I imagine their service, like many others, simply revolves around removing all the accumulated crap from your system and probably updating your drivers... Basically all the stuff a typical user won't do. By sending them a clean system, you won't see any benefit whatsoever.
Heat and noise... When CPU usage gets high, many machines especially laptops get hotter and crank up the fans to compensate... If the work is being done by the GPU then typically less heat is generated and thus less noise... Noise when watching a movie can detract from the enjoyment of the movie.
Also with your father being a doctor, he has incentive to give you medical advice which is in your best interest, rather than the advice which makes him the most money (as mentioned in the article)...
If you tunnel SSH directly over the proxy yes, but if you tunnel SSH over SSL over the proxy then it would have no way to differentiate it from a genuine HTTPS connection... And you could always buy yourself a cheap cert to get past any checks on that.
Do you think underground vendors who are already doing questionable things like selling malware and selling infected machines, will really care about using an unlicensed av product? Most likely all the av they use are pirated anyway...
When it connects to a server in its pseudo-random sequence, does it do anything to verify the server or does it connect blindly? I wonder if they used public/private rsa keys to verify that the host it connects to is really a genuine one or not...
If you're doing something as illegal as creating a botnet for the purposes of spam/ddos, then the additional illegality of pirating a bunch of av products isn't a huge stretch... As for a sting, most malware authors these days continually make new changes to their malware, often very simple changes can render something undetectable and extend the lifetime of a particular codebase.
Why not just make sure you DONT get infected? Being infected with malware, like falling for the various scams spread by spam, depends on a high level of stupidity and/or incompetence and i have very little sympathy for such people.
But, windows is always marketed as being "easy" and therefore not requiring skilled but expensive admins to run it... As a consequence, many companies employ cheaper people with lesser skills. At the lower end of the pay spectrum "give them admin" and "just reinstall" are considered acceptable solutions to problems.
By contrast, unix is generally considered harder so companies expect to pay more and generally end up with a higher standard of staff... Although in situations like this, unix is actually much easier.
A few years ago, a 1ghz P3 with 512mb and a 17" CRT was considered high end, and people would be very happy to have one... People developed software back then too you know... The mere fact you consider such a system inadequate highlights just how bloated software has become.
Of those 1.299 billion people, many will be physically unable to fight (too old, disabled, very young etc)... Many more will simply be unwilling to, there is no way you can motivate an entire population like that... And since there would be a high risk of death, people would need to be very motivated to act. And even if you tried, how would you get the word out to so many people, when the government controls all the mass communications systems?
In this modern age, it's simply impossible to motivate enough people to overthrow an entrenched government...
Companies break the rules when it will benefit them... Annoying the Chinese government will NOT benefit Apple, infact it would likely hurt them a lot because not only would they lose the ability to sell their products in china, but it's also likely the cost of goods that they have manufactured in china would increase or cease to be available to them.
No, it would help a lot... Most of the bandwidth from being hit by web requests is actually outbound traffic when the server actually responds and tries sending the site content... Also since you would be blocking the first get request, the client would never receive the html content and therefore not try to retrieve any images, css files, javascript etc.
Also, sometimes a site goes down not for lack of bandwidth but because the page is dynamically generated and too complex for its processor to handle so many simultaneous requests.
A lot of companies don't know enough to understand security, some well dressed salesman comes through the door and tells them whatever he's selling will make them more secure so they buy it...
I went to a company where every box was running a commercial implementation of SSH for just this reason, none of their staff actually used it, every box also ran telnet and rlogin and that's what the staff used. They believed that simply by having it there they had improved security, when in fact they had weakened it by introducing an additional listening service that was not being used.
I've also been to several places where they had an IDS, monitoring or logging setup that was running but either not configured or just completely ignored.
RH9 may be old, but not having root on it won't really be a significant detriment to a developer, unlike most windows setups...
Also, having old hardware encourages developers to write more efficient code... If you give developers the latest and greatest they will write code which is fast enough on their highend dev boxes, but uselessly slow when deployed on older hardware.
1, many MS customers are still using old versions which by definition *are* aged... 2, looks are not terrible important, and load time less so... in the win9x days when you had to reboot constantly and reload all your apps it mattered a lot, these days people will leave it running all day. 3, it has a slightly different feature set and in some ways is more featured than the ms offering, that said many customers use old versions of ms and most only use a small subset...
Remember that when MS took over from wordperfect, it was MS who had the inferior product considered a joke by any serious users of wordperfect...
Traditionally, using OOo has been considered detrimental because of the prevalence of proprietary ms formats, but this is gradually changing.. And despite the best efforts of MS the world is moving towards more open data formats which makes alternatives to ms seem less risky.
At the same time, the economy isn't doing so well and companies are looking for ways to cut costs... For many of those companies, IT is a cost and not part of their core business so faced with the choice between several "adequate" products may well go with the cheapest. The best product rarely wins, as MS have proved time and time again... It is usually the cheapest or best marketed product which wins. The people making decisions are rarely even qualified to judge which product is best, they will merely choose and expect everyone else to put up with it. Staff at such companies will complain whatever you do, but ultimately their complaints will get ignored anyway.
PPC is alive and well in the consumer market, just not in the general purpose computing market... PPC is currently dominating the games console market, and such devices are very much targeted at consumers.
Speaking of which, Sony could have done much better pushing the linux options on the PS3 - if setup with a good linux distro it would make a good browsing/mail/im platform that could have satisfied most people's computing requirements.
Years ago it was rare for most people to regularly communicate with those in other countries, and if they did it was likely to be a very slow exchange involving letters written on paper... Movies would come out in one country and people in another wouldn't even realise until the same movie came out in their country 6 months later. And then there were format differences (NTSC, PAL etc) which made it more difficult to play foreign videos. When i was younger, any media my parents bought me, they would make me copy and play the copy because as a child the chance of me damaging the original was pretty high.
Now, media is digital so the format difference becomes irrelevant, so they try to create an artificial difference (region coding)... People regularly communicate worldwide, so when something comes out in one country people in another hear about it and get exposed to the marketing, only they have no legitimate way to obtain it... By the time it comes out in their country, it's already old news on the internet.
People want to copy the media they legitimately purchased onto multiple devices, portable players, media jukeboxes (large hard drives so lots of media is available immediately without the hassle of swapping disks), in-car players, backup copies...
People might want to play out of region movies/games, perhaps they bought some on holiday, perhaps some media isn't available in their country at all, although they will still be exposed to talk of it on the internet.
Nowadays, only "pirate" copies provide the fair use rights we were once able to exercise or would like to exercise using new technology.
Consider that the "pirates" are providing a superior product for a lower cost. In fact, if the pirates charged the same price their product would still be superior. Without artificial help from the government, the media companies business model simply couldn't exist.... Your tax dollars are paying to prop up a broken business model so that what little money you have left after tax can go to them too in exchange for a crippled product.
Where many companies have contributed to Linux, their efforts have been available to everyone... Many companies have taken BSD variants and produced closed source forks, with the results not being shared with the community. There are a large number of commercial products out there based on modified BSD...
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Send in a computer which is totally infested with malware, maybe it will be able to infect their network and/or other customers...
I imagine their service, like many others, simply revolves around removing all the accumulated crap from your system and probably updating your drivers... Basically all the stuff a typical user won't do.
By sending them a clean system, you won't see any benefit whatsoever.
Heat and noise...
When CPU usage gets high, many machines especially laptops get hotter and crank up the fans to compensate...
If the work is being done by the GPU then typically less heat is generated and thus less noise...
Noise when watching a movie can detract from the enjoyment of the movie.
Also with your father being a doctor, he has incentive to give you medical advice which is in your best interest, rather than the advice which makes him the most money (as mentioned in the article)...
Then you completely break SSL, you are effectively doing a man in the middle attack on it so you'd also need to subvert the browser too.
If you tunnel SSH directly over the proxy yes, but if you tunnel SSH over SSL over the proxy then it would have no way to differentiate it from a genuine HTTPS connection... And you could always buy yourself a cheap cert to get past any checks on that.
Do you think underground vendors who are already doing questionable things like selling malware and selling infected machines, will really care about using an unlicensed av product?
Most likely all the av they use are pirated anyway...
When it connects to a server in its pseudo-random sequence, does it do anything to verify the server or does it connect blindly?
I wonder if they used public/private rsa keys to verify that the host it connects to is really a genuine one or not...
If you're doing something as illegal as creating a botnet for the purposes of spam/ddos, then the additional illegality of pirating a bunch of av products isn't a huge stretch...
As for a sting, most malware authors these days continually make new changes to their malware, often very simple changes can render something undetectable and extend the lifetime of a particular codebase.
Why not just make sure you DONT get infected?
Being infected with malware, like falling for the various scams spread by spam, depends on a high level of stupidity and/or incompetence and i have very little sympathy for such people.
But, windows is always marketed as being "easy" and therefore not requiring skilled but expensive admins to run it... As a consequence, many companies employ cheaper people with lesser skills. At the lower end of the pay spectrum "give them admin" and "just reinstall" are considered acceptable solutions to problems.
By contrast, unix is generally considered harder so companies expect to pay more and generally end up with a higher standard of staff... Although in situations like this, unix is actually much easier.
A few years ago, a 1ghz P3 with 512mb and a 17" CRT was considered high end, and people would be very happy to have one...
People developed software back then too you know...
The mere fact you consider such a system inadequate highlights just how bloated software has become.
Of those 1.299 billion people, many will be physically unable to fight (too old, disabled, very young etc)...
Many more will simply be unwilling to, there is no way you can motivate an entire population like that... And since there would be a high risk of death, people would need to be very motivated to act.
And even if you tried, how would you get the word out to so many people, when the government controls all the mass communications systems?
In this modern age, it's simply impossible to motivate enough people to overthrow an entrenched government...
Companies break the rules when it will benefit them...
Annoying the Chinese government will NOT benefit Apple, infact it would likely hurt them a lot because not only would they lose the ability to sell their products in china, but it's also likely the cost of goods that they have manufactured in china would increase or cease to be available to them.
No, it would help a lot... Most of the bandwidth from being hit by web requests is actually outbound traffic when the server actually responds and tries sending the site content... Also since you would be blocking the first get request, the client would never receive the html content and therefore not try to retrieve any images, css files, javascript etc.
Also, sometimes a site goes down not for lack of bandwidth but because the page is dynamically generated and too complex for its processor to handle so many simultaneous requests.
A lot of companies don't know enough to understand security, some well dressed salesman comes through the door and tells them whatever he's selling will make them more secure so they buy it...
I went to a company where every box was running a commercial implementation of SSH for just this reason, none of their staff actually used it, every box also ran telnet and rlogin and that's what the staff used.
They believed that simply by having it there they had improved security, when in fact they had weakened it by introducing an additional listening service that was not being used.
I've also been to several places where they had an IDS, monitoring or logging setup that was running but either not configured or just completely ignored.
RH9 may be old, but not having root on it won't really be a significant detriment to a developer, unlike most windows setups...
Also, having old hardware encourages developers to write more efficient code... If you give developers the latest and greatest they will write code which is fast enough on their highend dev boxes, but uselessly slow when deployed on older hardware.
1, many MS customers are still using old versions which by definition *are* aged...
2, looks are not terrible important, and load time less so... in the win9x days when you had to reboot constantly and reload all your apps it mattered a lot, these days people will leave it running all day.
3, it has a slightly different feature set and in some ways is more featured than the ms offering, that said many customers use old versions of ms and most only use a small subset...
Remember that when MS took over from wordperfect, it was MS who had the inferior product considered a joke by any serious users of wordperfect...
Traditionally, using OOo has been considered detrimental because of the prevalence of proprietary ms formats, but this is gradually changing.. And despite the best efforts of MS the world is moving towards more open data formats which makes alternatives to ms seem less risky.
At the same time, the economy isn't doing so well and companies are looking for ways to cut costs... For many of those companies, IT is a cost and not part of their core business so faced with the choice between several "adequate" products may well go with the cheapest.
The best product rarely wins, as MS have proved time and time again... It is usually the cheapest or best marketed product which wins. The people making decisions are rarely even qualified to judge which product is best, they will merely choose and expect everyone else to put up with it.
Staff at such companies will complain whatever you do, but ultimately their complaints will get ignored anyway.
PPC is alive and well in the consumer market, just not in the general purpose computing market...
PPC is currently dominating the games console market, and such devices are very much targeted at consumers.
Speaking of which, Sony could have done much better pushing the linux options on the PS3 - if setup with a good linux distro it would make a good browsing/mail/im platform that could have satisfied most people's computing requirements.
For international calls, roaming, and calling your own premium rate numbers with a bank of cloned phones....
Profit making businesses are not concerned with security until the problems become public knowledge and it starts hurting their profit...
Years ago it was rare for most people to regularly communicate with those in other countries, and if they did it was likely to be a very slow exchange involving letters written on paper... Movies would come out in one country and people in another wouldn't even realise until the same movie came out in their country 6 months later. And then there were format differences (NTSC, PAL etc) which made it more difficult to play foreign videos.
When i was younger, any media my parents bought me, they would make me copy and play the copy because as a child the chance of me damaging the original was pretty high.
Now, media is digital so the format difference becomes irrelevant, so they try to create an artificial difference (region coding)...
People regularly communicate worldwide, so when something comes out in one country people in another hear about it and get exposed to the marketing, only they have no legitimate way to obtain it... By the time it comes out in their country, it's already old news on the internet.
People want to copy the media they legitimately purchased onto multiple devices, portable players, media jukeboxes (large hard drives so lots of media is available immediately without the hassle of swapping disks), in-car players, backup copies...
People might want to play out of region movies/games, perhaps they bought some on holiday, perhaps some media isn't available in their country at all, although they will still be exposed to talk of it on the internet.
Nowadays, only "pirate" copies provide the fair use rights we were once able to exercise or would like to exercise using new technology.
Consider that the "pirates" are providing a superior product for a lower cost. In fact, if the pirates charged the same price their product would still be superior. Without artificial help from the government, the media companies business model simply couldn't exist.... Your tax dollars are paying to prop up a broken business model so that what little money you have left after tax can go to them too in exchange for a crippled product.
Instead of downloading for free, people will go back to buying copies from market stalls and people in pubs...
That only accounts for general purpose OS releases...
Juniper routers use a derivative or NetBSD
Nokia firewalls run the FreeBSD derived IPSO
Many commercial appliances are based on BSD too...
Where many companies have contributed to Linux, their efforts have been available to everyone...
Many companies have taken BSD variants and produced closed source forks, with the results not being shared with the community. There are a large number of commercial products out there based on modified BSD...