Get several audio clips of different presidential/dictator speaches in different languages and hold lots of extra calls just to play those back and forth.
Not only would you be switching languages, so would the filler voices. They would need even more people to sort it out.
So the encryption is sound, but did he just delete the old files after encrypting them or did he scrub the drive too.
Someone try to undelete the files with a disk recovery tool and see what you get. Just because the file is encrypted does not mean that the original was correctly destroyed.
This reminds me of that time a single computer shut down an airport for several hours. It was a win9X machine that an employee would reboot monthly because of a know bug. After that employee left, nobody reboted the machine and it crashed.
People are looing for the next wow killer. The new products know they can not fight with Blizzard directly. But what they can do is make more targeted MMORPGs that can pick up where wow leaves off. WoW can be the gateway drug that gets people addicted.
AoC and War focus on the PvP side and look to build a solid base that wants that. They will have PvE elements, but if you are a real PvE'r keep looking. AoC does have a good quest system and pulls you into the story. The shinning element is the seige PvP for AoC. If that fails, the game will die. If AoC fails at raid PvE content, few people will care and will be willing to wait for them to get it right.
WoW does alot and it reaches alot of people. These other games can target a select group and shift the game to their needs. WoW has PvP, but it is forced and added on late in the game. Thats why AoC and War are targeting those parts of the game. WoW has a lot of players asking for more when it comes to PvP.
Make the ballot display on a computer screen and let the user select the options he wants. When you are done, I punches a human readable card with the results.
Those results are placed into another box by hand after the voter looks over the results. You do the precount from the computer booth, then you feed the cards into a card punch reading machine for the official vote.
recount all you want. you will also have a paper trail. problem solved.
You honestly dont have the recources to provide that type of access. Tell them that the database was not structured in a way to keep customer data seperate. You would have to add staffing to manage the security and the seperation of the data. You also know what queries are demanding on the server, so you run them at a time that is low impact to the customers.
You also dont have a license to grant them access to the schema. If they query the database directly, any back end changes would break the reports they run.
You dont want to open that kind of access up to your database/network. It makes the entire structure that much less secure.
And like everyone else said, just tell them no. You already know why you don't want them in. You also understand how the tables relate. It is very easy for someone to wrtie the wrong report because of an important relationship or flag that was forgotten.
When I am watching TV, I try to find 2 shows to watch. When a comercial comes on, I pause the channel I am watching and flip over to the other show. after a few flips, I get a good buffer on both channels. So I either skip them or I find myself on live tv and flip over to the other side.
If I can only find one show to watch and I am stuck on live, I tend to skip back and rewatch clips where I didn't quite hear what they said. Or if a funny comercial does come on, I will flip back and watch it. I use the rest of the comercials to burn off the buffer. (I also have a 3 year old and a 6 month old, they produce enough noise sometimes that I have to skip back alot. That or they create several events that require me to pause the show from time to time building more of a buffer)
If I am watching a DRV recording I will skip every comercial.
thats how I manage my dvr when I am watching TV. Most of the time it is on as background noise. I sit in the living room with my laptop and pick my head up for the interesting parts of the show. When I do that, I tend to just let it play.
I think the bigest problem with this case is the exact detailed nature of it. Other courts will not have the technical grasp of what is going on here and will use the info incorrectly.
A 3rd party program is actualy making a copy of wow in ram, making a small change to it, then running it.
That is what they claim is copyright infringement.
Now look at this example
You run wow after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program that makes a small change to it.
That would not be covered under that copyright infringement claim. The difference is very small but it is very real and that is the detail the entire case depends on. The fear is that if blizzard wins this case, both examples will become copyright issues and that will have huge desasterous effects.
It is very rare that you would have a legal reason for running a program the way wow glider does when the main program is not designed that way.
The counter argument is this: does microsoft have a right to copy the program into ram and run it. That is basicly what the OS is doing when the user startes it. What if wow glider was 2 sepperate systems from 2 different groups. one that acts as a boot loader for wow and the other that patches it as an addon to the boot loader. If you remove the Hack from the case, would the case still have merrit?
why not give them a Palm or PocketPC with a bit larger display and a keyboard.
what more do they need?
I bet you can get every TYPE of application they need on one of those. So it wont run MS office or possibly even open office. But do they need much more than a notepad with spellcheck?
do we think this will have any effect other than cost us tax revenue?
All this does is force Yahoo or Google to open a company in China. Now the filters do not change and companies moved some of their revenue businesses out of the country.
Does anyone not see it happening this way if this is enforced?
first try to crack the passwords on his machine. If you can get any passwords in plain text write them down. He may have reused them. If you can get into his profile, its possible he set his cookies to auto login to his websites.
Next try to get into his email. Call the provider and ask about your situation and find out what the rules are with out ever telling the operator your name or the account name. If the info they give you will not help you, hang up and call back pretending to be the deceased. They dont know he is dead yet.
Get the birth cert, social security number, phone numbers and addresses (current and past), birthdate, drivers lic, mothers maiden name. Try calling from his home phone, or be near that phone when you make your call. Just pretend to be an average user that cant get into your email. Reset the password.
Once you have the email account under your control you can just request a password reset from most of the other services.
Basicly steal his identity, if they cant prove you are not him its hard for them to not let you in. Just play dumb. Dont say you forgot your password, tell them that your email is broken because your account won't work.
The loop hole for insurance is that they drop coverage for things that can be uncovered with the tests. Then they make an add hock policy that allows you to add coverage for those things one at a time.
If they offer the same price to everyone, then they have not descriminated anyone. The end result is everyone would get a test and then only cover what they needed. The prices would be much higher
There is no question that they will use virtual machines to support older apps. They have done alot of work in that area. And it is such an easy way to add backwards compatibility.
If it it not in the product, what reason do people have to stick with windows. I thought vista was a good enough reason to push people to linux. If the change will be as big as office 2007 was to 2003 it will give apple and linux alot more room to gain market.
I am tempted to do this all the time, but I know the administration would not understand what I am talking about. In the end I would prabably get fired on a technicality.
The weakest link in any security system is the end user. I work with users that have the hardest time with computers. I have this guy call every week because he forgot his password and I have to take 10 min training him how to change his password. (why every week? he only works on Thursdays).
Now you will have to make a new password is has to have... blah... blah...... You have to retype it to confirm it before you press enter this time.
now you have to put in your old password again. not that one, the one I just gave you is the old password. You have to click in the line. click the mouse. left click. you can't hover the mouse over it, you have to click in it.... now type you new password. On the next line retype it. You have to click, no left click, click the mouse in the box.
You have to type it the same. no, I can see they don't match. the first one is longer, it has more dots.
You just cant explain to some people what fishing even is.
I had one guy call up freaking out that his computer told him he had porn on it. (its a fire on the spot if you have porn). It was a little pop up window trying to get him to instal a program to "remove" it. The good news is he was too scared to click the button and called me instead. Other users had to be rebuilt.
I know an attack like this would catch so many people and you have to train them. But you spend so much time just logging them in or working on the basic stuff. This is one detail that some people will have a hard time grasping.
I am in an interesting enviroment. I have college students looking to enter the workforce working with people that are about to or have retired. So I deal will the full range of users all the time.
Every day I take the content from slashdot and talk about it with people I know.
And I auto filter it. I take the stories that I think they want to hear to them. Or stuff that I think they can contribute more information on. Its just a natural part how we do things.
I think the new generation is just more instant about it.
It may be a weak argument but it will require the wow Glider to hire a legal team to fight it. Its just another way them to attack.
I dont know if this is just another attack or Blizzard claiming defeat. Blizzard has been in a hacking war with bots for a long time. Blizzard was winning for a long time but wow glider is on top of the game now.
Just how do you hide from a program that is looking for you when they have access to your binaries? I don't want to say I support botting, but I have to give that dev team credit for doing such a good job.
I have this gut feeling that it would only compound the issue.
The article says they only had a 1% failure rate in field tests. I bet the crew of 20 to 30 year old tech guys had no issues with it. They under esimated the end users. Yes, some systems are very simple but you still find people that can't figure them out. Not only were more computers "breaking", the support calls would have been greater then expected.
With electronic, you now have to pay for the support of that electronic component.
People from all over the world will be visiting and all kinds of reporters will be onsite. How many reports do you think we will see that tell us China blocks part of the internet. Telling us stuff we already told them but they refused to listen.
This will be a big black eye for China because the whole world will be faced with the details and feel the impact.
This could get interesting.
I saw one person mention tor as a work around. I think using a VPN could also work for them.
If you dont ever take your laptop anyplace, you could take an old computer case from home. Gut the components out and hide the laptop inside it. Then lock that case down.
If you have external usb devices that you never unplug, just place them inside too. I guess this is the poor mans lock box with vent holes. That and if its yellow enough, nobody with think to take it.
Or just get used to the cable locks and put your things away. Change is not the end of the world, you just have to adjust to it. The external usb items would be an issue for anyone in your new area. Talk to them and see what they do.
Something we do in our public labs to lock down things like keyboards/mice/usb cords. Take a washer that is too small for either end of the cord to fit into. Fold the cord in half and insert the fold into the washer. Run a cable lock through the little loop and lock it onto the laptop or computer. You either have to unlock it or cut something. This protects the cords, but if it detaches from the device you are still out of luck.
We need a way to classify software that does this. Call it installware for all I care.
installware: software that installs other products that the user would not expect to be installed as a default option. This includes any 3rd pary addons or 1st party products that are unrelated to the current install.
something that would lable products that instal browser bars too. We know some products work hard to not get listed as spyware or adware. Its time to expand it to include this other crap.
I saw that Dell has a small business line of PC's that they claim to ship free of all that bloatware. I dont remember the name of that product line. But I liked the fact that you didnt have to select it as an option, it was a standard feature.
The first thing I do to every new computer I get (or my family) is to reformat and reinstall windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Get several audio clips of different presidential/dictator speaches in different languages and hold lots of extra calls just to play those back and forth.
Not only would you be switching languages, so would the filler voices. They would need even more people to sort it out.
Fail alot and learn from your failures.
Here is a nice post on the topic:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-fail-at-practically-anything.html
So the encryption is sound, but did he just delete the old files after encrypting them or did he scrub the drive too.
Someone try to undelete the files with a disk recovery tool and see what you get. Just because the file is encrypted does not mean that the original was correctly destroyed.
This reminds me of that time a single computer shut down an airport for several hours. It was a win9X machine that an employee would reboot monthly because of a know bug. After that employee left, nobody reboted the machine and it crashed.
The known bug was that win 9x stored the number of sec from last reboot in a int? and after about 47 days it would pass its max value and shut down. I did a quick search and this might be the story: http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39124122,00.htm
People are looing for the next wow killer. The new products know they can not fight with Blizzard directly. But what they can do is make more targeted MMORPGs that can pick up where wow leaves off. WoW can be the gateway drug that gets people addicted.
AoC and War focus on the PvP side and look to build a solid base that wants that. They will have PvE elements, but if you are a real PvE'r keep looking. AoC does have a good quest system and pulls you into the story. The shinning element is the seige PvP for AoC. If that fails, the game will die. If AoC fails at raid PvE content, few people will care and will be willing to wait for them to get it right.
WoW does alot and it reaches alot of people. These other games can target a select group and shift the game to their needs. WoW has PvP, but it is forced and added on late in the game. Thats why AoC and War are targeting those parts of the game. WoW has a lot of players asking for more when it comes to PvP.
Punch cards.
We need to reinvent punchcards.
Make the ballot display on a computer screen and let the user select the options he wants. When you are done, I punches a human readable card with the results.
Those results are placed into another box by hand after the voter looks over the results. You do the precount from the computer booth, then you feed the cards into a card punch reading machine for the official vote.
recount all you want. you will also have a paper trail. problem solved.
You honestly dont have the recources to provide that type of access. Tell them that the database was not structured in a way to keep customer data seperate. You would have to add staffing to manage the security and the seperation of the data. You also know what queries are demanding on the server, so you run them at a time that is low impact to the customers.
You also dont have a license to grant them access to the schema. If they query the database directly, any back end changes would break the reports they run.
You dont want to open that kind of access up to your database/network. It makes the entire structure that much less secure.
And like everyone else said, just tell them no. You already know why you don't want them in. You also understand how the tables relate. It is very easy for someone to wrtie the wrong report because of an important relationship or flag that was forgotten.
When I am watching TV, I try to find 2 shows to watch. When a comercial comes on, I pause the channel I am watching and flip over to the other show. after a few flips, I get a good buffer on both channels. So I either skip them or I find myself on live tv and flip over to the other side.
If I can only find one show to watch and I am stuck on live, I tend to skip back and rewatch clips where I didn't quite hear what they said. Or if a funny comercial does come on, I will flip back and watch it. I use the rest of the comercials to burn off the buffer. (I also have a 3 year old and a 6 month old, they produce enough noise sometimes that I have to skip back alot. That or they create several events that require me to pause the show from time to time building more of a buffer)
If I am watching a DRV recording I will skip every comercial.
thats how I manage my dvr when I am watching TV. Most of the time it is on as background noise. I sit in the living room with my laptop and pick my head up for the interesting parts of the show. When I do that, I tend to just let it play.
I think the bigest problem with this case is the exact detailed nature of it. Other courts will not have the technical grasp of what is going on here and will use the info incorrectly.
A 3rd party program is actualy making a copy of wow in ram, making a small change to it, then running it.
That is what they claim is copyright infringement.
Now look at this example
You run wow after loading it into ram, then start a 3rd party program that makes a small change to it.
That would not be covered under that copyright infringement claim. The difference is very small but it is very real and that is the detail the entire case depends on. The fear is that if blizzard wins this case, both examples will become copyright issues and that will have huge desasterous effects.
It is very rare that you would have a legal reason for running a program the way wow glider does when the main program is not designed that way.
The counter argument is this: does microsoft have a right to copy the program into ram and run it. That is basicly what the OS is doing when the user startes it. What if wow glider was 2 sepperate systems from 2 different groups. one that acts as a boot loader for wow and the other that patches it as an addon to the boot loader. If you remove the Hack from the case, would the case still have merrit?
I have found a lot of nice gems in that project.
You do get a lot of simple or basic functionality tests, but some do have a nice polished feel.
Crayon Physics and Tower of Goo stand out the most. Every few months I download all the new games and just kill time seeing what they can do.
they are just trying to get as many as they can while they can.
this little cash pot will go dark for 3 months as students head home or off campus now that the year is about over for them.
why not give them a Palm or PocketPC with a bit larger display and a keyboard.
what more do they need?
I bet you can get every TYPE of application they need on one of those.
So it wont run MS office or possibly even open office. But do they need much more than a notepad with spellcheck?
do we think this will have any effect other than cost us tax revenue?
All this does is force Yahoo or Google to open a company in China. Now the filters do not change and companies moved some of their revenue businesses out of the country.
Does anyone not see it happening this way if this is enforced?
Lots of options here.
first try to crack the passwords on his machine. If you can get any passwords in plain text write them down. He may have reused them. If you can get into his profile, its possible he set his cookies to auto login to his websites.
Next try to get into his email. Call the provider and ask about your situation and find out what the rules are with out ever telling the operator your name or the account name. If the info they give you will not help you, hang up and call back pretending to be the deceased. They dont know he is dead yet.
Get the birth cert, social security number, phone numbers and addresses (current and past), birthdate, drivers lic, mothers maiden name. Try calling from his home phone, or be near that phone when you make your call. Just pretend to be an average user that cant get into your email. Reset the password.
Once you have the email account under your control you can just request a password reset from most of the other services.
Basicly steal his identity, if they cant prove you are not him its hard for them to not let you in. Just play dumb. Dont say you forgot your password, tell them that your email is broken because your account won't work.
The loop hole for insurance is that they drop coverage for things that can be uncovered with the tests. Then they make an add hock policy that allows you to add coverage for those things one at a time.
If they offer the same price to everyone, then they have not descriminated anyone. The end result is everyone would get a test and then only cover what they needed. The prices would be much higher
There is no question that they will use virtual machines to support older apps. They have done alot of work in that area. And it is such an easy way to add backwards compatibility.
If it it not in the product, what reason do people have to stick with windows. I thought vista was a good enough reason to push people to linux. If the change will be as big as office 2007 was to 2003 it will give apple and linux alot more room to gain market.
I am tempted to do this all the time, but I know the administration would not understand what I am talking about. In the end I would prabably get fired on a technicality.
... blah ... blah ... ... You have to retype it to confirm it before you press enter this time.
... now type you new password. On the next line retype it. You have to click, no left click, click the mouse in the box.
The weakest link in any security system is the end user. I work with users that have the hardest time with computers. I have this guy call every week because he forgot his password and I have to take 10 min training him how to change his password. (why every week? he only works on Thursdays).
Now you will have to make a new password is has to have
now you have to put in your old password again. not that one, the one I just gave you is the old password. You have to click in the line. click the mouse. left click. you can't hover the mouse over it, you have to click in it.
You have to type it the same. no, I can see they don't match. the first one is longer, it has more dots.
You just cant explain to some people what fishing even is.
I had one guy call up freaking out that his computer told him he had porn on it. (its a fire on the spot if you have porn). It was a little pop up window trying to get him to instal a program to "remove" it. The good news is he was too scared to click the button and called me instead. Other users had to be rebuilt.
I know an attack like this would catch so many people and you have to train them. But you spend so much time just logging them in or working on the basic stuff. This is one detail that some people will have a hard time grasping.
I am in an interesting enviroment. I have college students looking to enter the workforce working with people that are about to or have retired. So I deal will the full range of users all the time.
Every day I take the content from slashdot and talk about it with people I know.
And I auto filter it. I take the stories that I think they want to hear to them. Or stuff that I think they can contribute more information on. Its just a natural part how we do things.
I think the new generation is just more instant about it.
It may be a weak argument but it will require the wow Glider to hire a legal team to fight it. Its just another way them to attack.
I dont know if this is just another attack or Blizzard claiming defeat. Blizzard has been in a hacking war with bots for a long time. Blizzard was winning for a long time but wow glider is on top of the game now.
Just how do you hide from a program that is looking for you when they have access to your binaries? I don't want to say I support botting, but I have to give that dev team credit for doing such a good job.
I love to see this competition to meet standards. We all win when this happens.
Although one could argue that any time a product deviates from the standard it should be logged as a bug.
I have this gut feeling that it would only compound the issue.
The article says they only had a 1% failure rate in field tests. I bet the crew of 20 to 30 year old tech guys had no issues with it. They under esimated the end users. Yes, some systems are very simple but you still find people that can't figure them out. Not only were more computers "breaking", the support calls would have been greater then expected.
With electronic, you now have to pay for the support of that electronic component.
This will be interesting.
People from all over the world will be visiting and all kinds of reporters will be onsite. How many reports do you think we will see that tell us China blocks part of the internet. Telling us stuff we already told them but they refused to listen.
This will be a big black eye for China because the whole world will be faced with the details and feel the impact.
This could get interesting.
I saw one person mention tor as a work around. I think using a VPN could also work for them.
If you dont ever take your laptop anyplace, you could take an old computer case from home. Gut the components out and hide the laptop inside it. Then lock that case down.
If you have external usb devices that you never unplug, just place them inside too. I guess this is the poor mans lock box with vent holes. That and if its yellow enough, nobody with think to take it.
Or just get used to the cable locks and put your things away. Change is not the end of the world, you just have to adjust to it. The external usb items would be an issue for anyone in your new area. Talk to them and see what they do.
Something we do in our public labs to lock down things like keyboards/mice/usb cords. Take a washer that is too small for either end of the cord to fit into. Fold the cord in half and insert the fold into the washer. Run a cable lock through the little loop and lock it onto the laptop or computer. You either have to unlock it or cut something. This protects the cords, but if it detaches from the device you are still out of luck.
We need a way to classify software that does this. Call it installware for all I care.
installware: software that installs other products that the user would not expect to be installed as a default option. This includes any 3rd pary addons or 1st party products that are unrelated to the current install.
something that would lable products that instal browser bars too. We know some products work hard to not get listed as spyware or adware. Its time to expand it to include this other crap.
I saw that Dell has a small business line of PC's that they claim to ship free of all that bloatware. I dont remember the name of that product line. But I liked the fact that you didnt have to select it as an option, it was a standard feature.
The first thing I do to every new computer I get (or my family) is to reformat and reinstall windows.