Which is a waste of time, copyright terms are unrealistically long so anyone who remembers these games will be long dead by the time they fall into the public domain.
Just goes to show that copyright terms are far too long. Anything that falls into the public domain will be long forgotten. Media should fall into the public domain once the original authors stop selling it.
I have an HP 9100C, i press the email button, press the first character from my email address and it automatically populates the address... Then i just press scan and it scans and emails to me. And this is quite an old network scanner.
I've used other models that work in a similar way too... I would avoid one that required proprietary software.
As ipv4 increasingly runs out, and more people find themselves natted behind a single address shared with hundreds of others, the harder it becomes to track down individuals...
Self signed certs would probably be a better idea for businesses you already have a relationship with, like banks... You already have offline contact with the bank via mail or even walking into a branch, so they could use this to send you their certs and you won't have to trust anyone else.
And what exactly does an "authentic signature" represent? It's just a random mark on a piece of paper, its trivial to spoof and usually not even necessary since you can just make a random mark yourself and noone will care. Every time i "sign" something i always make a different random mark and noone has ever noticed or cared.
Yes but not to the target building, you can just open the street telco cabinet (often their "lock" is just having a funny shaped screw to turn) and splice in...
Also most phone systems are computerised these days, what if you break into the telco remotely?
Most of the ones i see, have a control panel at the front where you can select a destination email address, so you enter the email address just like you would with a fax number, hit scan, machine scans and emails.
You can get cheaper sheet feed scanners, i had a samsung (4623N) all in one printer/scanner/copier (also included a modem for fax use), also since a device is more useful than a single purpose fax machine it's worth more, assuming you have use for its additional features - which most companies do.
Cheap fax machines are often also garbage... And since you work in support it's unlikely anyone is going to call you to tell you their scanner is still working fine, you won't hear from them until something goes wrong.
Email attachment sizes aren't an inherent limitation, they are a configured one that come about due to poorly designed mail servers...
That said, if you scan your page at a quality level similar to fax you will be able to transmit a large number of pages before you run foul of any size limits, remember fax runs at 1Kb/sec so a multi megabyte document would take hours to send.
Also a signature is a ridiculous requirement, anyone can make a random mark on a piece of paper. Quite often in these situations, i simply draw a random mark electronically so i don't have to go to the hassle (not to mention horrendous waste of paper) of printing and re-scanning. Not once has anyone ever questioned the output from this.
If an internet site has to comply with the local laws in every jurisdiction from which it is accessible, you would have an utterly farcical situation... Plenty of countries have laws which make it illegal to display content which is contrary to their regime, and some countries even require all content to be censored.
Imagine trying to comply with the laws of Myanmar or North Korea...
A website should only be beholden to the laws in the country from which it is hosted and/or operated.... And speaking of Russia, isn't that how allofmp3 worked? Blatantly ignoring US laws, but complying with Russian laws.
A country-wide license will still cost a huge amount of money, whereas any development work has to be done once regardless of how many end users will use it.
Many systems are never "combined", there are hundreds of disparate systems out there already. That said, systems based on open standards with source code availability would actually be easier to connect together.
Also, paying local engineers to develop open source (that can be used across all government) is actually much better than paying money to a foreign corporation... If you pay engineers then you create jobs, decrease unemployment and the majority of what you pay them, you will receive back in the form of direct and indirect taxes.
Another of the reasons is the various government approval schemes like CAPS, EAL and FIPS... If your software is not approved, then it's not allowed to be used in certain government projects. Now these approval schemes are utterly ridiculous for so many reasons...
Getting your product on these schemes is expensive, which means that only large vendors can afford to apply, and even those won't bother to certify all versions of their products. The approval process is slow (plus not all versions are submitted for certification) meaning that the certified versions are usually out of date, and often have known security holes. The evaluation process is often flawed, it will cover a limited scope thats defined by the vendor, and really just checks that features the vendor claims to have exist... There is no audit of the source code, no thorough evaluation of the software in a realistic environment, and no checks to make sure that the features the vendor claims to have actually work properly and can't be circumvented.
Incidentally, we should start a petition on the e-petitions site to get answers and draw political attention to this.
Things like re-training the existing in-house IT staff, re-training existing users, deciding exactly which combination of open source applications are capable of fulfilling existing functionality, converting existing application data,
While it would be wasteful to rip and replace existing systems just for the sake of moving them to open source, new systems are introduced all the time and old systems are retired/replaced. This is where open source should be deployed, and if training is going to be provided it will be needed regardless of what new/replacement systems are implemented.
As for deciding what software can fulfil given requirements, thats something thats not done enough anyway... A lot of departments simply trust what sales drones tell them, even when the software they're selling doesn't really fulfil the requirements.
and a reluctance to risk violating licensing requirements which can be open to liberal interpretations and are constantly being challenged today in court.
The most common open source licenses (GPL, BSD etc) place no restrictions whatsoever on use, and only come into effect if you wish to distribute the software. Considering that the government hardly ever distributes software this is pure FUD. By contrast, proprietary licenses are far more complex as they often place significant restrictions on use, and don't allow redistribution at all.
It does not seem to be a DNS poisoning, since the whois servers also reported the hacker's dns servers.
Also zone-h reports that the site was running Linux, but it is clearly whatever server the hackers redirected the DNS to that runs linux, it was not necessarily a linux system that was breached in order to actually carry out the defacement.
It would appear that the registrar for the domains in question has been hacked, and the hackers chose a few high profile sites to deface.
I'm not disputing that the device isn't overly useful on its own, or that there won't be bundled sold in future which include all the extra hardware required to get it working... But the fact that it's offered standalone, and not forced bundled with everything else is a good thing because many people will already have, or can get extremely cheaply all the other kit.
Keyboards, Screens, Cases and Speakers are all devices that have not changed much in years...
A CRT from 15 years ago will be perfectly capable of displaying a useful resolution, and are often being given away. Plus this device is capable of output to a TV set, anything from a modern HDMI HDTV, down to an old analog set. Speakers (or headphones) are widely available, old ones are often thrown out. A keyboard from 20 years ago will have the same keys as a modern one, some people even prefer to use older keyboards like the IBM model M. A case can also be had for virtually nothing, considering how small this board is, it should fit inside anything. I imagine someone will produce a small custom case for it, and a simple made in china plastic housing for a board of this size isn't going to cost a lot.
If someone is strapped for cash, they're not going to want to buy a whole bunch of new components, when they either already have perfectly serviceable parts, or would be able to obtain used ones cheaply or even free.
When i got my first computer, it didn't come with a monitor.. I had to connect it to the TV set.
Also if your really poor, you probably don't want to buy a new monitor when an old one can be had for little or no money, and will work just fine. Same for keyboards and mice, new ones are cheap enough but used ones are often thrown out in large quantities and work perfectly well.
Blackberry benefits from marketing and obscurity causing people to *think* its secure, just look at the comments made by the guy who successfully exploited a blackberry in the recent pwn2own contest.
Windows phone 7 likely benefits from the same obscurity at the moment...
iPhone is more of a target right now because they're desirable handsets, whereas windows phone 7 is largely undesirable and blackberry is considered boring and unfashionable, being associated with business and in some cases kids (who only use blackberry messenger because its free, unlike sms). In terms of actual security, iOS (and android) are unix systems at heart, with the same basic security model as any other unix, and are based on years of code which has been battle hardened over the years... Blackberryos and windows phone 7 on the other hand are primarily single user systems, with very little thought for low level security, although blackberry seems to be moving towards qnx which is also a tried and tested unix-like platform.
You could say the opposite of windows vs osx, any given exploit is generally harder to exploit in windows than osx (snow leopard, haven't looked at lion), because windows implements more technologies designed to deter exploitation attempts. This is largely because Apple haven't been attacked as much, and thus had less reason to implement such technologies. On the other hand, that relative ease of exploitation, combined with apple's high profile status at the moment, means that more white hats exploit apple to make a name for themselves, while blackhats still target windows.
This policy as acceptable for Apple because they do not have a monopoly stranglehold over the markets in question...
And it's not really a problem so long as options and competition exist.. If there are 3-4 major platforms with roughly equal marketshare, it wouldn't really matter if the consumer oriented platforms are locked down so long as there are geek/enthusiast oriented platforms which aren't.
And similarly, if you want an Apple phone your stuck with Safari, if you buy a windows phone your stuck with IE, if you buy an android phone you get chrome by default... If you don't like some aspect of a given platform, then you weigh that up when making your purchasing decision.
The days of walking into a store to buy software on physical media are long dead for many... Open Source has long been available from the Internet, and often via a convenient app-store like tool (how long has apt-get been around for?)...
And then of course while commercial vendors have been very slow to embrace new distribution models, pirates haven't.
The idea of producing and shipping physical media is a ridiculous one, it is extremely wasteful as the media will typically only be used for an initial install and then discarded, and its extremely slow... And for those who don't have internet connections, there's nothing to stop you going to a store with a usb stick, buying some software and copying it onto the stick... This would allow the store to have massively more inventory with less shelf/stock space wasted.
Also the idea of a locked down computer is actually a benefit for 95% of users... Current computers are geek tools, they are complex beasts where the average user only understands the very surface of the system, and if anything breaks they often don't have a hope in hell of fixing it. They are completely unsuitable for the average user, users don't need to worry about installing updates for their vcr or their microwave, so why should they be saddled with this on their internet/gaming appliance?
They say linux isn't suitable for end users, and thats very true, it isn't... but then windows is worse and osx isn't much better.
The key however, is to strike a balance... Provide the average user with a useful and suitable appliance, but don't destroy the geek tools in the process. Look at the auto market, most users buy a car, never look under the hood and take it to a dealer for service... But a few people tune and mod their cars.
Slashdot Mirror
A tiny handful is more than the current situation where noone buys roms simply because they are not for sale.
Which is a waste of time, copyright terms are unrealistically long so anyone who remembers these games will be long dead by the time they fall into the public domain.
Just goes to show that copyright terms are far too long. Anything that falls into the public domain will be long forgotten. Media should fall into the public domain once the original authors stop selling it.
I have an HP 9100C, i press the email button, press the first character from my email address and it automatically populates the address... Then i just press scan and it scans and emails to me. And this is quite an old network scanner.
I've used other models that work in a similar way too... I would avoid one that required proprietary software.
As ipv4 increasingly runs out, and more people find themselves natted behind a single address shared with hundreds of others, the harder it becomes to track down individuals...
Self signed certs would probably be a better idea for businesses you already have a relationship with, like banks... You already have offline contact with the bank via mail or even walking into a branch, so they could use this to send you their certs and you won't have to trust anyone else.
And what exactly does an "authentic signature" represent?
It's just a random mark on a piece of paper, its trivial to spoof and usually not even necessary since you can just make a random mark yourself and noone will care. Every time i "sign" something i always make a different random mark and noone has ever noticed or cared.
Yes but not to the target building, you can just open the street telco cabinet (often their "lock" is just having a funny shaped screw to turn) and splice in...
Also most phone systems are computerised these days, what if you break into the telco remotely?
That sounds like a very poorly setup scanner...
Most of the ones i see, have a control panel at the front where you can select a destination email address, so you enter the email address just like you would with a fax number, hit scan, machine scans and emails.
You can get cheaper sheet feed scanners, i had a samsung (4623N) all in one printer/scanner/copier (also included a modem for fax use), also since a device is more useful than a single purpose fax machine it's worth more, assuming you have use for its additional features - which most companies do.
Cheap fax machines are often also garbage... And since you work in support it's unlikely anyone is going to call you to tell you their scanner is still working fine, you won't hear from them until something goes wrong.
Email attachment sizes aren't an inherent limitation, they are a configured one that come about due to poorly designed mail servers...
That said, if you scan your page at a quality level similar to fax you will be able to transmit a large number of pages before you run foul of any size limits, remember fax runs at 1Kb/sec so a multi megabyte document would take hours to send.
Also a signature is a ridiculous requirement, anyone can make a random mark on a piece of paper. Quite often in these situations, i simply draw a random mark electronically so i don't have to go to the hassle (not to mention horrendous waste of paper) of printing and re-scanning. Not once has anyone ever questioned the output from this.
If an internet site has to comply with the local laws in every jurisdiction from which it is accessible, you would have an utterly farcical situation...
Plenty of countries have laws which make it illegal to display content which is contrary to their regime, and some countries even require all content to be censored.
Imagine trying to comply with the laws of Myanmar or North Korea...
A website should only be beholden to the laws in the country from which it is hosted and/or operated.... And speaking of Russia, isn't that how allofmp3 worked? Blatantly ignoring US laws, but complying with Russian laws.
A country-wide license will still cost a huge amount of money, whereas any development work has to be done once regardless of how many end users will use it.
Many systems are never "combined", there are hundreds of disparate systems out there already. That said, systems based on open standards with source code availability would actually be easier to connect together.
Also, paying local engineers to develop open source (that can be used across all government) is actually much better than paying money to a foreign corporation... If you pay engineers then you create jobs, decrease unemployment and the majority of what you pay them, you will receive back in the form of direct and indirect taxes.
Another of the reasons is the various government approval schemes like CAPS, EAL and FIPS... If your software is not approved, then it's not allowed to be used in certain government projects.
Now these approval schemes are utterly ridiculous for so many reasons...
Getting your product on these schemes is expensive, which means that only large vendors can afford to apply, and even those won't bother to certify all versions of their products.
The approval process is slow (plus not all versions are submitted for certification) meaning that the certified versions are usually out of date, and often have known security holes.
The evaluation process is often flawed, it will cover a limited scope thats defined by the vendor, and really just checks that features the vendor claims to have exist... There is no audit of the source code, no thorough evaluation of the software in a realistic environment, and no checks to make sure that the features the vendor claims to have actually work properly and can't be circumvented.
Incidentally, we should start a petition on the e-petitions site to get answers and draw political attention to this.
Things like re-training the existing in-house IT staff, re-training existing users, deciding exactly which combination of open source applications are capable of fulfilling existing functionality, converting existing application data,
While it would be wasteful to rip and replace existing systems just for the sake of moving them to open source, new systems are introduced all the time and old systems are retired/replaced. This is where open source should be deployed, and if training is going to be provided it will be needed regardless of what new/replacement systems are implemented.
As for deciding what software can fulfil given requirements, thats something thats not done enough anyway... A lot of departments simply trust what sales drones tell them, even when the software they're selling doesn't really fulfil the requirements.
and a reluctance to risk violating licensing requirements which can be open to liberal interpretations and are constantly being challenged today in court.
The most common open source licenses (GPL, BSD etc) place no restrictions whatsoever on use, and only come into effect if you wish to distribute the software. Considering that the government hardly ever distributes software this is pure FUD. By contrast, proprietary licenses are far more complex as they often place significant restrictions on use, and don't allow redistribution at all.
Someone else, i imagine the hackers are using another hacked server to host the defacement.
Several sites, including the register and ups.com were redirected by DNS to a defacement page...
A list of the sites is at:
http://www.zone-h.org/archive/notifier=TurkguvenLigi.info/page=1
It does not seem to be a DNS poisoning, since the whois servers also reported the hacker's dns servers.
Also zone-h reports that the site was running Linux, but it is clearly whatever server the hackers redirected the DNS to that runs linux, it was not necessarily a linux system that was breached in order to actually carry out the defacement.
It would appear that the registrar for the domains in question has been hacked, and the hackers chose a few high profile sites to deface.
I'm not disputing that the device isn't overly useful on its own, or that there won't be bundled sold in future which include all the extra hardware required to get it working...
But the fact that it's offered standalone, and not forced bundled with everything else is a good thing because many people will already have, or can get extremely cheaply all the other kit.
Commodore tried it with the C64 and Amiga, both wildly successful in their day..
Sinclair Spectrum...
Most games consoles...
People can still play and experiment when using an analog tv set.
Keyboards, Screens, Cases and Speakers are all devices that have not changed much in years...
A CRT from 15 years ago will be perfectly capable of displaying a useful resolution, and are often being given away. Plus this device is capable of output to a TV set, anything from a modern HDMI HDTV, down to an old analog set.
Speakers (or headphones) are widely available, old ones are often thrown out.
A keyboard from 20 years ago will have the same keys as a modern one, some people even prefer to use older keyboards like the IBM model M.
A case can also be had for virtually nothing, considering how small this board is, it should fit inside anything. I imagine someone will produce a small custom case for it, and a simple made in china plastic housing for a board of this size isn't going to cost a lot.
If someone is strapped for cash, they're not going to want to buy a whole bunch of new components, when they either already have perfectly serviceable parts, or would be able to obtain used ones cheaply or even free.
When i got my first computer, it didn't come with a monitor.. I had to connect it to the TV set.
Also if your really poor, you probably don't want to buy a new monitor when an old one can be had for little or no money, and will work just fine. Same for keyboards and mice, new ones are cheap enough but used ones are often thrown out in large quantities and work perfectly well.
Or you commute using underground or high speed public transport, where mobile signals are useless anyway...
Blackberry benefits from marketing and obscurity causing people to *think* its secure, just look at the comments made by the guy who successfully exploited a blackberry in the recent pwn2own contest.
Windows phone 7 likely benefits from the same obscurity at the moment...
iPhone is more of a target right now because they're desirable handsets, whereas windows phone 7 is largely undesirable and blackberry is considered boring and unfashionable, being associated with business and in some cases kids (who only use blackberry messenger because its free, unlike sms).
In terms of actual security, iOS (and android) are unix systems at heart, with the same basic security model as any other unix, and are based on years of code which has been battle hardened over the years...
Blackberryos and windows phone 7 on the other hand are primarily single user systems, with very little thought for low level security, although blackberry seems to be moving towards qnx which is also a tried and tested unix-like platform.
You could say the opposite of windows vs osx, any given exploit is generally harder to exploit in windows than osx (snow leopard, haven't looked at lion), because windows implements more technologies designed to deter exploitation attempts. This is largely because Apple haven't been attacked as much, and thus had less reason to implement such technologies. On the other hand, that relative ease of exploitation, combined with apple's high profile status at the moment, means that more white hats exploit apple to make a name for themselves, while blackhats still target windows.
The towers track you by necessity, the phone itself doesn't need to do anything special and even old dumb phones can be tracked in this way.
Native mounting of ISO and other disk images...
Linux - since as long as i can remember
OSX - since the first version (not sure if os9 could do it)
Windows - coming soon, in a paid for upgrade
Always years behind everyone else for the most basic of features.
This policy as acceptable for Apple because they do not have a monopoly stranglehold over the markets in question...
And it's not really a problem so long as options and competition exist.. If there are 3-4 major platforms with roughly equal marketshare, it wouldn't really matter if the consumer oriented platforms are locked down so long as there are geek/enthusiast oriented platforms which aren't.
And similarly, if you want an Apple phone your stuck with Safari, if you buy a windows phone your stuck with IE, if you buy an android phone you get chrome by default... If you don't like some aspect of a given platform, then you weigh that up when making your purchasing decision.
The days of walking into a store to buy software on physical media are long dead for many... Open Source has long been available from the Internet, and often via a convenient app-store like tool (how long has apt-get been around for?)...
And then of course while commercial vendors have been very slow to embrace new distribution models, pirates haven't.
The idea of producing and shipping physical media is a ridiculous one, it is extremely wasteful as the media will typically only be used for an initial install and then discarded, and its extremely slow...
And for those who don't have internet connections, there's nothing to stop you going to a store with a usb stick, buying some software and copying it onto the stick... This would allow the store to have massively more inventory with less shelf/stock space wasted.
Also the idea of a locked down computer is actually a benefit for 95% of users... Current computers are geek tools, they are complex beasts where the average user only understands the very surface of the system, and if anything breaks they often don't have a hope in hell of fixing it. They are completely unsuitable for the average user, users don't need to worry about installing updates for their vcr or their microwave, so why should they be saddled with this on their internet/gaming appliance?
They say linux isn't suitable for end users, and thats very true, it isn't... but then windows is worse and osx isn't much better.
The key however, is to strike a balance... Provide the average user with a useful and suitable appliance, but don't destroy the geek tools in the process.
Look at the auto market, most users buy a car, never look under the hood and take it to a dealer for service... But a few people tune and mod their cars.