No, the rootkit wasn't necessarily intentionally purchased by Sony. Re-read the article. Google for first 4 internet. Find this site. Notice they sell DRM. Thanks for playing.
The rootkit is by First 4 Internet. It's possible that Sony simply purchased this DRM from this outside company, not realizing that the DRM contained a rootkit.
Still, one would hope that Sony would only choose reputable suppliers, ones who wouldn't allow a virus/trojan to be distributed intentially or even through neglect.
The ISP's have pointed out that they need the ability to temporarily or permanently shut off users who are:
using an order of magnitude more bandwidth than the normal user (and hopefully those things are spelled out in the EULA), or
infected with a worm, and either blocking specific ports used during its spread, or temporarily cutting of users who are infected
That said, there is definitely solid interest in the FCC and congress to draw a bright red line that says that ISP's can't cut users off from VoIP or IP-TV, or anything else. ISP's clearly shouldn't use blocking for anticompetitive purposes, and most congresscritters agree.
Say you have a 1000-byte file called MyDocument1.doc.vistalnk on your desktop. It points to the real MyDocument1.doc somewhere else on your system.
If you open the file up in XP, Word will be very confused, and if anything, display the 1000-byte gibberish. In Vista, Word (and Outlook, and everything else) will automatically do the right thing, and read the contents of MyDocument1.docwithout having to change any code in Word/Outlook/etc.
Since it's aan automatic part of the operating system, all previous and all future programs will support it. Whereas in XP, only a few small things like the executable launcher try to undrestand.lnk files.
Linux should be an example, but it's only one example among many.
When compact discs were designed in the 80's, there was no way they could forsee that people would be carrying around all of their CDs in a player that fits in their shirt pocket, would be able to use them in ringtones, make backups, have cheap kareoke machines, organize them in a library in iTunes, etc.
This is in stark contrast to DVD's, where they're not going anywhere in 20 years. Any device made to expand their uses in ways not forseen by the original designers will be illegal in most cases, or, if you're rich enough, you get the big industries to agree to your innovation. But that's in stark contrast to the open source philosophy. Open source shows that any random person can have a good idea, and if they can implement it and send that code to everyone else, that lone-individual model is an engine for innovation.
LOL, so now it gets modded all the way down because I didn't make it 100% clear it was a joke? In all other cases, at worst, people would have ignored it as a bad joke. But because it gathered far more attention than I intended, it gets dropped down to 0. How funny.
LOL. Crap, I go to lunch, and come back to find out it's been modded "interesting". It was meant to be a joke. I don't know how much more I could have possibly exagerated it.
Vista will also require a special motherboard that allows Excel to run on a unique kind of CPU, separate from dual-core chips of today. New power supplies that output 17.23 volts will also be required. Buckle up, folks.
Good description
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Here's some fantastic diagrams that describe the history of telecom. See pages 9 through 12 on this powerpoint slide from MIT. The AT&T breakup made things kind of complicated, the 1996 Telecom Act made them even more complicated, but has allowed everything to go back to a pre-breakup configuration.
Windows Vista also reserves a chunk of RAM and disk space so that Excel can have its own memory manager and swap file. It's thought this C++ (complexity++) will make it more difficult or impossible for MSOffice to run on emulators such as Wine.
No, the issue was "why would copyright infringement via google be any easier or less troublesome than copyright infringement via the library", and the answer really is pretty obvious. You can write a problem to copy from Google, but you can't write a program to copy from the library. (yes, you can buy a machine to do it, but again, that's a huge monetary difference from simply copying from google)
Why not just go to B&N or Borders and read the book at that rate?
It should be really bloody obvious, but copyright infringement via Google can be automated, while copying things onto a notepad can't. Once one person writes the program to copy things off Google, EVERYONE can copy things off Google with minimal effort (with the wrinkle that Google would no doubt make ongoing server modifications to try to break said program).
Or did you, and all the moderators, sleep through the past decade of skyrocketing copyright infringements coincident with the onset of digital media?
Most of the measurements are fudged. Sometimes there are different end-user monitors that use the same LCD part from another company, but the two LCD's quote different specs. (eg. the Dell and Apple 20" widescreen). That's why a lot of people try to figure out who made the LCD panel itself, so they can find the published specs for that, as it's potentially less fudged.
Well, it's a small army. Reverting edits is obviously a pretty boring job.
I'm honestly pretty curious about vandal's motivations. Do you know anyone in real life who is a strong proponent of Wikipedia? Wikipedians do tend to be a touch fervent in their advocacy of the site.
Or trying to outsmart the system?
I can't bring myself to do more than a minor bit of vanadalism, so I don't know it very well from the other side. But I enjoy learning about psychology and security, so any comments you have on the motivations of people on the other side generally would be appreciated.
People on Wikipedia usually have a pretty itchy revert finger, and even if they're amused, will still revert as soon as they notice it.
It's true that more subtle vandalism (not pranks) can somewhat easily pass under the radar of those on RC patrol. If someone is doing RC patrol and isn't knowledgable about the topic, or doesn't want to spend the time to check whether that same IP is doing a string of vandalisms, or that the change is a change to a fact that's been in place for months or years, then you can get away with it.
I'm curious what kind of high-traffic articles are somewhat easily to vanadalize. Did you check the article's history? Every once in a while I run into an article that I think should have been created a long lnog time ago, but doesn't exist for some reason (eg. auto mechanic), so I don't think it's necessarily easy to guestimate how popular a page might be.
A page doesn't need obsessive fans, it's a simple matter of having one or more people who are still active (eg. who check their watchlist frequently), who have that page in their watchlist. By default, every page edited is added to a person's watchlist, so pages with longer histories are more likely to have lots of people watching it. But if they were edited months or years ago, it's possible those people have stopped being active on Wikipedia.
I do sort of think that Wikipedia is at a stage where slashdot was many years ago, where Slashdot tried its best to allow everyone to be anonymous if they wanted to. Over time, logged-in users gained more and more advantages. It's to the point now where I hide any posts with a score lower than 2. Hopefully Wikipedia will move in that direction eventually (though vandals will never stop, as evidenced by the constant crap that shows up on Slashdot at a score of -1).
Google's rel=nofollow tag allows bloggers to indicate that Trackbacks aren't to be trusted. If other search engines do the same thing, then that effectively makes Trackbacks useless for SEO people.
HOWEVER, it does not make Trackbacks completely useless for spamming purposes. It's still one (of many) ways for spammers to force their message in front of eyeballs without paying anything. Any time you give control of your website over to third parties, you're going to have to think carefully about it.
Exactly because they're grafted on top of the WWW architecture instead of being designed in from the start, no?
Either that, or it's simply a difficult problem that couldn't be designed into WWW from the start because there was no good solution.
Trackbacks aren't terribly CPU- or network-demanding in many cases (though note that weblogs.com has very high requirements). But there's still the trust / spam problem with them. That you're basically allowing anyone to add links to your webpage. That's fine if you have an army of people to comb through every single addition, but in cases where individual users don't want to monitor their trackbacks 24/7, it may not be a good thing.
Aren't Wiki backlinks somewhat computationally expensive? And they don't usually work across different wikis.
Blog's trackbacks are a little more generalized, but they haven't spread beyond blogs, have they? (partially because trackbacks are too-easily exploited for spam/search engine optimization purposes)
Actually, it's the freaks list that are the people who dislike me (my foes list is people who I don't like) and there are only 5 on that list.
As I said before, you're free to taunt people about ADD, but since it's nothing to be ashamed of, taunting people for it is like... I don't know... swordfighting with the breeze.
Anyway, if you see APK sometime, ask him if he can come out and play.
company realises the story hasn't reached most end cusomters yet, but it's only a matter of time, so they change quickly change their EULA
... process repeats every time a company starts enforcing crazy EULAs
Until a company actually enforces a EULA, it's still a somewhat theoretical problem... news places can't always print a story saying "Crazy EULA #1,942,682 released, film at 11" because people won't pay attention.
Gravity has nothing to do with a decreasing orbit. If you imagine a universe with only two objects near each other, and no atmospheres, the objects will always orbit at the same distance. Gravity is a critical part of the orbit itself, but nothing else. Play with this Java applet or this applet for a couple minutes to see what I mean.
The lowering of the orbit is primarily due to atmospheric drag, as mentioned in other posts.
AOL keywords are something that is somewhat stable due to contractual relations.
Google keywords, on the other hand, are not stable enough to satisfy pointy-haired bosses, especially for medium-to-small-sized companies.
Domain names, as random and hard-to-remember as they are, are at least something you can print on your business card and be reasonably sure that the URL will be valid as long as the company exists.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the rootkit wasn't necessarily intentionally purchased by Sony. Re-read the article. Google for first 4 internet. Find this site. Notice they sell DRM. Thanks for playing.
Still, one would hope that Sony would only choose reputable suppliers, ones who wouldn't allow a virus/trojan to be distributed intentially or even through neglect.
That said, there is definitely solid interest in the FCC and congress to draw a bright red line that says that ISP's can't cut users off from VoIP or IP-TV, or anything else. ISP's clearly shouldn't use blocking for anticompetitive purposes, and most congresscritters agree.
Okay, a different example. In vista, you'll be able to move c:\windows\win.ini somewhere else, and replace the original with a symbolic link.
But isn't "subst" the same thing as mapping a directory to a drive letter? Isn't it just a different interface to the same functionality?
If you open the file up in XP, Word will be very confused, and if anything, display the 1000-byte gibberish. In Vista, Word (and Outlook, and everything else) will automatically do the right thing, and read the contents of MyDocument1.doc without having to change any code in Word/Outlook/etc.
Since it's aan automatic part of the operating system, all previous and all future programs will support it. Whereas in XP, only a few small things like the executable launcher try to undrestand .lnk files.
When compact discs were designed in the 80's, there was no way they could forsee that people would be carrying around all of their CDs in a player that fits in their shirt pocket, would be able to use them in ringtones, make backups, have cheap kareoke machines, organize them in a library in iTunes, etc.
This is in stark contrast to DVD's, where they're not going anywhere in 20 years. Any device made to expand their uses in ways not forseen by the original designers will be illegal in most cases, or, if you're rich enough, you get the big industries to agree to your innovation. But that's in stark contrast to the open source philosophy. Open source shows that any random person can have a good idea, and if they can implement it and send that code to everyone else, that lone-individual model is an engine for innovation.
LOL, so now it gets modded all the way down because I didn't make it 100% clear it was a joke? In all other cases, at worst, people would have ignored it as a bad joke. But because it gathered far more attention than I intended, it gets dropped down to 0. How funny.
Here's some fantastic diagrams that describe the history of telecom. See pages 9 through 12 on this powerpoint slide from MIT. The AT&T breakup made things kind of complicated, the 1996 Telecom Act made them even more complicated, but has allowed everything to go back to a pre-breakup configuration.
Windows Vista also reserves a chunk of RAM and disk space so that Excel can have its own memory manager and swap file. It's thought this C++ (complexity++) will make it more difficult or impossible for MSOffice to run on emulators such as Wine.
No, the issue was "why would copyright infringement via google be any easier or less troublesome than copyright infringement via the library", and the answer really is pretty obvious. You can write a problem to copy from Google, but you can't write a program to copy from the library. (yes, you can buy a machine to do it, but again, that's a huge monetary difference from simply copying from google)
It should be really bloody obvious, but copyright infringement via Google can be automated, while copying things onto a notepad can't. Once one person writes the program to copy things off Google, EVERYONE can copy things off Google with minimal effort (with the wrinkle that Google would no doubt make ongoing server modifications to try to break said program).
Or did you, and all the moderators, sleep through the past decade of skyrocketing copyright infringements coincident with the onset of digital media?
Most of the measurements are fudged. Sometimes there are different end-user monitors that use the same LCD part from another company, but the two LCD's quote different specs. (eg. the Dell and Apple 20" widescreen). That's why a lot of people try to figure out who made the LCD panel itself, so they can find the published specs for that, as it's potentially less fudged.
I'm honestly pretty curious about vandal's motivations. Do you know anyone in real life who is a strong proponent of Wikipedia? Wikipedians do tend to be a touch fervent in their advocacy of the site.
Or trying to outsmart the system?
I can't bring myself to do more than a minor bit of vanadalism, so I don't know it very well from the other side. But I enjoy learning about psychology and security, so any comments you have on the motivations of people on the other side generally would be appreciated.
It's true that more subtle vandalism (not pranks) can somewhat easily pass under the radar of those on RC patrol. If someone is doing RC patrol and isn't knowledgable about the topic, or doesn't want to spend the time to check whether that same IP is doing a string of vandalisms, or that the change is a change to a fact that's been in place for months or years, then you can get away with it.
I'm curious what kind of high-traffic articles are somewhat easily to vanadalize. Did you check the article's history? Every once in a while I run into an article that I think should have been created a long lnog time ago, but doesn't exist for some reason (eg. auto mechanic), so I don't think it's necessarily easy to guestimate how popular a page might be.
A page doesn't need obsessive fans, it's a simple matter of having one or more people who are still active (eg. who check their watchlist frequently), who have that page in their watchlist. By default, every page edited is added to a person's watchlist, so pages with longer histories are more likely to have lots of people watching it. But if they were edited months or years ago, it's possible those people have stopped being active on Wikipedia.
I do sort of think that Wikipedia is at a stage where slashdot was many years ago, where Slashdot tried its best to allow everyone to be anonymous if they wanted to. Over time, logged-in users gained more and more advantages. It's to the point now where I hide any posts with a score lower than 2. Hopefully Wikipedia will move in that direction eventually (though vandals will never stop, as evidenced by the constant crap that shows up on Slashdot at a score of -1).
HOWEVER, it does not make Trackbacks completely useless for spamming purposes. It's still one (of many) ways for spammers to force their message in front of eyeballs without paying anything. Any time you give control of your website over to third parties, you're going to have to think carefully about it.
Either that, or it's simply a difficult problem that couldn't be designed into WWW from the start because there was no good solution.
Trackbacks aren't terribly CPU- or network-demanding in many cases (though note that weblogs.com has very high requirements). But there's still the trust / spam problem with them. That you're basically allowing anyone to add links to your webpage. That's fine if you have an army of people to comb through every single addition, but in cases where individual users don't want to monitor their trackbacks 24/7, it may not be a good thing.
Blog's trackbacks are a little more generalized, but they haven't spread beyond blogs, have they? (partially because trackbacks are too-easily exploited for spam/search engine optimization purposes)
Actually, it's the freaks list that are the people who dislike me (my foes list is people who I don't like) and there are only 5 on that list.
As I said before, you're free to taunt people about ADD, but since it's nothing to be ashamed of, taunting people for it is like... I don't know... swordfighting with the breeze.
Anyway, if you see APK sometime, ask him if he can come out and play.
Did you go on vacation or something? I think the people at the Memory-Optimization Hoax thread were worried about you...
- company publishes crazy EULA, and actually enforces it
- technical press notes insanity, writes story, warning readers to avoid product
- non-technical press reprints the story
- company realises the story hasn't reached most end cusomters yet, but it's only a matter of time, so they change quickly change their EULA
- ... process repeats every time a company starts enforcing crazy EULAs
Until a company actually enforces a EULA, it's still a somewhat theoretical problem... news places can't always print a story saying "Crazy EULA #1,942,682 released, film at 11" because people won't pay attention.2. So is this kind of ruling going to spread to radar detectors, baggage-scanning equipment, automated video cameras, etc?
The lowering of the orbit is primarily due to atmospheric drag, as mentioned in other posts.
Google keywords, on the other hand, are not stable enough to satisfy pointy-haired bosses, especially for medium-to-small-sized companies.
Domain names, as random and hard-to-remember as they are, are at least something you can print on your business card and be reasonably sure that the URL will be valid as long as the company exists.