I just won't watch it til it comes out on HBO and I happen to be sitting there.
As for '6 feet under', I actually was into that show in the first few seasons. I didn't have a TiVo, but my schedule permitted me to be at home to watch it. At the time, I didn't own a TiVo. My work schedule changed, and I missed several episodes, and was lost about the story line when I tried to start watching again. If I had a TiVo then, I could have spent some time catching up on old episodes, and still been interested in the series. Now that's a show I simply don't watch. It's a waste of their broadcasting time, because I don't know what's happened previously.
Year 1: Relax and recover from campaign. Bring the family to the new mansion. Party with contributors.
Year 2: Contemplate doing work, or simply visit Camp David, play with his *nix GBA (ha, thought this was off-topic!)
Year 3: Do a few things (blow something up), start working on campaign
Year 4: Brag about the previous three years, shake babies, kiss constituents hands.
Year 4.5: Talk bad about the opponent, read uncensored news and wonder why people hate him, get drunk frequently at "fund raisers", travel the country on the taxpayers money, fly around in his own private 747-200B
Year 4.9: Celebrate winning, or start packing up his personal effects from the Whitehouse and Camp David.
It's kind of funny, every reply to my message agreed with what I was saying. I don't want to be running down the street late for something, and get arrested based on the fact that I was running away from a crime scene I didn't know about.
CCTV does have it's uses though. A friend of mine installed a system at his store for his own use. It was initilly installed because the store had been robbed at gunpoint several times. It never did catch any robbers. He started watching employees from home though. He watch employees wandering in and out of the store, when they were suppose to be working, which was useful to get them to actually work.
The best instance of CCTV helping was at a club. The same store owner had a problem with what seemed to be a shortage of funds from the cover charge at the door. It always seemed a few hundred dollars short. They put a camera over the box, not to watch customers, but to watch the staff working the door. Through the night, he watched the girl working the door putting money in her clothes. Ah, ha! That's where the money is going. The next day, she was shown the tape, asked if she wanted to comment. Her comment was "You weren't paying me enough." (she was well paid). So, they simply told her, never come back to the store, even as a customer.
I feel that's a reasonable use of cameras. They already suspected a crime (stealing from the club), they put in cameras, recorded the act, and then had evidence of the act.
Thinking back on that particular incident, I would stand there and talk to her sometimes, when the door wasn't busy. She asked me to not hang around, because "the boss said no one should be here." I didn't question it then, but I mentioned it to the boss afterwards. He told me he hadn't said any such thing. She knew that I would have gone directly back to the boss, and had her fired on the spot if I had seen it. He's a good friend of mine, so I wouldn't want to see anyone stealing from him. In the end, having a taped witness was better than me seeing it.
BUT!
If the camera hadn't seen her actually putting the money in her clothes, and only had recorded who had come in and out of the booth, they could have fingered any other employee who had gone into the booth, or even me, who had worked the door on occasion, to cover for breaks. Really, if you had a choice between the friend of 5 years, or the good employee of 7 years, who would get fingered for the theft?
If a crime happens somewhere close to where you are, and you match the vauge description given by witnesses to that crime? Then you are guilty. At very least, you'll be explaining why you were there, and trying to explain that you didn't do the crime.
When I was in high school, a teacher did an exercise with us. A person walked into the classroom screaming, and "hit" the teacher (a fake punch). The teacher fell down, and the guy ran out of the room. The teacher then stood up and said, "Now write down what you just saw, including a description of the other guy". There were 30 students in the classroom, and none of them wrote an accurate description of him. To prove the point, the guy came back in, and everyone read their descriptions of him to him.
Most people are terrible witnesses, unless they are focused on details rather than reacting to the situation. Almost nobody focuses on details of the person.
Most people don't want to know their neighbors. I've had one neighbor that was interesting, in all the places I've lived. Generally, the people I end up living by, I don't want to have anything to do with.
It's better to have friends that aren't next door. It's a lot easier to avoid them, when you realize that they're psychopathic freaks. Or in their demented minds, they think you are.:)
It's really worth driving a few miles to visit friends, rather than having the uncomfortable moment of feeling like you have to say something to the freak next door, every time you see them outside.
I tried every neighborhood I've lived in, in the last few years. Nothing. I did try 10011, and found two.:)
I made one, for shits and giggles, but knowing my neighbors (the little bit that I do), none of them would read Slashdot, and probably wouldn't run across that site.
The biggest difference would be that I'm no Robin Hood.. Well, I would be, but I know the powers that be are stronger than the population saying "Thanks Robin Hacker!". Their thanks would be sent to my 4'x4' cell in Cuba.
An interesting hack would be to distribute the entire government budget to every back account in America, inversely by the balance.
The guy with a $100 balance would score several thousand.
The guy with $99,999 would score $0.01.:)
Legal Note: I don't advocate doing this, or any illegal funds transactions at all, and it definately won't be me doing it, I don't like prison that much.
I know that technologies exist to make the transfers secure, but it still seems like a *STUPID* idea.
An internet-like network, sure.. But having intra-bank transfers going over the same networks that us common folks use is a bad idea. We'll hear about the banks going offline, becuase someone picked the wrong IP to DDoS. There's people out there with mad bandwidth. I have 3Gb available myself. If I were to stop all the servers, and fill up those lines with garbage traffic going towards the bank's IP's, I could keep a bank down.. Well, down for long enough til my provider called the secret service, and I found myself in a hood and shackles in Cuba.
They really should be on their own network. But hey, if they're believers in security through obscurity, let 'em fuck up.
If you weren't just ignoring the fact that people were attempting, you could have already blocked them. And your logs shouldn't be kept on the same host.
Good advice. Just ignore that script kiddies are trying stuff. Until one of them gets a 0-day exploit, roots one of your critical machines, and wipes out all your data.
We actively block viruses at the mail server, and our logs show over 20k came towards us yesterday. Want to parse my logs and report the infected machines?:)
And yes, we don't send the automagic "We received a virus" notices. Those are just plain annoying considering most headers are faked.
I've received some really nasty Emails over the years from winners who just installed some firewall on their home machine, and wonder why we're sending packets to him from our port 80 to some high port on his machine. They're all demanding that we stop or they'll sue, blah, blah, blah.
I write a real friendly note back saying "sir, you were visiting a porn site at http://example.com. from which you detected the data coming back to you exactly as you requested. yada, yada, yada"
Once in a while our provider will get a new person in their abuse department, and forward those over. I kindly remind them to go back to their supervisor and ask them exactly what this traffic would mean. Then I write them a friendly letter explaining the basics of the Internet.:)
They are generally good about sending us only real problems, which are usually about sublet IP blocks. I either pass it on to their sales rep, or call them myself. Most customers I've delt with are very friendly about it.
We did have a federal agent show up in our office one day, about a hacking attempt from one of our networks (a sublet line). I called the sales rep, got the customer on the line, and they were already aware of it. It was an old unpatched machine, that they had taken offline a few days prior because they had already found it was broken into. They were still examining it, and offered to hold onto the drive for the investivator. I really like good customers.
The "Save as..." question is easy. Your drive was busy or is having a problem, you went into a directory with too much stuff in it, or a number of related things.
Or, in the case of my girlfriend's XP machine, it did it just because.:)
She got really upset a few days ago. Her printer disappeared. No real reason for it, it just stopped printing. It said it was there, it would self-test from the button, it just wouldn't do anything from the PC. She called me at work, so I told her to reboot. That usually fixed it before. This time, I had to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. WTF?
To add to the Pro-Linux spin of this site, I just did something *REALLY* cool. I downloaded clusterssh, and installed it on my Linux box. I have a bunch of servers to make the same change to, and a friend had sent me the link a few months ago. I just had windows open to 94 servers, and did the same change on every one of them simultaniously. I'd be afraid to have 94 (98 with a shell, cssh input box, browser, and email program) open on any Windows machine.
This has to be the best first post I've ever seen.:)
[Sarcasm On]
I just whipped out my credit card, and bought 10 SCO IP Licenses. We should all buy our licenses now, and avoid trouble with the BSA later.
By the way, I just got my patent for "electronic communication", and bought the patents for streaming media from Acacia. My fee is $10k per device (device defined as any individual component, including but not limited to telephone, cordless phone, modem, wireless network card, wireless network AP, router, switch, and cable), plus 10% of any company which may derive income from my patents. [Sarcasm Off]
I put money on a Microsoft backed shell company buying the licenses, and then revoking all of them. Linux is dead, everyone switch to Microsoft. hahaha
Probably. Anything's possible. At least that's what I tell my boss. He figured me out a while ago. I'll always say something can't be done, then 1/2 hour later, I'll go back into his office and tell him that it can be done and tell him how easy or hard it would be.:)
It shouldn't be all that hard (but a bit expensive) to do something silly like take a mirror (a really big freakin' mirror), and reflect the sun's light, and modulate the output at a 90 degree angle from the sun. Oh, that would look like a binary star (of sorts).
Or to have a satellite (moon size?), half black, half reflective or white, so it would appear to pulse as it rotated. That should be a clear indication that there's something here, when there's a regular pattern to the light. Oh wait, that's what a pulsar looks like. And back to the previous message, a pulsar may be a message saying "Hey, we're here, come look"
Slashdot Mirror
> There is no legitimate reason a PVR shouldn't be able to do everything
> my 10-year old VCR can do. Hardware that I purchase and own should not
> conspire against me.
That's exactly my argument. My TiVo is like having a VCR programmed to record my shows, but I have a limited stack of VHS tapes to use. If I was using a VCR, or DVD recorder (now commonly available), I could not only have the recording space of my TiVo, I could have VHS or DVD copies of every episode.
If they don't want people recording on TiVo's, they need to continue on and outlaw VCR's, DVD recorders, video capture cards, etc, etc.. They could just push us back to no broadcast television, and video works are only presented in theaters. But, I want my nickle bucket of popcorn.
Ahhh, the good ol' days, when talkies had just started coming into the mainstream, and newsreels.
Damn technology, making things better, faster, and easier. Forget comfort, or making customers happy.
After working from 10am to midnight, I like to sit down and relax for a little while before going to bed.
A couch potato would say "after watching TV from 10am to midnight, I get a few minutes work done before going to bed."
Well, TiVo has other great stuff to it. Being able to pause a live show, or rewind to hear what someone babbled is great. But still, sometimes the actors don't do well, and we (me and my GF) keep asking each other "what did he say". After rewinding 3 times, if we don't get it we give up.
I think one of the best parts (argued a lot online) is the TiVo picks. Based on what you've watched in the past, and the score that you've given shows, it picks other shows to record. It only uses empty space on the drive (which I have a lot of), and will never override your other recordings. I've actually seen some great movies that I've never heard of because of it. It's kind of like having a really great guy working at the video store, who can hand you movies based on what you watched before and said you liked, but since it's pulling it from the channels that you're already paying for, you aren't paying the extra rental fees.
Well, more like for years I watched crap, now I can watch a better quality of crap on my own schedule.
Speaking of the crap I watch, one of my shows comes on in two hours. I'm still at work, and won't be home for 4 hours. I'll watch it sometime after midnight.
That's crap!
Not that the story is wrong, but the idea is bullshit.
I have a TiVo and I upgraded it with a 140Gb drive, so I get over 100hrs of storage. I use it in exactly the way they should want someone to. I'm not a couch potato, I work for a living. There are shows I like to watch, but I usually don't have time to just sit down at watch when they're on. I usually start watching television around 2am. For years, this meant I watched crap. Now that I have a TiVo, I can watch good shows.
We'll use their example of '6 feet under'. I may not get a chance to watch it til a week later. Should I miss the episode because they decided to set an arbitrary limit to how long I can keep it stored? What if I'm out of town for work for a week? Can't I come home, and catch up on the episodes that I missed. Yes, this has happened more than once, and it's *REALLY* nice that I can do it.
I haven't seen any black market shops selling '6 feet under' episodes recorded with TiVo.
How about PPV movies? My girlfriend has watched movies, and recorded them (on the TiVo). I may sit down a week or two later, and watch that movie. Fair use. The household paid for it. Or more like, *I* paid for it. If we had been home at the same time, we would have watched together. So if this goes through, now she'll see the movie or show, and I'll be out of luck?
They're not afraid of piracy, they're looking at possible revenue that they're missing. They could possibly get an extra PPV viewing fee because I would possibly buy it twice. Well, that's wrong, I wouldn't. I won't pay twice, I just won't watch it til it comes out on HBO and I happen to be sitting there.
As for '6 feet under', I actually was into that show in the first few seasons. I didn't have a TiVo, but my schedule permitted me to be at home to watch it. At the time, I didn't own a TiVo. My work schedule changed, and I missed several episodes, and was lost about the story line when I tried to start watching again. If I had a TiVo then, I could have spent some time catching up on old episodes, and still been interested in the series. Now that's a show I simply don't watch. It's a waste of their broadcasting time, because I don't know what's happened previously.
Presidential Timeline:
Year 1: Relax and recover from campaign. Bring the family to the new mansion. Party with contributors.
Year 2: Contemplate doing work, or simply visit Camp David, play with his *nix GBA (ha, thought this was off-topic!)
Year 3: Do a few things (blow something up), start working on campaign
Year 4: Brag about the previous three years, shake babies, kiss constituents hands.
Year 4.5: Talk bad about the opponent, read uncensored news and wonder why people hate him, get drunk frequently at "fund raisers", travel the country on the taxpayers money, fly around in his own private 747-200B
Year 4.9: Celebrate winning, or start packing up his personal effects from the Whitehouse and Camp David.
It's kind of funny, every reply to my message agreed with what I was saying. I don't want to be running down the street late for something, and get arrested based on the fact that I was running away from a crime scene I didn't know about.
CCTV does have it's uses though. A friend of mine installed a system at his store for his own use. It was initilly installed because the store had been robbed at gunpoint several times. It never did catch any robbers. He started watching employees from home though. He watch employees wandering in and out of the store, when they were suppose to be working, which was useful to get them to actually work.
The best instance of CCTV helping was at a club. The same store owner had a problem with what seemed to be a shortage of funds from the cover charge at the door. It always seemed a few hundred dollars short. They put a camera over the box, not to watch customers, but to watch the staff working the door. Through the night, he watched the girl working the door putting money in her clothes. Ah, ha! That's where the money is going. The next day, she was shown the tape, asked if she wanted to comment. Her comment was "You weren't paying me enough." (she was well paid). So, they simply told her, never come back to the store, even as a customer.
I feel that's a reasonable use of cameras. They already suspected a crime (stealing from the club), they put in cameras, recorded the act, and then had evidence of the act.
Thinking back on that particular incident, I would stand there and talk to her sometimes, when the door wasn't busy. She asked me to not hang around, because "the boss said no one should be here." I didn't question it then, but I mentioned it to the boss afterwards. He told me he hadn't said any such thing. She knew that I would have gone directly back to the boss, and had her fired on the spot if I had seen it. He's a good friend of mine, so I wouldn't want to see anyone stealing from him. In the end, having a taped witness was better than me seeing it.
BUT!
If the camera hadn't seen her actually putting the money in her clothes, and only had recorded who had come in and out of the booth, they could have fingered any other employee who had gone into the booth, or even me, who had worked the door on occasion, to cover for breaks. Really, if you had a choice between the friend of 5 years, or the good employee of 7 years, who would get fingered for the theft?
If a crime happens somewhere close to where you are, and you match the vauge description given by witnesses to that crime? Then you are guilty. At very least, you'll be explaining why you were there, and trying to explain that you didn't do the crime.
When I was in high school, a teacher did an exercise with us. A person walked into the classroom screaming, and "hit" the teacher (a fake punch). The teacher fell down, and the guy ran out of the room. The teacher then stood up and said, "Now write down what you just saw, including a description of the other guy". There were 30 students in the classroom, and none of them wrote an accurate description of him. To prove the point, the guy came back in, and everyone read their descriptions of him to him.
Most people are terrible witnesses, unless they are focused on details rather than reacting to the situation. Almost nobody focuses on details of the person.
Exactly.
:)
Most people don't want to know their neighbors. I've had one neighbor that was interesting, in all the places I've lived. Generally, the people I end up living by, I don't want to have anything to do with.
It's better to have friends that aren't next door. It's a lot easier to avoid them, when you realize that they're psychopathic freaks. Or in their demented minds, they think you are.
It's really worth driving a few miles to visit friends, rather than having the uncomfortable moment of feeling like you have to say something to the freak next door, every time you see them outside.
I tried every neighborhood I've lived in, in the last few years. Nothing. I did try 10011, and found two.
I made one, for shits and giggles, but knowing my neighbors (the little bit that I do), none of them would read Slashdot, and probably wouldn't run across that site.
It's great, isn't it? We set up 3 AMD64 servers before I bought one for myself at home.
I can't imagine anyone wanting to criple themselves with Windows on such a great platform.
The biggest difference would be that I'm no Robin Hood.. Well, I would be, but I know the powers that be are stronger than the population saying "Thanks Robin Hacker!". Their thanks would be sent to my 4'x4' cell in Cuba.
Just imagine if they did something insane like making you call for permission to reinstall if you've changed some of your hardware.
Oh..
An interesting hack would be to distribute the entire government budget to every back account in America, inversely by the balance.
The guy with a $100 balance would score several thousand.
The guy with $99,999 would score $0.01.
Legal Note: I don't advocate doing this, or any illegal funds transactions at all, and it definately won't be me doing it, I don't like prison that much.
I know that technologies exist to make the transfers secure, but it still seems like a *STUPID* idea.
An internet-like network, sure.. But having intra-bank transfers going over the same networks that us common folks use is a bad idea. We'll hear about the banks going offline, becuase someone picked the wrong IP to DDoS. There's people out there with mad bandwidth. I have 3Gb available myself. If I were to stop all the servers, and fill up those lines with garbage traffic going towards the bank's IP's, I could keep a bank down.. Well, down for long enough til my provider called the secret service, and I found myself in a hood and shackles in Cuba.
They really should be on their own network. But hey, if they're believers in security through obscurity, let 'em fuck up.
Hehe.
Much unlike the trolls on here, I won't generally send people off to porn sites.
But if you'd like to, start at http://voyeurweb.com , and you can find references to our other sites.
If you weren't just ignoring the fact that people were attempting, you could have already blocked them. And your logs shouldn't be kept on the same host.
Good advice. Just ignore that script kiddies are trying stuff. Until one of them gets a 0-day exploit, roots one of your critical machines, and wipes out all your data.
Damn, you must have a lot of time on your hands..
We actively block viruses at the mail server, and our logs show over 20k came towards us yesterday. Want to parse my logs and report the infected machines?
And yes, we don't send the automagic "We received a virus" notices. Those are just plain annoying considering most headers are faked.
No shit..
I've received some really nasty Emails over the years from winners who just installed some firewall on their home machine, and wonder why we're sending packets to him from our port 80 to some high port on his machine. They're all demanding that we stop or they'll sue, blah, blah, blah.
I write a real friendly note back saying "sir, you were visiting a porn site at http://example.com. from which you detected the data coming back to you exactly as you requested. yada, yada, yada"
Once in a while our provider will get a new person in their abuse department, and forward those over. I kindly remind them to go back to their supervisor and ask them exactly what this traffic would mean. Then I write them a friendly letter explaining the basics of the Internet.
They are generally good about sending us only real problems, which are usually about sublet IP blocks. I either pass it on to their sales rep, or call them myself. Most customers I've delt with are very friendly about it.
We did have a federal agent show up in our office one day, about a hacking attempt from one of our networks (a sublet line). I called the sales rep, got the customer on the line, and they were already aware of it. It was an old unpatched machine, that they had taken offline a few days prior because they had already found it was broken into. They were still examining it, and offered to hold onto the drive for the investivator. I really like good customers.
The "Save as..." question is easy. Your drive was busy or is having a problem, you went into a directory with too much stuff in it, or a number of related things.
:)
Or, in the case of my girlfriend's XP machine, it did it just because.
She got really upset a few days ago. Her printer disappeared. No real reason for it, it just stopped printing. It said it was there, it would self-test from the button, it just wouldn't do anything from the PC. She called me at work, so I told her to reboot. That usually fixed it before. This time, I had to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. WTF?
To add to the Pro-Linux spin of this site, I just did something *REALLY* cool. I downloaded clusterssh, and installed it on my Linux box. I have a bunch of servers to make the same change to, and a friend had sent me the link a few months ago. I just had windows open to 94 servers, and did the same change on every one of them simultaniously. I'd be afraid to have 94 (98 with a shell, cssh input box, browser, and email program) open on any Windows machine.
This has to be the best first post I've ever seen. :)
[Sarcasm On]
I just whipped out my credit card, and bought 10 SCO IP Licenses. We should all buy our licenses now, and avoid trouble with the BSA later.
By the way, I just got my patent for "electronic communication", and bought the patents for streaming media from Acacia. My fee is $10k per device (device defined as any individual component, including but not limited to telephone, cordless phone, modem, wireless network card, wireless network AP, router, switch, and cable), plus 10% of any company which may derive income from my patents.
[Sarcasm Off]
I put money on a Microsoft backed shell company buying the licenses, and then revoking all of them. Linux is dead, everyone switch to Microsoft. hahaha
Probably. Anything's possible. At least that's what I tell my boss. He figured me out a while ago. I'll always say something can't be done, then 1/2 hour later, I'll go back into his office and tell him that it can be done and tell him how easy or hard it would be. :)
It shouldn't be all that hard (but a bit expensive) to do something silly like take a mirror (a really big freakin' mirror), and reflect the sun's light, and modulate the output at a 90 degree angle from the sun. Oh, that would look like a binary star (of sorts).
Or to have a satellite (moon size?), half black, half reflective or white, so it would appear to pulse as it rotated. That should be a clear indication that there's something here, when there's a regular pattern to the light. Oh wait, that's what a pulsar looks like. And back to the previous message, a pulsar may be a message saying "Hey, we're here, come look"
My automagic mirror caught the original site and picture.