Also, you can get RAID compatibility with PATA. I have a board that has it onboard.
I have bunches of perfectly good PATA RAID cards sitting around that I just haven't gotten around to (read: afford) buying drives for and loading into systems. Guess I should start snapping up whatever ones I can find.
I'm a bit bummed by the news. SATA is nice, but it's really only compatible with systems and equipment made in the past ~3 years. There's a LOT of hardware around that's older than that, and frankly I think that most people are getting to the point where they're getting sick of the upgrade treadmill. It's going to be around for a while.
Yeah I don't really get it. I'm sure that SF Bay is a nice place to work and all, probably a nice view, good selection of late-night delivery food... but why the heck would you site a datacenter there? I get that it's a big Internet peering point, but still.
It's not like you need to walk down there and eyeball your server every day. Does it give the suits the warm fuzzies to be able to see their DC from their office window or something?
It's not *that* hard to get multiple backhauls from different backbone providers in other parts of the country, ones which aren't close to oceans, tectonic fault lines, and have cheap power. As far back as the mid 90s I remember that there were some fairly serious datacenters in Texas -- I think EDS set up the first really big ones.
Even the big East-Coast peering point (Reston, VA?) seems like it would be a better choice. Still uncomfortably close to an ocean and a major metro area, though.
Well, according to their self-congratulatory press release, issued earlier today, they were allegedly at 100% uptime for the past two years.
The irony of issuing a press release like that, and then to be hit with a power outage and apparent simultaneous failure of all backup systems later that day, is beyond measure.
I don't know about God, but it's enough to make me believe in karma.;-)
I love OSS as much as the next Slashdotter, but I'm not sure it's a panacea here.
As long as the system relies on software, rather than something that can be physically verified, to actually tally votes, then you are at the mercy of the software. And that is a problem. Even if the code is available, you still have a long way to go. You have to ensure that the code that's running on every one of the voting machines is actually the source code that's available. And you have to have a completely clean, verified, and open-source compiler chain, to prevent someone from just tampering with the compiler and injecting badness into the binaries that way.
It's a step forward, sure, but a step forward towards what? Why are we going down this path at all?
I strongly suspect that with all the money that's been spent developing electronic voting systems -- not to mention all the money wasted on broken systems deployed in many states in the last few years -- we could have just paid humans to manually count the ballots at the next decade's worth of elections, while being observed by independent and partisan watchdogs (and videotaped for later review), and achieve far more confidence, while using a system that's understandable to the average voter.
I'm still a little bitter that A/UX wouldn't run on my Quadra 605, the only Mac I had at the time. (Due to the lack of an FPU in the 68LC040. Why I never swapped the CPU out for a real 68040 I'm not sure...I think I was saving all my money for RAM.)
I'm not sure that Onion routing scales to produce the performance that is necessary in order to have a usable P2P system for large files.
People abusing the existing Tor system for Bittorrent is a bad enough problem, and I think it's indicative of where efforts like that are going to end up: the people who create Onion routing nodes aren't doing it so that script kiddies can download Warez or pirate movies, and the script kiddies who want to download Warez or movies aren't going to set up onion-routing nodes, because it just increases the chance that they'll be targeted by the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/FBI and have their computer seized. (Granted, they'll be targeted for something that somebody else is doing, but that's not going to be of much help when they're going over their hard drive with a fine-tooth comb.)
If you trust the planes to tell you where they are, there is a potential that the planes could lie to you. I really hope they take that into account when designing the system.
I think that they already rely on the planes to transmit a lot of data correctly.
To the best of my understanding, civilian flight-control RADAR isn't an "active" system. It doesn't put out a whole lot of power and look for reflections, like a military system does. It's just a receive-only system, which listens to the signals being transmitted by the planes' transponders. If a plane changes its transponder code, it effectively "becomes" a different flight (with everything that entails: the ATC would think that it's a different type of plane, etc.). Short of going and looking up in the air, there's really nothing to prevent that, aside from whatever anti-tampering provisions the transponders themselves have.
But more to the point, if you don't trust the pilots in the planes, you have a much greater problem, since they are effectively big flying bombs. If a pilot wants to create havoc, they're more than able to, and they probably don't need to mess around with the GPS signal or their ATC transponder in order to do it. So a certain amount of trust is implicit in the design of the system. (In contrast, military systems or systems protecting critical parts of national infrastructure should NOT make the same assumptions, and shouldn't rely on any signals being transmitted from the aircraft; they should be active systems and assume that every possible attacker is going to be flying a stolen B-2 with its transponder and IFF turned off.)
Episode guides run the risk of violating both the "free" and "encyclopedia" parts: a detailed episode guide on a wiki is necessarily a derivative work of the original series and may compete with its official episode guide, crossing into unfair use territory
I've never heard anyone go down that particular avenue of argument. I don't think it would come close to holding water. At best it seems like the kind of spurious argument that would be used to justify a SLAPP-ish harassment suit, and perhaps under the copyright laws of some other countries it might be a concern, but I've never seen anything like it happen in the U.S. A summary of a plot is not necessarily a derivative work of the original; the summary is a new work, and the other data in an episode list -- simple facts -- would probably be un-copywritable.
That screams of an ex post facto justification for an action that someone took based on a totally different rationale.
Huh? I know conspiracy theories are popular here on Slashdot, but this is getting out of hand.
Here's a scenario that doesn't require the application of a tinfoil hat: NG took a look at NASA, and the aging Shuttle fleet, and realized that in the very near future, the U.S. space program is going to be out a launch vehicle. And because of certain other priorities that have gotten pushed to the forefront recently, NASA seems like they're pretty much out of the reusable-launch-vehicle business for the time being.
This is a pretty big opportunity. There's going to be a demand for launch vehicles, both for tourism and for more conventional purposes, and the company who can build a post-Shuttle reusable launch vehicle stands to make a lot of money. But, doing that is pretty hard, and it's not something that NG really knows anything about. They're not a space company. TRW is, sort of, but they're more of a satellite company.
The list of companies who have experience in actually building crap that goes from the earth to space (or even near it) is pretty short. Not only that, but there are a limited and finite supply of engineers who know how to do, and have experience in, that kind of stuff. And most of the other players on the field are pretty big (Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, etc.). Compared to them, Scaled Composites is tiny, cheap, and seems to be turning out new ideas at a good rate.
NG took a full stake in SC, because it's cheaper than trying to reinvent what SC has already done, and it could potentially give NG a favorable position over its real competitors (Raytheon, LM) in the future.
You kidding? They're still going to be flogging that franchise for all it's worth in 60 years.
(Besides which, I think copyright got extended to 120 years now, not 60; it's 60 until Mickey Mouse comes out of copyright -- if something was published in your lifetime, the way the laws have been bastardized, you won't live to see it go into the public domain.)
There are exceptions of course but this is the overall situation. Check any tech rag for an editorial - the critical shortage of US workers capable to do the jobs necessary to keep this country afloat. This is not a time to be like this. We are now dependent on foreign countries for manufacturing, energy, and a lot of raw materials. What do we bring to the table? Couldn't have said it better myself.
Aside from "a market," I think the U.S. is doing a piss-poor job of answering that question. Politicians just ignore it, or answer it with useless, nationalist/jingoist garbage that may play in Peoria, but doesn't change the fundamental problems we're facing.
We've become a nation of middle managers; buying raw materials from one Third World country, having it manufactured in another, and then shipping it here so that people can buy it on credit, which is held by foreign banks. Once some of the big Asian countries get their economies working right, we're going to be running a large risk of making ourselves irrelelvant: it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you're making stuff in China and selling it in China, you don't need a bunch of Americans acting as middlemen.
To be perfectly honest, I'm slightly frightened, and I don't see a lot to be reassured about. As someone who's a monolingual English-speaker, and not exactly thrilled about the idea of a world run by quasi-communist Chinese industrial magnates, and even less so about one run by Islamist oil barons, it doesn't seem like we're doing much to ensure that our way of life is going to be tenable into the future.
If it's true that the age of U.S.-led international geopolitics is over, and other countries -- ones which don't share the same ideals about personal freedom and democracy -- are going to be taking the helm, then I think we need to start taking some very hard looks at how we can insulate and preserve our way of life in the face of that.
Then either leave Silicon Valley -- there are plenty of lower-cost places in the U.S. with talented tech workers -- or pay more.
Just because some company wants to hire programmers at $35k a year, while staying in a high-cost area, doesn't mean they have some magical right to do it.
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
So, I just gotta ask -- does the cable industry pay you by the word, or do you get some sort of flat rate for your shilling?
You sound like one of those horrific industry ads that they're running every ten minutes on Comcast; the one with the not-really-a-doctor-but-I'm-wearing-a-white-coat guy mumbling about how cable internet fixed the healthcare system, or the one with the old woman who seems to be confusing high-speed internet and the Second Coming of Jesus.
There's no competition in broadband. For most people, it's the cable company, or the phone company -- and often it's one or the other. And that's assuming they have either one available. Both industries have been massaging the numbers for years, using ZIP-code based statistics to try and show competition and availability where it doesn't exist.
To wit, under the current scheme, if one house at one end of a ZIP code area can get cable internet, and another house at the opposite end of town can get DSL, then that ZIP code has both services available -- even though potentially nobody in the area has any choice for service.
Well, the kid can claim it's an accident.. wouldn't be the first kid to say "bet I can take out that window" and then claim later it was an accident.
True. At least the first time around though, without any reason not to, I'm willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt. I can't find any plausible excuse for slashing someone's tires, putting sugar in their gas tank, or putting glue in their ignition, or some of the other things that were mentioned in this thread.
No, I wouldn't press charges against a kid who put a baseball through my window (incidentally, I've actually had that happen). That's an accident. There's no shame in having an accident, particularly when you're a kid, as long as you take responsibility for it.
But going out and intentionally destroying other people's property is another thing entirely. That's not an accident, and I have very little tolerance for it.
Or like putting sugar in someone's gas tank? Or like putting a banana in their tail pipe? You mean like harmless fun?
If someone put sugar in my gas tank and it froze my car's engine, you're damn right I'd press charges. Sounds like vandalism and destruction of property to me. That kind of antisocial shit isn't acceptable regardless of the age of the people it's coming from.
The problem is that for a new activation, they won't let the cable modem onto the network until you somehow "activate" it's MAC address.
Now, until some time ago, this was done over the phone, I think. (I'm not totally sure -- it was done over the phone when I first got Comcast in 2001/02, though.) You called up, read them the number, and some keyboard-monkey typed it in and everything worked.
But then they decided that employing the keyboard-monkey was too expensive, and they came up with this horrible "online activation" system that avoids the phone call. Basically, you hook the cable modem up, hook your PC up to the modem, and then run this special software that's provided on the Comcast disc. This, along with your account information, does the same thing that the phone call used to, and registers your cable modem so you can get online.
So basically, regardless of what kind of modem you have, if you're doing a new install, and you don't have an Windows machine with IE, you need to call them during business hours and have their drone activate it.
Or, they could have hired somebody else (e.g. a Harry Potter fanfic writer) to write an alternative version, and then 'leaked' that. Then there would be less incentive for somebody to leak it for real.
I've heard rumors that there were, at least with one of the earlier books, not sure about this one, a few alternate endings leaked or distributed at different points in the publishing process. Not sure if there's any hard evidence on that, though.
Although, when you stop to think about it, what's really stopping someone from selling it as many times as they want? If they're the kind of person who'd create it and sell it in the first place, I'm supposed to believe their "promise" that they won't sell it to anyone else?
Um, threat of a very, very painful death? You'd be dealing with some very unpleasant people here; I think they might interpret such behavior as treachery.
It was covered extensively at the time by the likes of Bruce Schneier and others, his comments said:
Suddenly there's a flurry of press activity because someone notices that the second key in Microsoft's Crypto API in Windows NT Service Pack 5 is called "NSAKEY" in the code. Ah ha! The NSA can sign crypto suites. They can use this ability to drop a Trojaned crypto suite into your computers. Or so the conspiracy theory goes.
I don't buy it.
First, if the NSA wanted to compromise Microsoft's Crypto API, it would be much easier to either 1) convince MS to tell them the secret key for MS's signature key, 2) get MS to sign an NSA-compromised module, or 3) install a module other than Crypto API to break the encryption (no other modules need signatures). It's always easier to break good encryption by attacking the random number generator than it is to brute-force the key.
Second, NSA doesn't need a key to compromise security in Windows. Programs like Back Orifice can do it without any keys. Attacking the Crypto API still requires that the victim run an executable (even a Word macro) on his computer. If you can convince a victim to run an untrusted macro, there are a zillion smarter ways to compromise security.
Third, why in the world would anyone call a secret NSA key "NSAKEY"? Lots of people have access to source code within Microsoft; a conspiracy like this would only be known by a few people. Anyone with a debugger could have found this "NSAKEY." If this is a covert mechanism, it's not very covert.
I think the jury is still out on exactly what was really going on; if it was an NSA backdoor, it was a pretty boneheaded one. Alternately, if it was just Microsoft being redundant, then it shows that they didn't plan very well and don't seem to understand security very well. Given the choice between the two, I think boneheadedness on MS's part is more likely.
That's odd. I'm quite sure that T-Mobile will hook you up with just a SIM card for your existing phone; I've known quite a few people who have done it to get data plans for PCMCIA 3G interfaces.
The problem I've run into, and it's not just with T-Mobile, it happens with the other carriers too, is that there are two very distinct types of stores you can go into. One kind is the "corporate" store, it's actually run by T-Mobile (or Verizon, or AT&T, or whatever). Their employees are telco employees. The other kind of store is an independent or chain franchise store, and they're (IMO) usually much shadier. Sometimes it can be nice to go to one of them if you're not sure which network you want to go with, because sometimes they'll have relationships with more than one, but most of the time they just try to seem like a "T-Mobile store," but in reality they're a weird sort of front, making money by reselling T-Mobile plans and phones. The franchise/non-corporate stores seem to be much more interested in pushing contract signups and "free" phones, because I assume they get some major kickback for each new mark.
I've had good luck walking into the real (corporate) T-Mobile stores, after doing research on the web so that I know exactly what I want, and then just telling the employees to do it for me. So far, nobody's argued; I've done some pretty weird stuff, like signing up for CSD service (which isn't officially offered, and now I think it really is impossible to get), had the subsidy lock removed, etc. All by basically walking in and knowing the right words to say to the person at the store, so that they would repeat them to someone at Secret T-Mobile HQ, and they would punch the right keys to make things happen. It helps if you look at it as a social-engineering problem.
Only thing that it might require is telling them that you're using the SIM in some sort of data or other exotic device. Be vague. (Or lie. God never sent anyone to hell for lying to a salesperson.) There are lots of pieces of equipment out there that are cellular-based and use GSM (GPS tracking beacons, laptops with built-in cellular from Asia, etc.); if some retail drone is giving you shit because they're hoping to sucker you into a contract (and earn them some sort of sales incentive, no doubt), just push a bit higher up the ladder. If you know the lingo and know what you want, you'll get it.
It wouldn't surprise me if Cingular/AT&T is more asshattish about doing things in anything except "their way," but that's AT&T for you.
Honestly your best bet is probably to purchase a used GSM phone from eBay. There are quite a few of them out there, so you'll have choices. One that was very popular and manufactured for a while (or that uses a battery that's still in production) would definitely be the best.
Then just take it and get a basic plan at T-Mobile or Cingular (AT&T). Pop in the SIM and go.
What you want isn't a brand-new, basic phone like the Motorola one; what you want is a phone from about three or four years ago. It'll be a lot cheaper, too -- and if something happens to it, no problem, just get a new one.
The problem is that this, like most other effective security schemes, is expensive.
Companies won't implement more security than is cost-effective. Their decision making process is going to be driven directly by the perceived odds of being broken-into, times the cost of a possible breakin. They're not going to spend more money than that.
I doubt there are really going to be any serious (multi-million or -billion dollar) consequences for any of the companies involved. Maybe a few people will get fired and some new procedures will get written into some document that nobody reads, but there's not going to be a major bloodletting. (These companies run the government, in the most literal sense.)
When you see a F500 company absolutely taken to the cleaners -- totally bankrupted -- due to an IT-security mishap, then you'll see real security implemented. But until then it's just going to be a lot of after-the-fact patching-up and good 'ol "security theater." And a lot of blaming the messenger. That's always cheap.
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Also, you can get RAID compatibility with PATA. I have a board that has it onboard.
I have bunches of perfectly good PATA RAID cards sitting around that I just haven't gotten around to (read: afford) buying drives for and loading into systems. Guess I should start snapping up whatever ones I can find.
I'm a bit bummed by the news. SATA is nice, but it's really only compatible with systems and equipment made in the past ~3 years. There's a LOT of hardware around that's older than that, and frankly I think that most people are getting to the point where they're getting sick of the upgrade treadmill. It's going to be around for a while.
Yeah I don't really get it. I'm sure that SF Bay is a nice place to work and all, probably a nice view, good selection of late-night delivery food ... but why the heck would you site a datacenter there? I get that it's a big Internet peering point, but still.
It's not like you need to walk down there and eyeball your server every day. Does it give the suits the warm fuzzies to be able to see their DC from their office window or something?
It's not *that* hard to get multiple backhauls from different backbone providers in other parts of the country, ones which aren't close to oceans, tectonic fault lines, and have cheap power. As far back as the mid 90s I remember that there were some fairly serious datacenters in Texas -- I think EDS set up the first really big ones.
Even the big East-Coast peering point (Reston, VA?) seems like it would be a better choice. Still uncomfortably close to an ocean and a major metro area, though.
Well, according to their self-congratulatory press release, issued earlier today, they were allegedly at 100% uptime for the past two years.
;-)
The irony of issuing a press release like that, and then to be hit with a power outage and apparent simultaneous failure of all backup systems later that day, is beyond measure.
I don't know about God, but it's enough to make me believe in karma.
I love OSS as much as the next Slashdotter, but I'm not sure it's a panacea here.
As long as the system relies on software, rather than something that can be physically verified, to actually tally votes, then you are at the mercy of the software. And that is a problem. Even if the code is available, you still have a long way to go. You have to ensure that the code that's running on every one of the voting machines is actually the source code that's available. And you have to have a completely clean, verified, and open-source compiler chain, to prevent someone from just tampering with the compiler and injecting badness into the binaries that way.
It's a step forward, sure, but a step forward towards what? Why are we going down this path at all?
I strongly suspect that with all the money that's been spent developing electronic voting systems -- not to mention all the money wasted on broken systems deployed in many states in the last few years -- we could have just paid humans to manually count the ballots at the next decade's worth of elections, while being observed by independent and partisan watchdogs (and videotaped for later review), and achieve far more confidence, while using a system that's understandable to the average voter.
I'm still a little bitter that A/UX wouldn't run on my Quadra 605, the only Mac I had at the time. (Due to the lack of an FPU in the 68LC040. Why I never swapped the CPU out for a real 68040 I'm not sure...I think I was saving all my money for RAM.)
In the 80's I would have told you that the ultimate desktop OS would be System 6 with Unix underneath.
Funny, that's exactly the same answer I'd give in 2007.
(The eye candy -- make it stop!)
I'm not sure that Onion routing scales to produce the performance that is necessary in order to have a usable P2P system for large files.
People abusing the existing Tor system for Bittorrent is a bad enough problem, and I think it's indicative of where efforts like that are going to end up: the people who create Onion routing nodes aren't doing it so that script kiddies can download Warez or pirate movies, and the script kiddies who want to download Warez or movies aren't going to set up onion-routing nodes, because it just increases the chance that they'll be targeted by the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/FBI and have their computer seized. (Granted, they'll be targeted for something that somebody else is doing, but that's not going to be of much help when they're going over their hard drive with a fine-tooth comb.)
If you trust the planes to tell you where they are, there is a potential that the planes could lie to you. I really hope they take that into account when designing the system.
I think that they already rely on the planes to transmit a lot of data correctly.
To the best of my understanding, civilian flight-control RADAR isn't an "active" system. It doesn't put out a whole lot of power and look for reflections, like a military system does. It's just a receive-only system, which listens to the signals being transmitted by the planes' transponders. If a plane changes its transponder code, it effectively "becomes" a different flight (with everything that entails: the ATC would think that it's a different type of plane, etc.). Short of going and looking up in the air, there's really nothing to prevent that, aside from whatever anti-tampering provisions the transponders themselves have.
But more to the point, if you don't trust the pilots in the planes, you have a much greater problem, since they are effectively big flying bombs. If a pilot wants to create havoc, they're more than able to, and they probably don't need to mess around with the GPS signal or their ATC transponder in order to do it. So a certain amount of trust is implicit in the design of the system. (In contrast, military systems or systems protecting critical parts of national infrastructure should NOT make the same assumptions, and shouldn't rely on any signals being transmitted from the aircraft; they should be active systems and assume that every possible attacker is going to be flying a stolen B-2 with its transponder and IFF turned off.)
Episode guides run the risk of violating both the "free" and "encyclopedia" parts: a detailed episode guide on a wiki is necessarily a derivative work of the original series and may compete with its official episode guide, crossing into unfair use territory
I've never heard anyone go down that particular avenue of argument. I don't think it would come close to holding water. At best it seems like the kind of spurious argument that would be used to justify a SLAPP-ish harassment suit, and perhaps under the copyright laws of some other countries it might be a concern, but I've never seen anything like it happen in the U.S. A summary of a plot is not necessarily a derivative work of the original; the summary is a new work, and the other data in an episode list -- simple facts -- would probably be un-copywritable.
That screams of an ex post facto justification for an action that someone took based on a totally different rationale.
Huh? I know conspiracy theories are popular here on Slashdot, but this is getting out of hand.
Here's a scenario that doesn't require the application of a tinfoil hat: NG took a look at NASA, and the aging Shuttle fleet, and realized that in the very near future, the U.S. space program is going to be out a launch vehicle. And because of certain other priorities that have gotten pushed to the forefront recently, NASA seems like they're pretty much out of the reusable-launch-vehicle business for the time being.
This is a pretty big opportunity. There's going to be a demand for launch vehicles, both for tourism and for more conventional purposes, and the company who can build a post-Shuttle reusable launch vehicle stands to make a lot of money. But, doing that is pretty hard, and it's not something that NG really knows anything about. They're not a space company. TRW is, sort of, but they're more of a satellite company.
The list of companies who have experience in actually building crap that goes from the earth to space (or even near it) is pretty short. Not only that, but there are a limited and finite supply of engineers who know how to do, and have experience in, that kind of stuff. And most of the other players on the field are pretty big (Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, etc.). Compared to them, Scaled Composites is tiny, cheap, and seems to be turning out new ideas at a good rate.
NG took a full stake in SC, because it's cheaper than trying to reinvent what SC has already done, and it could potentially give NG a favorable position over its real competitors (Raytheon, LM) in the future.
You kidding? They're still going to be flogging that franchise for all it's worth in 60 years.
(Besides which, I think copyright got extended to 120 years now, not 60; it's 60 until Mickey Mouse comes out of copyright -- if something was published in your lifetime, the way the laws have been bastardized, you won't live to see it go into the public domain.)
Aside from "a market," I think the U.S. is doing a piss-poor job of answering that question. Politicians just ignore it, or answer it with useless, nationalist/jingoist garbage that may play in Peoria, but doesn't change the fundamental problems we're facing.
We've become a nation of middle managers; buying raw materials from one Third World country, having it manufactured in another, and then shipping it here so that people can buy it on credit, which is held by foreign banks. Once some of the big Asian countries get their economies working right, we're going to be running a large risk of making ourselves irrelelvant: it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you're making stuff in China and selling it in China, you don't need a bunch of Americans acting as middlemen.
To be perfectly honest, I'm slightly frightened, and I don't see a lot to be reassured about. As someone who's a monolingual English-speaker, and not exactly thrilled about the idea of a world run by quasi-communist Chinese industrial magnates, and even less so about one run by Islamist oil barons, it doesn't seem like we're doing much to ensure that our way of life is going to be tenable into the future.
If it's true that the age of U.S.-led international geopolitics is over, and other countries -- ones which don't share the same ideals about personal freedom and democracy -- are going to be taking the helm, then I think we need to start taking some very hard looks at how we can insulate and preserve our way of life in the face of that.
Then either leave Silicon Valley -- there are plenty of lower-cost places in the U.S. with talented tech workers -- or pay more.
Just because some company wants to hire programmers at $35k a year, while staying in a high-cost area, doesn't mean they have some magical right to do it.
a. That was an EXTREMELY targeted spam run. In which case, WHERE did he get the email addresses?
Maybe it was the email database from a softcore porn site that specializes in fully-clothed women popping balloons?
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
So, I just gotta ask -- does the cable industry pay you by the word, or do you get some sort of flat rate for your shilling?
You sound like one of those horrific industry ads that they're running every ten minutes on Comcast; the one with the not-really-a-doctor-but-I'm-wearing-a-white-coat guy mumbling about how cable internet fixed the healthcare system, or the one with the old woman who seems to be confusing high-speed internet and the Second Coming of Jesus.
There's no competition in broadband. For most people, it's the cable company, or the phone company -- and often it's one or the other. And that's assuming they have either one available. Both industries have been massaging the numbers for years, using ZIP-code based statistics to try and show competition and availability where it doesn't exist.
To wit, under the current scheme, if one house at one end of a ZIP code area can get cable internet, and another house at the opposite end of town can get DSL, then that ZIP code has both services available -- even though potentially nobody in the area has any choice for service.
Well, the kid can claim it's an accident.. wouldn't be the first kid to say "bet I can take out that window" and then claim later it was an accident.
True. At least the first time around though, without any reason not to, I'm willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt. I can't find any plausible excuse for slashing someone's tires, putting sugar in their gas tank, or putting glue in their ignition, or some of the other things that were mentioned in this thread.
No, I wouldn't press charges against a kid who put a baseball through my window (incidentally, I've actually had that happen). That's an accident. There's no shame in having an accident, particularly when you're a kid, as long as you take responsibility for it.
But going out and intentionally destroying other people's property is another thing entirely. That's not an accident, and I have very little tolerance for it.
Or like putting sugar in someone's gas tank? Or like putting a banana in their tail pipe? You mean like harmless fun?
If someone put sugar in my gas tank and it froze my car's engine, you're damn right I'd press charges. Sounds like vandalism and destruction of property to me. That kind of antisocial shit isn't acceptable regardless of the age of the people it's coming from.
The problem is that for a new activation, they won't let the cable modem onto the network until you somehow "activate" it's MAC address.
Now, until some time ago, this was done over the phone, I think. (I'm not totally sure -- it was done over the phone when I first got Comcast in 2001/02, though.) You called up, read them the number, and some keyboard-monkey typed it in and everything worked.
But then they decided that employing the keyboard-monkey was too expensive, and they came up with this horrible "online activation" system that avoids the phone call. Basically, you hook the cable modem up, hook your PC up to the modem, and then run this special software that's provided on the Comcast disc. This, along with your account information, does the same thing that the phone call used to, and registers your cable modem so you can get online.
So basically, regardless of what kind of modem you have, if you're doing a new install, and you don't have an Windows machine with IE, you need to call them during business hours and have their drone activate it.
Or, they could have hired somebody else (e.g. a Harry Potter fanfic writer) to write an alternative version, and then 'leaked' that. Then there would be less incentive for somebody to leak it for real.
I've heard rumors that there were, at least with one of the earlier books, not sure about this one, a few alternate endings leaked or distributed at different points in the publishing process. Not sure if there's any hard evidence on that, though.
Although, when you stop to think about it, what's really stopping someone from selling it as many times as they want? If they're the kind of person who'd create it and sell it in the first place, I'm supposed to believe their "promise" that they won't sell it to anyone else?
Um, threat of a very, very painful death? You'd be dealing with some very unpleasant people here; I think they might interpret such behavior as treachery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY is a good primer.
It was covered extensively at the time by the likes of Bruce Schneier and others, his comments said:I think the jury is still out on exactly what was really going on; if it was an NSA backdoor, it was a pretty boneheaded one. Alternately, if it was just Microsoft being redundant, then it shows that they didn't plan very well and don't seem to understand security very well. Given the choice between the two, I think boneheadedness on MS's part is more likely.
That's odd. I'm quite sure that T-Mobile will hook you up with just a SIM card for your existing phone; I've known quite a few people who have done it to get data plans for PCMCIA 3G interfaces.
The problem I've run into, and it's not just with T-Mobile, it happens with the other carriers too, is that there are two very distinct types of stores you can go into. One kind is the "corporate" store, it's actually run by T-Mobile (or Verizon, or AT&T, or whatever). Their employees are telco employees. The other kind of store is an independent or chain franchise store, and they're (IMO) usually much shadier. Sometimes it can be nice to go to one of them if you're not sure which network you want to go with, because sometimes they'll have relationships with more than one, but most of the time they just try to seem like a "T-Mobile store," but in reality they're a weird sort of front, making money by reselling T-Mobile plans and phones. The franchise/non-corporate stores seem to be much more interested in pushing contract signups and "free" phones, because I assume they get some major kickback for each new mark.
I've had good luck walking into the real (corporate) T-Mobile stores, after doing research on the web so that I know exactly what I want, and then just telling the employees to do it for me. So far, nobody's argued; I've done some pretty weird stuff, like signing up for CSD service (which isn't officially offered, and now I think it really is impossible to get), had the subsidy lock removed, etc. All by basically walking in and knowing the right words to say to the person at the store, so that they would repeat them to someone at Secret T-Mobile HQ, and they would punch the right keys to make things happen. It helps if you look at it as a social-engineering problem.
Only thing that it might require is telling them that you're using the SIM in some sort of data or other exotic device. Be vague. (Or lie. God never sent anyone to hell for lying to a salesperson.) There are lots of pieces of equipment out there that are cellular-based and use GSM (GPS tracking beacons, laptops with built-in cellular from Asia, etc.); if some retail drone is giving you shit because they're hoping to sucker you into a contract (and earn them some sort of sales incentive, no doubt), just push a bit higher up the ladder. If you know the lingo and know what you want, you'll get it.
It wouldn't surprise me if Cingular/AT&T is more asshattish about doing things in anything except "their way," but that's AT&T for you.
Honestly your best bet is probably to purchase a used GSM phone from eBay. There are quite a few of them out there, so you'll have choices. One that was very popular and manufactured for a while (or that uses a battery that's still in production) would definitely be the best.
Then just take it and get a basic plan at T-Mobile or Cingular (AT&T). Pop in the SIM and go.
What you want isn't a brand-new, basic phone like the Motorola one; what you want is a phone from about three or four years ago. It'll be a lot cheaper, too -- and if something happens to it, no problem, just get a new one.
The problem is that this, like most other effective security schemes, is expensive.
Companies won't implement more security than is cost-effective. Their decision making process is going to be driven directly by the perceived odds of being broken-into, times the cost of a possible breakin. They're not going to spend more money than that.
I doubt there are really going to be any serious (multi-million or -billion dollar) consequences for any of the companies involved. Maybe a few people will get fired and some new procedures will get written into some document that nobody reads, but there's not going to be a major bloodletting. (These companies run the government, in the most literal sense.)
When you see a F500 company absolutely taken to the cleaners -- totally bankrupted -- due to an IT-security mishap, then you'll see real security implemented. But until then it's just going to be a lot of after-the-fact patching-up and good 'ol "security theater." And a lot of blaming the messenger. That's always cheap.