Unless the bios itself is encrypted, none of this is useful. People who steal your laptop (say on a train) have 2 things in mind. Either they sell it to a fence, who doesn't care about what used to be on it and will wipe it anyway (so encryption doesn't matter) or, the more profitable way is to ransom it back to the owner for a few hundred bucks. This has seriously happened to several people i know, you sit down on a train with the laptop not in use on the table in front of you, then someone else comes and by slight of hand or whatever takes it, then leaves. Later on you get a call (they have your personal info from the computer usually) or an email or whatever, and they set up a drop for your laptop which has your irreplacable information on it. The drop is done by someone who can prove he wasn't there and has little or no connection with the theif... well you understand how it goes.
Laptop thieves don't care about your data. YOU care about your data.
Well ID has only recently moved to the "disappearing corpses" act. In previous games (Quake and Quake 2) the corpses stayed, at least in single player. Quake 3 was designed from the ground up for multi player so disappearing corpses make sense. I doubt a game like doom iii, which has such a heavy, famous atmosphere, would sacrifice anything that diminishes that dark feel. Trust id... they always make something that fullfills their goals. Some people might not like quake 3 because it lacked some things (like a single player game;-) but id's goals were a multiplayer game, and that's what they delivered.
Honestly i think the limitation of games now is the interface (keyboard and mouse) instead of the graphics. WHERE IS MY VR????
"A web standard for documents would be nice instead of plain txt or vendor locked Microsoft and Adobe format"
You mean like HTML?;-)
Most (if not all) word processors are capable of exporting html and that's one hell of a standard. Open too.
Imagine a beo... but seriously folks
on
Danger Device Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
from the article
"I was very impressed with the speed of the AOL IM client, but was disappointed that it was the only IM option offered pre-loaded on the device. While I expect that MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger will be supported in the future, for now, you're out of luck if you use either of them."
I hope they move to something more extensible like jabber or trillian. However AIM is the de-facto standard so it isn't such a big loss.
Also, in another section of the article he comments negatively on the camera add on... ITS A FREAKIN PHONE! IMHO the communications should come first (which they apparently do) and the nifty stuff that you wouldn't use much (camera) second. However, adding a quality digital camera to one of these PDA/Phone things would be extremely useful... enough that i might actually get one!
But then again there is the constant tradeoff between battery, cost, and quality. In mobile devices you have to pay for every little bit, so you better make sure its worth putting in.
The article doesn't say anything about the hackability of this gadget. Does anyone have any knowledge of that?
Re:After actually READING the article...
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"So 25-125 million dollars payoff for the team.
I wouldn't mind that in my pocket"
neither would i;-)
but if you're going to be making money honestly (which they are) then there are cases where people have made much more (some college dropouts, for example)
This article reminds me of the stupid stories about how some high school or college student made millions during the dot-com era. I regard these as a symptom of a problem, not as a role model to follow. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and when someone seems to be getting one, something is broken and sooner or later it's gunna get fixed:-D. You see this again and again - from dot com to gambling, and in particular Long Term Capital Management. If you ever have some time to read a fantastic book about something... oddly similar to the wired article, check out _When_Genius_Failed_
Replace MIT students with Nobel prize winners, replace millions with billions, and throw in a potential collapse of the western financial system... it is well worth reading.
After actually READING the article...
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 1
I noticed that nothing that they are doing on the blackjack side is new. It has been possible to make money counting cards at blackjack forever, except that the casinos will blacklist you and then you're screwed. OTOH what they are doing is social engineering - they make it look like they aren't counting cards so they can continue. And they are slightly better at counting cards than the average guy. When they are doing this with millions of dollars, of course their return is good and consistant. BUT - if their scheme was so great then why don't they have more money??? The main subject of the article only had 1 to 5 million bucks, which isn't that much considering. If it was a truly groundbreaking idea, he would have a lot more than that. I know i sound like the regular slashdot "nothing to see here" post and i'm sorry but i think the article sensationalizes something that isn't very special, even if it is an interesting read.
I recently switched from Redhat to Debian linux. I used the network install (because i have a fast connection) and i found that the most obscure part of the install was finding which NIC model i had (because they went by manufacturer code instead of human-readable names) If a prepackaged installer simply had something that detected your NIC automatically, with some simple instructions to read along with each install stage (easy ones found at www.linuxnewbie.org), then it would be a much less painful install. As a seperate note, something must be added to automatically configure USB optical mice, because as it is they are not (a huge pain for a user with limited skills).
dselect is already a good tool for choosing packages to install and seeing what is out there to install. Its interface could be improved somewhat (always going past help screens becomes a pain, and collapsable trees should be in to reduce clutter(and if they are already, why aren't they obvious))
This should put user-friendliness in, while maintaining most of the customization available in the regular install (after all, you could always ignore the advice...)
But what does that mean anyway? Being more effecient on a "TRUE per MHz" basis doesn't mean that it is a better machine! I'd bet anything that the pentium 1 is more efficient than any of the newest AMD and intel chips... and do you know why? When they crank up the clock speed like that, they are actually increasing the depth of the pipeline as well, and that means that when there are control hazards (any branch in the program) they are far more likely to have a branch misprediction fault, where they have to clear the entire pipeline and that kills performance on a per clock basis. Furthermore, clock speed doesn't mention how many instructions are being executed per clock, and both AMD and intel are using superscalar machines (more than one instruction per clock).
The reality is that there isn't any good way of benchmarking any processors, for several reasons. First, chip makers optimize their chips to perform well on benchmarks. This might seem like underhandedness, but they are just trying to make their CPU's perform as well as possible on generic applications - that's what benchmarks are! Second, no benchmarks accurately measure performance on real-life applications. It's just like the SAT's or ACT's... all they do is measure how well you can take the test, not how much you know about math and the english language.
As you say the problem is limited parallelism in computers. Computers using superscalar design(most modern computers) have limited returns on executing more than one instruction per clock, in fact, the benefit gets lower for every level of parallelism added. (aka, you get the biggest performance gain when going from 1 to 2 instructions per clock, and then less from there on) This is because of control hazards, choices. (if statements are one example of these) Unless they are using the IA64 EPIC feature, which chooses ALL paths and then finalizes the right ones, distributed computing won't work right for PS3.
The problem with lasers is that they are line of sight weapons, which means that an anti-missile should have greater range than a laser head, since the horizon will get into the way (cruize missiles travel very close to the surface of the water)
The whole point of an aegis cruiser is to tie together the radar of an entire group of ships, and make them all "see" further. Radar is also a line of sight device, which is why you need this tactical net.
Of course, a nuclear anti-ship missile makes this all useless, but who is really counting anyway?
The reason for this is that you can create a very simple weapon to disable optical equipment (cameras on a tank for aiming, etc)
step 1: Send a pulse of light in all directions.
step 2: when there is a return pulse of light of light in a certain pattern indicating optical equipment, fire a BIG pulse of light right at them
This works great, until you recognize that a person with binoculars would be blinded just as permenantly as a camera. That's what the section was added in to address.
The real problem with the health system is the legal system of the united states. Right now anytime something bad happens to you (you are injured, you don't fully recover from an injury, etc) you can sue someone. Almost always, these legal costs and settlements and fines come from insurance companies in the end. People sue doctors because they don't produce perfect results... but they are human, and can make mistakes without it being malpractice, and yes there are limits to modern science.
But when someone is hurt, and they go to court, juries are mostly inclined to rule in favor of the one who was hurt, penalizing the big corporation which has so much money they won't even feel the pinch, so no one loses in the end. But real life doesn't work that way. When an insurance company loses money in a cash award or settlement, the rates of their customers MUST go up. This hurts everyone.
Now lets look at an extreme (BUT NOT UNCOMMON) example. This summer there was an outbreak of some food poisoning on long island. Only a few people actually got sick, and no more than a few dozen were even exposed to the contaminated food. Most of those exposed didn't know, never showed signs of it, and went about their business. On the other hand, HUNDREDS of people tried to show that they were sick because of that food, in order to collect money from it. THIS IS WRONG! This shows that there is enough incentive for people to fake thier own injury (food poisoning in this case) in order to get a possible payoff from a fast food chain.
What do we need to do about this? Simple. Dont adopt the UK's health system. Instead adopt a part of their legal system: the loser of a legal dispute should have to pay the legal fees of the winner. That alone would deter most fake claims, and would reduce the cost of health care coverage, which cause more people to be covered.
Re:Making the US vulnerable to economic warfare?
on
Losing the War on Patents
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Most likely not: for the simple reason that the united states legal system has a habit of ruling in favor of US residents (of which, big corporations are the most important;D) Take for instance the patent on radio communication by marconi(an italian), which was overturned in favor of one of tesla's (an american). And this comes after marconi won the nobel prize for inventing the radio. (not that tesla didn't deserve to win the dispute... but he was dead at the time i think) And in any case, any money that you put into disputing a patent goes into the united states legal community and legal system, so you are making your own worst nightmare: a nation of practicing lawyers. (wait... do we have that already?:( )
Not entirely true. You don't have to have things like your monitor and speakers on, and i believe that they take up much more energy than a dinky processor running at 1.5 V. And you should be able to save power by turning off things like the video card, sound card, a significant portion of the ram, all but one hard disk, the cd rom, lower the power consumption by the processor and slow it down so your fan can turn off, etc. The core of a computer (CPU, ram, and HD) doesn't take up much power. Otherwise how could you have things like those 10 gb mp3 players that run for hours and hours on batteries? It is the human interface part of a computer that takes up all the juice, and you can turn that off if there is no human to interface with:D
Since.NET isn't out yet, i can't see what you could possibly be upset about. By sending this message to the.NET developers before their products are even finished, there will be no problem with upgrades or mismatched versions with the hole still in them. But then again, i have no doubt that.NET has more holes than a cheese grator. I would be suprised if there weren't virii already written by less helpful hackers, just waiting for the first.NET services to get in gear so they can take them down or take your information. I think that the real solution to protecting yourself from credit card theft on the internet is to use one of the temporary credit card numbers that some credit cards allow for. Who cares if they get an expired credit card number...
Are you suggesting that if the Nazis got the atomic bomb before the united states did that the world would be a better place? I'm sure everyone in london would disagree with you... as they wouldn't be here now. And the argument can be made (and has, often) that the loss of life in pacific theater was reduced because the japanese were forced into surrendering by overwhelming power. It certainly reduced the loss of life by americans, and that was the military's FIRST goal. SECOND is to keep civillian casualties to a minimum. In truth we can never know how big the butcher's bill would be if the united states had invaded japan instead. But given the willingness of so many japanese soldiers to not surrender even if it meant certain death, the toll would have been immense. However, there was never any doubt to the outcome. Over the course of the war the united states only sent 1/5th of its war material to fight japan. The two bombs just served as a wakeup call to the militarists who were running japan at that time. They were the ones who refused to give an unconditional surrender, and that is why the united states had to drop the second bomb.
he did flash the bios. He took an image of it and re-wrote it over itself (when he thought he had the wrong image, i dont understand why he would want to destroy the original this way but whatever) and then re-inserted it. That's flashing the bios. He removed it to flash it cuz asking the XBox to flash its bios nicely seems ineffective... Its a nice story, you might want to read it.
Well this bios might be EPROM which means that you can only reset it when using an ultraviolet light. Then again i dont have an xbox and i'm not a hardware hacker. The other thing is, if it really is flash bios (EEPROM) then convicing the xbox to flash its own bios chip might be impossible ATM, so you could take it out and do it elsewhere (which he did):D
I don't understand what people are talking about with an increase in bandwidth usage by more worms. More worms does not have to mean more bandwidth used up! Here is a simple layout for an algorithm that would reduce the bandwidth taken up by either code red (sorry i don't know how to program the virus myself, otherwise i would)
1. Make the retrovirus
A counter-infected machine should first patch itself and fix the effects of the code red II virus. Then it should kill all code red infections found on the machine. Then the virus should scan other computers randomly for 24 hours, and then remove itself from the computer.
Why does this reduce the bandwidth? Because the counter infected machine almost certainly has the virus if the retrovirus can come in. Then the retrovirus kills the regular virus, and takes the bandwidth that the old code red was using as its own. Thus there is no increase in usage. But OTOH many machines are infected many times, so it would almost certainly reduce the worm bandwidth usage. Also, a machine that has been counterinfected cannot be counterinfected again, so there is no risk of multiple infections on a counter-infected machine. (BTW one might want to add in that any server that probes the infected machine should also be counter-infected. make the probes from the retrovirus and regular virus look different. then again this is just getting fancy and doesn't need to be added)
And lets not forget the infection rate. You can expect it to be less than the code red because it cannot have multiple infections on the same machine, but even then it should get hundreds of thousands of machines in a few weeks, certainly. And if these machines are all patched, and after 24 hours the countervirus stops operating on a new machine, then you would have drastic bandwidth reduction. So what do we have?
First: the bandwidth usage of a counter infected machine is the same or less than that machine infected.
Second: the bandwidth is less after the machine is 'clean'
there will be a few machines that are 'innocent bystanders' which will add slightly to the overall bandwidth, but that will most likely not be significant (i have no idea how to calculate this, but i am going on the assumption that the CR virus is already on 95% of machines that it can get on. More than 5% of machines cross-infected is not such a leap of faith, especially when considering the code red 2 virus could be considered a cross infection! By msnbc's stats at least 1/3 of machines infected by CR1 are infected by CR2)
Finally: initial spread
You could simply set up a script that would counterinfect a machine if it probed you. Set that up on some regularly probed servers, and once the probes stop your job is done.
The ONLY issue is the "taking the law into your own hands"
But as people have said, you can be forced to take medicine if you are a danger to other people(anti-psychotics anyone?), you can be forced to put your dog to sleep if it has rabies. There is a precident for this, but it is carried out by the government.
The biggest problem with a 'vigilante' approach is that if someone were to do it and get caught, then they would possibly be scapegoated. What we need is for someone in a government agency (FBI, CIA, or NSA to name a few) to do it. Especially those last two.
Or someone else could just post HOW to do it (as anonymous coward of course) somewhere... and a lot of people on/. could all do it. I mean, a couple hundred. What is uncle sam gunna do, jail a few hundred people for fixing our own infrastructure? If no one goes out and makes it very obvious that they did it, then is the FBI going to go out of their way to catch you?
As Winston Churchill said (keep in mind his mother was American), "You can count on the Americans to do the right thing, once they've exhausted every other possible course of action."
Slashdot Mirror
How can you tell the difference between static and Nu Metal????
;-)
Their legal team will eat you alive!
how about this for a loophole:
Reformat the hard drive.
Unless the bios itself is encrypted, none of this is useful. People who steal your laptop (say on a train) have 2 things in mind. Either they sell it to a fence, who doesn't care about what used to be on it and will wipe it anyway (so encryption doesn't matter) or, the more profitable way is to ransom it back to the owner for a few hundred bucks. This has seriously happened to several people i know, you sit down on a train with the laptop not in use on the table in front of you, then someone else comes and by slight of hand or whatever takes it, then leaves. Later on you get a call (they have your personal info from the computer usually) or an email or whatever, and they set up a drop for your laptop which has your irreplacable information on it. The drop is done by someone who can prove he wasn't there and has little or no connection with the theif... well you understand how it goes.
Laptop thieves don't care about your data. YOU care about your data.
"I have not received *ANY* spam in over a month.
;-)
Zero spam, period."
I haven't checked my hotmail account since a month + 1 week ago...
I think a lot of spammers have been getting "mailbox full: too much spam" messages from me
Well ID has only recently moved to the "disappearing corpses" act. In previous games (Quake and Quake 2) the corpses stayed, at least in single player. Quake 3 was designed from the ground up for multi player so disappearing corpses make sense. I doubt a game like doom iii, which has such a heavy, famous atmosphere, would sacrifice anything that diminishes that dark feel. Trust id... they always make something that fullfills their goals. Some people might not like quake 3 because it lacked some things (like a single player game ;-) but id's goals were a multiplayer game, and that's what they delivered.
Honestly i think the limitation of games now is the interface (keyboard and mouse) instead of the graphics. WHERE IS MY VR????
"A web standard for documents would be nice instead of plain txt or vendor locked Microsoft and Adobe format"
;-)
You mean like HTML?
Most (if not all) word processors are capable of exporting html and that's one hell of a standard. Open too.
from the article
"I was very impressed with the speed of the AOL IM client, but was disappointed that it was the only IM option offered pre-loaded on the device. While I expect that MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger will be supported in the future, for now, you're out of luck if you use either of them."
I hope they move to something more extensible like jabber or trillian. However AIM is the de-facto standard so it isn't such a big loss.
Also, in another section of the article he comments negatively on the camera add on... ITS A FREAKIN PHONE! IMHO the communications should come first (which they apparently do) and the nifty stuff that you wouldn't use much (camera) second. However, adding a quality digital camera to one of these PDA/Phone things would be extremely useful... enough that i might actually get one!
But then again there is the constant tradeoff between battery, cost, and quality. In mobile devices you have to pay for every little bit, so you better make sure its worth putting in.
The article doesn't say anything about the hackability of this gadget. Does anyone have any knowledge of that?
"So 25-125 million dollars payoff for the team.
;-)
:-D. You see this again and again - from dot com to gambling, and in particular Long Term Capital Management. If you ever have some time to read a fantastic book about something... oddly similar to the wired article, check out _When_Genius_Failed_
I wouldn't mind that in my pocket"
neither would i
but if you're going to be making money honestly (which they are) then there are cases where people have made much more (some college dropouts, for example)
This article reminds me of the stupid stories about how some high school or college student made millions during the dot-com era. I regard these as a symptom of a problem, not as a role model to follow. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and when someone seems to be getting one, something is broken and sooner or later it's gunna get fixed
Replace MIT students with Nobel prize winners, replace millions with billions, and throw in a potential collapse of the western financial system... it is well worth reading.
I noticed that nothing that they are doing on the blackjack side is new. It has been possible to make money counting cards at blackjack forever, except that the casinos will blacklist you and then you're screwed. OTOH what they are doing is social engineering - they make it look like they aren't counting cards so they can continue. And they are slightly better at counting cards than the average guy. When they are doing this with millions of dollars, of course their return is good and consistant. BUT - if their scheme was so great then why don't they have more money??? The main subject of the article only had 1 to 5 million bucks, which isn't that much considering. If it was a truly groundbreaking idea, he would have a lot more than that. I know i sound like the regular slashdot "nothing to see here" post and i'm sorry but i think the article sensationalizes something that isn't very special, even if it is an interesting read.
I recently switched from Redhat to Debian linux. I used the network install (because i have a fast connection) and i found that the most obscure part of the install was finding which NIC model i had (because they went by manufacturer code instead of human-readable names) If a prepackaged installer simply had something that detected your NIC automatically, with some simple instructions to read along with each install stage (easy ones found at www.linuxnewbie.org), then it would be a much less painful install. As a seperate note, something must be added to automatically configure USB optical mice, because as it is they are not (a huge pain for a user with limited skills).
dselect is already a good tool for choosing packages to install and seeing what is out there to install. Its interface could be improved somewhat (always going past help screens becomes a pain, and collapsable trees should be in to reduce clutter(and if they are already, why aren't they obvious))
This should put user-friendliness in, while maintaining most of the customization available in the regular install (after all, you could always ignore the advice...)
But what does that mean anyway? Being more effecient on a "TRUE per MHz" basis doesn't mean that it is a better machine! I'd bet anything that the pentium 1 is more efficient than any of the newest AMD and intel chips... and do you know why? When they crank up the clock speed like that, they are actually increasing the depth of the pipeline as well, and that means that when there are control hazards (any branch in the program) they are far more likely to have a branch misprediction fault, where they have to clear the entire pipeline and that kills performance on a per clock basis. Furthermore, clock speed doesn't mention how many instructions are being executed per clock, and both AMD and intel are using superscalar machines (more than one instruction per clock).
The reality is that there isn't any good way of benchmarking any processors, for several reasons. First, chip makers optimize their chips to perform well on benchmarks. This might seem like underhandedness, but they are just trying to make their CPU's perform as well as possible on generic applications - that's what benchmarks are! Second, no benchmarks accurately measure performance on real-life applications. It's just like the SAT's or ACT's... all they do is measure how well you can take the test, not how much you know about math and the english language.
As you say the problem is limited parallelism in computers. Computers using superscalar design(most modern computers) have limited returns on executing more than one instruction per clock, in fact, the benefit gets lower for every level of parallelism added. (aka, you get the biggest performance gain when going from 1 to 2 instructions per clock, and then less from there on) This is because of control hazards, choices. (if statements are one example of these) Unless they are using the IA64 EPIC feature, which chooses ALL paths and then finalizes the right ones, distributed computing won't work right for PS3.
The problem with lasers is that they are line of sight weapons, which means that an anti-missile should have greater range than a laser head, since the horizon will get into the way (cruize missiles travel very close to the surface of the water)
The whole point of an aegis cruiser is to tie together the radar of an entire group of ships, and make them all "see" further. Radar is also a line of sight device, which is why you need this tactical net.
Of course, a nuclear anti-ship missile makes this all useless, but who is really counting anyway?
The reason for this is that you can create a very simple weapon to disable optical equipment (cameras on a tank for aiming, etc)
step 1: Send a pulse of light in all directions.
step 2: when there is a return pulse of light of light in a certain pattern indicating optical equipment, fire a BIG pulse of light right at them
This works great, until you recognize that a person with binoculars would be blinded just as permenantly as a camera. That's what the section was added in to address.
The real problem with the health system is the legal system of the united states. Right now anytime something bad happens to you (you are injured, you don't fully recover from an injury, etc) you can sue someone. Almost always, these legal costs and settlements and fines come from insurance companies in the end. People sue doctors because they don't produce perfect results... but they are human, and can make mistakes without it being malpractice, and yes there are limits to modern science.
But when someone is hurt, and they go to court, juries are mostly inclined to rule in favor of the one who was hurt, penalizing the big corporation which has so much money they won't even feel the pinch, so no one loses in the end. But real life doesn't work that way. When an insurance company loses money in a cash award or settlement, the rates of their customers MUST go up. This hurts everyone.
Now lets look at an extreme (BUT NOT UNCOMMON) example. This summer there was an outbreak of some food poisoning on long island. Only a few people actually got sick, and no more than a few dozen were even exposed to the contaminated food. Most of those exposed didn't know, never showed signs of it, and went about their business. On the other hand, HUNDREDS of people tried to show that they were sick because of that food, in order to collect money from it. THIS IS WRONG! This shows that there is enough incentive for people to fake thier own injury (food poisoning in this case) in order to get a possible payoff from a fast food chain.
What do we need to do about this? Simple. Dont adopt the UK's health system. Instead adopt a part of their legal system: the loser of a legal dispute should have to pay the legal fees of the winner. That alone would deter most fake claims, and would reduce the cost of health care coverage, which cause more people to be covered.
Most likely not: for the simple reason that the united states legal system has a habit of ruling in favor of US residents (of which, big corporations are the most important ;D) Take for instance the patent on radio communication by marconi(an italian), which was overturned in favor of one of tesla's (an american). And this comes after marconi won the nobel prize for inventing the radio. (not that tesla didn't deserve to win the dispute... but he was dead at the time i think) And in any case, any money that you put into disputing a patent goes into the united states legal community and legal system, so you are making your own worst nightmare: a nation of practicing lawyers. (wait... do we have that already? :( )
Not entirely true. You don't have to have things like your monitor and speakers on, and i believe that they take up much more energy than a dinky processor running at 1.5 V. And you should be able to save power by turning off things like the video card, sound card, a significant portion of the ram, all but one hard disk, the cd rom, lower the power consumption by the processor and slow it down so your fan can turn off, etc. The core of a computer (CPU, ram, and HD) doesn't take up much power. Otherwise how could you have things like those 10 gb mp3 players that run for hours and hours on batteries? It is the human interface part of a computer that takes up all the juice, and you can turn that off if there is no human to interface with :D
Don't let the word get out to AOL!
ALL NEW AOL XP^2+
AOL HAS BECOME EASIER TO USE THAN EVER!
:(
Since .NET isn't out yet, i can't see what you could possibly be upset about. By sending this message to the .NET developers before their products are even finished, there will be no problem with upgrades or mismatched versions with the hole still in them. But then again, i have no doubt that .NET has more holes than a cheese grator. I would be suprised if there weren't virii already written by less helpful hackers, just waiting for the first .NET services to get in gear so they can take them down or take your information. I think that the real solution to protecting yourself from credit card theft on the internet is to use one of the temporary credit card numbers that some credit cards allow for. Who cares if they get an expired credit card number...
Are you suggesting that if the Nazis got the atomic bomb before the united states did that the world would be a better place? I'm sure everyone in london would disagree with you... as they wouldn't be here now. And the argument can be made (and has, often) that the loss of life in pacific theater was reduced because the japanese were forced into surrendering by overwhelming power. It certainly reduced the loss of life by americans, and that was the military's FIRST goal. SECOND is to keep civillian casualties to a minimum. In truth we can never know how big the butcher's bill would be if the united states had invaded japan instead. But given the willingness of so many japanese soldiers to not surrender even if it meant certain death, the toll would have been immense. However, there was never any doubt to the outcome. Over the course of the war the united states only sent 1/5th of its war material to fight japan. The two bombs just served as a wakeup call to the militarists who were running japan at that time. They were the ones who refused to give an unconditional surrender, and that is why the united states had to drop the second bomb.
he did flash the bios. He took an image of it and re-wrote it over itself (when he thought he had the wrong image, i dont understand why he would want to destroy the original this way but whatever) and then re-inserted it. That's flashing the bios. He removed it to flash it cuz asking the XBox to flash its bios nicely seems ineffective... Its a nice story, you might want to read it.
Well this bios might be EPROM which means that you can only reset it when using an ultraviolet light. Then again i dont have an xbox and i'm not a hardware hacker. The other thing is, if it really is flash bios (EEPROM) then convicing the xbox to flash its own bios chip might be impossible ATM, so you could take it out and do it elsewhere (which he did) :D
no, they can still sue the RIAA for DELAYING the release of their findings. And that is what they were suing about in the first place.
is a weirdo
I don't understand what people are talking about with an increase in bandwidth usage by more worms. More worms does not have to mean more bandwidth used up! Here is a simple layout for an algorithm that would reduce the bandwidth taken up by either code red (sorry i don't know how to program the virus myself, otherwise i would) /. could all do it. I mean, a couple hundred. What is uncle sam gunna do, jail a few hundred people for fixing our own infrastructure? If no one goes out and makes it very obvious that they did it, then is the FBI going to go out of their way to catch you?
1. Make the retrovirus
A counter-infected machine should first patch itself and fix the effects of the code red II virus. Then it should kill all code red infections found on the machine. Then the virus should scan other computers randomly for 24 hours, and then remove itself from the computer.
Why does this reduce the bandwidth? Because the counter infected machine almost certainly has the virus if the retrovirus can come in. Then the retrovirus kills the regular virus, and takes the bandwidth that the old code red was using as its own. Thus there is no increase in usage. But OTOH many machines are infected many times, so it would almost certainly reduce the worm bandwidth usage. Also, a machine that has been counterinfected cannot be counterinfected again, so there is no risk of multiple infections on a counter-infected machine. (BTW one might want to add in that any server that probes the infected machine should also be counter-infected. make the probes from the retrovirus and regular virus look different. then again this is just getting fancy and doesn't need to be added)
And lets not forget the infection rate. You can expect it to be less than the code red because it cannot have multiple infections on the same machine, but even then it should get hundreds of thousands of machines in a few weeks, certainly. And if these machines are all patched, and after 24 hours the countervirus stops operating on a new machine, then you would have drastic bandwidth reduction. So what do we have?
First: the bandwidth usage of a counter infected machine is the same or less than that machine infected.
Second: the bandwidth is less after the machine is 'clean'
there will be a few machines that are 'innocent bystanders' which will add slightly to the overall bandwidth, but that will most likely not be significant (i have no idea how to calculate this, but i am going on the assumption that the CR virus is already on 95% of machines that it can get on. More than 5% of machines cross-infected is not such a leap of faith, especially when considering the code red 2 virus could be considered a cross infection! By msnbc's stats at least 1/3 of machines infected by CR1 are infected by CR2)
Finally: initial spread
You could simply set up a script that would counterinfect a machine if it probed you. Set that up on some regularly probed servers, and once the probes stop your job is done.
The ONLY issue is the "taking the law into your own hands"
But as people have said, you can be forced to take medicine if you are a danger to other people(anti-psychotics anyone?), you can be forced to put your dog to sleep if it has rabies. There is a precident for this, but it is carried out by the government.
The biggest problem with a 'vigilante' approach is that if someone were to do it and get caught, then they would possibly be scapegoated. What we need is for someone in a government agency (FBI, CIA, or NSA to name a few) to do it. Especially those last two.
Or someone else could just post HOW to do it (as anonymous coward of course) somewhere... and a lot of people on
As Winston Churchill said (keep in mind his mother was American), "You can count on the Americans to do the right thing, once they've exhausted every other possible course of action."