These guys need to have a chat with the DRM folks
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Wireless Mania
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· Score: 1
From the Internet Week article about Boingo:
" Oren Michels, CEO of Wi-Finder, agreed.
"It all boils down to: 'you get what you pay for.' A strong community network gets people to try the technology. But once
you try it, it gets addictive. At a certain point, the community people will get tired of giving it away or the quality of
service will degrade to the point where people are more than willing to pay." " If only the RIAA would wake up and realize that Napster (et al) would work just about the same way for them: Like so many have been saying for so long, we'd LOVE to make micro-payments to download tracks from a reliable, high-speed, high-quality server... Oh well.. at least SOMEONE out there gets it...
Thats one the problems a company should address with a diclaimer in order to not fall into the legal handlings of someone claiming dire crimes against them. People should know, when your on the Internet, especially exchanging during a forum, your not going to find that everyone is Sally fucking Jo Homemaker with etiquette. The problem I see, is that not much was done by those who had their information posted, to hide their information in the first place. Don't they know what privacy is, or was it until someone bitched about it, they turned and said, "Oh my maybe I should not have made my login name maryjosuefrom21mainstreetbirminghamalabama@someshi t.com"
So... does that mean if you're listed in the phone book, you're not trying to hide yourself, so I can harass you? If you have a license plate on your car, I can get your information from the transporation cabinet and harass you, because you're not obscuring your plate number? If it's illegal to harrass, then it's illegal to harrass, regardless of how easy the victim made it for his attacker, just like it's still a crime to take stuff out of my car regardless of if my doors were locked or not.
While I'm glad to see that HP is going to be giving their blessing to the "offical port" and supporting GNOME, it is already availible (for 11.00, for sure, unknown about 10.20) in depot format.
The big difference here, though, is that now it will be *supported*. Much like you could download Samba and install it on an HPUX box, we had no support options for the product until HP shipped CIFS/9000 (which is samba 2.06).
So, I keep seeing this "it's not *REALLY* stealing" comment pop up all the time, and how this whole concept of "intellectual property" is just garbage. While I do not necessarily side with the people that say "you may only watch this movie on a windows or mac computer", I completely disagree with the people that say "if you're transmitting a signal, I can eavesdrop on it because I'm not actually taking anything away from you."
Imagine you had a really good idea at work for improving some process. You tell your coworker about it. He goes and tells the boss. Boss likes the idea and gives the coworker a promotion. You still have your idea. You can still use it. But I bet you'd be pretty ticked off.
While I do not pretend to understand the rationale behind this most bizzare AMD v/s Intel Jihad that I don't participate in, I do beleive in fairness. So, in response to your comment, I went to AMD's website and found a copy of the 3-year limited warranty for your processor. Here is a direct quote:
AMD does not warrant that your AMD processor will be free from design defects or errors known as "errata". A description of the current characterized errata are available upon request.
So, it looks like, using your own logic, AMD is saying, the Athlon is crap, but we don't have to fix it.
Personally, I think what both vendors are saying is "hey... we've made an awfully complex product... and we might have borked it up here and there. sorry... but you can't sue us for it." Right or wrong? I don't really care, but let's not go off half-cocked, shall we?
Regarding the talk about mobile devices/wireless protocols in hospitals:
I'm currently working in a hospital where there is a lot of wireless networking deployed. The manufacturer is Aironet and it's been working great with no interference with the ICU equipment...
...I can't find anything on Specialized's or Sun's websites that mention a word about Sun-purple bikes. Very disapointing. They had a picture of McNealy being presented with a custom-made bike that was sun purple. But, according to the press release, the co-branding ACTUALLY involves putting a logo saying 'Desgined on Sun' on all the bikes and helmets. Oh well. Too good to be true, I guess.
You'll notice that the article didn't say that they lost any computers. They lost network access. And the network at the university would be owned by said university. In fact, as a sysadmin, if I knew my network was getting bogged down with that kind of traffic, I'd gladly do the same thing. Or something similar. I'd have to ask myself: WWSD?* * What Would Simon Do?
I actually, honestly possess a USB-capable motherboard (Abit BH6) along with a USB keyboard, wheel mouse, and joystick on my game machine (win98 for now...). In the CMOS setup, I had first set USB support to come from the OS. While I had keyboard support in the CMOS after that, 'safe mode' and booting directly into MSDOS was a problem: No keyboard, no mouse. Changing that setting back to letting the BIOS handle the USB resulted in perfect performance in the CMOS setup, DOS mode, safe mode, and in regular win98.
And, naturally, they are foolish for listening to the protests of the 'religious right', but making good sense when listening to the protests of people like you and me when we say that censorship* is bad.
Just remember that free speech does apply to everyone, including neo nazis, the KKK, and the 'religious right'. What you have in the case that you've described is a situation where the group in Georgia has taken to the streets and exercised their God-given right to tell the theater/studio that they have a beef. You have the same God-given right to get your own peaceful assembly of people together to hold your own demonstration and/or boycott. The studio, in turn, has its own right to listen to whichever group it wants to, but more importantly, it has the legal obligation to its shareholders to do whatever it thinks will piss off the fewest people, so it usually will side with whichever side has the loudest voices.
So, think what you will about the three sides in this scenario, but from the theater/studio's point of view, keeping the general public happy with them, and keeping their asses in the seats at eight bucks a crack, is their primary reason for exisitance.
* - I use the word 'censorship', however I don't beleive that it is really appropriate in this context. If some governmental authority was telling the theater that they may not show a particular film, yes. But when they bend to the will of some vocal customers or potential customers, that's just business.
Actually, that isn't too far from what is going on in reality, I think.
If you look at people like Janet Reno, for example, you have all these law-enforcement people talking about how having good crypto in the hands of the ordinary folk is such a dangerous thing. They can't monitor it and see if it's big bad terrorists or drug dealers that are trying to kill your kids and rape your wife. Can crypto be banned effectively? No, probably not. However, there are a lot of things that are 'banned', even though their complete removal would be impossible. As examples, I offer: Underage drinking; Pot; Cocaine; Nuclear Proliferation. What I think could very well happen is that crypto would be 'banned', causing a hassle for those of us that would like to stay within the bounds of the law*, while the very people from whom the government is trying to keep crypto away are using it without any real hinderances.
But I stray from my point & the point of this news item. What I'm getting at here is that one of the reasons to be so concerned about mandatory voluntary self-rating is that methods that could be used to circumvent it will be prosecuted and also put into forbidden territory right along with unpopular speech.
* - You can rest assured that should crypto become illegal in any fashion, I would sooner disappear in a Stalinistic fashion than be considered 'law abiding', even though I normally consider myself to be a lawful citizen.
I was a Sysadmin/Network Engineer/One-Who-Was-In-Charge-Of-Anything-That-Po ssessed-Buttons-And-Wires as an emp (notice the closeness to 'imp':)) for a fairly small company for about five years. I was able to learn a lot while I was there, since I had my fingers in all the server platforms we used, the network infrastructure, the phone system, running cable, getting things down off the top shelf, and ocassionally fixing the AC system.
While I was able to educate myself to more-or-less expert status in all those areas (well, except for the AC units), there were four main problems:
I was paid about the same as a junior admin
All my experience in dealing with these great systems & technologies was all in the context of one company's implementation and in the context of that company's industry.
Politics, not my ability, was the main factor in any pay raises/promotions/whatever
I was salary. (Which was even worse, because the CEO thought flex-time was the work of the devil. After pulling 20 hours days Fri., Sat., and Sun., I was expected to take a vacation day if I wanted to take monday off to, say, sleep.)
When I got myself out of that gig, I started looking for a new 'everything' job like that, but quickly turned my attention to contracting. I'm with a contracting firm (they tell me they're pretty big), and I get to see how different companies and different industries use the technologies that I know, and I get to see new toys that need integration. Plus, I get to play with things that I know, but not everyone wants or needs to implement.
My time is rather expensive, so if I don't get asked to work late as often, and if I do, no big deal: they pay for it. I don't get bullshit assignments from my client-boss, because I cost too much to be bothered with that. The emps have to do that work.
And, the best part, I am more or less above the political stuff. Sure, I have to be smiling and nice all the time (which, for me, is no small task!:)), but I am, for the most part, judged on my technical prowess.
So, I guess, the long and the short of it: To answer your question, I would say go as a contractor and you'll get to see the things you know working in ways and places that you never considered.
And you have to give up a thumb print digitally to the Drivers License place
Back when the 'national id card' story hit/. (sorry, no link, I'm too lazy to go looking for it), I immediately fired off a letter to my Congressfolks. Sen. McConnell (Commonwealth of KY), returned the favour with a letter that appeared to make some attempt at calming my concerns about a federal ID system. As I read his letter, I beleive that he said that as part of the anti illegal immigration act, states were required to have a magnetic stripe, fingerprint, ssn, and perhaps a couple other 'security features'. They only had to implement one of those, but they were encouraged to implement as many as possible. The good (?) news is that they weren't required to put the info on the card itself, (like ssn, for example), but they had to collect that info from you and keep it on file.
Still sounds awfully fishy to me, but I that is the explination as I have had it explained to me.
Assumptions: Home (l)user, using windows, 56k modem (probably a "win"-modem) dialup internet access, doing taxes, versus some yet-to-be-implemented network computer setup that involves a minimal OS, connected to an 'application server' through something like a X session, or something.
In order to get to your home windows (l)user, you've gotta get to them while they're connected, which could be for a day, or could be for 10 minutes, while they check their e-mail. And then, you have to hope that they haven't put that data on a zip disk, or a floppy, or something like that. And I know plenty of windows (l)users who save *everything* to floppy disks because they're "afraid of a hard drive crash that could wipe out everything". (keep in mind, here, that we're talking about the joe average home user, not the/. crowd.:))
If this (l)user was using some sort of NC service, all one would have to do is crack the security on that service. Then you would have access to this (l)user's data, as well as everyone else's in one convenient package, unlike having to go from machine to machine to machine to pick up several users' data.
This is not to dismiss the importance of the bug (or, wait, don't they call that a "feature"?) in either system. And it's kind of borderline 'security through obscurity'. But, overall, I think that I would feel more secure knowing that my data is stored right here where I can keep an eye on it, over having my data stored on some server located God knows where, that is constantly being hammered by attackers trying to get to this virtual gold mine of data. (maybe what I'm getting at is that my local PC isn't as attractive of a target as some NC server that has a few thousand people's data on it?)
No, no, and no. I'm far from any sort of fan -- I use MS products only when I have no other choice. I find the hotmail product to be acceptable for a 'throw-away' e-mail address, and I use it as such. However, I think that it is a mistake to expect any business to experience a failure like this and come out with a press release saying: "Woah! We completely screwed everything up and are hopelessly lost when it comes to network security. Whoops!".
Let's just throw away all the fanatical, biased crap for a minute and think real long and hard about it from a business standpoint: If you say something like this, your credibilty will be forever shot, and you'll probably never recover. As much as you and I would cackle with glee over the demise of MS, only an utter idiot would expect that any company would release such a self-destructive statement.
You might argue that nobody has any confidence in MS as it is, so why would it matter. Of course, that would be incorrect. I have no confidence in MS's abilty to market a secure, reliable product. But, I assure you, there are plenty of people out there that don't know any better. If there weren't MS wouldn't be making money.
So, we come back to the crux of the issue: MS borked things up real bad. There are a couple different ways they could have dealt with it. While shifting the blame from themselves to the scapegoat of "evil hacker guys" isn't very accurate, it didn't get the usual microsoft treatment of 'That's a feeeeeeeture'. Or simply ignoring it. Or fixing it and not saying a word about it.
I guess what bugs me about the whole ordeal is that instead of focusing on the fact that they built themselves a gaping security hole that they either never bothered to check for, or found and left alone until someone else pointed it out, everyone is nitpicking on their announcement. And that announcement isn't half as bad as some of the others that I've seen from other companies. At least they didn't say "we can fix the bug for any customer that can prove they really need the extra security afforded by a password".:)
I've read several comments here attempting to run Microsoft out of town on a rail for their statement, referenced in the abstract. While I don't think that running them out of town on a rail is such a bad thing, overall, I also think you need to give some credit where it's due.
One of the worst things you can do, in my experience, is come out and say "Wow. Our system got totally borked, because we didn't think things all the way through and anyone who wanted could read your private mail. Oh, we fixed it, by the by." Sure, you can't deny that there was a problem, but you also can't run around proclaiming to the world that the sky is falling, or you loose any shred of confidence that anyone might have had in you.
This was a fairly serious security breech caused by the implementation of a system before it had been throughougly tested or thought-through. That is inexcusable. And you can't just fix it and then never mention a word about it -- that undermines your credibility as much as a 'chicken little' reaction. Given the circumstances, I think it was a very appropriate response. They admitted the problem, they admitted responsibilty for the problem, and they issued assurances that the problem is fixed, and gave the usual drivel about being comitted to privacy and all that.
As fluffy and irrelevant as all that may sound, when it comes to marketing/crisis handling, I think it was about as responsible as you can get. It certainly beats the usual 'feature-not-a-bug' argument, or the 'gee, it's because our Cisco routers got upgraded wrongly', or 'problem? what problem?'.
The hospital at which I'm working had IBM come in to, basically re-engineer their existing token ring network. IBM's favourite solution seems to be to phase token ring out, put in ethernet, and connect the ethernet hubs to the core network through redundant ATM switches with fibre.
I have to admit, it was somewhat funny sitting in on a meeting with IBM network engineers while they talked about how bad token ring was.
...Since this uses the exact same sender unit as the camera, DVD Anywhere, and the Video Sender, you've got an extra port that you can send video on. In fact, I've been using my DVDAnywhere kit to send MP3 sound for some time now: I have my peesee's dvd decoder's video going through the video sender, and the AC3 output going on regular cable through the wall. Then, I use the sound on the video sender to send my line out to the line-in on my AC3 decoder (the Cambridge Desktop Theater 5.1). Sounds great. And the MouseRemote will work with winamp right out of the box, no special plugin needed.:)
I was pretty excited about the MP3 anywhere, until I realized that the only real innovation here is the winamp plugin.:)
I currently have the DxR2 card with the DVD Encore kit in my Win98 Peesee. It does do Dolby AC-3 5.1 (I've got the Caimbridge Desktop Theater 5.1 decoder/speakers and it sounds great). And, it can also skip the macrovision stuff if you use Remote Selector, which is a tiny little utility that is absolutely wonderful. I have heard rumors that some of the things you can do with Remote Selector on the DxR2 don't work in newer versions of the decoder card, however, I don't know for certain...
I actually just bought one of the Desktop Theater 5.1 setups from Buy.com. $230, give or take a couple bucks after shipping. Very, very nice. You get the decoder, the center speaker, the sub, and the four surround speakers, plus some tripod stands, some velcro, and table-/desk -top stands. My only problem was that I had to use a lot of RCA extenders to get everything to reach from the computer room to the living room, and then from the AC-3 decoder to the read speakers. But, even taking that into consideration, it's pretty good.
The biggest drawback: No remote control -- you've gotta get up to change the volume, or the fade/balance/sub. For the money, though, a very capable system.
But, to answer your question, I don't belive that they sell the decoder seperately.
...one night while talking with someone who was in the pathology department at a local hospital. He was telling me about the efforts that they were making to take an existing virus and remove its 'destructive' genetic code (the code that causes it to break down a cell) and replace it with a 'good' genetic code.
The theory here was that the (for example) influenza virus would have its genetic code altered so that it would attach to a cell and insert its genetic code, like normal, into the cell. This mutatation of the cell would correct whatever defect was present in the cell. This thrust of the work was apparently to attempt to mend the cells of Cystic Fibrosis sufferers (I could be wrong about the disease/disorder they were working on, but it was one that had to do with defective genetic code in cells, and I thought it was CF.)
This sounds like wonderful research, and if it works, it could really help a lot of people. However, this researcher brought up what I thought was a good point: What if the genetic code that we've developed to cure CF (or whatever) mutates? We have new strains of 'resistant' bacteria growing now that have gone that way in the wild -- they couldn't live because they were vunerable to traditional anti-biotics, so strains that were not affected by that (that is to say that they had a different genetic code) would reproduce more, and spread further. Influenza strains do much the same thing -- there are many different strains that have the same genetic makeup, basically, but have mutated somewhat from the original.
I'm not in favor of shutting down all this research because of this, however, I can't help but think that some thought needs to be put into this kind of potential outcome. I doubt seriously that a super-virus would arise overnight and wipe out all of humanity. I can see, however, a genetically-altered virus, designed to combat some disorder, mutating and gaining the ability to reproduce, or inserting a different, more destructive snippet of genetic code into human cells resulting in who-knows-what.
Just my own reflections from a very interesting conversation, but, Lord knows, IANAMicrobiologist.
From the unsubstantiated rumors pile:
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DVD-RAM Support
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I had problems with my DVD-Encore DxR2 kit about two weeks ago, and while talking with Creative's tech support (two different guys on two different days), I posed the question: 'when can I use my DxR2 decoder under linux?'. The answer (both times) was that not now, but soon, very soon. I was told that Creative is working on porting all of its drivers over to linux and that the DVD products were on the list.
Again, I have no other information or facts to present, that's just what I was told by two different tech support guys.
And the best part is, if they're savvy enough, once they have their net access, we can watch all this on their 'web-cam'! I'm looking forward to this!:)
Slashdot Mirror
From the Internet Week article about Boingo:
" Oren Michels, CEO of Wi-Finder, agreed.
"It all boils down to: 'you get what you pay for.' A strong community network gets people to try the technology. But once
you try it, it gets addictive. At a certain point, the community people will get tired of giving it away or the quality of
service will degrade to the point where people are more than willing to pay."
"
If only the RIAA would wake up and realize that Napster (et al) would work just about the same way for them: Like so many have been saying for so long, we'd LOVE to make micro-payments to download tracks from a reliable, high-speed, high-quality server... Oh well.. at least SOMEONE out there gets it...
So... does that mean if you're listed in the phone book, you're not trying to hide yourself, so I can harass you? If you have a license plate on your car, I can get your information from the transporation cabinet and harass you, because you're not obscuring your plate number? If it's illegal to harrass, then it's illegal to harrass, regardless of how easy the victim made it for his attacker, just like it's still a crime to take stuff out of my car regardless of if my doors were locked or not.
The big difference here, though, is that now it will be *supported*. Much like you could download Samba and install it on an HPUX box, we had no support options for the product until HP shipped CIFS/9000 (which is samba 2.06).
Imagine you had a really good idea at work for improving some process. You tell your coworker about it. He goes and tells the boss. Boss likes the idea and gives the coworker a promotion. You still have your idea. You can still use it. But I bet you'd be pretty ticked off.
AMD does not warrant that your AMD processor will be free from design defects or errors known as "errata". A description of the current characterized errata are available upon request.
So, it looks like, using your own logic, AMD is saying, the Athlon is crap, but we don't have to fix it.
Personally, I think what both vendors are saying is "hey... we've made an awfully complex product... and we might have borked it up here and there. sorry... but you can't sue us for it." Right or wrong? I don't really care, but let's not go off half-cocked, shall we?
I'm currently working in a hospital where there is a lot of wireless networking deployed. The manufacturer is Aironet and it's been working great with no interference with the ICU equipment...
...I can't find anything on Specialized's or Sun's websites that mention a word about Sun-purple bikes. Very disapointing. They had a picture of McNealy being presented with a custom-made bike that was sun purple. But, according to the press release, the co-branding ACTUALLY involves putting a logo saying 'Desgined on Sun' on all the bikes and helmets. Oh well. Too good to be true, I guess.
You'll notice that the article didn't say that they lost any computers. They lost network access. And the network at the university would be owned by said university. In fact, as a sysadmin, if I knew my network was getting bogged down with that kind of traffic, I'd gladly do the same thing. Or something similar. I'd have to ask myself: WWSD?* * What Would Simon Do?
I actually, honestly possess a USB-capable motherboard (Abit BH6) along with a USB keyboard, wheel mouse, and joystick on my game machine (win98 for now...). In the CMOS setup, I had first set USB support to come from the OS. While I had keyboard support in the CMOS after that, 'safe mode' and booting directly into MSDOS was a problem: No keyboard, no mouse. Changing that setting back to letting the BIOS handle the USB resulted in perfect performance in the CMOS setup, DOS mode, safe mode, and in regular win98.
Just remember that free speech does apply to everyone, including neo nazis, the KKK, and the 'religious right'. What you have in the case that you've described is a situation where the group in Georgia has taken to the streets and exercised their God-given right to tell the theater/studio that they have a beef. You have the same God-given right to get your own peaceful assembly of people together to hold your own demonstration and/or boycott. The studio, in turn, has its own right to listen to whichever group it wants to, but more importantly, it has the legal obligation to its shareholders to do whatever it thinks will piss off the fewest people, so it usually will side with whichever side has the loudest voices.
So, think what you will about the three sides in this scenario, but from the theater/studio's point of view, keeping the general public happy with them, and keeping their asses in the seats at eight bucks a crack, is their primary reason for exisitance.
* - I use the word 'censorship', however I don't beleive that it is really appropriate in this context. If some governmental authority was telling the theater that they may not show a particular film, yes. But when they bend to the will of some vocal customers or potential customers, that's just business.
If you look at people like Janet Reno, for example, you have all these law-enforcement people talking about how having good crypto in the hands of the ordinary folk is such a dangerous thing. They can't monitor it and see if it's big bad terrorists or drug dealers that are trying to kill your kids and rape your wife. Can crypto be banned effectively? No, probably not. However, there are a lot of things that are 'banned', even though their complete removal would be impossible. As examples, I offer: Underage drinking; Pot; Cocaine; Nuclear Proliferation. What I think could very well happen is that crypto would be 'banned', causing a hassle for those of us that would like to stay within the bounds of the law*, while the very people from whom the government is trying to keep crypto away are using it without any real hinderances.
But I stray from my point & the point of this news item. What I'm getting at here is that one of the reasons to be so concerned about mandatory voluntary self-rating is that methods that could be used to circumvent it will be prosecuted and also put into forbidden territory right along with unpopular speech.
* - You can rest assured that should crypto become illegal in any fashion, I would sooner disappear in a Stalinistic fashion than be considered 'law abiding', even though I normally consider myself to be a lawful citizen.
While I was able to educate myself to more-or-less expert status in all those areas (well, except for the AC units), there were four main problems:
I was paid about the same as a junior admin
All my experience in dealing with these great systems & technologies was all in the context of one company's implementation and in the context of that company's industry.
Politics, not my ability, was the main factor in any pay raises/promotions/whatever
I was salary. (Which was even worse, because the CEO thought flex-time was the work of the devil. After pulling 20 hours days Fri., Sat., and Sun., I was expected to take a vacation day if I wanted to take monday off to, say, sleep.)
When I got myself out of that gig, I started looking for a new 'everything' job like that, but quickly turned my attention to contracting. I'm with a contracting firm (they tell me they're pretty big), and I get to see how different companies and different industries use the technologies that I know, and I get to see new toys that need integration. Plus, I get to play with things that I know, but not everyone wants or needs to implement.
My time is rather expensive, so if I don't get asked to work late as often, and if I do, no big deal: they pay for it. I don't get bullshit assignments from my client-boss, because I cost too much to be bothered with that. The emps have to do that work.
And, the best part, I am more or less above the political stuff. Sure, I have to be smiling and nice all the time (which, for me, is no small task! :)), but I am, for the most part, judged on my technical prowess.
So, I guess, the long and the short of it: To answer your question, I would say go as a contractor and you'll get to see the things you know working in ways and places that you never considered.
Back when the 'national id card' story hit /. (sorry, no link, I'm too lazy to go looking for it), I immediately fired off a letter to my Congressfolks. Sen. McConnell (Commonwealth of KY), returned the favour with a letter that appeared to make some attempt at calming my concerns about a federal ID system. As I read his letter, I beleive that he said that as part of the anti illegal immigration act, states were required to have a magnetic stripe, fingerprint, ssn, and perhaps a couple other 'security features'. They only had to implement one of those, but they were encouraged to implement as many as possible. The good (?) news is that they weren't required to put the info on the card itself, (like ssn, for example), but they had to collect that info from you and keep it on file.
Still sounds awfully fishy to me, but I that is the explination as I have had it explained to me.
IIRC the law prohibits the CIA from operating domestically, however, the NSA's job is SIGINT of domestic and foreign sources.
Assumptions: Home (l)user, using windows, 56k modem (probably a "win"-modem) dialup internet access, doing taxes, versus some yet-to-be-implemented network computer setup that involves a minimal OS, connected to an 'application server' through something like a X session, or something.
In order to get to your home windows (l)user, you've gotta get to them while they're connected, which could be for a day, or could be for 10 minutes, while they check their e-mail. And then, you have to hope that they haven't put that data on a zip disk, or a floppy, or something like that. And I know plenty of windows (l)users who save *everything* to floppy disks because they're "afraid of a hard drive crash that could wipe out everything". (keep in mind, here, that we're talking about the joe average home user, not the /. crowd. :))
If this (l)user was using some sort of NC service, all one would have to do is crack the security on that service. Then you would have access to this (l)user's data, as well as everyone else's in one convenient package, unlike having to go from machine to machine to machine to pick up several users' data.
This is not to dismiss the importance of the bug (or, wait, don't they call that a "feature"?) in either system. And it's kind of borderline 'security through obscurity'. But, overall, I think that I would feel more secure knowing that my data is stored right here where I can keep an eye on it, over having my data stored on some server located God knows where, that is constantly being hammered by attackers trying to get to this virtual gold mine of data. (maybe what I'm getting at is that my local PC isn't as attractive of a target as some NC server that has a few thousand people's data on it?)
Just my thoughts...
Let's just throw away all the fanatical, biased crap for a minute and think real long and hard about it from a business standpoint: If you say something like this, your credibilty will be forever shot, and you'll probably never recover. As much as you and I would cackle with glee over the demise of MS, only an utter idiot would expect that any company would release such a self-destructive statement.
You might argue that nobody has any confidence in MS as it is, so why would it matter. Of course, that would be incorrect. I have no confidence in MS's abilty to market a secure, reliable product. But, I assure you, there are plenty of people out there that don't know any better. If there weren't MS wouldn't be making money.
So, we come back to the crux of the issue: MS borked things up real bad. There are a couple different ways they could have dealt with it. While shifting the blame from themselves to the scapegoat of "evil hacker guys" isn't very accurate, it didn't get the usual microsoft treatment of 'That's a feeeeeeeture'. Or simply ignoring it. Or fixing it and not saying a word about it.
I guess what bugs me about the whole ordeal is that instead of focusing on the fact that they built themselves a gaping security hole that they either never bothered to check for, or found and left alone until someone else pointed it out, everyone is nitpicking on their announcement. And that announcement isn't half as bad as some of the others that I've seen from other companies. At least they didn't say "we can fix the bug for any customer that can prove they really need the extra security afforded by a password". :)
One of the worst things you can do, in my experience, is come out and say "Wow. Our system got totally borked, because we didn't think things all the way through and anyone who wanted could read your private mail. Oh, we fixed it, by the by." Sure, you can't deny that there was a problem, but you also can't run around proclaiming to the world that the sky is falling, or you loose any shred of confidence that anyone might have had in you.
This was a fairly serious security breech caused by the implementation of a system before it had been throughougly tested or thought-through. That is inexcusable. And you can't just fix it and then never mention a word about it -- that undermines your credibility as much as a 'chicken little' reaction. Given the circumstances, I think it was a very appropriate response. They admitted the problem, they admitted responsibilty for the problem, and they issued assurances that the problem is fixed, and gave the usual drivel about being comitted to privacy and all that.
As fluffy and irrelevant as all that may sound, when it comes to marketing/crisis handling, I think it was about as responsible as you can get. It certainly beats the usual 'feature-not-a-bug' argument, or the 'gee, it's because our Cisco routers got upgraded wrongly', or 'problem? what problem?'.
I have to admit, it was somewhat funny sitting in on a meeting with IBM network engineers while they talked about how bad token ring was.
I was pretty excited about the MP3 anywhere, until I realized that the only real innovation here is the winamp plugin. :)
What's going to happen when some high school teacher in the great state of Kansas decides to bring this up to his class?
I currently have the DxR2 card with the DVD Encore kit in my Win98 Peesee. It does do Dolby AC-3 5.1 (I've got the Caimbridge Desktop Theater 5.1 decoder/speakers and it sounds great). And, it can also skip the macrovision stuff if you use Remote Selector, which is a tiny little utility that is absolutely wonderful. I have heard rumors that some of the things you can do with Remote Selector on the DxR2 don't work in newer versions of the decoder card, however, I don't know for certain...
The biggest drawback: No remote control -- you've gotta get up to change the volume, or the fade/balance/sub. For the money, though, a very capable system.
But, to answer your question, I don't belive that they sell the decoder seperately.
The theory here was that the (for example) influenza virus would have its genetic code altered so that it would attach to a cell and insert its genetic code, like normal, into the cell. This mutatation of the cell would correct whatever defect was present in the cell. This thrust of the work was apparently to attempt to mend the cells of Cystic Fibrosis sufferers (I could be wrong about the disease/disorder they were working on, but it was one that had to do with defective genetic code in cells, and I thought it was CF.)
This sounds like wonderful research, and if it works, it could really help a lot of people. However, this researcher brought up what I thought was a good point: What if the genetic code that we've developed to cure CF (or whatever) mutates? We have new strains of 'resistant' bacteria growing now that have gone that way in the wild -- they couldn't live because they were vunerable to traditional anti-biotics, so strains that were not affected by that (that is to say that they had a different genetic code) would reproduce more, and spread further. Influenza strains do much the same thing -- there are many different strains that have the same genetic makeup, basically, but have mutated somewhat from the original.
I'm not in favor of shutting down all this research because of this, however, I can't help but think that some thought needs to be put into this kind of potential outcome. I doubt seriously that a super-virus would arise overnight and wipe out all of humanity. I can see, however, a genetically-altered virus, designed to combat some disorder, mutating and gaining the ability to reproduce, or inserting a different, more destructive snippet of genetic code into human cells resulting in who-knows-what.
Just my own reflections from a very interesting conversation, but, Lord knows, IANAMicrobiologist.
Again, I have no other information or facts to present, that's just what I was told by two different tech support guys.
And the best part is, if they're savvy enough, once they have their net access, we can watch all this on their 'web-cam'! I'm looking forward to this! :)